Category: Reviews

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I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, Vol. 1 by Tardi

I probably should say this first: this book is titled I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, Vol. 1. And it’s credited to “Tardi.”

One might easily assume “Tardi” means “Rene Tardi,” the chap who was a POW. But one would be wrong.

Rene died in 1986, and never drew comics. (There are some of his sketches in the frontmatter here, so I don’t want to say he didn’t draw anything. He could draw better than me, for one thing.)

This “Tardi” is his son Jacques, who originally used both of those names for his bandes dessinees until the weight of all of those other French cartoonists who only use one name got to be too much for him, and he succumbed to the lure of the single moniker.

Even in a case, like this one, where that creates confusion. Style is more important than anything else, eh mes amis?

Rene POW is a 2012 comic — translated into English for a 2018 publication in the US — based on a series of notebooks that Jacques made during conversations with his father in the early ’80s. One may presume that he had the idea for this book even then; Jacques Tardi had been a working cartoonist for over a decade at that point. But it took a few more decades for him to get around to it, during years when he told stories about The Great War and Paris detectives and Adele Blanc-Sec and American crime and steampunky super-science and many more.

For a book that claims to be a memoir of WWII, Rene POW has some very odd elements. It starts off with an introduction by Dominique Grange, which is mostly about her father and only secondarily about Rene Tardi. Somewhat later in the book, the reader realizes that Grange is Jacques Tardi’s wife, but the book does not explain this explicitly anywhere. In honor of that connection, Rene meets Grange’s father in that POW camp later in the book — they didn’t actually meet then in real life, or at least didn’t remember it.

And then the book itself is framed as Rene telling the story to Jacques. Rene looks like he did at the time of the war, a strong, angry young man in his uniform, and he narrates the book — sometimes as a voice coming out of nowhere, sometimes as his young self in the scene. And then Jacques appears as a schoolboy, maybe ten or thirteen, who wanders through the scenes without being part of them, questioning his father in words that mostly seem to be post-Rene’s death but sometimes do turn into a conversation between the two men.

So this is neither exactly what Rene wrote nor a true collaboration between the two. It is instead based on notes made while Rene was alive, but full of questions and second thoughts that Jacques only had after his father was dead. But that’s the only way to collaborate with the dead: to take everything they did and said, and present it as honestly as possible, while also pointing out the things they didn’t do or say.

POW life in WWII was horrible, and the French had it nearly the worst. (The Russians probably had it the absolute worst, and the Americans probably the “best.”) Rene Tardi was in Stalag IIB for basically the entire war; he was captured just as France fell. So he has a long time of horrible events to cover here, and they are horrible and unpleasant and full of hideous details.

This is not quite as searing as Tardi’s books about World War One; this book is about his own father, who survived the war. But it’s still a war story, and it’s a reminder of how much war destroys — not just the people who are killed and the cities that are flattened, but also what’s broken in even the people who survive.

[1] Completely unconnected footnote: I realized, when putting together this post, that I don’t have a snarky tag for France. (England has There Will Always Be An England, for example, but I tend to use the vaguer Foreigners Sure Are Foreign for the whole rest of the world, which may not be the best plan.) My first thought, since my tags tend to be super-sarcastic and borderline obnoxious, was Wogs Begin at Calais, but that’s vastly too offensive.

So, instead, I’m creating the slightly less offensive new tag 246 Kinds of Cheese, in honor of De Gaulle. I trust you will treat this with exactly as much seriousness as it deserves.

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Mage: The Hero Denied Vol. 2 and/or 6 by Matt Wagner

So this is the end, huh? After thirty-some years and around twelve hundred pages of comics, Matt Wagner’s comics fantasy autobiography is done.

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the earlier pieces are the two volumes of Mage: The Hero Discovered from the mid-80s, the two volumes of Mage: The Hero Defined from the late ’90s, and the prior collection of this 2017 series.)

Almost anything I could say here would be spoilers of one sort or another, so I will try to be vague without being totally pointless. Mage: The Hero Denied, Vol. 6 has a confusing volume number — it’s the second half of Hero Denied, and only number six of the overall series — and should encompass the lowest point of hero Kevin Matchstick and then his triumphant conclusion.

It does that, reasonably well, and gives space for the rest of Kevin’s fictional family to shine: wife Magda, son Hugo and daughter Miranda. They’re not allowed to be heroic in the same way Kevin is, perhaps because they are not comics-makers in the real world, and so can’t actually fight nasties in the metaphor the way he can. But they’re active, and useful, and not just people who Kevin needs to save — which is nice. He’s the one who has to do the important stuff, since he’s the one who looks like Wagner.

The metaphor is still very vague: I don’t think each series is meant to be about a specific comics project or time in Wagner’s life; just a transmutation of “sitting at a table writing words and drawing lines” into “wacking evil with a baseball bat just like the characters he draws.” And the Big Evil of all three series is the same: the middle book was slightly different, in a generational way, but Denied goes back to the original Big Bad. And the Big Bad doesn’t relate to the real-world end of the metaphor at all: there’s no force or entity conspiring to stop comics creators, unless it’s something universal like Death or Entropy or Watching Cat Videos Instead.

Also, at the end of this story Kevin Matchstick is explicitly done with heroing. I want to leave it vague exactly as to why, but that’s another way the metaphor diverges strongly from Wagner’s own life — his own kids are old enough to collaborate with him on comics (his son Brennan colors this book), and he’s clearly still working.

In the end, Mage is much more superhero comic than it is transmuted autobiography. It’s the story of a guy who looks like Matt Wagner but does comic-book stuff instead of creating comic-book stuff. And Wagner is not the kind of creator, it appears, that cares about digging into the wellsprings of creation to tell stories about that act: his shtick, like most of modern commercial comics, is making pretty pictures of people hitting each other until the world is saved.

So, after three stories and more than a thousand pages, Mage ends up as just decent superhero comics with a vague mythological shell and a this-is-me conceit that doesn’t go much deeper than the surface. It might still be too weird for a lot of superhero-comics fans, because they are stunted and blinkered individuals, but sucks to their assmar.

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Pillow Fight by Brandon Graham

So this is not a book to review, exactly. But, since I’m doing posts on all of the books I read — even now, in my lesser state this year — I figured I should at least mention Brandon Graham’s smutty 2006 “graphic” “novel” Pillow Fight, since I did read it.

Graham, like a lot of comics-makers starting out in the Great Smutty Comics Boom (lasting roughly from Eros’s birth in 1990 to the utter apotheosis of the Smutty Internet and the near-simultaneous Great Recession), did smutty print comics at the beginning of his career. This was one of them; it followed the similar album Perverts of the Unknown, which I haven’t seen. (He did other, non-smutty early work, too — that was pretty common, and probably still is these days, though the smutty stuff now tends to be password-locked at places like Slipshine and Filthy Figments, so it may be easier to keep the two strands of career separated without using pseudonyms.)

So Pillow Fight is a short, album-format comic, published as part of a sex-oriented imprint (NBM’s Amerotica), and the plot and characterization is all sex-comic stuff — the point is to move smoothly through a bunch of sex scenes and have some humor and general story virtues along the way as well.

Our main character is Jem, a young woman being sent off to boarding school after her parents walked in on her in flagrante — Graham does not describe exactly what she was doing, or with whom, but it was clearly very steamy, and “with whom” might have been a multiple-choice answer. But she arrives at this unnamed school for “naughties,” quickly meets her new roommate Bones, and first witnesses a scene with said roommate and soon after has sex with that roommate herself. And so it goes on from there — it’s a short book, and the point of this kind of thing isn’t plot to begin with.

Graham has his usual punny jokes — both visual and spoken — though his work was cleaner and less cluttered this early in his career. (He wasn’t cramming in as many visual jokes and pun labels at this point.) The jokes tend to be up front in the narrative in this book instead of half-hidden off to the edges.

But the point is to be a sex book, with nubile young women enthusiastically doing every last thing the young Graham could think up. Graham’s line was zippy and precise by this point; it’s drawn in basically the same style he still uses now. It’s mostly of interested to big fans of Graham (like me) digging up the last disreputable corners of his oeuvre, or for people who really really like naughty schoolgirl stories.

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Review: Oberon #1

You might already know that Aftershock Comics is on a roll. In just three years, they’ve won Diamond’s Publisher of the Year award (for publishers under a certain market share) and have pushed several properties forward to media deals.  It’s a publisher that seems to attract smart talent and then provides the support and freedom to create strong work.

Aftershock Comics’ tagline is The Year of Living Dangerously.  That has the sense of urgency and the zing that the entire industry needs.  In fact, I’ve been hearing John Siuntres talk about Aftershock on his excellent Word Balloon podcast (Aftershock is a sponsor).  An interview with creator of Moth & Whisper inspired me to pick up a series I probably wouldn’t have otherwise, in fact.

One of Aftershock’s most recent debuts was Oberon #1.   The king of the fairies, Oberon, may be best known for his role in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, but it turns out the character was a part of mythology long before that.  

This story is about the journey of a smart young girl, Molly, who is introduced to the world of fairies and finds an alternative to her humdrum life.  But all isn’t as it seems, as both Molly and the readers struggle to understand the truth and the reasons behind all the character’s seemingly-sinister motivations.

Writer Ryan Parrott weaves an adventure that has the threads of many tales.  But with his urgent pacing and true-to-the-ear dialog, he never lets the reader feel as if it’s simply a rehash of anything we’ve read before.

The art is compelling and fresh.  Serbian artist Milos Slakovic employs a breezy, engaging style that propels the story along and is gorgeous to view. He’s not much on inky blacks, but his various line weights delight the eye. He offers a varied visual texture for fans who want to either rush through the adventure or just leisurely linger. It’s all evocative of Michael Kaluta, Walter Simonson and J.H. Williams, with a veneer of Terry and Rachel Dodson to give it all a silky smoothness.

Slakovic also provides innovative panel layouts, without being overwhelming. He also offers a lovely pallet of colors, especially leveraging a lot of purples, and oranges to set Oberon apart from the crowd.

Of note: Aftershock provides several pages of their next series, Stronghold, as a preview so it feels as if there’s a back-up story in this comic.   This marketing tool gives the whole thing a little more substance and value to the reader.

All in all – a compelling first issue. I’m a bit worried about Molly and will keep reading to ensure she’s all right. But I’m not entirely sure she will be.

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REVIEW: Overlord

You have to give J.J. Abrams credit. For the last eleven years, he’s been surprising audiences with films he manages to make under the radar and then unleashes them on an unsuspecting audience.

The most recent was November’s Overlord, which had trailers that lulled you into thinking Abrams was producing his first war film. But, after the soldiers are dropped into Nazi-occupied territory, the creepy stuff starts and then you know you’re in for a horror thriller.

Operation Overlord, of course, was the code name for D-Day, June 6, 1944, a turning point in World War II and ripe for exploration, or in this case, exploitation. Once director Julius Avery plops Private Boyce (Jovan Adepo) and Corporal Ford (Wyatt Russell) behind enemy lines to disrupt the supply lines and mess with communications, things proceed apace. However, once they enter a church, things get creepy. Heinous activities have been happening beneath the holy structure, the kinds of things that would give even Dr. Josef Mengele nightmares.

The men gain help from a young local woman (Mathilde Ollivier) and they set to work to dismantle the experiments and complete their assigned mission. Of course, things go awry from here and Avery amps up the pace and the horrors begin. We shift from war to horror and there’s nary a let up

This is a pure horror film and there’s mayhem and gore aplenty, with a score to match the special effects, a concert of mayhem you don’t usually associate with a Bad Robot production.

The film, out this week from Paramount Home Entertainment, is an uneven production, marred by a tedious middle and nondescript characters so you don’t feel much for the leads. It’s really a throwback B film that has superior production values. If you like this sort of stuff, it’ll be a thrill ride. For the rest of us, it’s more meh than eek.

The film is out in a variety of formats including the newly regular 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and Digital HD combo pack. The 4K disc certainly has sharper colors and depth, a noticeably superior image to the Blu-ray (which is an excellent 1080p transfer). For a film of this nature to work best, the audio track has to be superior and here, Paramount delivers a brilliant Dolby Atmos soundtrack.

Note that the 4K disc comes with no extras but the Blu-ray contains a six-part behind-the-scenes The Horrors of War: Creation (11:04), Death Above (7:18), Death on the Ground (9:16), Death Below (6:25), Death No More (1080p, 12:19), and Brothers in Arms (5:03). There’s some interesting stuff in this 51-minute making of lore but it’s interesting there are no deleted scenes.

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Review: Bumblebee

When I first saw the trailer for Bumblebee last June, I liked a lot of what I saw. The fact that the hero is a Volkswagen Beetle instead of a Camaro. The more faithful robot designs. I also liked the idea of the focus on a single character, since it suggested a stripped-down type of story, which after the cacophony of twisted metal that was the Michael Bay film series, was a welcome prospect. I had wanted to see this film earlier, but with all the holiday goings-on and other films to watch, it kinda got lost in the shuffle until now.

It was pretty good. Aside from the kid next to me that wouldn’t shut up because his typically discourteous parent wouldn’t do the right thing by instructing his child that you’re not supposed to talk during a movie (which are often found in theaters I frequent today), it was an enjoyable experience. It didn’t reinvent the wheel, but it was what the first Transformers movie should’ve been.

Storywise, the plot is a fairly straightforward prequel set in 1987, using the classic troubled-child-meets-alien framework, which evokes films of the era like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Reagan era pop culture references abound, and it’s clear that 1987 was chosen not just to establish the Transformers on Earth before they met Shia LaBeouf, but to call back to the era that saw that first wave of the Transformers franchise, when the first comics filled my back issue bins (actually an old white bureau that I still own), the action figures populated the shelves of a healthy company called Toys R Us, and Orson Welles was literally a planet. Songs from the 1980s fill the soundtrack, providing not just a sense of time, but some in-jokes for Transformers fans, and for that matter, current Internet culture. I imagine that the choice of time setting may also have made it easier to write some of the film’s scenes. Without the ubiquity of cell phones, a nighttime prank carried out by characters can plausibly be pulled off without it being filmed. And without the Web to instantly learn everything about Earth history and culture, the titular hero has to learn it through his interactions with his primary contact on Earth, a talented but troubled teen tomboy (say that three times really fast) named Charlie Watson, who is given a beat-up old 1967 Volkswagen Beetle on her 18th birthday. As a prequel, the film does a good job of establishing how the Cybertronians came to Earth and why Bumblebee doesn’t talk, and answers a number of other continuity-related questions.

Hailee Steinfeld does a good job of portraying Charlie’s angst, her conflict with family and peers, and her wide-eyed astonishment at her new friend. She’s a dedicated mechanic, but sullen and withdrawn, owing to unresolved bereavement, until meeting the eponymous robot whose damaged memory and voice synthesizer helps her to confront her demons. John Cena also goes a good job as Lt. Jack Burns, a U.S. Army Ranger who comes into conflict with the Cybertronians. While I surmised from the trailer and Cena’s interviews that his character was a typical one-dimensional hardass authority figure, Cena and screenwriter Christina Hodson dial down the jingoism that might normally be on display in one of the earlier films. Burns’ actions are understandable, given the circumstances, and he is at times overzealous, but is not the cartoonishly obtuse horror movie sheriff-type that often populate films like this. There are moments when he is depicted to be as skeptical of the Decepticons as he is of Autobots, and even genuinely sympathetic. Angela Bassett and Justin Theroux voice Shatter and Dropkick, the two main villains in the film, Decepticon triple-changers who follow Bumblebee to Earth, and who easily earn the label “evil” from their surprisingly grotesque treatment of humans, including innocent bystanders.

I mentioned my hopes for the Transformer designs from the trailer, and the film doesn’t disappoint. If you were a fan of the Transformers when you were a kid like me, then you’ll appreciate that right from the opening war scene on Cybertron, you can tell which character is which. Ratchet. Arcee. Brawn. Optimus Prime. Soundwave. Shockwave. And it’s not like they copied the animated series designs slavishly. The designers struck a nice balance between the simple designs of the animated Transformers, and the greater detail needed for a modern HD theater screens. A character that may have had a completely red arm in the comics or animation, for example, may in this film have an arm that’s a red panel on top and maybe on the sides, but whose underside is a detailed collection of mechanics. The result is a gorgeous realization of what the Transformers should look like, a welcome change from the ugly mess of Erector Sets coughed up by a nauseated wood chipper that characterized the look of the Michael Bay Transformers. This isn’t just a question of aesthetics, mind you; these designs are also exhibit a greater clarity, with the greater amount of color panels making it only easier to identify characters at a glance, but to discern what’s happening during fight scenes. Instead of an incomprehensible tangle of twisted metal that typified robot-on-robot fights in the Bay films. I also especially liked the human-looking fight moves that Bumblebee displayed in one scene, which left me to wonder if there was a scene left on the cutting room floor of him watching martial arts movies and professional wrestling on Charlie’s television that had been intended to set this up.

Cheetah!

I will say on the issue of clarity, however, that the film’s opening scene could’ve benefited from a more lucid layout of the geography of the battle. We open on an aerial shot of Cybertron, where tracer fire is blasting in half a dozen different directions from as many sources, making it difficult to discern any particular “front” between opposing forces. This wouldn’t be a big issue if it were the intention of director Travis Knight to convey a disorganized and decentralized collection of factions scattered across the Cybertroninan landscape (cyberscape?). But after we are introduced to the good Autobots and the evil Decepticons, Autobot leader Optimus Prime tells his forces to “fall back,” which is a bit confusing, since it wasn’t clearly established what was “forward” for them to begin with. Still, it’s a relatively minor point, since the story immediately moves to focus on Bumblebee, who is sent to Earth, where he’s the sole protector of humans against the two Decepticons who seek to use the planet’s satellite system to summon the entire Decepticon army to Earth. This provides a more intimate conflict, with greater breathing room for character work for both Charlie and Bumblebee, or simply Bee, as she comes to call him. The motivations are simple to understand, and action flows naturally from the conflict.

If you’ve been turned off by the last several Transformers films, and prefer a more accessible and likable story, try to catch this one before it’s gone completely from theaters.

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REVIEW: First Man

We’ve become accustomed to movies about American heroes to have grand moments that catch our breath, make our pulses race, and bring forth an audible cheer throughout the auditorium. So, when we’re presented with a film about a grand achievement that is fairly level in its intensity regardless of human or heroic moment, we’re somewhat nonplussed.

Damien Chazelle put heart and soul into La La Land and followed it with this past fall’s First Man, an intimate look at Neil Armstrong who went from test pilot to the first man on the moon. The real Armstrong, who died in 2012, was famously private, almost taciturn. He was unflappable whether he was watching his daughter die from a brain tumor to rescuing his family from a house fire (in a deleted scene) to crashing a test model of the lunar lander. It was those qualities that made him a standout in a field of brash, crew-cutted astronauts and why NASA easily chose him to command Apollo 11.

The movie, out today from Universal Home Entertainment, fills in a lot of information about Armstrong (Ryan Goslnig), his wife Janet (Claire Foy), and the NASA family, demonstrating there was a plan and little would derail it. Armstrong apparently bottled everything up, pouring himself into his work rather than express his emotions to anyone, even his wife, who wrestled with the relocation and requirements of being an astronaut’s wife. There’s a telling scene where she has to force him to sit their two young sons down and talk about the moon mission and the possibility he might not return.

The pacing and approach to the story matches Armstrong’s personality but robs you of the feeling of exhilaration I recall when I watched the grainy television broadcast on July 20, 1969. Yu want to cheer out loud but find yourself holding your breath. This even-handedness may be why the film failed to connect with audiences and prove a box office disappointment despite the story and stellar cast.

Writer Josh Singer tells the story in a series of snippets and scenes that don’t appear to connect but before you know it, you fele something for the friendship between Armstrong and Ed White (Jason Clarke) so perhaps the most emotional moment in the film is watching Armstrong receive the news of White’s death while testing Apollo 1.

Chazelle does a terrific job recreating NASA, the astronaut neighborhoods, and the grueling testing that had to happen prior to flying into space. The 1960s is well recreated and adds much to the overall feel of the film.

It’s a worthy story with some heart and soul but in need of adrenaline.

The film comes in the usual assortment of combinations including the Blu-ray, DVD, Digital HD edition being reviewed. The 1080p transfer nicely captures the look and feel, the colors and textures of the film’s subject. There an equally strong Dolby Atmos track that captures all the nuance.

The Blu-ray comes with an assortment of features that adequately serve the film but could have been stronger. First up are the Deleted Scenes: Included are House Fire (3:37) and Apollo 8 Launch (0:37); Shooting for the Moon (3:40) with Chazelle talking about why he chose the film; Preparing to Launch (3:39), routine background on the making of the film; Giant Leap in One Small Step (4:31), all about Armstrong; Mission Gone Wrong (2:42), exploring the stunts; Putting You in the Seat (7:09), looking at the production design; Recreating the Moon Landing (6:01); Shooting at NASA (3:11); Astronaut Training (4:02); and, finally, Audio Commentary with Chazelle, Singer, and Editor Tim Cross, which offers some good insights to their thinking during production.

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Book-A-Day 2018 #380: Royalboiler by Brandon Graham

This is not a comic. It’s an art book by a cartoonist, featuring covers (from his own books and guest covers for others’ comics), sketchbook pages, odd single-page comics from in-house Image newsletters, convention posters, a T-shirt design or two, some logos for porn companies and stars, a little bit of movie concept art, and other assorted stuff that Brandon Graham has created in the twentyish years of his comics career.

Royalboiler is an oversized paperback with full-bleed art most of the time — it’s a great size and format for an art book, and really makes the covers (here presented without logos) show up well. That does mean, though, that text is minimal and mostly restricted to some captions on pages where they can be accommodated. The captions are also all in Graham’s lettering font — I can’t say if they’re all hand-lettered or not; does anyone actually still do that? — so they look like they’re part of the underlying art if you don’t slow down and pay attention.

But the point of an art book is to slow down and pay attention, so I don’t consider that a problem.

There is minimal text here, again: just enough to say what this piece of art is, maybe who worked on it with Graham or what year it was done. But there is enough, from those captions and a few semi-autobiographical strips and some collages of photos and artwork from conventions, to piece together a bit of Graham’s life, or at least the parts of his life that he wants to present in his art in public.

So it starts out with covers from King City and Multiple Warheads and then goes into some of his odder, earlier, obscurer, or more collaborative projects — Prophet and Perverts of the Unknown and October Yen and so on, and then into lots of art for conventions and covers for other comics. After that comes the Comic Lovers strip for Image Plus, other odd pieces about comics, and so on.

There’s a lot in here — the book has no page numbers, but informed sources claim it’s 248 pages, and that seems about right. That’s almost 250 big pages full of interesting art by a quirky creator — the one thing I would note is that his cover/sketch work is often less dense than his story pages, so there aren’t as many buried jokes or puns in Royalboiler as there are in his narrative comics. Or, maybe, they’re buried even more deeply, so I missed them….

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Book-A-Day 2018 #380: Royalboiler by Brandon Graham

This is not a comic. It’s an art book by a cartoonist, featuring covers (from his own books and guest covers for others’ comics), sketchbook pages, odd single-page comics from in-house Image newsletters, convention posters, a T-shirt design or two, some logos for porn companies and stars, a little bit of movie concept art, and other assorted stuff that Brandon Graham has created in the twentyish years of his comics career.

Royalboiler is an oversized paperback with full-bleed art most of the time — it’s a great size and format for an art book, and really makes the covers (here presented without logos) show up well. That does mean, though, that text is minimal and mostly restricted to some captions on pages where they can be accommodated. The captions are also all in Graham’s lettering font — I can’t say if they’re all hand-lettered or not; does anyone actually still do that? — so they look like they’re part of the underlying art if you don’t slow down and pay attention.

But the point of an art book is to slow down and pay attention, so I don’t consider that a problem.

There is minimal text here, again: just enough to say what this piece of art is, maybe who worked on it with Graham or what year it was done. But there is enough, from those captions and a few semi-autobiographical strips and some collages of photos and artwork from conventions, to piece together a bit of Graham’s life, or at least the parts of his life that he wants to present in his art in public.

So it starts out with covers from King City and Multiple Warheads and then goes into some of his odder, earlier, obscurer, or more collaborative projects — Prophet and Perverts of the Unknown and October Yen and so on, and then into lots of art for conventions and covers for other comics. After that comes the Comic Lovers strip for Image Plus, other odd pieces about comics, and so on.

There’s a lot in here — the book has no page numbers, but informed sources claim it’s 248 pages, and that seems about right. That’s almost 250 big pages full of interesting art by a quirky creator — the one thing I would note is that his cover/sketch work is often less dense than his story pages, so there aren’t as many buried jokes or puns in Royalboiler as there are in his narrative comics. Or, maybe, they’re buried even more deeply, so I missed them….

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Book-A-Day 2018 #379: Emma by Kaoru Mori (5 hardcover 2-in-1 volumes)

Is it damning with faint praise to say of a painter that you love her brushstrokes but aren’t crazy about her paintings? I hope not, because I’m about to say that about Kaoru Mori’s first major manga series Emma.

Emma originally ran for 72 chapters — 52 of the main story, and a follow-up 20 side-story chapters — in Japan’s Beam magazine from 2002 through 2008. It was collected into ten volumes, with the side-stories taking up the last three, then the volumes were translated into English. At some point, there were hardcovers, each collecting two of the smaller paperback tankobon volumes. And that’s what I just read: 72 serial chapters, 10 paperbacks, or five hardcovers. (Links to Volumes One, Two, Three, Four and Five)

It’s set in the transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian era in England, starting in what seems to be the late 1890s and continuing for a few years past Victoria’s death in 1901. (There are no actual dates in the series, but Mori does contrast Victorian and Edwardian clothing styles in her afterwords without a whole lot of explanation…I don’t think she believes that everything changed poof! all at once. It is also difficult to judge how much time is passing, since even the old characters are mostly drawn with young faces.) The central character is Emma, a young woman of uncertain parentage and no actual last name, initially working as the maid-of-all-work in the London home of retired governess Kelly Stowner.

Emma meets and falls in love with William Jones, scion of a rich and rising merchant family, who also loves her. But there are the usual impediments: their respective positions in life, William’s engagement to the daughter of a Viscount, his stern father, blah blah blah and so on.

Reader, of course they get married in the end. We all know that. So I won’t pretend otherwise.

My problem is that the problems in their way are neither fish nor fowl. I’d be happy with a Dickensian drama with melodramatic problems solved in melodramatic ways — if one party were kidnapped to America by characters who look a lot like 19th century Jewish stereotypes, for example, and the other party had to chase her there and save her from durance vile — and I’d also be happy with a more serious, sedate story of manners and closely examined social mores of the time. Emma is neither of those. This story instead throws in a couple of melodramatic moments for no clear reason (like that abduction by racist stereotypes), but generally steers a sedate course without actually closely examining the actual standards of the society it concerns.

Emma, frankly, is a caricature of circa-1900 English society as seen through the lens of circa-2002 Japanese society: the aspects that resonate with Mori and her audience are emphasized, and the ones that would be inconvenient to this story are ignored or changed or misunderstood.

Some of my major issues with Emma:

  • the narrative seems to have never even heard of a “breach of promise” suit
  • a “former governess” lives in what would be an expensive London townhouse, perhaps because she became a governess as something to do after her husband died
  • in general, money may exist, but the lack of it does not seem to harm or motivate a single person in the world
  • an honest-to-God kidnapping happens and is never mentioned afterward
  • the entire race of the “the Irish” seem not to exist in this world, or at least to have no connection to domestic service
  • it’s yet another comic series whose narrative is apparently driven primarily by what the artist wanted to draw, and not any actual story purpose
  • fans of the series, and possibly even its creator, seem to be mostly interested in “stories about maids” and details of their clothing, rather than any actual story points

This is not an exhaustive list.

On the other hand, Emma looks gorgeous, and the character interaction on a scene-by-scene level is true and engaging. I might not always believe that all of Mori’s characters actually are British people born in the 19th century, but they’re interesting, distinct people no matter how ahistorical they may be. Their interactions are realistic, and if Emma had not insisted on its historicity, it could all be taken as the ways these people in this society interact.

I expect most readers won’t care about any of that. It’s a nice love story, sweet and totally innocent, as befitting the time-period. (Though there is quite a bit of female nudity in Emma, both of an older married woman and of a high-class prostitute, so it’s not appropriate for anyone looking for absolute purity of the Christian Dominionist strain.) And, again, I’m quite happy with ahistorical melodramatic stories — or solidly historical melodramatic stories, for that matter — but if something pretends to be serious and grounded, it should actually be so, and not just pretend to it.