There’s a lot of really fun stuff available, dang
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cat’s eye - the premise to this one is that there’s a master thief called cat’s eye. the detective assigned to the case spends his free time at a cafe that’s also called cat’s eye, run by his girlfriend and her sisters, to whom he describes all the schemes he’s concocting to catch cat’s eye. his girlfriend is always saying stuff like “bad weather to have to walk a tightrope in… oh! nothing!” and occasionally he finds gemstones in her pocket. i just finished the 22nd chapter of the manga, by which point the whole staff of the police department are now meeting regularly at the cafe cat’s eye to loudly describe the new plans for catching cat’s eye.
it gets kinda fun when the rival female detective joins and is the only one who can see what’s going on. midway through it starts having actual heist type plots instead of just being like ah, the vault is impregnable → full page shot of one of the cat’s eye girls making a cool pose in a jumpsuit → what!! the painting is gone!. 2/3rds into this first volume and there’s already a sense of desperation to plot elements like “the cop goes temporarily blind before getting stuck in a well with his girlfriend/target” and “the cop is now living in the cat’s eye cafe after his house burns down for unrelated reasons”. but what can i tell you. despite or perhaps because of the above i’ve been finding this pretty fun. i love the one acrobat bodysuit that has the giant 70s collar on it for some reason.
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cat’s eye is really good fun until the nazi plot
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i mean i can’t imagine this comic being able to sustain subject matter heavier than “locked the car doors with the key inside” but would be cautiously intrigued if they ever fought hitler’s brain like Golgo 13
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no they’re on the wrong side of history
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it’s about as bad as that entire part of arcadia of my youth where captain harlock’s ancestor is in the luftwaffe
The cat’s eye chapter about the nuremberg trials was extremely contentious
wow is any of that in the anime?
Yes, in the second season
It doesn’t go Angel Cop or anything but the sisters seem to have no qualms about their dad making propaganda for the nazis, they only object to a group of neo-nazis getting access to a chemical weapons formula written on the back of some his art
Its very stupid and leaves a bad taste but tsukasa hojo isn’t actually a nazi
i remember raising an eyebrow at captain harlock when i saw that the premise for at least one version of him is that everyone on earth lives easy lives where everything is free because all the manufacturing and food production is automated, and he’s destroying the food delivery spaceships because this is a terrible world that needs to be stopped for some reason
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I don’t know this version, but the manga has some similarities to what you describe. In the manga, Earth is indeed decadent/fully automated but Harlock raids spaceships that deliver liquor, gold, and gemstones to earth, not food. The earth government is portrayed as bad because their reaction to an alien invasion is to build a golf course around it
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Learning this about Captain Harlock puts Danzig’s debacle from a couple months back in a new light.
I hope Lando isn’t also a Nazi.
Most of non-leftism Japanese is crypto-fascist. The core of the post-war Japanese narrative is to transform the fascists of that time into high level patriots or martyrs, a few extremists redirected a potentially successful war towards failure. Extremists are what they despise, while calm fascist patriots are what they admire.
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oh yeah definitely, I just think hojo isn’t even cryptofascist. He went from making stuff like City Hunter and Cat’s Eye to making Family Compo, which is so surprising to me it is still hard to reconcile that its the same guy
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I have thought about this before, I think many Japanese artist are filled with humanism, however their point about self-esteem always returns to the collective rather than the individual. In the end they cannot escape being held hostage by patriotic narratives (like how to judge collective actions when individual values are challenged, sometimes it’s the people closest to you, Hojo has a series of WWII shorts reflected that hijacking). That’s why Tezuka Osamu is truly unique, he believe there is a justice based on independent self-esteem in any time (and also one of the reasons why Hayao Miyazaki doesn’t like him). I try to illustrate this tiny difference but contrary ideology with an example.
Tezuka Osamu: The television bonus because my father died in an aggressive war should be smashed. If my father knew that this was an aggressive war now, he would have smashed it without hesitation.
Miyazaki Hayao: This television is a war relic left by my father. He worked very hard at the time, and the war that caused harm to everyone has finally come to an end.
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The impression i get of Leiji Matsumoto is he’s a similar sort of curmudgeonly old guy to Miyazaki who believes life isn’t worth living unless you’re struggling to survive by working really hard until you drop.
See also: the episode of Galaxy Express where everyone is morbidly obese because robots do all the work
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idw are following dc’s lead and releasing a range of thick, cheap manga-sized books. definitely getting the godzilla one, since it’s the entire 25 issue series rulers of earth, practically an omnibus for $14.
also on the subject of godzilla and idw, is anyone else reading their three current ongoings?
godzilla is ok. a team of superpowered agents go around fighting kaiju, one of them has a personal grudge against godzilla.
starship godzilla has lamost nothing to do with godzilla, being a spaceship show in comic form, where the spaceship happens to be mechagodzilla.
escape the dead zone is the weirdest, and i’m starting to think it might be the best? a large region of what used to be the western united states is now the dead zone, a post-apocalyptic wasteland cut off from the rest of the world, and filled with kaiju twists on typical post apocalypse tropes: cults, battle arenas, clean 50s-looking towns that are actually traps, etc. a gruff godzilla-man travels around this place with some kids who also have monster powers and they get into various stylishly-presented adventures.
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I remember telling a bunch of people about a decade ago that the trad comics publishers should switch to this exact format and most folks were certain it could never work, would never happen. Happy to be vindicated after all these years
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i just found out that idw sonic has been getting released in this format for a while, as “sonic the hedgehog on the go”
as perfect as this idea is, it seems insane that i haven’t seen it advertised in the monthly comic