They were trying to meet the old cartoon, "how you remember it’ which I guess looks like that. But they wanted the style similar, but allowing for more detail and color, also FRAMES.
Have you seen the old cartoon lately? It looks weiiird because it’s like 15 FPS.
Yeah I can see that. Watching the old X-Men is kind of janky, yeah, but you can tell they really studied the comics when making it. It feels like a comic book in action.
For 97 the stills make it look like “a modern old X-Men cartoon” which is great! But the final effect comes off as just fine. I think it’s because it looks like it’s been mastered on a computer with fully cleaned up lines and tweening between frames.
read up on ore ga watashi ni naru made, fantranslated as until i become me
one of those basically magic “gender bends”, specifically those where there’s a mysterious disease that hits a rare amount of people and changes their sexual characteristics over night. i feel a bit wary about that trope, like it just seems kinda shitty when transpeople are real, but i love until i become me, and like, it’s not even the only one in this subgenre that has good stuff going for it.
seven year old bully boy, the bane of all girls in his class, gets hit with this and gets the wombo-combo of all your previous friends are now your bullies and you can’t get along with any of the girls you used to bully.
results: intense guilt, fear of ostracization, fear of other boys
so like, with this setup he gets to move somewhere else, introduced as a girl, and while he is increasingly getting along with girls he keeps having to contend with all kinds of invasive and conflicting gendering, being expected to be a girl at school, but treated as a poor suffering boy at home, and grows increasingly confused about what it’s ok for him to feel and be. it feels weird when something he likes gets ascribed as a boy thing. it feels weird when something he likes gets ascribed to being a girl. it feels weird when he’s expected to be uncomfortable about something “girly”. it feels terrible when the boys are being weird about girls and it feels awful when the girls are talking about what boys are like. everything is discomfort and for a long while he defaults to doing his best to mask in either kind of situation, being a girl at school while acting on boyish expectations at home, and so on, and so on.
it’s a fun read.
oh, but it’s not like it’s constant misery or something. it’s fair if you expect that from something i like, but like, he finds support in various people around him in different ways. things are difficult but they are also good a lot of the time. maybe i should use she but i’m not gonna ascribe him eventually liking some feminine things to being a girl, especially when he’s later on settled on using boku internally while masking with watashi externally. and maybe he hasn’t settled. tbf i’m sure his gender identity could totally be whatever at this point and it doesn’t really matter what it ends up being, it’s just good seeing him becoming better able to be however he wants to be, wether it’s doing something “girly” or “boyish” or whatever. i mean shit, maybe the author has also gathered how arbitrary any of that is? it sure feels like it, it’s not like he’s the only one in his class struggling with gender expectations. kinda like its a running theme or something.
Reading thru Gay Comix, whole thing is on internet archive.
gonna think about this a lot
i found out 170 chapters of “section chief shima kosaku” had been translated over the last three years… i always wanted to read some straight salaryman manga after years of coming across pastiches and parodies of it in other comics so i’ve started going through. there’s a lot more sex than i expected!! nearly every story has the protagonist sort of passively, semi-reluctantly drift into a new affair, which ends painlessly when the woman he’s with does the decent thing by deciding to quietly leave his life rather than causing a hassle. so it’s sorta wish fulfilment so far but in kind of a sour way, bc both the text and the author foreword mention how office culture rewards not making waves more than anything… the integration of erotic content can be kind of funny though. my favourite story seems at first to finally be a straightforward workplace procedural about his boss’s desire to win a purely ceremonial rotating client award for the second year in a row. when he meets with an agent of the client to find out how this could be achieved the next panel just says
i also liked this panel
still reading section chief shima kosaku. it does find its groove a little more or maybe it took me a while to find the tone it was going for - the main character is a sinatra fan and all the chapters are named after jazz standards so it’s sort of leaning towards that bruised romanticism vein more than actual office stuff. which is kind of nice, i appreciate that whenever the workplace stuff comes up it’s always treated as like a slog that not even the protagonist can really bring himself to care about. hard work and loyalty are never rewarded; office life as a kind of endless, aimless children’s game that eats up everything around it but is too fatally self-absorbed to even notice.
the few chapters where we get pulled into caring about company intrigue always end with deflating shots of the deposed rival salarymen ending up unemployed, struggling to buy their kids something for christmas. at one point the happy ending is that the main character’s company (a by all accounts thinly disguised Panasonic) gets a vendor to pay them back for some wasted marketing supplies, and it’s immediately pointed out that it just means none of the low level line and file will get bonuses that year. most of the female characters are sex workers and at one point the protagonist basically deploys his lover to sleep with an old flame for the sake of getting to use the guy’s work in a marketing campaign. i’m not marking labour sentiment on a scorecard here it’s just funny to me how much deliberately bleaker it is than its own parodies.
having said that it’s still p funny how horny this is and especially how wild the attempt to couple that with the melodrama can be. there’s a one-off chapter where he meets an old friend whose wife has leukemia and a month left to live, and the friend asks him to go to her hospital bed one last time bc she was always secretly in love with him, and when they meet she says “touch me…” and he jerks her off under the hospital covers!! the last page is him saying “…she was wet…” while walking mournfully down a street of falling leaves etc. i’m also curious how guys at the real-life panasonic took the chapter where it’s revealed that the fictionalised konosuke matsushita’s illegitimate child has a fetish for threesomes bc she once hid in a closet and watched him and another guy have sex with her mom.
there is some good mid 80s time capsule stuff including a part where the protag’s daughter tells him all about Captain EO, and also some sequences where he goes to america which are especially crazed in ways both good and bad. there’s a part where he deduces a couple is homosexual in the goofiest possible way
that panel is immediately followed by this one
there’s also a chapter where he reflects on the racism of american society and the multi ethnic nature of new york that abruptly shifts into being mugged on a subway, getting saved by a bernie goetz type guy with a gun and then, ah
so if nothing else i can truly say i have very little idea where the chapters will end up going every time
Checking out the first few pages on amazon.co.jp’s preview, the first thing that strikes me is the portrayal of how masking culture can function as corporate ritual.
Kōsaku is wearing a mask as he enters an office tower, and when he sits down at a conference table covered with glass dividers, he takes it off as one would a hat. One of the two men waiting for him at the table was wearing one until now, and takes it off to greet him.
Last year I read the first volume of working mom manga Shijūkara and this description fits it perfectly too
People should go to these events so I can live vicariously through you. I promise to tell you about Bubblescon if you do.
Oh and if it wasn’t clear where these are located, they are Toronto, Vancouver, Columbus, and Chicago.
got caught up to ultimate spider-man, and it’s still very interesting. definitely doing an infinitely better job of “spider-man, but a real guy” than any previous attempt, in comics or otherwise.
also started reading ultimate x-men, and the very 00s concept of an oel manga re-imagining has been revived?! the focus is on the character armour, who it seems like has been “the next big thing” for x-comics for well over a decade now, and in the second issue, she befriends storm, who is also a japanese teenager in this world. and it seems like the villain might be the venom symbiote?
i love these two series so far, i really have no idea where they’re going, and they’re a billion times more interesting than seeing the same origin stories for the millionth time. for the first time in what feels like forever, something cool is being done with marvel characters!
I have been slowly (as an issue every day or so with stretches where I don’t for a few weeks) making my way through the IDW Transformers series as I grew up on the original Marvel series and hence have a soft spot for something like this. It will obviously never be something big or important but after the first chunk of issues it eventually gets to what is seemingly referred to as phase 2 where it becomes pretty much the best Transformers comic ever by breaking more or less every rule the property has ever had.
The war ends, Earth is left behind, for just about the first time ever they explain what the war was about and touch on the whole “but what about everyone who wasn’t an Autobot or Decepticon?” question. It initially split between half the focus on one group going on space adventures and getting into wacky hijinks and the rest staying on Cybertron and dealing with the aftermath of a 4 millions years long war (just recently a third comic has emerged focusing on Optimus Prime making earth a colony, beyond the interesting conceit of Prime starting to buy into his own hype as a messiah figure and slowly lose his way it is the weakest written by far). A bunch of characters have actually developed from their forever characterization, Megatron is reflecting on how things went wrong and where he lost his way, Starscream runs Cybertron but is mentally collapsing under the strain of it and mostly talks to a hallucination of the dead Bumblebee who ran the planet with him beforehand and acts as the angel on his shoulder pushing him to be better, etc.
I wouldn’t go run out and read it if one didn’t care for those giant shape-shifting robots, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised as I was just checking it out out of curiosity and it has easily cleared the bar of what I expected from it.
checking manga tagged crossdressing a lot, not gonna talk about a specific one and a lot of it is trash, probably, don’t fucking judge me some of us need to watch a boy get flustered as his childhood best friend falls in love with his “girlsona”, ok? there’s some catharsis there, ok? also it’s great watching them get all red in the face when they for a moment consider their guy friend in “that” way for the first time.
anyway, there’s a whole bunch of these that use temporary cross-dressing of a very het guy as the premise for getting close to a girl and then the cross-dressing takes a backseat to a regular fucking romance. what the fuck. inexcusable. and i keep reading chapters cause i just want him to put it on again, but no, only when plot relevant. he’s not a pervert after all. ugh. fucking get out of here. make out with a dude or go all in on the dresses! the girls usually love the cross-dressing too! come on! are you gonna disappoint the girl you like this way! SHE’S SUPER INTO YOU WEARING THOSE TIGHT LEGGINGS WITH THAT CUTE TOP! SO WHAT IF THIS OPENS SOME WEIRD DOORS?! LET THOSE OPEN DAMN YOU!! COME THE FUCK ON!!! ARE YOU ALL GONNA END UP AS SOME FUCKING IDEAL CORE FAMILY OF FOUR LIVING IN A NICE TWO FLOOR HOUSE EVENTUALLY?! DISGUSTING!! ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING!!!
binge read a bunch of jiro matsumoto. don’t know what to say about most of it. like, one of the short stories in one of his anthologies is about two kids at an all boys school who hang out in a derelict tower which one of them defends in viciously violent knife fights with other kids, but it’s also about gender but only because matsumoto had just watched funeral parade of roses, like, i’m not sure if there’s a lot to read into? but i always love the way he draws stuff (also, watch funeral parade of roses, it’s great)
there’s also a page where they hang out while the blonde kid is jerking it spying on their teacher having sex while the girly kid is eating the bugs they’ve collected. is this allegory? fuck, i don’t know
oh right, that’s like, one of the things to look out for. jiro matsumoto comics are kinda obscene. remember reading a review of velveteen & mandala (which i love) which was almost positive about it except they’d rather the rape/diarrhea scene didn’t exist. but that’s like part of the package deal for indulging in a horrific kind of drawn violence. like… it shouldn’t just feel nice. if you feel ill, that’s also a worthwhile feeling to linger on
so uh, moving on, alice in hell.
about a sniper boy in a wasteland and his alice in wonderland looking android which he uses as bait to set up targets. he treats his doll with abuse and violence, which we later see reflected in his past, the same words and mistreatment from his dad while he’s forced to dress up as bait to make caravans stop before robbery.
i do think about how his distrust and superiority complex and loneliness all manifest in the desert fortification he’s set up, and how it’s ultimately all used to kill another boy who desperately wanted to reach out for him. maybe it just strikes a cord with me BECAUSE BOY HOWDY DO I WISH I COULD JUST HOLE UP AND FORTIFY MYSELF FROM SOCIAL ANXIETY. to my own detriment of course but… ehh. also, i just happened to select only pages with the protagonist in drag, despite there being like, maybe 20 pages tops with that
ok, next up, joshi kouhei
this is one of the big ones. it’s like, exploitation movie x giant robot x military fetishism x gender(???)
we got a scenario where dimensional wars have to be fought with partially organic robots modeled after girls, for reasons unknown to humans cause it was decided by ai, but really its mostly jiro matsumoto being a fucking weirdo. the girlbots cause eventual corruption of their pilots where the pilots persona is gradually overridden by girl, causing more and more girlish behavior until they turn into body-horror monsters.
uh… this is sick, y’know? in a fun way. i wanted to show a violent page here but the soldier getting gored also pissed herself so…
anyway, this other page is totally sick
oh… just occured to me the giant peoplebots thing is totally an airtight garage thing. probably another influence. this is better than the airtight garage tho. sorry moebius heads.
best manga for me, especially for someone who wonders how ‘feudal’ (not capitalism) works in a Japanese group (includes school, hobby group and volunteer) but the plot is a little out of control when he becomes the president of the corporation later.
another mangas that has the same mid-80s sense is Emblem Take 2 (highly recommended) and Mad Bull 34 (how Japanese writers imagine New York).
back to my sporadic comics i’ve read / have been reading roundup:
choujin X
this one is set up as a straightforward teenage super-hero story and its super fun.
it goes really in depth in the kinds of institutional nitty-gritty of the warring factions in the narrative and the weird politics that spill from the geographies where the story is set.
people with extreme superpowers can become kings and/or religious authorities and that grants them the social / physical capital necessary to become nation-makers. that means having to rule over lands where you have to negotiate the rules between the individual territories of the country as well as neighboring countries with their own political/historical traditions of codifying superpowers into the law. choujin X is a story that’s super interested in this type of worldbuilding.
also has very well drawn action and physical comedy, which i also like
tower dungeon
last year i caught up with tsutomu nihei’s major works so it was really pleasant to start following his current one. it feels like a much more well thought-out attempt at a mainstream action adventure narrative than his previous attempts over the years. very snappy to read while also being economical enough with the details of how that world works that it feels mysterious
girl meets rock!
this one caught my attention because the protagonist is a huge loser who’s a mark for mukai shutoku and late 1990s-2010s japanese rock music in general and who’s just started learning how to play a musical instrument so i feel kinship. that’s real fanservice to me.
i’ve been reading this one whenever i travel in the weekends because its very light. at some point in the story the characters started talking about boyfriends / relationships and i couldn’t get what the deal was with that, it felt really out of nowhere and kind of bland. now we seem to be back on track, though.
i love this stupid idiot she’s my daughter
witch and the beast
extremely tumblr-teen-coded fantasy story about witches and werewolves and people being cool while wearing suits and black dresses and parallel societies, etc. not super interesting at all but has good action.
the elusive samurai
very funny. there’s something very cozy to me in reading these comics that are about constantly breaking the fourth wall for comedic effect. reminds one of simpler times, even though i never got into gintama back in the day. the action has a similar (if much more simmered down) affect to it as, like, grappler baki. the protagonist is adorable
witch hat atelier
i’ve gotten into this one recently. it’s so, so cute! i deeply love the concept of magic being presented as a sort of kinetic, explicitly craftsman-like representation of what’s basically magic
programming. crafting spells as composition-based software archicteture that you beautifully draw on paper or cloth in order to, i don’t know, throw sick fire balls and stuff
I keep meaning to get back to that last one, I’ll probably start over
i gotta yuri-post
it’s about cheating if that matters.
the protagonist is totally falling apart and i can only sympathize
Tower Dungeon and Witch Hat Atelier look pretty neat. : )
The first two WHA chapters are readable on Kodansha’s site:
