Who's Who In The CBU Update 2008

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper writes the comic GUN STREET GIRL at Panel 2 Panel, was an original founder of Sequential Tart, is the managing editrix of the 2004 Eisner award-winning print magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST, and was named by Mark Millar (The Authority, Ultimates, Wanted) as one of the three most promising new talents in the next wave of comics writing.

Park Cooper started writing about comics at the now-defunct DC FANZINE website.

The Manga Bandwagon, Installment Three: Credit Where Credit's Due

By Park Cooper

Last time, I started talking about the symbiotic connection between manga and anime... let's get into some more examples.


Manga you might want to get into by trying the anime first:

AZUMANGA DAIOH: Last time, I discussed manga that I felt one could best get into by watching the anime first, and thereby warming to the characters and the plot, such as KARE KANO and EXCEL SAGA. Azumanga Daioh's another example of that. Put out by ADV (both the manga and the anime), Azumanga Daioh is an excellent series about a handful of high school girls. One, Chiyo, is a child genius of 11 who's jumped from grade school to high school. The rest also have their own well-developed personalities, like the tall, cool athelete who has secret love of all things cute that she feels doesn't match her exterior (she's right, but it just makes you love her more) and Osaka, a girl who's goofy daydreams add a really surreal touch to the story. Their homeroom teacher is the most immature of them all. Sounds like a good sitcom, but Azumanga Daioh is really much more than that. There are elements that are as good as the work of the master of all Japanese animated storytelling, Hayao Miyazaki, and the series indeed sometimes soars off into his type of practically-patented pastoral dreamy sequences. The best volumes of this series are the first two and the last two, but you can't skip the middle. Trust me, it's worth it -- and then you'll want to read the manga to savor every detail of your new friends' adventures.

FRUITS BASKET: First there was Rurouni Kenshin. Now, thanks to Cartoon Network, I think that Naruto is arguably the king. But in between, I'd have to say FRUITS BASKET was the most popular American manga, and it's still going strong. I've seen high school kids reading Fruits Basket's manga in high school and in middle school fairly often in the last year and a half. The Sohma family is accursed, somehow, to turn into one of the animals of the Chinese zodiac whenever anyone of the opposite sex hugs them. Intimacy, understandably, is made rather difficult... but the real curse comes from their dysfunctional family self-image of being freaks. The lengths they have to go to to keep this secret are very emotionally stressful. One high school girl comes into their lives and changes everything. Toru Honda hasn't figured out any way to break the curse, or even gotten anyone to try to tell her quite how it came into being, but you cheer for the determined, bright spirit her character represents as she just plain LOVES the accursed members of this family into new hope for the future. The anime is EXCELLENT, and every chapter of the manga is eagerly awaited. The manga is from TokyoPop, the anime is by FUNimation.

OH MY GODDESS: The manga adventures are from Dark Horse, of all things. Basically, one day, a college guy dials for pizza, misdials, and instead gets Heaven. He gets a beautiful goddess who says she'll grants him one wish. Rueing his short stature, he quips, "Tch. What I really wish for is for a goddess like you to come and live with me forever." Oops, that wish was, of course, counted as the official one. Guess what? It's the first of a long string of wacky yet ultimately lucky adventures for the poor dope, and Belldandy, his magical goddess lady love who's really quite happy to stick with him forever. With her sexy older sister Urd and their bratty, technical genius kid sister-goddess Skuld, our heroes have a comparatively short anime career, but if you like it, the Dark Horse manga series goes on and on and on and on.

RUROUNI KENSHIN: This is it, baby... the coolest samurai in manga/anime. In the era after Japan's civil war between the old, corrupt rulers and the farmers (surprisingly close to the modern day -- the west has steamships, and Japan itself has trains by this time), one guy, Kenshin Himura, walks the earth. He WANTS to be a goofy, goodnatured guy, doing odd jobs and playing with the neighbor's kids. But he USED to be the deadliest samurai alive -- the battosai -- the mankiller that killed EVERYONE's older brother in the war. Now, he fights to be left the hell alone, but even more to contain his bloodlust and keep it a part of his past. If only evil would stay out of his way. If only everyone didn't want to come find him and avenge their dead older brothers. If only he wasn't so GOOD. So you've got Kenshin the peacemaker, with his reverse-blade sword, with the edge on the inside instead of the outside, who'll use it to crease your ribcage like a mofo or break just your thumb so you'll never hold a sword the right way again, and then you've got the manslayer, who, when pressed, will give you a cold-of-the-endless-plains-of-hell look and make you shiver, then leap over your head and do things that, if he was using a normal sword, would kill about 100 guys in 8 seconds. Add in some other friends who are pretty handy in a fight and the little lady who would love to marry him if people would ever stop attacking them for 5 minutes, and you've got the grand anime and manga that is RUROUNI KENSHIN, a manga that has been on the top-seller lists of American BOOKS. Not COMIC BOOKS or GRAPHIC NOVELS... BOOK lists. Try the anime and see if you aren't hooked.


Now then. Am I saying all manga is perfect? No. Here's some hot titles you might want to try the on-screen versions of "instead of" as opposed to "in addition to":

BATTLE ROYALE: I haven't seen the movie versions yet, but the manga starts off pretty strong but gets weaker and weaker the deeper you go in my opinion (and Barb's).

TRIGUN: There are excellent moments in the manga, but they don't live up to the incredibly good (in my opinion) anime series, which starts off amusing and cute and gets better and BETTER AND _BETTER_...

SAYUKI: I've tried the anime, and I've tried the first three volumes of the manga. The anime's better.

RUNE SOLDIER LOUIE: Barb and I are extremely fond of this fantasy adventure/comedy series... the anime is much better than THOSE WHO HUNT ELVES' version. And just as weak as the anime version of THOSE WHO HUNT ELVES is RUNE SOLDIER LOUIE's manga version. Please do go enjoy the extremely entertaining and amusing anime of RUNE SOLDIER LOUIE, but don't bother with his manga incarnation.

COWBOY BEBOP: I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this, one of the greatest anime series of all time, is saddled with a sort of Cowboy Bebop Adventures version in print. The manga is Not Cool. The anime series is, with a very few dud episodes, VERY, VERY COOL.


Which brings us to the queen of them all, the one who started my wife and myself on our manga journey (whereas I think our anime journey was started by Hayao Miyazaki and his beloved story of Lupin III in CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO): Rumiko Takahashi. The woman is in a class by herself... let's deal with three of her works.

MAISON IKKOKU: A long, long love story. Godai is a student who moves into a house that's been turned into an apartment building. He quickly falls in love with the manager/landlady, a young woman who married young but is now a widow because her husband died of pneumonia not terribly long ago. Her tennis coach is also hot for her, but both of them have to be sensitive to the shadow of her poor first husband. Godai, our hero, also has to try to find his way out of college and into a steady job, in order to prove he'll be a good provider. It's a good manga, and the anime is pretty much equally good, but it sure is long. The anime series is shorter, but you can read the manga a lot faster, so experience it as you like.

RANMA 1/2: Ranma Saotome was doing martial arts training with his dad in China when they each fell into one of the pools of the accursed springs. In Ranma's, a young woman fell in long ago and died, and so now, whenever anyone else falls into the same pool, they will, when exposed to cold water, become a pretty young woman. So yes, it's the greatest gender-changing epic known to mankind, although we deal with the psychological ramifications a lot less than, say, the manga YOUR AND MY SECRET (which I've reviewed here before). No, mostly it's comedic hijinks with Ranma turning into a girl when splashed with cold water, and stuck that way until immersed in hot water. But wait, his dad fell into a different pool, remember? Dad... turns into a panda. And the Chinese girl who's got the hots for Ranma turns into a cat. And her boyfriend turns into a duck. Oh, and Ranma's afraid of cats. Oh, and they live at the house of the family whose daughter was long ago promised in marriage to Ranma. But she thinks he's a jerk. But the guy who likes HER turns into a piglet. And the little old man who's their master in the martial arts, their Yoda if you will, lives there too, and he has an underwear fetish and steals ladies' underwear from clotheslines in the neighborhood. And THIS GOES ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON. It's really funny. A good manga, and an equally good-if-old-school anime, BUT IT NEVER ENDS. So after you've seen Ranma and his friends win some contest where they have to do something (cooking, ice-skating, eating, tea-serving ceremony), but MARTIAL-ARTS STYLE, FOR THE BILLIONTH TIME, after you've seen Ranma ALMOST get some magic thingy that would break his curse FOR THE BILLIONTH TIME, you wish these amusing friends farewell and go watch some damn Trigun instead. But it's a hell of a ride while it lasts.

INU-YASHA: I told a high school manga artist that Barb once met at San Diego Con that I was the faculty sponsor of the local Animation Club. "Neat," she said. She paused. "But at my school it'd just be taken over by those damn Inu-Yasha fans..." Inu-Yasha is arguably Cartoon Network's greatest imported anime success, over even Rurouni Kenshin or Yu Yu Haakusho. A girl, Kagome, falls down a well in the present and ends up in mythic Japan where she helps to assemble all the pieces of the shattered Jewel of Four Souls, which, when assembled, could make hot male lead bad-boy Inu-Yasha a full-blooded Dog Demon, or... or will his practically-never-admitted love for Kagome make him choose to rid himself of his demon half forever? Or, alternatively, will we never find out because it just goes ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON? Truly, being a Rumiko Takahashi fan means that you believe that there can, at least sometimes, be no such thing as Too Much Of A Good Thing. Is Inu-Yasha a Good Thing? Yeah, it's got its moments. But while it's more likely to end than Ranma 1/2, what's even MORE likely is that Rumiko's most successful work ever will be stretched out until no one cares anymore... and while that day has come for me, for anime fans in general, hell may well freeze over first.




I'll see you people at Austin's Ushicon this weekend... peace out.















































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