Category Archives: manga

The Best Argument for Creationism: Dragonball Evolution

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Dragonball Evolution, what can be said about it? Well,  I can certainly call it a “movie.” It is a series of scenes placed one after the other on a film strip and shown in a sequential order. Dragonball Evolution: People involved in a production to put a form of entertainment in theaters.

Upon first hearing that a live-action Dragon Ball movie was being made, I had an image in my head full of cheesy lines and attempts to bring stories full circle, revisions to existing aspects of Dragon Ball designed to make it seem “cooler” and less “cartoony,” unfaithfulness to the source material’s characters and their personality, and awkward special effects. When the first trailer was released, and then the second, this prediction still appeared to hold true. Now, after having seen the whole thing, I can say that the movie was exactly what I expected it to be.

Where to start with this, “Evolution” of Dragon Ball as it wishes to be known? Well, how about the way in which it relates to Charles Darwin’s theory, or rather the attack on it by certain religious groups?

Proponents of Intelligent Design commonly state that there is evidence in the bedrock that shows that the Earth’s history is not a continuous chain of events, and that there are mass extinctions and sudden increases of certain types of animals, as if the history of the Earth and its wildlife are a series of islands connected by a higher power. This is in fact how Dragonball Evolution feels. You know it’s a story mainly because you’ve been told that it’s one, but while the events of the movie follow a chronological order, there is almost nothing which smoothly connects one scene to the next. Master Roshi will claim that going to the tournament is vital to their quest to defeat Piccolo. Then no one will participate in the tournament and then we never find out what going to the tournament actually accomplished. Yamcha and Bulma hate each other in one scene and in the very next they’re already falling in love. There isn’t even at the least a generic scene where Yamcha catches Bulma while she’s falling or something. Goku is in high school for some reason, and he gets picked on by jocks. He meets Chi Chi there. Then high school is never ever mentioned again. Master Roshi, the narrator, and Piccolo will all mention that Piccolo was responsible for nearly destroying the Earth until he was sealed 2000 years ago, but now he’s free and looking to enact revenge on humanity. How exactly did he break free from his confinement? Apparently NOBODY KNOWS OR CARES, at least not enough to tell the audience.

That’s not to say EVERYTHING is bad about this movie. Characters are occasionally true to their manga portrayals in certain ways. Goku is always naive, gets one or two nice lines to show how dumb he is. Master Roshi’s introduction feels very much like Master Roshi except in every scene after that he turns into generic old master. Also, sometimes the action scenes make it feel like a generic action movie, which is to say not super awful. Also my friends and I burst out laughing practically every minute at one bad line after another until we lost count.

An interview with the people who made Dragonball Evolution has members of the cast and crew defending the production, saying that the director succeeded in keeping the spirit of Dragon Ball alive and adapting it just enough to appeal to a wider audience. The problem is that they’re totally wrong and Dragonball Evolution is not faithful to the spirit of Dragon Ball at all. I can go into the many reasons why this is the case, but I’ll just give one: the core of Dragon Ball is represented by its main character Son Goku and his personality: goofy, often very dumb, loves to fight, and has a strong sense of justice when it comes down to it. There’s a certain kind of whimsy and humor that never leaves the series even when planets are being destroyed and limbs are being chopped off. That is to say, Dragon Ball is all about having serious fights never be too serious because it’s always been about the comedy as well. Dragonball Evolution throws all of this out and decides to be an action movie and coming-of-age story like so many others out there. Even if it succeeded in being a well-constructed story with brilliant direction, it would still not be Dragon Ball.

The Fujoshi Files 9: Asou Akari

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Name: Asou, Akari (麻生あかり)
Alias: N/A
Relationship Status: Ambiguous
Origin: Psyche!

Information:
High schooler Asou Akari is a thorough merchandise-grabbing otaku who is also a popular artist and cosplayer. Known among otaku for her hardcore yaoi doujinshi, one would never expect her to also be one of the most popular and beautiful girls in her school, even sporting her very own fan club. While most fujoshi lead some degree of a double life, few have their two sides as diametrically opposed as Asou does. The only one in on her secret is her best friend from childhood, Tanigaki Sadakazu.

Asou’s current favorite show is Senkou no Two Top, for which she is proud to be one of the first to draw a doujinshi of it for Comic Market. Her obsession with the dark-skinned and handsome Senkou Two character Azuma leads Asou to also have a crush on a student at her school named Abe, who bears a resemblance to the character Azuma. However, Asou eventually learns that, while their looks are smiliar their personalities are not, which brings her a little closer to Tanigaki.

Fujoshi Level:
Asou Akari’s fujoshi level is indicated by her tendency to confuse fiction with reality. In addition to having a crush on Abe due to his resemblance to an anime character, Tanigaki’s decision to punch Abe (who had hurt Asou’s feelings) only inspires Asou to draw more doujinshi and turns that real life physical altercation into a steamy sexual fantasy. However, it’s not a fantasy about Tanigaki but rather one about a character from Senkou Two whom he resembles.

The Exciting World of Ron Sharks: Akagi

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When you first look at an anime like Akagi, there might not be much to grab you especially if you’re an anime fan. The art style is very unusual, some would even say “awful.” You’re not even entirely sure what the show is about, and all you’ve seen of it are screenshots of a guy with a chin so pointy he could use it to assassinate people. But that’s when you look at the full title and realize that’s all you need: It’s not just Akagi, no it’s Mahjong Legend Akagi: The Genius Who Descended Into the Darkness.

Akagi is based on a manga about mahjong by Fukumoto Nobuyuki. This might be an unusual topic for you. “Who would make a comic about mahjong?!” However, unlike most cases where this might be shocking (“Who would make a comic about breadmaking?!”), what you have to know here is that mahjong manga are actually quite common in Japan. There are entire magazines devoted to the subject, like if you took Shounen Jump or Shounen Magazine and instead devoted all of the content to how-to-play mahjong guides and mahjong comics. This is the world Akagi comes from.

The titular character is Akagi Shigeru, who when we first see him is a boy in his early teens, who the narrator (voiced by Furuya Tohru i.e. AMURO RAY) tells us will “some day” be a legend in the underworld. Akagi is a lad with a penchant for deadly games which push his body and will to their limits. At this point, Akagi has never played mahjong in his life, but his intelligence, fearlessness, and incredible capacity for gambling with all of his soul without succumbing to pressure make him a perfect match for a game like mahjong, a game where your entire psyche is mapped out in the actions you take. Needless to say, the entire show revolves around Akagi playing Mahjong with a) Yakuza b) people known by the Yakuza c) Yakuza-esque people, and every moment at the mahjong table is filled with the kind of intensity you can only get when your life can be decided by a single, seemingly insignificant action.

You might think that with all this talk of mahjong, you would need to know how to play the game in order to properly understand Akagi. This is not the case at all, and I will attest that I watched the whole show before ever learning anything about mahjong. There’s a lot of strategy involved, but it has little to do with the actual rules of the game and everything to do with human psychology. The way the show is presented makes every moment as tense as possible, as the characters’ minds are assaulted by doubts and fears that come from trying to read another player’s moves.

The art style for Akagi is pretty unusual, but my only complaint about it is that the anime doesn’t quite match up to the art style of the manga. Neither one is very conventional, but when you look at the manga, you’ll see that it has a vibrancy and “ugliness of the world” that is lessened due to the consistency of the animation in the anime adaptation.

The Akagi manga practically looks like a gag manga, but it only makes the comic better, especially when combined with the game of mahjong. One advantage of the anime though is that they were able to create a CG set of mahjong tiles to use throughout the show, and are able to do some pretty creative things with it.

It does seem like the animators got a little bored with the show after a while and began to do more creative things. In the early episodes, Amuro Ray would describe a metaphor for how a character was feeling at the time and that was it. Towards the end however, it ends up being a situation where the narrator will describe a metaphor, and then the anime will shift to a visual scene to accompany the metaphor. So if the narrator says, “AKAGI’S SITUATION IS SIMILAR TO BEING A COBRA IN A DESERT WITH ONLY A CAN OF PICKLES AT ITS SIDE,” you will be sure to see a scene with a cobra, in the desert, with a can of pickles. Some might call it stalling for time, I think it’s the animators wanting to do something special. This would continue into the next anime adaptation of a Fukumoto work, Kaiji.

Ultimately, Akagi might be about mahjong but what they’re playing matters less than how they’re playing it. Again, if you’re worried about not understanding it, do not let that stop you. This is Initial D with mahjong tiles instead of cars. This is Yu-Gi-Oh! for 40 year olds (especially the early chapters of Yu-Gi-Oh!). If either of those descriptions make you hesitant, don’t let them stop you either. Watch this show.

Mager

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Ogiue’s Favorite Show from Spring 2009

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I think it’s pretty clear to everyone who’s seen it that Ristorante Paradiso would be Ohno Kanako’s favorite anime of the new season. Going with that, I began to wonder what, then, would Ogiue’s most anticipated anime of Spring 2009 would be. Ultimately, I decided that it would have to be the new Fullmetal Alchemist series, known in English as Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (though I still enjoy calling it 鋼の錬金術師 Fullmetal Alchemist).

This might be too easy an exercise in hindsight. We already know that not only does Ogiue tend to prefer shounen series with lots of cute guys, but that she’s already a Fullmetal Alchemist fan. For those of you who don’t recall, in the manga Ohno slyly revealed that she was well aware of Ogiue’s burgeoning “Haregan (sic)” obsession (this was replaced by “Reass Mood” in the anime). On top of that, Ogiue is a fan of Roy x Ed, and was even originally planning on doing her first Comic Market erotic doujinshi of Fullmetal Alchemist.

I’m sure she’d have read the manga already, but that she’d still tune in for each episode in order to further fill her fujoshi reservoir, a reservoir for which there is no bottom. Well, not that kind of bottom.

Belated Happy Birthday to Ogiue

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I am ashamed.

Just as I did last year, I failed to mention in time that last Saturday was the birthday for the great and wonderful Ogiue Chika, who if we go by the dates set in the Genshiken manga is already a productive(?) member of society.

If you recall, Ogiue at the end of Genshiken started to work as a manga artist for Monthly Afternoon. This was in 2005, and so by now she’s had about 4 years to make something of herself. I’d like to believe that in the world of Genshiken, she has worked hard with Sasahara at her side, a wonderful professional manga romance. Sasahara meanwhile is still probably working hard as an editor, possibly losing lots of sleep and wrangling manga artists to get their jobs finished on time. Such a splendid concept, being in a relationship with a person in your field who approaches it just a bit differently from you.

Let us give our goodwill to Ogiue in her future endeavors, and hope for happiness for her in the years to come.

The Pros and Cons of Technology and its Effects on Society: Magic Geox

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The Magic Geox comic series is often underappreciated and overlooked. This is especially the case with issue 12 of the series. This issue, titled Magic Geox and…the School of Magic, manages to blend subtle societal commentary with deep, complex characters in a unique setting combining magic and technology with a dash of superheroics. It also reveals much about our hero Magic Geox’s character flaws, and does so with grace on the level of Kino’s Journey.

The story begins on a world called Planet Magix III where a group of young wizard apprentices are tasked with creating shoes that are all but devoid of odor, a practical exercise fitting for a final exam from one of the most prominent magic planets in the galaxy. The young wizards-to-be, in their attempt to find a solid solution to their problem, inadvertently unleash an ancient and terrible pair of demonic shoes with a pungent aroma so foul that they are actually able to control other smelly footwear through the power of their combined stench. Ultimately, it is up to Magic Geox to descend from space and use his advanced technology to put an end to the evil shoes.

It is in this issue that we begin to truly see the level of hatred Magic Geox has for odiferous shoes. Though he hides it well with a smile, and a look of confidence, the sublime artwork really conveys the obsession inherent in Magic Geox.

A lot can be said about the symbolism strewn throughout the story, but three main points come to mind.

1) The young magicians are eager to solve their problem without thinking through the consequences, and their mistake balloons and goes out of control to the point that not even the adults in their community can handle it. This speaks to a growing paranoia in our society that children are growing up faster than their parents and guardians can keep up with, and even those with the power to control matter itself cannot entirely understand the minds of children.

2) Magic Geox is himself a technological being who arrives on a backwater “magical world” in order to save it from the perils caused by its own people. In this sense, Magic Geox is not unlike a Christ figure. Though he uses technology, he chooses to have the word “Magic” in his name, as if to say that his abilities, man-made as they may be, can still cause miracles. It does not appear to be hubris or conceit however, but rather true faith in his cause.

3) The demon shoes themselves possess sharp teeth placed in such a way that if one were to actually wear them as shoes, the pain would be immense despite at first seeming to be very comfortable. When one realizes that the “stink trails” that emit from these shoes are just creatively disguised smog clouds, it is clear that these shoes are a metaphor for pollution caused by industrialization, an interesting contrast to the promotion of technology inherent in Magic Geox’s presence. Much like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke, this comic wants to show both sides to a situation.

Overall, Magic Geox and…the School of Magic is an ambitious work. Its main flaw may be that it is so densely packed with content in every page and panel that it becomes a difficult read. However, this is also what makes it worth revisiting time and time again.

Guilty Over My Gear (or lack thereof)

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Sometimes I feel as if anime companies are trying to guilt trip me into buying their products. Now, I will say that I download anime and manga. I also buy anime and manga, but it’s usually of series I already know are good or tend to be inexpensive purchases or both. The sheer amount of series which I think are good and worth my time are far greater than my income. I still get series, but as anime companies struggle to keep up, the feeling I occasionally get from interviews and such is that I am not doing enough. It’s really uncomfortable.

This is especially true of series which I think are quite good and even somewhat affordable but simply am unable to purchase in the near future. Should I be getting it in lieu of others simply for the sake of “supporting?” If I buy a series from one licensing company but not the other, is it all right for me to be supporting the anime industry as a whole but not helping out all the companies which put the shows I like?

The Differences in Realism in Video Games

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For as long as video games have existed, there’s been a graphical arms race. The Intellivision claims its superiority over the Atari 2600 due to its much more accurate-looking versions of Basketball and Football. The Sega Genesis has 16 whole bits, twice as many as the NES, a number whose significance in marketing was always accompanied by images to show much better Genesis games looked. With the rise of 3-d graphics, particularly with the era where the original Playstation was king, there’s been a push towards manufactured realism. While it’s not like the pursuit of realism didn’t exist previously (Mortal Kombat’s digitized graphics looked amazing at first), it was with 3-d graphics that the foundation was laid due to the simple if faulty logic that a three-dimensional game is more like our three-dimensional world.

As we look at today’s graphics, we know that the pursuit of realism is still going strong, with improved lighting, increasing numbers of polygons per model, and just tons of work and money being put into getting a scene in a video game to look like a photo. While I’m not a fan of this push towards realism as I believe it to be somewhat of a dead end, what I am interested in is how America and Japan differ in their depictions of “realism” in video games, or at least what the perceived difference is. The reason why I say America and Japan of course is that these two countries are really considered to be the places where mainstream video games happen.

Let’s take a look at male characters in games. In essence, characters in “realistic” games made in America are stereotyped as a bunch of square-jawed tough guys who have to drink beer and shoot enemies with automatic weapon fire as a display of their manliness. The male characters of Japan are criticized as being overly effeminate, sometimes to the point that people wonder whether or not it was necessary to make them guys in the first place, and even the more muscular and masculine guys in Japanese games tend to have a bit of beauty to them. Neither category is actually true and you can find a million exceptions, but these are where the stereotypes stand. And as I looked at these generalizations, they seemed oddly familiar, as if I’d seen this argument happen before, and it also occurred between Japan and America. And then I remembered: Comics vs Manga.

The same complaints that are leveled at the male characters of Japanese and American games are given to the characters of comics, from complaints about superheroes being too musclebound to bishounen being too much bi and not enough shounen. And so I have to wonder, how much do comics play a role in the depiction of realism in games for either culture?

By now, we know that the realism from games isn’t meant to actually be “like reality,” but rather a sort of hyper-realism where things we consider to be part of the actual world like muscles and sweat are emphasized and exaggerated. The difference then comes from what is perceived to be important to realism, and when it comes to non-abstract comics, I believe these elements are also very present and perhaps even more prominent. Of course, I can’t completely ignore the idea that both comics and video games are simply influenced by the reality of society. Most likely, it’s not a unidirectional relationship and at this point, especially as video games enter the mainstream more and more, and they will affect the aesthetics of video games and the environment around us in even more profound ways.

Dragon Ball Kai over Dragon Ball Z?

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Dragon Ball Kai, for those of you who don’t already know, is the remastered, revised new airing of Dragon Ball Z with the filler cut out and the pacing altered to remove the fluff and get closer to the pacing of the original manga. Obviously, this is going to at some point be released on a physical format for purchase. Most likely it’s even going to be on Blu-Ray what with this being a remastering for HD broadcast.

If you enjoyed the series on Cartoon Network or syndication but never purchased any series, is how willing would you be to buy Dragon Ball Kai INSTEAD OF the original Dragon Ball Z anime? If you have the original DBZ anime, would you be willing to sell it in order to get DBKai, or does the original hold too much sentimental value?

It’s supposed to be about half as long with everything improved, so it looks to me like a more enticing purchase, but I just want to get a better idea of what others think. Would DBKai being essentially a condensed DBZ anime be a more attractive product to lay money down on? Is DBKai something only existing DBZ fans will pay attention to? Can it draw in a new audience, one that was born within the past decade and is now just reaching the target age for a classic great shounen series?