Kingdom Come - Superman's Midlife Crisis...

Venue: Kingdom Come, written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Alex Ross, published by DC, published first as a four issue miniseries in 1996 and then as a trade paperback in 1997 priced at $US 14.95, which is still its list price today. Don't buy it at that price without first checking to see if folks like Amazon sell it for a discount, which they often do. If you, like me, prefer to give your business to independent book stores, lest they vanish from the landscape entirely, then I suggest you buy this work from your local comic book shop. A good comic book shop will always give you better service and better advice on comics than anyone like Borders or Barnes & Noble. Bookstore chains just don't understand this genre, which is why your local comic book store deserves your custom.

Kingdom Come is now also available as a DC "Absolute" hardcover edition, c. 2006, for $US 75.00. If I had the money to spare, I'd own it by now in the Absolute edition as I love the art and my trade paperback version is worse for wear. There was also a novelization book version of Kingdom Come issued in 1997; I have a copy of this somewhere in the house - it was actually quite good, as far as that sort of thing goes, though it had to tweak some of the story's particulars to cover that which was taken on faith in the visuals of the graphic novel original. Try as I might, but I can not find any info on the novelization anywhere, not even amazon.com... If I find my copy, I'll post the ISBN and any other info I can find on it being in or out of print.

Setting: This is a DC comic set in the DC universe. Within the DC universe, the story takes place one or two decades from now - in Metropolis, Gotham City, Keystone City, Green Lantern's orbitting New OA, and many other places on DC's planet earth. The comic is part of what DC was calling its Elseworlds series. According to their own promotional blurb: "In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places - some that have existed or might have existed, and others that can't, couldn't or shouldn't exist." In many ways, this is another postmodern setting for a comic book in a time and place close to our own. It is not as cynically deconstructionist as Watchmen was, but it is well within the genre of near-future nuclear-holocaust apocalyptic stories. But this is a nuclear-holocaust apocalyptic book with Superman in it, so it has to all come out right in the end, right?

Story: It's a sad sort of world one or two decades from now, with the demise of the Nobel Prizes, Major League Baseball and the Olympics. (Face it, the only thing worse than a world where the Yankees can beat the Red Sox is a world without any Red Sox at all...!) Worse yet, the old-school superheroes, now known as the first generation of metahumans, are at odds with the younger generations of metahumans which have come into being since the glory days of Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman. At the start of Kingdom Come, Wonder Woman is at odds with the rest of the Amazon nation over some of her actions in the outside world so she has been exiled from her homeland. Batman is a wreak after 40 years of physical abuse while fighting crime in Gotham City; he now hides in his underground cave where he guides a small army of sentinel robots to keep order in Gotham City for him. Hawkman has turned into an ecoterrorist in the Pacific Northwest. Superman has quit the scene and plays loner in his Antarctic fortress home in protest over humanity's preference for newer Metahuman superheroes for whom the ends justify the means.

In this world, a post-modern metahuman "protector" of Metropolis named Magog, along with his metahuman support team, has pursued a metahuman criminal from St. Louis west to the farm fields of central Kansas. This pursuit is ongoing despite the fugitive's pleas for mercy - these pleas are ignored. In Kansas, the containment suit for one of the metahuman pursuers is ripped open by the fugitive. The problem here is that this metahuman is essentially a thermonuclear reaction confined only by his special clothing. The breach of his containment suit has the same effect as a multi-megaton H-bomb. Kansas and large tracts of surrounding states are devastated.

An elderly minister (denomination unknown) by the name of Norman McKay has been having apocalyptic visions straight out of the Revelations of St. John the Divine and other related New Testament books. After the nuclear devastation of Kansas, McKay is visited by an old DC character some older folks may recognize as The Spectre, in his role as delegated angelic judge of good and evil. He comes for McKay because McKay has the visions and therefore is The Spectre's appointed partner and foil in judging the upcoming nuclear-abetted apocalypse. This apocalypse will result from the conflict between the old-school metahumans like Superman, the newer generations of metahumans like Magog, other metahumans who are trying to play the middle-ground like Batman and Lex Luther, and the normal human race which has a nuclear arsenal controlled by the UN.

In a conflict where Superman has lost his empathy for humanity, it's not Superman who ends up saving the day. Superman here is very solidly part of the problem. The two people who serially manage to "save the day," if you could call it that, are not anyone I would have guessed ahead of time - and as someone who frequently figures out the end to books half way through reading them, this left me very pleased the first time I read Kingdom Come. It's a good ending - a double ending actually - but not an ending I expected. In a way, I was a little disappointed to find that someone really did save the day in a very DC superhero manner after all. I was hoping that the plot might end with something that could be taken symbolically for the apocalypse - just like the beginning of the story explicitly proposed in the conversations between The Spectre and McKay. But this is DC where someone saving the day is part of what you pay for. Regardless, Kingdom Come is a good read, especially if you already are familiar with the DC universe and its superheroes.

The Art: The illustrator is Alex Ross, who is probably the single best American graphic novel/comic book artist alive today. He doesn't pencil, ink and color in the traditional comic book methodology. He uses mainly gouache (opaque watercolor). Got that: he paints his comic book art. The result is amazing. Anything illustrated by Alex Ross is a feast for the eyes. The story of Kingdom Come is really quite good, as good as it gets for something within the confines of the DC universe - but the art is what really makes Kingdom Come special. Ross is the same guy how did the art on the wonderful Peace on Earth Superman special where the Man of Steel realizes that not even he can solve the problem of world hunger, probably the most profound Superman story ever written. (I should probably do a review of Peace on Earth at some point...). Basically, anything that Ross does is good but in Kingdom Come, he outdoes himself in the huge scope and composition of his illustrations, which are best and grandly displayed in the battle scenes in chapter four, especially the two page splash scene of pp. 160-161 and the full-page descent of Batman's forces on p. 168. I am particularly fond of the arrival of Captain Marvel page, which is the last page in chapter three. I could make a list of all of my favorite pages but it would be too long for a blog review... Without Ross's art, Kingdom Come would be just another decently-written comic book which I probably wouldn't bother reviewing. There are bonus pages at the end of the trade paperback edition where Ross demonstrates how he did his illustration for Kingdom Come. I assume DC included the bonus pages in the Absolute edition too since these pages are offer a detailed and interesting look at a master artist's working methods.

Other Comments: Kingdom Come won three Eisners in 1997.

'Yo Folks, this is DC Superman title we're taking about here. While Kingdom Come is a more mature work than your normal drug store comic book-rack Superman issue, it's still a Superman title, even if it is in the Elseworlds series. The violence is more tasteful and less egregious than your average modern TV cop show. Other than the spit-curled perfectly-muscled guys in skin-tight long-johns (with and without capes) and the beautiful statuesque full-figured women with perfect hair in skin-tight bodysuits (all of which are still far less revealing than your average bikini), there is no scary sexual content to speak of. Bad language is not even an issue. For a story that features nuclear devastation on two occasions, there are no disturbing depictions of victims of nuclear explosions. The sort of parade of horrors you read about after Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not present, so there are no worries about your kid in fifth grade having nightmares after reading Kingdom Come, at least as far as visualization of nuclear horrors are concerned. The worst we see in this work are the bleached fleshless bones of metahumans caught in a thermonuclear blast - which is not at all realistic of what would happen in a real thermonuclear event. I guess the bare bones are to convey the deadly consequences of a nuclear exchange without showing any of the icky drippy bodily fluids and charred and burnt flesh of victims who escaped vaporization... While I can point out the unrealistic depiction of post-nuclear effects, the upside is that we get to skip looking at all that stomach-turning stuff. Kingdom Come is essentially safe to give to any kid old enough to appreciate the story, which in my estimation is middle-school aged kids and up (grade 5 and higher). They'll follow the story at least at a surface level, and there's enough action going on that most will like it. It's the older kids, the mature junior high school kids and up who will appreciate the more sophisticated setting, especially if they grew up reading a lot of DC.

It is interesting to note that anyone lacking familiarity with the Bible isn't going to have the background to fully appreciate the biblical references and nuances that run through Kingdom Come.

Ross used real people as models for the characters he illustrated. It's strange but I find that the face on the character of Donna Troy, the one-time protege of Wonder Woman and former Teen Titans member known as Wonder Girl, looks remarkably like the Fantasy author Diana Paxton - and ever since I first read Kingdom Come, I've wondered if Ross knows Paxton from somewhere. If I ever have opportunity to run into Diana again, who I met years ago in the Society for Creative Anachronism, I'll have to ask her. I find the resemblance is uncanny.

Watchmen - one of the great American Graphic Novels

Venue: The award-winning Watchmen was written by Alan Moore, drawn and lettered by Dave Gibbons, colored by John Higgins and published by DC. It is available as both a hardcover and as a trade paperback, both currently in print. There are also two hardcover collector's editions, one published in 1987 by Graphitti Designs and one labeled Absolute Watchmen put out by DC in 2005. The latter is larger than the previous editions and completely recolored by John Higgins. I don't own a copy of Absolute Watchmen but I wish I did. The recoloring is wonderful and the new edition includes previously unseen bonus material. Since I've never seen a copy of the Graphitti Designs edition, I can't say how the bonus material in the latter compares to the Absolute edition.

The Watchmen originally appeared as a miniseries of 12 comic books published monthly in 1986 to 1987 and are no longer in print. You can sometimes find the original monthly comics at stores which specialize in comic book back issues, usually priced at $10 to $20 per issue depending on condition. The book form of The Watchmen collects all 12 of the original comics and puts them under one cover. There is a Watchmen module for the DC Heroes RPG, if you're into that sort of thing. There is also a film version of Watchmen scheduled for release sometime in 2009.

Setting: It is 1985 in a world like our own. The differences are subtle but often profound. All ground vehicles are electric. Airships appear to be a popular form of travel. Hats, helmets and other headgear sport audio gizmoes that look just a bit off to our eyes. Tobacco is smoked in strange round pipes reminiscent of early-20th century cigarette holders. Richard Nixon is on his fifth term as US president. America won the Vietnam War and the Cold War is still going full blast. The threat of a nuclear conflict is greater than ever.

In the world of The Watchmen, comic books are dominated by pirate stories. There is no superhero genre in comic books. Real-life costumed crime fighters had their heyday in the 40s and 50s; but with the passage of the Keene Act in the late 70s, all costumed vigilantes were either forced to retire or work for the government. It is a world that most of us could live in comfortably. The culture is the same though the details are a bit different.

Story: The Watchmen is an action thriller, a science fiction story and a murder mystery all rolled up into one. A man called Edward Blake is murdered one night in October, 1985, thrown through the plate glass window of his apartment in New York City. Only a few people know that Blake was a former freelance vigilante before he became a paramilitary agent for the government. A former crime-fighting colleague of Blake's known as Rorschach visits the crime scene after the cops have left. He discovers that Blake was The Comedian, a crime-fighter whose career started before WWII. Though he is a wanted man, Rorschach informs his former crime-fighting associates on the chance that someone is targetting them. His suspicions are bolstered by a smear campaign aimed at the world's only true super being and confirmed the attempted murder of billionaire Adrian Veidt, formerly known as the crime-fighter Ozymandias. As the plot unfolds, Rorschach himself is framed; this leads his old partner, the Owlman, to conclude that Rorschach is right and that some sort of conspiracy is afoot. All the action is played against a background of escalating international tension between the USA and the Soviet Union, but the cataclysm at the end of the novel is not the one everyone expected.

This description of the plot doesn't it justice as it weaves through major themes, numerous subplots and ethical dilemmas. The romantic angle alone involves the love-hate relationship of the Silk Spectre I and The Comedian (Sally Jupiter and Eddie Blake) and the lovers' triangle of Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre II and Owlman II (Jon Osterman, Laurie Jupiter and Dan Dreiberg).

One of major themes of The Watchmen is whether the ends can ever justify the means. At the end of the novel, nuclear holocaust is adverted through a conspiracy authored by the book's main villain - but at the cost of millions of lives. At the denouement, only one of the protagonists protests this outcome, insisting that the ends can never justify the means. This is an ironic twist since this character never questions his own dubious methods. Silencing the lone protester introduces a wonderful touch of ambivalence in the last handful of pages, where the reader is left to ponder the ethics of the pact of silence agreed to by the rest of the protagonists for the sake of world peace.

Watchmen includes one independent story-within-a-story and many subplots. These include the history of the early costumed crime-fighters of the 30s and 40s and the everyday lives of people in New York City. The writing is deep, ironic and full of well-timed pathos. The depth and number of literary and artistic allusions in Watchmen has given rise to several annotated guides; some of the best are available for free on the internet. This isn't a story that you read only once. Among graphic novels written in English, only The Invisibles and the Sandman series are in the same literary league as Watchmen. Don't think of this work as a collection of 12 comic books. Think of it as visual literature. If you like high-tech action thrillers, skip buying The Watchmen for your kids and get for yourself. Download one of the many annotated guides to get the most out of your first reading.

Art: The Watchmen is drawn in the American Superhero style but with a twist. In the cheesy iconic style of traditional American comics, the superhero was always sleek and trim with sculptured muscles; the good guys were always well-dressed and clean cut; the women were always fashion-plate perfect; and the bad guys were either perfectly groomed, or ugly with bad teeth and worse posture. In Watchmen, retired superheroes get pudgy. The oldest of the retired superheroes and one retired bad guy are elderly and in one case frail. Two of the "superheroes" often need a shave and one really needs a bath, clean clothes and socks without holes in them. These aren't comic book archetypes as we've come to know them - these are superheroes and villains living in a post-modern deconstructionist world. The art makes it clear that they are all real people and not just icons.

The colors in the original comics and in the trade paperbacks are often lurid with back lighting and extreme angles of light and shadow, usually in dimly lit or nighttime settings. Personally, I am not fond of this style which I believe Frank Miller first popularized in the early 80s in comics like Daredevil and the Ronin mini-series; however, here the colors and inking appear to fit the storyline. Most of the action takes place in an alternate New York whose grit and attitude are lovingly rendered. The street scenes are exquisite, including the sidewalk shop signs, the litter and the graffiti; even the street lights are correct right down to the trapezoidal bases you see all over New York. There have been several different covers on the various editions and printings of The Watchmen, but the cover with the Chrysler Building is almost the same as the view from my late Uncle Ed's east side apartment. Dave Gibbons knows his New York.

One of the finer touches in The Watchmen are the artistic motifs that run through the story. The most obvious motif is the bloodied smiley face. The smiley face is that iconic yellow circle with two black oval eyes and a smile. It was created in 1963 by the retired general and ad executive Harvey Ball. Walmart used the smiley face for several years in their "roll'em back" advertising campaign. The smiley face is also the basis for those "emoticons" that are now ubiquitous on internet forums. At the time that The Watchmen was published, however, the smiley face had morphed from popular idea to icon to cliche. The 1986 use of the smiley face in The Watchmen came attached with some irony through its association with the Spain Brothers' line of "Have a happy day" novelty goods and its general overuse commercially. The travels of the smiley face through the pages of The Watchment is poignant at times. At the start of the story, the button is pinned to the bathrobe of the most brutal character in the story while he is murdered. The smiley face button is spattered with his blood and lands in the gutter next to the defenestrated body. It is picked up by Rorschach who gives it to the Owlman. After that, the smiley face shows up in cameos throughout the rest of the story: spattered with blood in Vietnam, splashed with wine on a tuxedo lapel at a party, stained with ketchup on a t-shirt. There are many of these cameos; a more complete list can be found on the rather extensive Wikipedia page for The Watchmen.

A similar motif of clocks also occurs throughout the story: a dead watch from Hiroshima, pieces of a dismantled watch being repaired, a copy of Dali's clock painting on the wall of Osterman's apartment, the watches of the murdered millions at the end of the book, all reading 11:25, etc. The most important of these is the clock face on the end page of each chapter, deliberately invoking the famous doomsday clock from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

There are many other little artistic touches in Watchmen that make it clear that this is a graphic novel above and beyond any of those superhero comics we read as kids, like the tear-shaped raindrop running down the face of a "weeping" mausoleum statue or the 70s style political cartoon in a rabid right wing newspaper. The biggest artistic touch is the inclusion of an entire pirate comic book which you see a few frames at a time interspersed throughout the graphic novel. This story-inside-a-story is drawn in a "golden-age" comics style. The contrast between the main story and the pirate comic stands out even more in the recolored Absolute Watchmen edition.

Age Groups: I would consider The Watchmen an adult book. It's graphically violent in unpredictable ways which is why I would let a mature high school student read it but I would have reservations over anyone younger. One of the main characters of the story is a psychotic vigilante known as Rorschach. His demeanor is calm but his techniques of interrogation and self-defense are simple, effective, and stomach-turning. He kills and maims people with the bored demeanor of someone waiting for his clothes to dry at the laundromat. For weapons and tools, he uses whatever is on hand like hair spray or his own clothing. He throws a cafeteria chafing dish full of hot food in someone's face. Another of his victims has a drinking glass crushed inside his fist. He stabs a street bully in the eye with a lit cigarette. Rorschach creatively uses a refrigerator to terrorize and interrogate an elderly man. This sort of stuff is not fodder for young children.

Rorschach is not the only disturbing character in the book: Edward Blake, also known as The Comedian, is a costumed vigilante turned government agent. He is one of the most amoral characters ever to cross a page of fiction; however, when compared to Rorschach, his behavior is the sort of thuggish brutality you'd expect from Nazi concentration camp guards. By his own admission, Blake has merrily murdered and raped his way through life, regardless of age or gender of his victims. His thoughtless murder of an inconvenient pregnant girlfriend is characteristic of his behavior throughout his 45 year career as a professional thug. I would be uncomfortable if I let an impressionable 14 year old read the pregnant girlfriend murder scene or Blake's attempted rape scene.

There's another reason to possibly restrict this work to more mature teens and older: full-frontal male nudity and some sexual scenes which are not explicit but are highly suggestive regardless. The male nudity concerns a character who is the only real "super" being among a cast of normal humans dressed up as costumed crime fighters. Jon Osterman was changed into a blue-skinned deus-ex-machina by an accidental exposure to a particle physics experiment. Imparted with god-like powers, he gradually loses touch with his humanity. One symptom of his increasing alienation is his implicit attitude toward the necessity of clothing. He no longer needs to wear any clothes so why should he? In the privacy of his own government laboratory, he doesn't bother with clothes anymore. When he makes his final break from humanity and the planet earth, he abandons clothes forever. Osterman's approach to optional clothing leads to several pages of this tall blue-skinned character in the nude, though the sparseness of detail and the unexciting presentation of his genitals is hardly the stuff that Playgirl Magazine is made of. The exposure of this character in the buff is about as exciting as the final coven scene in Roman Polanski's Macbeth with its room full of naked unkept witch women of various ages and states of sagging flesh and flab. Frankly, spying on the boys skinny-dipping at summer camp did a lot more for me than the male nudity in The Watchmen. Regardless, if this sort of thing is important to you, you need to consider it when deciding whether you want your kids reading this graphic novel.

I find the sexually suggestive scenes more disturbing than the tall blue guy in the buff. Despite the omission of exposed private parts, the art of The Watchmen is so good at suggestion that covering up is almost irrelevant. The scene of Eddie Blake fumbling with his pants in the Sally Jupiter rape scene is sufficiently evocative that I would not want any junior high school-aged daughter of mine to read it, especially if she was as impressionable as I was at her age. Another suggestive scene is where the boy Rorschach interrupts his mother the whore and her john in the act. The art is good enough that the tawdry sexual offering of Rorschach's mother in her slip is more suggestive than showing her nude would have been. While lacking the filthy feel of the scene with Rorschach's mother, the make-out scene with Jon Osterman and Laurie Jupiter suggests just enough to send even the most boring imagination south of the naval, despite the fact that all you see is Laurie from the neck up and Jon's very expressive hands.

I know that kids these days are getting exposed to sexual and violent content at younger and younger ages and that you may think I'm making mountains out of molehills. Maybe in Boston or New York there are lots of kids mature enough at younger ages to handle something like Watchmen; however, in the small Idaho town where I live, I wouldn't even think of handing this splendid piece of visual literature to any of the teenagers I know. Most of them have been raised in Mormon families with very conservative sexual and moral values compared to those common in the suburbs of California or the east coast. Many of these kids have never been to an R rated movie. What's acceptable in LA or DC is very different from what's acceptable in rural Idaho, South Dakota and inland Texas. I'm not saying that kids shouldn't learn about sex or the existence of graphic violence. I am saying that you should take the time to look at what your kids are watching on TV and reading online or in books, and evaluating whether it is appropriate for their maturity level. As someone who grew up in a small town in a conservative family and went to a church-run school, I would have been disturbed by certain scenes in The Watchmen before the age of 17 or 18. Even at 26, after living in New York City and Los Angeles, I found certain scenes in Watchmen disturbing – and by that age I was no longer an innocent. So read this book, all of it, and then evaluate if you want your teenagers reading it. And remember, once your kids reach the legal age of majority, you no longer have a say in what they read, regardless of their maturity or lack thereof. So be cautious but also try to be fair.

Other Comments: Granted mainline American comics have had their share of conflicted heroes like Spiderman and characters skirting the realm of true bete noire like the X-Men's Jane Grey in the late 70s; but the characters in The Watchmen were really the first to cross the line en masse out of two-dimensional superhero comics of the mid-20th century and into real literature. The costumed crime fighters in Watchmen are believably real in comparison to the perfection of someone like Superman; and as a group, they display interesting to frightening imperfections that make it clear we've left the comic book self-censorship of 1950s far behind. Consider Rorschach who is one of the most twisted and fascinating characters ever conceived in a work of fiction. He has an uncompromising black-and-white sense of right and wrong which eventually lands him on the wrong side of the law. He is clearly not right in his head as the unaware victim and product of his horrendous upbringing. As an unskilled garment district worker and a loner with no family, the maladapted Walter Kovacs is the kind of person that most of us would avoid if possible. Then one day at his job, he made a full-face mask using a space-age fabric that behaved like a 3D inkblot in constant motion. He considers his mask to be his real face, the face of Rorschach, the confident agent of a strict morality who is effective though brutal to his victims. This is Rorschach who once trapped a child killer and pedophile inside a house which Rorschach then set it on fire because the murderer had destroyed enough evidence that he would be acquitted if he went to trial.

When wearing his real face, Rorschach has power. He achieves respect, he gains the ear of several people who matter, and he even finds some friends – the one thing that Walter Kovacs never had. Dan Dreiberg, also known as the second Owlman, has been Rorschach's friend and occasional partner. He is also Rorschach's perfect foil. Dreiberg is one of the most decent characters you could ever run into - in fiction or real life. He's an affluent man raised in affluent circumstance. In contrast to the short, scrawny and unkept Walter Kovacs, Dreiberg is tall and good-looking; and while he is just a bit round in the stomach in his middle age, it is obvious that Dreiberg is a well-built and fit man. The contrast and interaction between these two characters gives the book a lot of its dramatic tension. Rorschach is easily the most complex and interesting character in Watchmen.

The Watchmen is the only graphic novel to win a Hugo and three Eisners and four Kirby awards. These are the top awards in comics and in science fiction. Only the Sandman series is in the same class with a World Fantasy Award and 18 Eisners. While not part of the original series, a Gaiman-penned Sandman spinoff novella, The Dream Hunters, was nominated for a Hugo. It is somewhat difficult to make comparisons between the two series since The Watchmen was a one-year 12-issue run in the mid-80s while the Sandman series put out 75 issues published over seven years. The Sandman story had longer exposure and profited by following the trail that the The Watchmen had blazed. Would Gaiman's Sandman have done as well if Watchmen had not gone before it? I am inclined to think not.

I've seen several annotated guides for Watchmen but I prefer the one online at http://www.arschkrebs.de/watchmen/annotations/ the best.

Ponderings: World-Wide Graphic Stories and American Cluelessness

One of the things that turned me into a reader was comic books and cartoons - though those who know me these days might find that hard to believe. I was not a big reader before the age of 12 and what I did read almost always had pictures: pages full of text and nothing else were uninteresting to me. I wasn't a bad reader - anything but! I was the best reader in my class and was reading at the college level by the time I was eight. I just didn't find reading interesting. If I read, it was a comic book from the 10 cent comic book rack at the now long gone Groton Pharmacy, across the street from the old Bureau of Groton Post Office. I remember the terrible day that comics went up in price to 12 cents!

As a kid, I used to wait impatiently for the monthly delivery of Children's Digest in the mail. Inside that venerable publication was the monthly installment of Tintin by Herge. Tintin was my introduction to the world beyond the stagnant American comics venue. In Belgium and France, graphic novel offerings like Tintin are known as Bandes Designees. Just about the whole world knows that graphic novels and graphic stories in Japan are called manga. It's only here in the United States and Canada that we are stuck with the names "comic books" or "comics" for things that are better termed sequential art or graphic stories.

So here we are, two decades into a quiet revolution of graphic story telling, in large part fueled by the breakthrough of Japanese manga and anime into American culture. The current mostly young male and female audience of mange and anime will be the first American generation to recognize that the scope of comics is huge and covers all of life. And yet, we still seem to be saddled with literary critics and scholars who just don't get it. Many of these literary pundits still think that comics are for not-too-bright junior high school boys interested in only superheroes wearing skin-tight tights and female supergirls in tighter tights with impossibly round and unsagging boobs...

Why does the "death" of a Marvel or DC comic book hero make front page news - like the recent demise of Captain America - but that most Americans have never even heard of the world's most popular "comic book," the manga called Naruto? I think that part of the answer has to do with what passes for "news" these days. I guess Captain America must be more news worthy than things like the increasing shortages of raw material commodities or the demise of small manufacturing businesses in Italy - but the media types know they will lose their advertisers to the competition if they report too much "boring" news and not enough "human interest" stories. Certainly no journalist in America is going to report on major literary trends in another country, especially in a genre that's considered the purview of pimply adolescent boys. I find it disturbing that the news media really do have the power to shape public opinion in this manner. Perhaps the news worthiness of Captain America stems from the belief that American icons still define world culture, a comfortable stance that speaks of our continuing inability to admit that the world doesn't love us anymore.

The world of the graphic story is immense. Anyone who has kids these days probably has encountered the tour-de-force of Japanese manga and anime. What we are missing, however, is the breadth of Japanese manga as a literary phenomenon. There are manga for little kids, for adolescent girls, adolescent boys, and adults. It seems to be a continuing and very annoying theme that when you mention adult manga in this country, the news types inevitably jump on the non-representative and trivializing happenstance that some of that adult manga literature is pornographic in both depiction and intent. I'm going to resist the temptation to trash our journalism professionals any further - so I will rant no more about the proclivity of the press to report on the most crass, trivial and irrelevant characteristics of any news item they find. The world of adult manga covers classic stories like Barefoot Gen, an eyewitness account of Hiroshima; great modern graphic novels like Adolf, a story of Japan, Germany and Jews during WWII; and new works like Deathnote whose protagonist is a anti-hero mass murderer. Comic book porn, however, will always make "good copy" on any news program or radio broadcast, regardless of the merits of other (non-pornographic) adult manga.

Frankly, the drugged up and pornographic character of your typical National Lampoon comic strip or 60s underground comic book is old news in this country and has been since at least the early 70s. American underground comics are probably Ph.D. fodder at this point since they capture a snapshot of the now long-gone hippie era. The taboos these comics broke seemed like a big deal at the time; however, since then we have gotten used to literature and movies that depict sexual acts and doing drugs regardless of our approbation or lack thereof. Back then, the reaction of "The Establishment" to these comics was due in part to the expectation of comic book self-censorship. What gets to me is the mind-set which still assumes American comics should follow the self-censorship of the 50s comic book code and that the target audience for comic books will always be adolescent boys.

Because of these ingrained American attitudes toward comics, there have been some major works that have never received the critical acclaim they deserve, like Will Eisner's Contract with God, The Invisibles, the Jane Grey storyline of 1978-1980 in Marvel's X-Men and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four stories. Why is it that the literary savants of this country can only take an American graphic novel seriously if it deals with big, socially-valued events, like one family's story of surviving the Holocaust in the Pulitzer-prize winning Maus? Our graphic story-telling legacy is far greater and much richer than just Superman or Spiderman. Recognizing this is more than overdue.

When is the literary establishment of this country going to wake up and admit that something like Hal Foster's Prince Valiant is a major work of 20th century literature?

Deathnote - a serious thriller and study of moral ambivalence for mature readers

Venue: Deathnote by Tsugumi Ohba (story) and Takeshi Obata (art) is a shonen (“boys” story) manga originally serialized in the weekly Shonen Jump magazine published in Japan. It has recently been made into two “live-action” films, an anime and a prequel novel, all in Japan. The anime version has recently started showing on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim program though I haven't had a chance to watch it yet (I noticed the Cartoon Network commercial for it while watching TV at a hotel when on a recent business trip). The episode I did manage to catch was a bit disappointing. Most of the episode covered the conversation between Light and the fiancee of the FBI agent Light murdered. The pacing was too slow for the length of the conversation and the cinematography of the scene was bland. It certainly didn't leave me with the feeling that I had to see more. This limited sampling of the anime may not be a representative, but since Deathnote is one of most cerebral manga in existence, I'm not feeling optimistic.

The manga series started in 2003 in Japan and the complete story arc is now available in its entirety in trade paperback in both Japan and in English in North America. The English version is published by Viz Media and has been recently showcased with big splashy displays in the manga sections of both Borders and Barnes & Noble.

The Viz Media version of the completed story takes up 12 trade paperbacks priced at $8 apiece. There are also several site where the fan-translated serialized version from Shonen Jump is available for free reading. The language in the translated versions available online is much much courser than that in the Viz Media version.

Art: This manga uses typical Japanese black and white manga style but it's more realistic and “grittier” in quality than your usual samurai/ninja-fantasy manga that you see in Shonen Jump. Given the subject matter, the stark and very detailed style is appropriate to the moral ambivalence of the story. The use of the occasional odd angle of perspective is employed to great effect in the story to emphasize the increasing alienation of the main character from the rest of humanity as the story progresses. In many of the episodes, the use of close-ups and half-face views of the characters feed the suspense of the cat-and-mouse game played by Light and his colleagues against the super-sleuths on Light's trail.

Age Groups: Senior high school and up. As far as junior high school students are concerned, I think I'd let a ninth grader read Deathnote but not a sixth grader. The story is essentially what I'd consider as adult fare. You may want to ponder the implications that in Japan, this is a story is in the “boys literature” genre. Personally, I find that this really is a story for adults. If you want an example of a graphic novel that's the antithesis of stupid superhero comic books targeted at adolescent American males, Deathnote is it. There is some bad language though no pornographic art, not even the soft-porn variety that sometimes creeps into other “shonen” targeted manga. There is no silly impossible boob art for a change. There is, however, a ton of moral ambivalence.

Publishing Frequency: the series was originally a weekly serialized graphic novel (see venue, above). The series is now complete. The completed manga is now in bookstores in English. The anime version in Japanese with English subtitles was available on a pay-per-view basis from Viz, almost in real time as it aired in Japan: this is the fastest that an anime has ever been available to the North American market. It's now on Adult Swim. The anime is currently being released on DVD, with two or three currently out and the rest to be released in dribs and drabs throughout 2008.

Story: Deathnote is at the intersection of horror, crime fiction and psychological thriller. Remember the shinigami from the review of Bleach? Well, there are shinigami of a very different character in Deathnote. In Japanese culture, shinigami are like angels of death or the anthropomorphic and scythe-carrying character of Death in Western culture. In Japan, supernatural creatures like shinigami fall into a class of being known as kami. Kami is a word that doesn't translate well because the Japanese have very different conceptions of gods and spirits than we do. Some Kami, like Amerastu, are deities – though it is good to keep in mind that even gods in Japanese mythology are not truly immortal though they can be long-lived. Other kami are more like angels or demons or bogey men, like the creatures called kappa who prey on travelers alone in swamps.

So anyway, shinigami are the kami of death. In the world of Deathnote, a creepy-looking batwinged shinigami named Ryuk is bored. To generate some entertainment for himself, Ryuk leaves his deathnote, i. e. his notebook of names of people scheduled to die, in an alleyway for someone to find. A top merit-scholarship-class high school student named Light Yagami finds the deathnote (in Japan and in some of the translated online manga, the name is Yagami Raito). Upon reading the instructions in the deathnote, Light decides it's a good prank. The instructions say that the person whose name is written in the deathnote will die in several minutes of a heart attack if there are no other details describing the future death. So Light tries the deathnote and discovers that it's no hoax. In the space of a day or two, Light decides to use the deathnote to improve the world by removing all the world's hardened criminals. The moral ambivalence of the story involves Light's efforts to create a better world by the simple expedient of murdering hundreds of thousands of criminals. The plot tension of the series revolves around the cat-and-mouse game between Light in his vigilante role of “Kira” (a word that's essentially the same in pronunciation of the Japanese word for killer) and a set of virtuoso extralegal detectives known as L, Mello and Near. The road that Light subsequently follows is a dark one. To protect himself, Light bumps off several legitimate policemen. Because of the deathnote, he is also the indirect cause of his police-detective father's death. As the story progresses, more than one deathnote is in play though Light is the mastermind behind most of the action. The real story of Deathnote is really about the corruption of Light and his followers.

The end of Deathnote is both horrific and appropriate – though I won't ruin it by leaving any spoilers here. The short epilogue to the story is a rather timeless statement about the perseverance of religious faith in a godless world.

Setting: The setting for Deathnote is modern-day Japan, specifically the Kanto region (the area around Tokyo). The story is the most morally ambivalent I've read in years with a central character who ends up more twisted inside than Captain Ahab. There is none of the noble underworld character you find in Frank Miller's Sin City or the corrupted innocence of the characters in The Great Gatsby. There are no happy endings here; even the “good guys” are tainted as they resort to more and more desperate measures to end the reign of Light Yagami's alter ego as Kiro, self-appointed judge and executioner to all of humanity.

This is not really a setting that is congruent with modern American culture. The characters may look like modern urban dwellers but the venue is modern urban secular Japan with its Shinto and Buddhist roots intact. The story gives a person living on this side of the Pacific a good look into the academic “cram culture” that many middle class Japanese students experience daily (since many top careers in Japan are only available to graduates of a handful of top universities). In keeping with this modern secular world view, at the beginning of the story, Ryuk the shinigami tells Light that there is no heaven or hell, that the ultimate fate of humans after death is non-existence (the mu state, as one of the online English translations versions stated it). Within the context of the Deathnote setting, this makes the end of the story and its epilogue all the more poignant.

Other Comments: Deathnote is a tremendous piece of literature. Don't be fooled by its wrapper and the still-too-common American devaluation of sequential-art storytelling. To say that Deathnote is a great book with all the literary baggage that that statement implies is dead on the money from my point of view. Deathnote is an excellent example of all that a graphic novel can be - and yet you'll never see something like Deathnote ever get a review in the New York Times, which is highly regrettable considering that the rest of the world is nowhere near as stupid as we are about this fine art form.

Deathnote isn't a manga for kids. This is a graphic novel for adults and should be approached as such.

Naruto: the world's more popular manga for a reason...

Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto is another Shonen Jump manga available as dead treeware from the publisher, Viz Media. There are 24 trade paperback volumes priced at $8 apiece. There are also anime episodes currently showing nightly on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim program. In Japan, this manga is published in 20 page installments weekly in Shonen Jump, a manga serial targeting the “boys” market. There are several places online that carry Naruto as an English-language translation, either as a download or as a streaming manga read via an embedded manga page viewer

Art: Typical Japanese manga style. Okay art but nothing hugely special.

It is interesting to note that the author was motivated to become a manga artist because of inspiration like a promotional poster for Akira, the famous manga-cum-anime movie.

Age Groups: Junior hight school and up. If your kids are reading Natruto online, be aware that some of the translations available use occasional profanity. There is also a small amount of impossible and silly boob art.

Publishing Frequency: the series is a weekly comic book (see venue, above). Some of the translations online are posted as fast as the translators can translate...i. e. weekly. The “official” English language versions of the anime and manga are significantly behind the Japanese originals.

Story: Naruto is a boy in a world where some small nations are controlled by ninjas. At the start of the story, he is a 12 year old ninja student in the village/polity of the “Hidden Leaf.” He has a bit of a problem in that the soul of an evil nine-tailed fox was sealed inside of him when he was an infant. When things get tough, the power of that evil spirit becomes available for Naruto to use. The “plot line” of the manga revolves around Naruto's adventures as he comes of age as a ninja of the Hidden Leaf.

Setting: The setting for Naruto emphasizes the principles of stubborn self-determination in the face of adversity and also of the value of love while growing up. As a kid with no parents growing up in an atmosphere of distrust because of the demon trapped inside him, Naruto is faced with overcoming prejudice on a daily basis. He starts the story arc as a kid acting out and committing acts of vnadalism for attention. He is saved from becoming a juvenile deliquent by the care and attention of his teacher at ninja school – and through his growing love for his very few friends – but it is an effort on everyone's part to keep Naruto on a straight path. Naruto resembles both the Little Train Who Could and The Man From La Mancha: his determination to succeed, to earn the respect of his village and to grow up to become the Hokage (ruler and ninja champion) of his village is what keeps the kid going through thick and thin. His refusal to give up on the seemingly-impossible goal of becoming Hokage invites both ridicule and ultimately admiration from the people in his life. He's not exactly a great brain nor is he a good student initially and his self-assumed role as an irresistable force is one of his few good characteristics.

Other Comments: Given the rather common fantasy setting (for Japan) and theme of coming of age through adversity, there is little that stands out about this manga at first glance. Accordingly, one might be bemused over Naruto's status as Japan's most popular manga of all time - right up to the point of reading it for the first time. My husband and I made the mistake of picking up the first three trade paperbacks issued by Viz Media and now we're stuck... For something that from the outside looks like just another ho-hum manga imported to exploit the growing American manga market, Naruto is addictive. The story is so tight from the get-go and the characters so very well-conceived that it's impossible to put down. Naruto works because its young author can really craft a great story and that's all there is too it. It's a great manga because its delivery is perfect.

It's the characters that make this story. Naruto is populated by believable people with believable lives and believable flaws. There is plenty of hubris driving several of the bad guys and there are lots of ethical potholes to trip up the good guys. The emphasis on affection in families and between friends, even when relationships are flawed, is everything one could ask for in a manga that lots of kids are going to read. There are a lot of life's little lessons in this manga. If you find your kids reading or watching Naruto, don't stop them. It's a great story set with good ethics set in a well-conceived fantasy world.

The Wizard of Oz as a manga

Venue: Oz the Manga by David Hutchison is available as dead treeware from the publisher, Antarctic Press of San Antonio, Texas. There are nine individual comic books priced at $3 apiece. Since Oz the Manga was published in 2005, I would call or email Antarctic Press to see if they had any paper copies left. Oz the Manga is also available as a free download from Wowio.com. Wowio's website rules don't allow you to download more than three ebooks a day, so it would take you 3 days to download all nine issues.

Art: It's the Wizard of Oz done in Japanese manga style. If you don't know what the term "manga" means, manga is the Japanese word for graphic novels. Here in North America, we call them comic books whether the content is funny or not. That's because of the rather absurd attitude in this part of the world that "comic books" are really just frivolous illustrated stories for children, hence the name reflects the attitude. Manga style is immediately identifiable with its exaggerated big eyes and round faces for kids, use of specific pictorial symbols to convey visual clues in the plot (stylized nose drip while sleeping, bead of sweat for anxiety/nervousness, etc.) and more realistic body types with a tendency toward proportionally bigger heads (as opposed to American comic book style
with proportionally smaller heads on anatomically-exaggerated bodies).

So anyway, Oz the Manga is drawn manga style, and it's very good manga style too, done in black at white like most manga. I just love the picture of Dorothy and her friends on the very last page of issue 6. This is a mature version of Dorothy who has been through a lot, who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to ask for what she's due. There's some lovely drawing in Oz the Manga, but that last frame in issue 6 is the one that really sticks with me.

Age Groups: You can safely give this manga to kids of any age. I suspect older kids might be bored, especially since TV has usurped the place of the book in kids' lives these days.

Publishing Frequency: the series was originally a monthly comic book. The entire series was finished in 2005 so now you can get all nine issues all at the same time.

Story: Oz the Manga is a faithful retelling of Baum's original 1900 book with a handful of episodes left out of the main story line for the sake of continuity. Most of those skipped episodes like the country of china doll people become flashbacks in the ninth issue, which is labeled as the epilogue issue. There are isolated spots in the series where the action jumps into the next scene without a good scene transition, like the jump from the post-Wicked Witch of the West audience of Dorothy's group with the Wizard and the meetings afterward that the Wizard has individually with the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion. The poor transitions are jarring but they are thankfully few.

The portrayal of Dorothy is not the semi-hapless, fortunate-through-accident, girly-girl Judy Garland version of the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie. This is the Dorothy of Baum's books: honest, forthright, kind and brave - the apotheosis of the self-reliant Midwest farm girl. This Dorothy is more like Harold Gray's original Little Orphan Annie than anything else. Dorothy doesn't sing and there aren't any rainbows. This is the real Dorothy Gale, not the Hollywood version.

Setting: Can you say "good ol'fashioned family values"? I knew you could. Dorothy Gale is a great kid and a great role model. Glinda the Good's short appearance at the end of the story is an example of noblesse oblige, especially toward the flying monkeys. The Wizard of Oz himself may be a "humbug" but he is forgivably so due to his very frank admission of his faults to Dorothy and her friends. Giving up his life as ruler of Oz in order to try to take Dorothy home is generous in the extreme, especially given what he has to give up in order to keep his promise to her.

To be totally truthful, Baum wrote very strong female characters all the way around and was known as an advocate of womens' suffrage, which was one of the largest womens' issues of his day. Critics and scholars of his books often see his views about suffrage reflected in the Oz books and other books by Baum.

Baum's Oz books have been occasionally banned or censored, sometimes on the grounds that Baum has "good witch" characters who use magic. Some of his Oz books have also been labeled as racist because he used late 19th C. stereotypes of black people in them. While Hutchison's faithful adaptation of Oz as a manga can certainly be painted with the former brush regarding the biblical knee-jerk reaction of some fundamentalists over witches in fiction, the former is not a factor at all in Baum's first book and its manga adaptation under discussion here.

Other Comments: Get these for your kids if they are still available on dead treeware or download them and share. This graphic novel adaptation of The Wizard of Oz is first-rate and a good example of just how good "comic books" can be.

Antarctic Press is a little comics company based in San Antonio. A bunch of small comics ventures started up in the 1980s. Most folded, Antarctic didn't so they've got to be doing something right. I've not been partial to a lot of their stuff over the years since much of it feels like it's targeted at the American male adolescent market and all that entails (stupid costumes, 2D characters and plots, etc.). Oz the Manga shows that Antarctic is breaking out of their old mold and maturing as a comics company, which is nice to see. To be truthful, I wouldn't mind at all if the author, Hutchison, did some more manga adaptations of L. Frank Baum's books. I would certainly pick them up if he did.

The Dreamland Chronicles - a near perfect comic

As far as I'm concerned, The Dreamland Chronicles is as good as it gets. This is on the list for what I'll be getting the niece and nephew for Christmas. So, let's break things down and critique this graphic story.

Venues: Online comic, trade paperback collections and Wowio. If you want to get a good idea of what Dreamland Chronicles is like, download some issues of it from Wowio. (What? You've never heard of Wowio??? Oh my, are you in for a pleasant surprise! Wowio is a website with free ebook downloads. You do need to register but their privacy pledge is solid.)

Art: awesome CGI work. Having played with some computer rendering myself, turning out a page per day of this stuff is astounding. Way good art, some of the best on the internet. I've attached a sample page to this post so you can see for yourself.

Age Groups: kids of any age (and as my grandmother was fond of saying, you're only young twice...). Even the high school-aged cynics should like this one.

Publishing Frequency: usually everyday. I have no idea how the author and his crew manage to do this.

Story: The plot is a very well-done adventure-quest theme involving a guy named Alexander and his mythical friends, an elf princess, a fairy and a rock giant. Superficially, it looks like it could be a D&D adventure but do not be fooled. It's not D&D - it's closer to Oz or Tolkien or Treasure Island than it is to fantasy RPG. As a little boy, Alexander used to visit his friends in Dreamland every night until he was 12. After an encounter with a nasty dragon over a sword he found, Alexander stops dreaming altogether until he's in college. He finds a pendant one day and suddenly is back to visiting Dreamland again, where his old friends have also grown up and they are having troubles. The elf princess's parents are missing...so the old friends begin a quest to find them. And that's just the starting premise...

Setting: An unnamed college campus somewhere in North America and Dreamland, the land of dreams populated by elves, fairies, dragons, pirates, etc. Mythical creatures and magic are real in Dreamland but there's no disturbing moral ambivalence here - the Dreamland setting has very sharp standards of right and wrong. Fighting nasty giants, kidnapping pirates and evil dragons is good; lying, arrogance, dishonesty, etc. are bad. If he were alive today, the plot could easily be something that Robert Louise Stevenson wrote but in a fantasy setting. Needless to say, there is no bad language and no unwelcome sexual content. You can read this stuff to your kindergarten-aged kids at bedtime. You'll want to read it yourself too.

Other comments: The Dreamland Chronicles are addictive. The comic is available for free reading at http://www.thedreamlandchronicles.com. There is now an RSS feed which is really convenient. You can download short episodes for free at Wowio, http://www.wowio.com/users/comicshome.asp?cbPublisher=37. The Wowio downloads actually help support the comic in terms of putting food on the table for the artist and his crew so I'd encourage everyone to do this. Efforts this good deserve support. I've seen too many promising online comics die because it's really hard to make a living this way. Besides, Wowio downloads are free! What do you have to lose? The comic is also being released in trade paperback collections. As of this date, there are two volumes of the collected series - and this is the form that the niece and nephew will be getting for Christmas. There are links to buy the trade paperback collections on the comic's website and I would urge you to use them instead of buying from Amazon.com directly. When you use those links, a small amount of revenue from the sale goes back to the author, and you already know why I think that's a good thing.

One thing that I really like about The Dreamland Chronicles are the female characters. The medical researcher studying sleep disorders is smart, sassy and appropriately professional - she reminds me of my late grandmother the doctor. The fairy character is a girly-looking girl but she knows how to take care of herself and her friends. She's solid and brave, someone you can count on in a pinch. The elf princess can be a real stuffed shirt and displays really pompous behavior at times. She can get a bit wound up - but her friends manage to deflate the worst of her behaviors. Despite that, she is brave, loyal, strong, determined, organized, smart, and very moral. She's been raised to be a ruler who will do the right thing for her kingdom. She's a knockout too, but in sensible shoes... The girls in this comic are very good role models. As someone who got really sick and tired of wimpy female superheroes in DC and Marvel comics as a kid, I'm happy to say that The Dreamland Chronicles do their female characters right.

While this is a comic that young kids are going to enjoy, don't make the mistake of thinking that comics are just for kiddies. The rest of the world knows that comics are for everybody - it's about time that Americans figured that out too. You think all those Latin puns in Asterix or Captain Haddock's pursuit by a famous opera singer in Tintin are for little kids?!? Guess again! Seriously, The Dreamland Chronicles have huge appeal to people of all ages. The story is good and the characters are extremely well developed and they grow and change with time. I really do think that comparing it to the sophistication of Oz is justified. Checking it out online or downloading it from Wowio doesn't cost you anything except for a few minutes of your time. What do you have to lose?

Let me just say here and now that I have no connection of commercial interest in anything that I review here. This is a review, not an advertisement. I'm doing this blog because I love comics - and no other reason than that.

The Harry Potter Effect, Oz, Narnia and Totoro

I realized the other day how defensive I was feeling when I wrote the first post to this blog. I feel I spent more time than I ought to have addressing the issue of the "young earth"/"creationist" view point vs. the more "inclusive" world view of the Japanese manga What's Michael and Bleach. I think this happened because of my intent to review "comic books" from the perspective of adults trying to evaluate what sort of comics their kids are reading. I've been through this already with respect to buying comics and anime that the "rent-a-kid" used to watch and find myself doing these evaluations again for buying stuff for my niece and nephew, both in grade school.

The problem here is what part of what I've been calling "The Harry Potter Effect." Basically, there are fundamentalist Christians who have gone nutso because of the world view extent in the Harry Potter books, especially concerning the terms of "witch" and "wizard." It's that whole "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" bit in the bible (Exodus 22:18). If you subscribe to the most extreme version of this world view (see Deut 18:9-14), then all witches are bad and using magic is bad too. It is clear that the bible disapproves of magic and witches (and there is much more than just Exodus 22:18 - the disapproval is found multiple places in the Old Testament) then using this line of reasoning, it should also be clear that the Harry Potter books are bad because they present some witches, wizards and magic as being good.

To be honest, I personally think that this fundamentalist Christian take on Harry Potter is a bit absurd. Seriously, anyone with sense knows that fiction is not real life. To think that your kids will be corrupted if they read Harry Potter is ridiculous. Give your kids some credit for having brains enough to distinguish between the real world and make-believe. To think that all good Christian kids will go to hell because they read Harry Potter treats your kids as stupid and robs them of an opportunity to exercise critical thinking. The key here is what is known as "the suspension of disbelief." Good fiction requires the suspension of disbelief because all fiction is make-believe.

I think that the Harry Potter Effect became an issue because of the popularity of the Harry Potter books and movies. There are certainly other works of fiction and film that have sympathetic treatments of witches and magic; the Wizard of Oz is a very good example of this. These treatments usually distinguish between good (white) magic and bad (black) magic and between good witches like Glinda the Good and bad witches like the Wicked Witch of the West. It's all made up and everyone above the age of eight knows this. To let the single issue of magic use determine whether your kids read a story ignores the positive morality inherent in these stories. The Land of Oz and Harry Potter present clear depictions of right and wrong in self consistent make-believe settings. The authors of these works have never pretended that their stories were anything other than fiction. If we insist that the biblical prohibition against magic be applied to all fiction, then Narnia is just as bad as Harry Potter because many of the Narnia protagonists use magic to do good. Get a clue, folks: it's all make-believe. If you are a member of the ban-Harry-Potter club, my advice is to get over it. Instead, I think you would do your kids some good if you used works like Harry Potter to contrast and compare fictional settings with scripture.

Given that the Harry Potter Effect is an issue for some folks, this makes reviewing comic books and manga problematic. Manga plots in particular use settings that are often very different from the ethical monotheism of Western civilization. That difference is sometimes very subtle and many non-Japanese will miss it. What's Michael has a very good example of this. In What's Michael, Michael the cat is shown washing his ears in front of small Japanese sculptures as the narrator tells the reader that this motion denotes sadness in cats. Every native of Japan knows that these sculptures are not only ubiquitous in Buddhist temples, they are grave markers and memorials for the deceased. Most non-Japanese will not realize that Michael is washing his ears (expressing sorrow) in front of a grave marker in the middle of a cemetery. Another example of this phenomenon is found in the feature-legnth animation My Friend Totoro (Tonari no Totoro). The toddler Mei becomes lost and the second half of the movie is spent looking for her. At one point, she sits down in front of some stone buddha statues. When this happens, Japanese viewers will know immediately that all will turn out well for Mei - because those statues are gizo statues. Gizo are like Buddhist guardian angels for lost children. People make devotions to gizo to help them find lost children in a way that closely parallels the Roman Catholic intersession of the saints.

The modern Japanese world view in My Friend Totoro is strongly influenced by Japanese Buddhism and Shinto. Mei is protected by gizo. The old Japanese farmer woman prays with her Buddhist prayer beads. The father and his two daughters pay their prayerful respects to the spirit of the giant camphor tree. Let's face it: there is nothing even remotely Judeao-Christian in this animated movie. Should we protest against this movie because of that? If we subscribe to the attitude embodied by Harry Potter Effect and apply it rigorously, then anime movies like My Friend Totoro should also be placed on the list of things that should be banned for the sake of our American children. My Friend Totoro is a G movie and a wonderful portrayal of family values. It's such a good piece of entertainment that when I showed the movie to the high school-aged rent-a-kid, he liked it despite the lack of chase scenes, transformer-fu, and superhero action.

Frankly, if we are going to judge popular Japanese anime and manga to see if they conform to a wished-for Christianized American culture, then we might as well stop importing them; and while we're doing that, we should shove our heads back into the sand, fence all our borders, give up our status as a superpower and sink into isolationism. We'll have to start censoring content on the internet too since you can find a huge amount of readily available manga and anime online.

I am not going to stop reviewing the settings of graphic novels because I find the Harry Potter Effect deplorable. A lot of folks care about things like smoking, profanity, sexual content and violence when it relates to their own children. I know I care about those things too when it comes time to find more graphic novels to give the niece and nephew for Christmas. I've been down this road before, especially when it involved what the rent-a-kid read and watched when he was in grade school (no RoboTech without finishing his homework first!). I am not, however, going to obsess over these issues like I did on my first two posts. I think people just have to be aware that manga and anime will almost always reflect aspects of the modern Japanese culture where they are produced.

What's Michael? - The Cat Lover's Comic

What's Michael by Makoto Kobayashi is admittedly one of my favorite manga. I suppose if you don't care for cats, then you probably wouldn't care for this comic. What's Michael follows the adventures of a ginger tabby called (surprise!) Michael. The story telling is not strictly sequential over the 11 volumes that have been published in English. Little kids may be confused by this since the stories often change setting: in one, Michael may be owned by a young Japanese couple; in the next, Michael may be owned by an older couple with children and in a third, Michael might be owned by a yakuza (Japanese mafia member). There are even story settings that place groups of cats in business suits or playing baseball in sport team uniforms. There is no consistent setting and Michael doesn't have one consistent home or set of owners. The stories are all episodes involving the cat Michael, his mate Popo, the monsterous Catzilla, any number of other cats, different dogs including one common repeat character named Bear, a couple of yakuza with pet anxieties, and all sorts of other everyday folk living in suburban Japan. Though the stories, settings, language and presentation are all appropriate for even little kids in the lower grades at elementary school, the ever-changing settings can be confusing for the younger age groups.

If you're looking to buy What's Michael for kids, be prepared to explain why the settings change. Also be prepared to explain why people in the comic do things like sit on the floor at a low table to eat meals or sleep on futons on the floor. All of the settings are modern suburban Japanese. The people in the comic are not North Americans - something that's most noticeable by the amount that they smoke. If you buy this comic for your kids, be prepared for this and be prepared to talk with your kids about it.

Like most manga, published weekly in Japan in serial form, the art is black-and-white. It is also very crisp and unlike a lot of manga, the faces of many of the characters are often distinctly Japanese. The ever-changing settings are part of the charm of the What's Michael and the take-off of The Planet of the Apes, appropriately titled The Planet of the Cats (Dark Horse volume #11) is a side-splitter. The author of this comic really understands his cats.

What's Michael is appropriate for all ages - though I suspect a lot of modern American adolescent boys would be bored by it. For the rest of us, it's a great read and a lot of fun. There is no bad language, no inappropriate or graphic violence, no "adult situations." Once in a great while, there may be a glimpse of modest mundane underwear under pajamas - your average American beach is worse...

What's Michael is published in English by Dark Horse Comics. It's initial debut in the USA won a New York Library Book Award in 1990. For about 6 years, it was also serialized in Dark Horse's now defunct Super Manga Blast which was not at all appropriate for little kids due to the rest of its content. As of this writing, Dark Horse has put out 11 volumes of What's Michael as 100-page self-contained collections of 4 to 8 stories. One of my biggest beefs over Dark Horse's publication of What's Michael is that the oldest volumes are out of print and hard to find. Every one of these volumes is worth owning in my opinion. Personally, I'd like to find all 11 volumes of What's Michael to give to my niece and nephew for Christmas.