Favourite manga part 5/6…
10.
Junji Ito –
GyoThis is the most recent of Ito’s three major sustained works, and also the one that most resembles a single contiguous story rather than a constellation of related shorts. In practice, though, Ito is still performing variations on a singular and terrifying theme. In
Gyo, fish are coming to claim the land, their rotting corpses scuttling into people’s homes on pointed mechanical spider legs. Given the space to stretch out, Ito takes this image from its initial
Evil Dead setup of a couple being menaced in their holiday home to a more apocalyptic,
World War Z type of vision, as humanity is quickly overrun. At the same time, the strange gases that perpetuate the fish are starting to affect humans as well. Although its central image never loses its capacity to shock and disturb, this series is more a game of logistics than most, and more of an adventure. His characters are constantly on the move, struggling for survival – there’s a lot less of the soft resets that for some people can spoil the momentum of Ito’s work. While I’m not convinced there’s a huge amount operating beneath the surface here, Ito’s visual imagination makes it a genuinely horrifying melding of zombie and Godzilla tropes.
9.
Inio Asano –
Nijigahara HolographAgain, this has been talked about a lot on the board, and I haven’t read it for years, so I’ll keep it brief. This is my favourite Asano work, certainly the one which makes the most sense to me – a very deep dive into a dark and bottomless well of alternating timelines, each promising a legacy of abuse and cruelty. Asano’s detached, ethereal style is something I often find a little grating, but here it provides a high enough vantage point to let us deal with his vision of a world that decays inexorably towards evil and sorrow. His art, as always, is extraordinary – his images are as rich with detail and dreamlike terror as those of David Lynch, who is the obvious comparison for this story.
8.
Naoki Urasawa –
PlutoUrasawa’s greatest work in an extraordinary career, this is manga’s
Planetary: a thrilling metafictional investigation into Osamu Tezuka’s
Astro Boy, a foundational text for all of comics. Urasawa reframes Tezuka’s story “The Greatest Robot on Earth” as a gripping murder mystery, as a detective trails a serial killer who has been picking off the world’s most famous robots. The robots, once mighty weapons of war, are long past their days of heroism and living in a state of elegiac perpetual retirement. Honestly it brings Tezuka alive in a whole new way, adapting the source material in the most satisfying way by finding a patient and mature equivalent to Tezuka’s story, delivering that same sense of adventure, invention and high stakes that Tezuka did so well but removing the sunny disposition and manic busywork that mark Astro Boy out as a text for children. It’s something I love in Western comics as well, the continual dialogue with what is essentially a rolling past, testing the universality of an idea by continually refining it. Urasawa is always gripping, but hitched to Tezuka’s force of imagination he really takes flight, achieving a unique synthesis of fantasy and humanism, past and present.
7.
Yuichi Yokoyama –
New EngineeringThis oversized collection of short pieces is in some ways a defining statement of experimentation for Yokoyama, dispensing with his usual thin veneer of narrative to give us moments in time, or perhaps more accurately, instances in systems. His art examines objects, sounds and situations from the perspective of a god, using a cone to carve a concavity into a mountain, or rolling out giant bales of turf across a flat plain. His characters, with their blank faces sprayed on extraordinary heads, are like little recording devices, prompting and commenting on inexplicable phenomena. The tactility he lends to unreal forms is incredible, as is the way he can communicate his massive sound effects with what to me are essentially abstract symbols. A highlight, and one of my favourite things Yokoyama has ever done, is the extraordinary fight scene in which the characters use blades to slice apart a roomful of objects in midair, creating a staccato dance of shape and motion. This is genuinely like nothing else in comics.
6.
Minoru Furuya –
Boku to Issho / Together With MeThis is probably my last pick that isn’t super well-known, so bear with me.
Together With Me is the second major work from Minoru Furuya, who started off with the more gag-heavy
Ping Pong Club (not to be confused with Taiyo Matsumoto’s
Ping Pong) and then went on to more “serious” stuff that never quite connected with me in the same way. This series follows two brothers who are kicked out of their dead mother’s house and go to Tokyo hoping to turn rags into riches. In Tokyo, they meet a third boy and, as a trio, start sponging off a kindly barber. Their efforts to make something of themselves are hampered by being the worst, most pathetic and detestable losers of all time. The two older boys especially are surreal and grotesque parodies of a typical underdog teenage protagonist: not just clumsy and bad with the ladies, but hateful and awful clowns, changing forms between panels like The Mask, gurning and screaming at their own inadequacy. Which is the main thing, I suppose; the emotions in this series are cartoonishly extreme, turned up to an intolerable volume for a laugh, but inside that extremity there’s somehow still nuance in the way you respond to these characters, a cyclonic mix of pity, hatred, hilarity and perhaps recognition. This is Beavis & Butthead but in a HOWL of sorrow that they can’t just be normal people. Foregrounding the profound depression in his protagonists, Furuya satirises the way we perceive idiocy itself, exposing the frustration, fear and shame of being an oaf. All that said, it’s the drawings that will catch your eye at first. The precision that he puts into his huge heads and bizarre facial expressions has a real evil energy about it, like Johnny Ryan with perfectly controlled draughtsmanship.