japan

Major Issues: Wayward #1

Wayward02A-585x900-web.jpg

In Major Issues, we look at one newly-released comic book each week. Updated Mondays.

Gardner Mounce

Wayward #1
Written by Jim Zub
Art by Steve Cummings
Colors by John Rauch and Jim Zub
Letters by Marshall Dillon
Published by Image Comics 8/27/14

My high school English teacher taught me that it’s bad form to begin an essay with a quote, and that’s why I’m saving it for sentence two. Someone once said that anyone can write a first act. It’s fun and easy to come up with a group of characters and establish a conflict; it’s in act two where things get tricky. Even so, a first act can be told poorly. Wayward’s problem is that it sets up its pieces so quickly that it doesn’t seem to enjoy its own premise.

Issue one falls into the trap of trying too quickly to get to the action. It assumes readers don’t have patience for the setup and are rolling their eyes until someone draws a sword. Protagonist Rori Lane, an Irish-Japanese high school student, lands in Japan to start a new life with her mom. For some reason, her mom doesn’t pick her up from the airport, which conveniently allows Rori to discover her new superpower–the ability to see her literal future path displayed for her in a red line (exactly like Donnie Darko’s ability to see his future path in a blue line). She catches up with her mom over dinner and explores Japan a little. Three men in an alleyway accost her. She’s saved by a ninja girl. They fight them off. The guys end up being turtle monsters, she discovers she can jump buildings for some reason, etc, etc.

This would be too much for one issue anyways, but writer Jim Zub dumps additional exposition on us in gobs of narration. Comics are a combination of words and pictures, but I’d argue that they’re a visual medium first. I hold them to Alfred Hitchcock’s standard that, like film, if they are played “silently” (without narration) the story should still work. It’s the cliche: show don’t tell. Narration should never do the work that the visual element could do. Most of the narration in Wayward could have been relayed to the reader visually, but oftentimes the narration just parrots what the comic is already showing. For instance, in one scene Rori struggles to take an afternoon nap, but is unable to do so due to jet lag. There are three frames. In frame one, Rori is lying down, staring at the ceiling. The narrator says, “I wonder if my brain will stop whirling long enough to take a nap.” The second frame is the same shot, to show that time has passed. The third frame shows Rori sitting up, indicating that, no, her brain won’t stop whirling long enough for her to take a nap. The reader understands this and needs no further indication, but Zub provides two additional layers of narration. First, Rori says, “Nope!” Second, the narrator says, “I guess it’s time to go exploring!”, which is an unnecessary line since the next panel shows Rori exploring. Zub commits this crime of over explaining constantly in issue one. The overall effect is that it reads like a rough draft, like Zub is still in the process of learning what his characters want and hasn’t yet found a way to tell the story in an interesting visual way.

Artist Steve Cummings and colorist John Rauch created this comic for a niche audience: the anime-ers. Skin is translucent. Hair is green or blue. Everyone’s dressed like they’re in attendance at Anime Expo. I’m not an anime or manga fan, so the art doesn’t feel like an homage to a Japanese style so much as it feels derivative of it. However, Cummings’s perspectives are noteworthy. Wide shots distort like wide angle lenses, giving the effect that the comic is filmed. It gives issue one a slick cinematic feel that definitely catches the eye. Now, if only Zub would trust him enough to take that camera eye and show us Japan and Rori Lane’s knotty relationship to her parents rather than tell us about it.

Should You Get It?

No. Unless manga is an obsession for you, and you’ve read all the manga, and you need anything that looks like manga or anime right now.

Gardner Mounce is a writer, speaker, listener, husband, wife, truck driver, detective, liar. When asked to describe himself in three words, Gardner Mounce says: humble, humble, God-sent. You can find him at gardnermounce.tumblr.com or email him at gmounce611@gmail.com 

Tough Questions: What’s the Best Thing You’ve Seen this Year?

question-mark

Every week we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week:

What’s the best thing you’ve seen this year?

Rules are simple: what have we, like, gotta see, man? No, really, what have we gotta see? It’s the middle of the year and nearly everything worthwhile is on hiatus. Wonder if anyone here is writing about that? Is that the first meta-plug in the intro paragraph? Why are you reading this, still? Go find out what you’re missing! What’s the best stuff from your first half of 2014?

Alex Russell

“So Did the Fat Lady” is the episode of Louie that’s nominated for an Emmy, but I’m sticking with the entire “Elevator” saga. I’m Louie‘s biggest fan, and I’m honestly a little surprised every time I realize it competes for Emmy awards as a “comedy.” I guess it is, but the “Elevator” arc from this season is everything the show is supposed to be. There were a ton of thinkpieces written about how it’s not funny anymore, but if you’re watching Louie to laugh then you’re missing the point. It’s all about watching a woman try to explain “hairdryer” to someone with no shared language between them. DAMN this season of Louie was good, y’all.

Jonathan May

IMG_1472

I’d have to say the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado. Clyfford Still was one of the leading American Abtract-Expressionist painters. The Museum houses 94% of the artist’s output, and he stipulated in his will that all of his work should be sealed off from the public (upon his death) until a museum devoted solely to it was built. The Museum opened just a few years ago, so I was lucky to be able to return to Denver to see it this year. Not only is the building itself absolutely gorgeous (concrete and steel), the paintings hang beautifully in chronological order, with many more in careful storage. I’d never been able to see his paintings in the flesh, so to walk through rooms and rooms of them was just heaven.

IMG_1476

Brent Hopkins

I would say the best thing I have seen this year would have to be Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe in Japan. I’ve always been intrigued by Japan as a long time video game and anime fan, and finally had a chance to go visit. (I wrote about the arcade culture there way back when.) You always hear about Tokyo, but the other cities are so vibrant and lively that they shouldn’t be taken for granted either. Kyoto in particular had me feeling like I had lived there forever or could live there forever. Just a breathtaking place with amazing people.

Gardner Mounce

The best thing I’ve seen so far this year is the trailer for Boyhood, the new Richard Linklater film. I’m a huge Linklater fan, having seen all of the Before… movies a dozen times. I was smiling ear-to-ear when I saw that trailer. It looks like it’s going to be like the Before…movies but three hours long and with all the cringiness of puberty. That’s my kind of entertainment.

Colton Royle

Can we just talk about how incredible The Lego Movie really was? I mean here is a movie about a kid’s toy that was somehow also about globalization, free movement of capital, and the possibility for a post-nation state while also adding in a little Marxist criticism for the low income workers?

In all seriousness, the movie is really funny. Each cliché is tweaked just out of reach for comedy. Consider the foreshadowing of Emmit’s fall into the human world (spoilers, but it’s been enough time) with items like the “Blade of Exact Zero” and the enlightened flashes that included a cat poster. Consider how Morgan Freeman’s character Vitruvius thinks that a prophecy is true because it rhymes. And the first five minutes of the film in Bricksburg is the most satirical animated wonder since Shrek. While it definitely shows as not a movie for children, it is philosophical and quirky in a way that had me doing jumping jacks.

Andrew Findlay

The best thing I have seen all year is The Sopranos. I have been on a quest to catch up on all of the universally acclaimed television shows from the last couple decades, and The Sopranos has impressed me the most by far. Mad Men is dripping with style, The Wire is sprawling, complex, and incisive, and Breaking Bad is absurdly exciting to watch, but none quite hit the slow and workmanlike layering of a fully realized network of people. The Sopranos is a show about generational psychosis, the American dream, and family (both the kind you see at Thanksgiving and the kind you order to hijack a semi of fine Italian suits for you). All the shows I listed are amazing, but they are all missing something intangible that The Sopranos has, and I expect it to remain for some time in my top five cultural experiences.

What is a Japanese Arcade Like?

bright

Brent Hopkins

Back again with a shorter entry. This one will be gaming related, but not a review. This one is a cultural story. Last weekend I went to Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto in Japan for vacation. They are about two hours away from Seoul by flight and it was my first foray into the land of video game history. I was with a friend who is not a gamer in the least, so I knew this wasn’t going to be a nerdcation. Still, we started out in Kobe and while we were walking around looking for some sweet Kobe beef we happened upon an arcade. Now, one thing about me that my gaming friends know is that I am an avid Sega fan — the Sega Saturn is my favorite system — and I’ve debated with myself over getting a Sega-flavor tattoo on my person.

This was a Sega arcade and when I walked in it was like all the synapses in my brain fired at once. I went from travel-weary to gleeful. The arcades in Japan are different than the ones I’ve been to in America and Korea in that the peripherals are extremely ornate. There are cards to save your profiles, there are fishing controllers, there are built in mouse and keyboards for PC-like gaming, there is just everything. Korea is close to this but as a PC-gaming nation the arcades are small and they focus more on dancing and light-gun games. America doesn’t really have arcades and the peripherals are almost always broken and mangled so it tends to be just light-gun, racing, and a few fighting games.

The thing I noticed most about this Sega arcade is the atmosphere of it. The men there (my travel buddy was the only woman) looked really serious and did not appear to be playing for fun. Some were grinding characters in games others were practicing combos in fighting games but the general air was serious gaming. I only had a short time to play so I say down and played some solo BlazBlue (a fighting game) and I had a blast. The games all appeared to cost about 100 yen (which is about a dollar, which is expensive) but there was no worrying about not having the right change after exchanging bills.

Later on in the trip we headed to Osaka where we spent most of our time and I got to go to a few more arcades. Sega has really cornered the market on the arcade scene in Osaka and Kobe at least with about 80% of the arcades being Sega branded. There was a large Namco (think Pac-Man and Tekken) arcade in Kobe but that was the only one I saw the entire time I was in Japan. The first Sega arcade I went to with the grumpy men was also the smallest I saw. The few Sega arcades I went to in Osaka were MASSIVE with the largest being a six-to-eight floor themeland with claw machines, pachinko, and photo booths. It felt closer to an amusement park than an actual arcade.

I love arcades and miss being able to go to them freely in America due to the console scene but they appear to be doing fine in Japan. There are plenty of really amazing games I wish would be released outside of Japan. The entire country is not as game-crazy as is oft perceived of Japan (especially not in the Kansai region) but you see Pokemon here and there and lots of anime characters (One Piece being the hands down most prevalent). I tried hard to pick up some nerd swag (goods, not swagger) while I was there and did find a few things, but it was hard (the best being Nintendo-brand playing cards, which is what the company originally made before video games). If you want your gaming fix I would recommend going to Tokyo, not elsewhere.