House of 1000 Manga
Sparkler Monthly
by Jason Thompson,
Sparkler Monthly
“What kind of people go to these anime conventions? Is it mostly Asians?” one of my elderly relatives asked me once. I took a deep breath and gave her a lecture: anime and manga wasn't something ‘just’ for Asian-Americans, fans of all ethnicities enjoyed Japanese pop culture, and so on. And it's true. The Japanese economic boom from the 1960s to the 1980s wasn't just about selling consumer electronics and cars; it was about selling cultural exports, arts and entertainment and escapism. Just as the US sells a fantasy image of itself abroad, through American TV, movies and superheroes, Japan sells itself too; in America anime fandom cuts across race and class, and globally it extends into the Middle East, Latin America and other places where Naruto resonate much more strongly than locally produced offerings. Japanese pop culture is global pop culture: its capitalistic success is a rare (but nowadays, increasingly less rare) example of cultural power radiating not West—>East, but East—>West, East—>South, East—>East, everywhere that licenses or scanlations take it, a global marketplace of fantasies and desires.
But just how “Japanese” is manga? Is it more or less Japanese, in some essential way, than samurai, ninja, Christmas cake and Shinto? In response to a question of whether white people cosplaying Asian characters from anime and manga was offensive, a friend on Fullmetal Alchemist fretting that his brother Edward will get a cold if he sleeps with his tummy showing. A friend from Jordan grew up watching Arabic-dubbed anime, with the characters given Arabic names, but found herself wondering at an early age in what part of Jordan people ate rice with chopsticks. Such cultural differences invariably as ‘weird’ to foreign audiences, but whitewashing them—or making them off limits for discussion—is surely a worse idea than acknowledging them. To be interested in anime and manga is to be interested in Japan, if only to understand the perspective you're watching, though such understanding may be distorted and shallow. For a foreign fan of anime and manga, appreciation of craft and exoticism of Japan are always mixed.
Few fans are entirely content to be in a position of just ively watching and reading and not making or doing, and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so of course foreign fans absorb manga influence into their own art. Manga-influenced comics have been published in America since the mid-‘80s (or the late ‘70s if you count Elfquest and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane found an audience).
I've always enjoyed manga-influenced comics—KAZU Kibuishi's Flight anthologies weren't d as “manga,” but could just as easily have claimed the title. It was a rare time of opportunity when inexperienced, manga-influenced artists could get ADVANCES (!!!) and even ROYALTIES (!!!) for drawing ORIGINAL CONTENT (not licensed properties based on games, movies and TV shows!!). The contracts weren't always great, and some of the books were pretty awful, but it was the crest of a wave when it briefly seemed like a new, international-aimed art style and new stories might sweep over the dusty 80-year-old superhero franchises.
It didn't happen, of course; the manga boom crashed, and One manga-influenced site that stands out is the online magazine Kickstarter
The prose and audio sections of the site have many interesting stories, including Tokyo Demons, a story about a girl who can transform into a swarm of insects, and Dusk in Kalevia with its mixture of European military uniforms, angels and Lianne Sentar and dee Juusan is more original, both in of Sentar's scenario and Juusan's handsome, highly rendered art: the tale of Rashid and his childhood friend Bo, a shut-in who spends all his life in his apartment wrapped up in a blanket playing online games. “I guess I figured he'd grow out of it,” Rashid tells another character. “But he still won't even try to go out. Ever. And he wants me to live in his little bubble with him…” Were this a Boy's Love title, it'd be easy to imagine it ending with the characters spiraling down into codependence, but instead it's more of a story of friendship, and refreshingly, the arc follows Rashid's attempts to bring Bo into the outside world (“You're the most important person in my life. But you're not my ENTIRE life!”). I'd love to read more about these two characters.
One of the longer stories, KaiJu's Mahou Josei Chimaka, is a parody of Magical Girl manga. The opening scene sets the tone: Chimaka, basically a Sailor Scout, is fighting an evil cloud of darkness with the help of her winged snake friend, Snakey. “Shimmer Shimmer Diamond Reflection!!” she calls out, and raises her wand for the final blast, and then we cut to 15 years later, with a coffee-swigging grownup Chimaka looking out at the giant blast crater left over from that battle and saying “Well, fuck.” Turns out that there was no happy ending: Chimaka failed to save the city, she lost the prince who has her reincarnated love from the past life, she lost Snakey, and now she's in her thirties working a 9-to-5 corporate job as a ’mad scientist’ ( “By ‘mad’, I mean ‘angry at my life’”). When the threat from the past reappears in the form of a massive hole in the ozone layer, the government tries to get Chimaka to step back into her secret heroic identity of Shimmer Shimmer Sky Patcher, but it's not so easy. Her powers don't work anymore. She tries to activate her magic jewelled hairbrush and throws it in the air, but it just falls back down and lands on her head (“Ow, fucker!”). Not knowing what else to do, Chimaka confides in her drinking buddy Pippa. “Pip…I'm a magical girl.” “Yeah? I mean, we're all a little magical, right?”
This kind of thing has been done before—if you've been reading maho shojo, sentai or superhero stories all your life and now you're 30, it's natural to imagine your heroes growing up and perhaps having shitty jobs and swearing a lot—but it's rarely been done this well. KaiJu's shojo-esque art is smooth and beautiful, with a lot of lovely illustrations of plants and nature in keeping with the environmental theme. Like several other Sparkler titles, it's nice to see that the lead isn't a skinny white or East Asian woman, but curvy and brown-skinned; the diverse attention to both race and bodytype makes me want to print out Mahou Josei Chimaka on paper just so I can roll it up and beat the creators of Ugly Duckling Christy Lijewski was a winner of the Tokyopop “Revolutionary Girl Utena
One of the most visually manga-like titles is Orange Junk by Heldrad. If it wasn't mentioned that Heldrad was from Mexico I could easily think the artist was Japanese, so perfectly does the story (and art, for that matter) replicate a 1990s Shōjo Manga. Louise Barton is a sheltered rich girl whose family has fallen on hard times, forcing her to go to (gasp!) a public school while her mom works as a door-to-door saleswoman and her dad mopes gloomily. At her new school, Louise is horrified to behold such low-class sights as students with mohawks (gasp!); her math teacher, Jack, is an ex-thug with dark glasses, a leather jacket and four-day stubble; and her violent classmate Bruce mocks her with “This isn't some private school where you can just pay out of your grades! This is why I hate rich bastards!” The only thing that makes her new life bearable is Andrew Gray, her super-handsome, super-sweet classmate, but Andrew's actually a spacey ditz who sings along to anime songs and gets distracted looking at the clouds (“The clouds are fluffy today!”). Surprise Number 2: brutish Bruce is secretly a super-genius, and he ends up becoming Louise's math tutor! With the two men in the love triangle being a sexless, Pollyanna-ish space cadet and a grouchy jerk, it's easy to guess who our heroine will end up with; later the storyline turns to Bruce's impoverished background and Louise visits his crumbling house in the slums where he works to his loving mother and siblings. (“What a warm home…” she thinks.) Unfortunately, although the Sparkler websites s Orange Junk as a parody of old Shōjo Manga, the weak heroine, tsundere love interest and unsubtle class elements feel more like a recycling of tropes than a parody of them. Although the setting isn't explicitly named, one of the most interesting things about itis that it seems to be set in America: a slightly unconvicing cartoon America where people eat hamburgers and have names like Jack and Andrew and Bruce, not unlike America in the manga of 
There's nothing better than the thrill of discovering an artist who's totally unique, and that's the thrill of reading Alexis Cooke, whose artwork reminds me of moe daughter pixie seen in manga. Most of all, I never thought I'd read a comic that made the “they suck at cooking” cliché actually funny. Alexis’ other ongoing Sparkler story, For Peace, is also a romance. Following two lesbian truckers, youthful Lillian and more experienced convoy-leader BeBe, it follows them through their struggles as they try to balance love with the demands of trucking and life on the road. As Lillie's mom teases her “You only get this excited over fast cars and girls!”
For romance in the word's older sense of “adventure” (a la KOSEN, a pair of artists from Spain. In 17th century Spain, Daniela, a teenage noblewoman, runs away from home, following instructions in a letter from her absent father who also leaves her a mysterious astrolabe. She soon discovers that the astrolabe is the clue to a priceless treasure: “the voice of storms,” a magic artifact that controls the seas, and whatever nation controls the seas controls the world! Her father was a secret agent trying to help Charles III, the true king of Spain, regain his throne from the French-installed puppet monarch. But danger lurks along the way to the artifact; pirate attacks, evil French agents, and two roguish travelers, the beautiful swordswoman Angeline and her equally handsome brother Leon. After Angeline robs Daniela and Daniela hunts her down, the strange trio become reluctant allies to find the “voice of storms”…but can the two thieves really be trusted? It's a promising historical story full of fancy costumes, fancy balls, swordfights and secret ages, drawn in a realistic style that might appeal to both manga- and non-manga-readers. (The realism ends at those perfect faces and jewel-like eyes.)
One minor thing about Sparkler is that, with the exception of Tokyo Demons, none of the stories are set in Japan, at least not obviously. I'm often skeptical of Western comics set in Japan, but I don't think it's innately wrong (Isao Takahata), something rare in the fantasy-oriented stories of his native French comics. Writing an artistic manifesto for what he called the “Nouvelle Manga” movement, he invited French and Japanese artists to work together, to make stories that used the best techniques of both countries to create comics not set in generic fantasy worlds, but in a specific time and place.
I don't know if she's a fan of such manga, but Jen Lee Quick's Off*Beat is one or both of two things: (1) one of the most subtle, realistic Boy's Love stories I've ever read (2) a psychological mystery about a brilliant, neurotic teenager and his self-destructive obsession. After a slightly abrupt start the pacing is wonderful, a long slow burn that must have required as much patience from the artist as it does from the main character. It's a good example of the truth that the specific beats the general; only an East Coaster who attended an American high school could tell this story so well. Off*Beat is complete in three 200-page volumes, but Jen Lee Quick also has two other stories on Sparkler; although fantasies, unlike Off*Beat, they share the same great art and great sense of place. Witch’s Quarry is a maybe-romance set in a world of magic and monsters, in which Veolynn, Lady Knight of Chrisbury, rides out to attend her brother's arranged marriage to a foreign sorceress and finds herself caught up in (sexy) intrigues. Gatesmith is perhaps the Sparkler manga I'm most excited to read more of: a Wild West tale which opens with a brutal scene of violence then subsides into a slow, creepy buildup as supernatural events begin to plague the small Western town of Edgeward. Doc Malik, a black cowboy, and Ashkii, a Native American cowboy who tells tales of witches and skinwalkers, are soon ed by Miss Morgan, a mysterious drifter; while meanwhile Lucrezia Cruz, a lady scientist from the East, comes into town to meet her mentor, Professor Emile, who may have been experimenting with Things Humans We Not Meant To Know. (No, it's not a Cthulhu story. Probably.) Mutilated animal corpses…strange glowing lights in the desert dusk…tentacles that turn into trees (and back again?)…it's a cool story, moving with the slow confident pace of the best manga, towards unknown territory. Neither fully “manga” nor fully “Western” (whatever either of those means), manga-influenced comics are often fascinating precisely because they don't fit into any one market or mindset. Mainstream manga, although technically creator-owned, is often so editorially controlled that it's totally predictable, and even the mind tricks of Dragonball: Evolution.) Sparkler is just one of the best of thousands of small groups and artists remixing culture in their art,sometimes skillfully and respectfully, sometimes crudely, but always bravely and according to their own personal interpretations of that art and culture. Manga is by definition Japanese, like manhua is Chinese and manwha is Korean, but it's also international. This is its strength. As I told my old relative, it's for everybody.
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