Marvel Mangaverse

Some years back, someone at Marvel Comics said, "Golly, maybe there's somethin' to this Manga craze all the kids are all hepped up about." They tried a number of experiments about this time to combine Japanese comic style with mighty Marvel characters, including translating the licensed Japanese version of Spider-Man, but perhaps the strangest, most interesting of all was called MARVEL MANGAVERSE. They gave cartoonist Ben Dunn the keys to the Marvel Universe and let him re-make it, manga-style, for a fifth-week event.

Ben Dunn, founder of Antarctic Press and creator of NINJA HIGH SCHOOL, has been drawing manga-style comics since before manga-style was cool. Like the best of the "American manga" artists, he does not ape the look of Japanese comics as much as he takes visual techniques from manga and incorporates them into his own distinctive style. Oddly enough, the American artist Dunn most resembles is George Perez. Like Perez, he has a love of detail; and when presented with a fight scene of CRISIS-level proportions, says "Gimme a couple dozen more Para-demons! I can take it!" Which is just what is required for a story like MARVEL MANGAVERSE.

The title is appropriate. Ben Dunn was not just re-imagining a few popular characters; MANGAVERSE presented a densely-textured world with an elaborate history to it, just like the real Marvel Universe. Reading it is a lot like jumping into, say, an AVENGERS ANNUAL with no familiarity of the continuity. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a bit confusing, but Ben gives us enough points of similarity to keep us oriented and provides the backstory on the fly; and the complexity also gives a sense that this isn't just a miniseries to fill a hole in the monthly schedule, but that it truly is a universe with it's own history and rich population of characters.

The bookend issues of the series, NEW DAWN and ETERNAL TWILIGHT, were written and illustrated by Ben Dunn and provide the set-up and the resolution of the main story, how Hydra instigates a war between Atlantis and the surface world in order to seize a source of unlimited power. It also introduces the main characters: U.S. President Steve Rogers, who also leads the Avengers as Captain America; Doctor Strange and his familiar Tigra; billionairess Antionette Stark, a Godzilla-sized behemoth called the Hulk, and others.

Between the bookends were six issues focusing on individual characters and teams within the Universe. They are largely independent of the overall plot and of each other and vary in quality. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE (written by Ken Sui-Chong, with art by Alvin Lee, Arnold Tsang, Omar Dogan and Shane Law) takes the Avengers' battle cry literally as the team pilots battle craft which combine to form a giant robot: ULTIMATE IRON MAN!!! The story and art are fairly good; it lacks some of the goofy fun of Ben's work, but it's a serviceable manga pastiche.

MEGA-SCALE META-TALENT RESPONSE TEAM FANTASTIC FOUR has the most Japanese title of the six interior issues. It was written by Adam Warren, one of the best of the American manga artists, who did a number of first rate DIRTY PAIR miniseries for Dark Horse back in the late '80s. He did not draw this comic, but Keron Grant and Rob Stull did a fine job with the artwork. In this version, the Fantastic Four wear exo-skeletons which give them the team's familiar powers. (Reed's power is not exactly the one we're familiar with, but is brilliantly imagined). The team has been organized to combat other-dimensional threats to the Earth. The story isn't perfect; I did not find the characters terribly likable and Adam's liberal sprinkling of foul language, (represented by black censor bars), comes off as grating rather than naturalistic and clashes stylistically with the dialogue in the other books. Nevertheless, I like Adam's stuff and the story does a decent job of fusing manga themes with the Marvel Universe.

GHOST RIDERS is the weakest of the lot. Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan, and Johnny Blaze, the Ghost Rider, two supernatural characters from the '70s, hang out in a bar while outside the kaiju-sized Hulk lumbers about. Daimon tries to convince Johnny that they're related; Johnny wants nothing to do with him. Their sister, Satana, shows up and is embarrassing. The story, by Chuck Austin, is not bad, but feels stretched and thin compared with the other stories in the set. The artwork, also by Austin, features simply-drawn characters with flat, animation cel coloring over 3-D computer-rendered backgrounds. It's an interesting technique, but comes off as garish and ugly.

Of course, it just wouldn't be manga if we didn't have some sexy schoolgirls. But PUNISHER, written by Peter David and drawn by Lea Hernandez goes against expectations. By day, Sosumi Brown is the strict disciplinarian principal of a boarding school. By night, she adopts the guise of the PUNISHER to give crime a sound spanking. One might expect the character to be drawn as a scantily-clad dominatrix, as in some of the manga of Japanese artist Go Nagai; but Hernandez draws her fully-clothed in kimono and Geisha make-up. (The obi of her kimono tied in an elaborate knot that looks like a skull, referencing the skull on Frank Castle's outfit, is a nice touch)

Perhaps the most successful story in the series is SPIDER SCROLL, written and drawn by Kaare Andrews. In this re-imagining of Spider-Man, Peter Parker's Uncle Ben was the last of the Spider Ninja Clan, and Peter his student. When Sensei Ben is killed on the orders of the villainous Kingpin, Peter vows vengeance; but since he has promised his Aunt May that he will turn his back on the Way of the Ninja, he must do it in secret, wearing a mask. The story skillfully blends all the essential Peter Parker elements with those of a martial arts story. SPIDER SCROLL was spun off into a limited series; and more recently, the character has resurfaced in the “Spider-verse” storyline, in which Peter encounters alternate versions of Spider-Man from other universes.

X-MEN, written by C.B. Cebulski, penciled by Jeff Atsuda and A.J Jothikumar with inks by Andy Owens, was another disappointment. It came off as just another X-Men story with slightly different costumes. Theoretically, these X-Men's powers are based on magic rather than genetic mutation, but I didn't really see much to make this group special and different than the regular Marvel Universe version.

Ben Dunn returns for the final chapter, ETERNITY TWILIGHT, which brings everything back together. We get the defeat of Ultimate Iron Man, the betrayal of Baron Strucker, the return of Black Panther, the arising of the Dread Dormammu and the coming of the one hero on earth who can stop him!

MARVEL MANGAVERSE was followed by a monthly series, once again written and drawn by Ben Dunn, that lasted eight issues. The second series was more focused, benefiting from a single writer. The first story arc introduced a re-imagined version of Captain Mar-Vell and a weird and fantastic version of Galactus. The second arc introduced this world's Doctor Doom, who has a tragic connection to the Black Panther.

Truthfully, not everything in the series works; (I thought the appearance of Spider-Man in the conclusion of the initial story, for example, a little forced); but there are just so many fantastic ideas in MARVEL MANGAVERSE, so many appealing and intriguing characters and such promise that I was more than willing to overlook it's weak spots and just revel in the sheer Marveltude of it all.

I've long been a fan of Ben's work, and MARVEL MANGAVERSE was a fun look at the Marvel Universe through a different lens.

He Saw It: Manga Artist and Hiroshima Survivor Keiji Nakazawa

This past month we lost a notable comic book artist: Keiji Nakazawa, a Hiroshima survivor who used his comics to bear witness to his personal experience of war and of the atomic bomb.


He was born in 1939 in the city of Hiroshima, Japan. He was 7 years old on August 6, 1945, when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. He happened to be standing next to a concrete wall when the bomb went off, which shielded him from the blast, while a man who was talking to him burned to death. His father and most of his family perished when their home collapsed.

His family suffered from poverty and hunger during the post-war years; his baby sister died after only a few weeks. Nakazawa made a career for himself as a manga artist and moved to Tokyo, but even there he found that Hiroshima survivors were discriminated against. People feared contact with the survivors as in a later generation people would fear touching a person with AIDS, as if radiation exposure was somehow contagious.

So Nakazawa kept his experiences to himself, until his mother died in 1966. She was cremated, as was customary, but when Keiji sifted through her ashes hoping to find a piece of bone to keep to remember her, he found nothing. The radiation exposure which had ruined her health and killed her at an early age had eaten away at her bones to the point where after the cremation there was nothing left. His anger and frustration drove him to put his experiences down the only way he knew how: in comic form.

His first attempt at dramatizing his experiences was a manga titled Kuroi Ame ni Utarete ("Struck by Black Rain"), fictional story about five survivors involved in the black market in the ruins of post-war Hiroshima. He had difficulty selling this story, though, because the publishers felt it was too dark.
In 1972, the editors at Weekly Shonen Jump, one of the major manga magazines, asked several of it's artists to create autobiographical stories for a special issue. Nakazawa's story was titled Ore Wa Mita ("I Saw It"), and told how he and his mother survived the bombing of Hiroshima and how he ultimately became a manga artist. His editor encouraged him to expand the story, and the following year Nakazawa began Hadashi no Gen ("Barefoot Gen"), a fictionalized version of his experiences.

Barefoot Gen is a powerful work about the horrific toll of war on people. Nakazawa's drawing style is cartoony, influenced by Osamu Tezuka, and often goofy, which makes the graphic depictions of the bomb's aftermath all the more shocking, as when Gen encounters people whose skin seems to be melting off their bodies, or a girl with shards of glass embedded in her face, or his own family trapped in the burning rubble of a demolished house, as Nakazawa's family was, helpless to save them as they burn to death.

But Gen is a plucky and resourceful lad, determined to make a better life for his family, even in the ruins of war. Despite the atomic horror of radioactive death and the bitter struggle against society in collapse, the story of Gen is at its core a hopeful one. Nakazawa's purpose in writing it was to teach a new generation about the horror and reality of atomic war.

“I want Gen to become a source of the new generation’s strength with the strength to say no to oppose nuclear weapons, stepping on the scorched earth in Hiroshima with his bare feet and feeling the firm ground on his feet.”

Both I Saw It and Barefoot Gen have been published in English. Barefoot Gen has been adapted into two animated films and a live-action TV series.

Keiji Nakazawa died on December 19, 2012 of lung cancer at the age of 73

2001 Nights

(cross-posted from DKos)

It's not very often that you see a comic book that can be classified as Hard Science Fiction, but Yukinobu Hushino's 2001 Nights certainly qualifies. It was originally published in the mid-'80s in the manga magazine Monthly Super Action and then translated into English by Viz Comics as a series of graphic novels in 1996.

The title evokes the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is an important source of inspiration for the series, combined with the Thousand and One Nights. Instead of following the adventures of a single protagonist, the series is a collection of tales, each one called a "Night", tracing the story of mankind's journey to the stars.

Hushino's artwork is rich and meticulously detailed. Unlike a lot of manga, which lavishes loving attention to buildings and mecha but has characters who are stylized and cartoony, Hushino has a naturalistic style. Although you won't mistake his artwork for Neal Adams or George Perez, neither will you see a lot of manga hair and anime eyes. He achieves a rare balance in comics: not only does he make the technology visually plausible, but he makes the characters believably human and not exaggerated superbeings.

The first story, "Night 1: Earthglow", illustrates a recurring theme of the series. It is set in the immediate future. Mideast tensions have brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and the pilots of a US Space Shuttle wonder if their secret mission will precipitate it. Their flight plan brings them to a Soviet Space Station and they learn that their secret cargo is the President, who is going to meet with the Soviet Premier in a place where they can see the earth without borders, as a single planet. This story offers both the hope that the promises of technology and of space can solve our problems, and the fear that the conflicts of the past will remain with us.

Both that hope and that fear echo through many of the stories. In "Night 11: Stranger's Footsteps", two nations vie to establish colonies on the same planet; In "Night 12: Symbiotic Planet", colonies established on a planet by rival nations learn a lesson in cooperation by the planet's ecosystem.

At the end of "Night Night 7: Lucifer Rising", Father Chavez, the priest accompanying a mission to a newly-discovered planet beyond the orbit of Pluto, prays:

To Man, who in the distant past lost Paradise and now prepares to journey of his own will away from even the glory of the sun... please grant mercy and forgiveness... that our descendants not spread into the universe still as sinful as we... Please, Lord...

The series is not an optimistic look at the future. Many of the space colonies fail; some spectacularly. By the end of the series, mankind has grown tired of the expansion and has begun to withdraw back to the Solar System. But humanity has also spawned a "New Generation," people who may be the next stage of evolution who will remain traveling the stars after their planet-bound fathers have returned to Earth.

Several of the stories follow a single family, the Robinsons, as succeeding generations travel farther and farther out into space. Early in the series, a colony ship is sent out carrying banks of sperm and ova that will be grown into colonists. A generation or two later, FTL travel has been developed and one of the descendants of the original donors puts his fortune into terraforming the planet that colony ship is bound for so that his cousins will have a hospitable place to land when it arrives. Other members of the Space Family Robinson play important parts in other stories and the "The Final Night: Children of Earth" brings many of the generational plot threads back together.

Most of the stories are fairly short, maybe a dozen pages or so; but a couple of them are more lengthy and deserve special comment. One is "Lucifer Rising." Mankind is still limited to the Solar System, although a couple of extra-solar missions have been launched; (one an unmanned probe called Discovery, described in Night 6, and which contains the most obvious 2001 references; the other the Robinson Family seeder ship, which we first encounter in "Night 4: Posterity"). A hitherto unknown planet is discovered outside the orbit of Pluto composed entirely of antimatter. The Vatican sends a priest on the mission to the planet, called Lucifer, in order to prove that it is indeed the "Devil's star" and that further space exploration is contrary to God's Will. But Father Sanchez, the Vatican's emissary, is a scientist as well as a priest. As he grapples with his conflicting missions, he also grapples with his own guilt over failing to save a crewman who died in a space accident. And in addition, someone is performing acts of sabotage on the ship. Hushino interweaves his story with asides about the formation of the Solar System, evolution, and excerpts from Paradise Lost.

The penultimate tale in the collection, "Night 18: Odyssey in Green", is another epic, taking up a volume and a half of the Viz collection. Mankind is starting to withdraw back to the Solar System. Most of the colonies have failed; habitable planets are few and far between. But one thing could revitalize man's exploring spirit: if they could find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. So far, humans have discovered life on other worlds, but no other people. Then a spacecraft passing near Betelgeuse encounters a rapidly-moving object being propelled from the planet by a laser drive; an enormous beam of energy coming from the planet's surface and pushing it. While investigating the planet, the ship is damaged by a second laser pulse, and the surviving crew are stranded on a jungle world trying to find the civilization which built the laser. What they find is nothing like they expect.

The final night brings the last of the roving Robinsons to the planet in the Tau Ceti system where the children of the original Robinson Project, sent from Earth long ago, have formed an idyllic colony; along with the New Generation, who have plans of their own. The meeting marks the end of the first wave of human exploration, but also the beginning of a new one. Even in leaving the Earth, mankind seems unable to shake the clay of past sins, past grudges, past mistakes off its feet. And yet hope remains, and the stars are there to beckon us on.