What's a Shaman to a Non-Belieeeeeever?

I got my first smartphone and I’m really excited about the camera, so I’m using it for the pictures instead of my scanner.

Hiroyuki Takei’s Shaman King has been on my comic radar almost as long as any other title.  With my introduction to comic reading essentially being a roommate chiding me into watching/reading Naruto during a bad breakup, all of the turn-of-the-century Jump titles were always in my peripherals, especially back in the days when I caught up on ~500 chapters or so of Naruto on illegal scanlation sites (back then I think it was mostly the now defunct Manga Fox?).  Anyway, I was weirdly stubborn back then: I insisted that Naruto would be my only anime/manga, out of some arbitrary Will to Douchebag.  That same friend changed that when he blared the Death Note dub at full volume sometime later that year, catching me in an event horizon of excellent Japanese storytelling in pretty pictures.  Yes, he is a good friend.

I could not be rediscovering Shaman King at a better time in my comic reading life: when younger, I might have been a little bored with how quintessentially shonen this comic really is.  I might have found Manta annoying, Yoh and Anna too powerful, and the art far too cartoonish.  Now, I don’t think any of those things are true (or really that interesting as opinions): I find Manta’s perspective to be a unique boon to Takei’s storytelling, and think that the skill, variety, and humor in Takei’s more cartoony depictions is one of the strongest, most important features of the work.  More than anything else, however, Takei’s layouts are sort of shockingly sophisticated from jump (GET IT?!).  I don’t know of any other creator—not even any of the holy trinity of Kubo, Kishimoto, or Oda—who were able to produce such great art within the confines of such consistently interesting pages as early as the first two volumes.

The many faces of Manta

For those who don’t know, it could be argued that in the first volume, the main character is actually Manta Oyamada, a short goody two-shoes with a dumb haircut and fantastically stubby legs.  The titular shaman, Yoh Asakura, is at a distance for the early parts of the series, with Manta wrapping up each chapter in a sort of narrative diary format as he learns more about Yoh and what it means to be a shaman.  A big part of any enduring shonen series is this process of finding out the fundamental rules of the universe; you know, being a saiyan, a ninja, a soul reaper, a pirate, etc.  Often this exploration happens by way of a teaching figure, and even where the world being explored is particularly interesting, the learning curve for enjoying a shonen series is usually a road paved with stilted explanations of chakra, haki, magical fruits, and power levels.

Manta helps tremendously with the feel of learning what makes Shaman King tick.  He’s essentially this complete nerd who has been dropped smack in the middle of a shonen story unfolding before his very eyes, which would be far less dramatic than it often gets made to be and is, in fact, completely absurd most of the time.  At one point, when Yoh first joins Manta’s school, Manta starts screaming about the fact that Yoh just showed up and started sleeping.  “Does he think he’s a god?!?!” Manta exclaims at Yoh’s brazen disregard for academia.  Mind you, Manta just saw this kid communing with dozens of spirits in a graveyard the day before, and that set of concerns is completely eclipsed by this kid sleeping in a classroom.  Manta keeps this story surprisingly grounded even as it quickly tries to pull the reader into its unique metaphysical take on spirits.  His reactions are often such exaggerated approximations of the skeptical reader that it’s really easy to buy what Takei is selling.

The quality of Takei’s cartooning has a huge role in this.  Melodramatic overreactions are part and parcel with shonen humor: just ask Oda about the way he draws Usopp freaking out with the same face half a dozen times every single issue.  Takei doesn’t have just one go-to face for Manta: he has dozens, all of which are fully realized and humorous in their own ways.  Going through volume one to find unique faces made by Manta that I thought were entertaining, I ended up with nearly three dozen examples, and probably could have found a few more.  Establishing something so central to the manga’s identity and tone so early on and so consistently is just one of many reasons Takei is impressive to me.  Approaching humor so deliberately and in such a detailed fashion as he does with Manta opens up possibilities for the depiction of every other character.

Another thing that really sets Takei apart among the crop of mangakas that sprung up around the turn of the century is how mature his page layouts were early on.  The cartooning is ahead of many of his peers, and the overall quality and consistency of the art is yet another thing that he was ahead of the curve on.  I think he falls behind a little bit on action sequences (at least in early volumes) but his pages are often thoughtful, and sometimes really quite clever.

Here’s Yoh reacting to a movie staring Shaman King’s proxy for Bruce Lee, Lee Bailong.  If you have any friends telling you about the similarities between film and comics as mediums, feel free to show them this page as proof that comics are quite different (and perhaps even more powerful, at least independent of sound): look at how much narrative power Takei is able to draw from putting a film strip to use as comic panels juxtaposed with the reactions of a viewer.  Of course, I adore what’s happening on this page, completely independent of any weight it might lend to weird esoteric formalist conversations about the medium’s capability.  Takei gets to show off as an artist and as a storyteller, adding particular weight to a scene that is really participating in some hardcore foreshadowing.

As if this sequence wasn’t already good enough, here’s the page after next.

Again, Takei is taking time here to front-end-load a lot of details so that when Lee Bailong’s corpse shows up to kick some ass, we have all this prelude about the character itself and how much Manta looks up to him.  But that’s not all the scene does, visually.  It uses the same kind of repetition-of-elements-in-parallel as the aforementioned page: main action proceeds in the middle, reactions to Bailong occur off to the left.  Shaman King isn’t just good by comparison—it’s good on its own—but I feel like I can’t stress enough that nobody else on the Jump mainstage, not even from the dream class of the turn of the century mangakas, was doing this much with their pages.

I’m especially struck by this because when I go and find reviews of the Shaman King manga, almost all of them focus on the content or general aesthetic, and none give Takei credit as a visual storyteller.  His page layouts are diverse, interesting, and often border on meticulous.  Asymmetry is a big feature of a lot of his pages.  Obviously not a lot of pages are actually symmetrical in comics, but the way that Takei alternates between lining up and juxtaposing elements vertically on his pages throughout different panels gives his pages this really sophisticated feel that is at the same time very easy to enjoy.  Anna easily could have remained in the center of the page in the bottom panel as she is prior, but offsetting her just… it just works.  The page just feels fantastic with her skewed off to the side, clutching her magical channeling beads in the page’s center.

Takei has a clear eye for style, but rather than transcending plot completely in order to show off (*cough*, Kubo, *cough*), he reinvests his keen eye for interesting composition into keeping the story grounded.  I’m still early in my Shaman King reading experience, and am interested to see how Takei develops over time; even so, I’m just short of being blown away by how substantial this comic is so early on in its run.

Veni, Vidi, Vulcan

“So… this is the X-Men now…?”

Vulcan, in a rare moment of open reflection, reveals his state of disbelief regarding being attacked by his comrades.  The top panel is especially prescient: Xavier holds back Havok (Alex Summers) from doing more damage, making sure that Havok does not kill his brother, Gabriel Summers.  Things really are quite different from the days when all of the X-men were still green and Vulcan was being sent off to save their asses.  But one thing hasn’t changed:

Xavier is a fucking prick.

The tragedy of Vulcan is inextricably wrapped up in what a manipulative sociopath Xavier really is.  The guy commissions a team of kids to save HIS team of kids that he already irresponsibly sent into unknown danger. In the process, he slapdashedly puts them through an accelerated training program (a Danger Room in his own fucking mind), gets them killed, then wipes out everyone’s memory that they ever existed. Two actually survive, of course: Gabriel Summers, a.k.a. Vulcan, a very powerful energy manipulator, and Darwin, a.k.a. Darwin, a being who can only be killed by one single thing in the universe: Kevin Bacon.

When the events of “Deadly Genesis” come to a head, Xavier is beside himself, full of remorse, fully aware that this is the most fucked up thing he has ever done and that Scott, who might as well be his son, has every reason never to speak to him again. He then asks Rachel to show Vulcan his origin story so that he can get his bearings after being stranded in space for so long.

But he gets shown too much. He essentially gets a live reenactment of being pulled from his mother’s womb, then sees her die at the hands of the Shi’ar. Xavier’s game is to appeal to empathy; straight, no chaser. Human beings (or mutants, or bird aliens, whatever) are at their strongest when they directly confront strong memories or emotions and make constructive decisions about who they are going to be as a result. Xavier makes this appeal to Vulcan, insisting his life is already so tragic that he needn’t go killing more people than he already has.

If there was any lingering hope that Xavier was a redeemable character, I think the reader really has to lose it right there at the end of “Deadly Genesis.”  Xavier proves himself to be the epitome of manipulative.  He brings out the best in people when it’s convenient for him to do so.  Otherwise, he condescends to them in the ultimate fashion by removing their agency completely.  If he deems an event too dark or an emotion too powerful, he walls people off from it so that they don’t have to confront it.  Showing Gabriel the men that killed his mother and asking him to face up to it, to overcome it—it’s in such bad faith.

Nothing can change how massively screwed up Xavier’s initial choices were.  He made such a big mistake that he saddled other people—especially Vulcan’s squad and Moira if she were to ever remember—with a tremendous amount of baggage that they would never be able to work through even if they tried.

The message that the relationship between Xavier and Vulcan sends is one that never gets old: the party that fiddles around in something and fucks it up doesn’t just get to say to the victim, “hey, listen, you need to be better than this.”  Generally speaking, the offending party needs to find a course of action to help make things right if they are going to act like they care.  Xavier is responsible for the events of “Deadly Genesis,” but even they could have ended better if he hadn’t decided to step in and paint a huge target on the Shi’ar empire.  The entire “Emperor Vulcan” saga through “War of Kings” probably doesn’t happen if Xavier doesn’t fill the kid’s head with images of his dead mom. 

None of this is to absolve Vulcan of responsibility for the horrible shit that follows his return: he is certainly a mad man through almost no fault of his own, but is the one doing all the killing.  Still, I like that he is a villain that the story is committed to portraying as unambiguously villainous.  As much as we all love our allegedly ambiguously evil villains like Magneto, or our weirdly power-hungry, but also mad, but also sort of benevolent Dr. Dooms, or our mission-from-the-stars, ultra powerful Apocalypses, it’s refreshing as hell to have a crazy motherfucker who just thinks Augustus Caesar is cool and wants to take over the most powerful space empire in the galaxy.  Vulcan is a petulant child who has been given tremendous anguish and power tremendously quickly who then goes on to cause several intergalactic wars among the most powerful races in the galaxy.

In the first intergalactic conflict, a team consisting of Havok, Rachel Grey, Polaris, Warpath, a Phoenix-sword-wielding-duder named Korvus, and the Starjammers try to hunt down Vulcan, who instead succeeds in ascending to the throne of the Shi’ar empire.  In the process, he murders his father, Corsair, referring to him as simply being a man who was too weak to protect his mother.  We see in this huge character moment that reliving his mother’s death is pivotal in the most despicable of his actions, and we can trace that shit right back to Xavier.  Of course, Xavier didn’t kill Corsair, but Jesus Christ did he mess this kid up.

Here the two heroes who each wield the power of the Phoenix trade their memories, instantly falling in love and bringing Korvus onboard as a member of the new Starjammer crew for the next few conflicts.  Korvus completely drops off the radar after “War of Kings” completes, but for the duration of these events serves as a glaringly obvious Wolverine stand-in who feels tremendously fresh and interesting given his Shi’ar background and ties to the Phoenix force.

Korvus signals another one of the most compelling thing about “Emperor Vulcan,” “Kingbreaker,” and “War of Kings”: the Shi’ar have a mythology that is not 100% familiar to the reader.  When Korvus begins to explain the origin of the Phoenix sword, it becomes clear that the Shi’ar have had their own issues with the Phoenix Force;  butt not that much is revealed about them.  Unlike the Earther mutants who have origin stories for their origin stories for their cousin's mom's time-dislocated retconned origin stories, the Shi’ar are opaque.  New characters and situations constantly leave the reader wanting to know more.

Of course, where the familiar is concerned, the brotherly drama comes through strong in a welcome new flavor.  Scott Summers is a goddamn cardboard cutout.  He’s daddy’s little boy, and since his de facto daddy is a major sociopath, Scott is kind of an uninteresting dickworm.  Yeah, he’s a talented tactician and makes good use of a fairly one-dimensional mutant power:

But he’s the least interesting of the Summers brothers, and I can’t say enough of what an incredible choice it was to have Havok be the one to hunt down Vulcan.  Alex and Gabriel are both stubborn and tremendously fallible.  Of course, Vulcan is more like Scott, in that he often doubles down on awful decisions.  Alex doubts himself in the most relatable way of the three; hell, even one of the Starjammers makes a remark at one point about how odd it is to be around Havok who openly shares his self-doubt unlike the King of Stubborn, his father, Corsair.

The art in the "Kingbreaker" event is wildly inconsistent.  Above is a mix of both good and bad.  A circular panel emanating from Havok’s power as he stands over Vulcan with the power of an entire sun, ready to defeat him, until the page devolves into a weird cartoonish mess.  Two pencilers were on duty for this comic event, and whether they switch duty on drawing characters while trying to keep them in the same style or something else, it’s often jarring how rushed some of the pages feel.  Of course, when the pages in "Kingbreaker" are good, they’re GOOD.

Yost is at his best when he’s juxtaposing these two brothers in his script, so it’s no shocker that the panels that juxtapose them come off just as successful.  Though early parts of this series are cluttered with some odd white space, this is one page where I really enjoy the effect.  There’s nothing else I want out of this page, and Yost is firing on all cylinders.  All I feel when I look at this page is Vulcan’s anger, mixed with Alex’s confused emotional cocktail of love, empathy, and murderous intent.  Havok’s motivations here as both an older brother and as someone seeking justice for his friends are way more complicated than what I usually see a superhero going through in a comic event.  There’s really no “choose a side!” going on here: Alex has his mind made up regarding a situation that would break most siblings.

That decision, however, is not some large, arbitrary, childish machination like the one that Vulcan is making to run an empire.  It’s also not the kind of reactionary-posing-as-innovative thinking that so often characterizes the actions of his brother, Cyclops, who is constantly staying one step ahead of the game, only to come crashing into the same situations over, and over, and over again.  The sort of heads down, “let’s get this fucking job done” attitude exemplified by Alex and his impromptu Starjammers crew is weirdly graceful, and seems perfectly in place for a big bloody space adventure.

War of Kings sends Vulcan on a collision course with one of my other favorite Marvel characters, Black Bolt.  As is usually the case with major events trying to ship units, this comic eventually gets too big for its britches.  The art never feels rushed, but sometimes feels uneven, particularly when switching between the locales of the Kree and the Shi’ar.  This might have been intentional, but it plays less like contrast and more like the comic has no idea what tone it wants to set.  Still, when Pelletier is on, he is on.  Above we see the faux-climax of the big Black Bolt v. Vulcan showdown.  Seriously, they took Vulcan so seriously as a character that they had him go toe-to-toe with Black Bolt, even pushing him to yelling.  I love seeing Vulcan drawn as being flayed by Black Bolt’s yell within Black Bolt’s yell.  It’s a really gutsy choice and my goodness does it pay off.

Like the art, "War of Kings" is all over the place.  At some point in the middle of "Kingbreaker," everything that has resulted in all of these cool Shi’ar and Starjammer and X-men characters colliding starts to feel like just any other tie-in: it’s really all here to set up the new status quo in the broader universe.  Of course, I know it’s not “War of Brothers,” so the fact that Vulcan leaves Havok for bigger and better fights with Black Bolt shouldn’t be all that shocking to me. 

After everything Havok goes through to try and take down his brother, after having him at his mercy on two separate occasions, he has to sit back and watch him (maybe?) die at the hands of someone else.  Alex’s obsession, at the end of everything, had an endpoint.  Though stranding himself and several people that he loves in hostile space infinitely far from home, he mans the fuck up at the end, hugs his main squeeze, and accepts the reality that there is nothing left for him to do.  Despite the lives at stake, despite the possibility that his audacity might have doomed not only himself but billions of other lives, he faces reality. 

He’s really the one Summers brother free from Xavier’s fuckery, and it shows in this moment.  Maybe facing reality means something different back on earth (Scott certainly thinks so, especially “Schism” and after), but in that moment, Havok and the Starjammers really ascend the whole thing, as the Inhumans, Kree, and Shi’ar all slide into disrepair.

Oh, the other thing I like about everything Vulcan is in:

FUCKING SPACE WARS!!1 *PEW PEW PEW*

Captions and Comedy in Inio Asano's "Solanin"

Psst.  Anything I write on this blog is liable to have spoilers.  I don't like doing spoiler warnings, but I casually spoil a huge part of this book, and haven't done that in anything else I've written here yet. 

The story of Inio Asano's Solanin hits very close to home and I’m not sure how to talk about it without spiraling into a lot of really personal stuff.  The thing is, even though I’m really excited about how Asano dealt with something so personal and relevant to me and many others in a similar situation, the most impressive things about Solanin are his storytelling choices.  The fact that he tells a story that is this depressing and makes it feel somewhere between neutral and uplifting is a feat.  He achieves this through investing in visual themes, giving character's thoughts their own narrative space, and through being very good at building jokes visually.


Above, we see the two young lovers silhouetted by the setting sun as Meiko makes a remark about how vast the sky seemed when her and the boyfriend, Taneda, moved to Tokyo to begin their lives after graduating from school.  We are told the bit about the sky seeming big to her back then in a caption over the aforementioned panel, but of particular note here is the fact that Asano rarely captions panels.  Most captions throughout Solanin occur in the black boxes.  Only very rarely will Asano mix captions and images together directly, and only maybe once or twice are the words in those captions not a direct reflection of the images over which they are placed.  Meiko or other character’s more abstract meditations about life or their friends, however, are never bandied about with other images.  Asano is not frivolous with his words, particularly not in relation to his images.

Through packing the reflections of characters into a dedicated space, the mental/emotional life of characters--particularly Meiko--is taken seriously as its own narrative element.  As a further result, captions that do occur over images have a weightier impact on even the least discerning reader: when unspoken words occur unbound within an image, it’s usually regarding something quite serious.  It’s really important for Asano to earn the weight that these words have on these occasions, and I think he succeeds.

Asano loves to use the angle of his shots to build the scene.  For instance, it’s not enough for the reader to see Meiko looking up here: the heaviness of the sky is represented in the manner in which the top panel bears down upon Meiko.  This easily could have been a profile shot from eye-level showing her looking up.  Similarly, the two panels could have been combined, shot from under Meiko, getting both her and the sky.  Instead, Asano gives us both, fully, and in relation to each other, each providing us a visual representation of the words "low," “narrow,” and “heavy.”

If there was any mystery, the sky the theme of choice for this first chapter of Solanin.

Imagine this chapter ending without the prior time spent dealing with Meiko’s perceptions of the sky in relation to her struggle with purpose in the big city.  Asano earns this page.

Humor plays just as important of a role in Solanin.  On paper, this story should be ten times more depressing than it feels: two unemployed people, one has a dream for the other who sort of has the same dream, fails at it, then dies.  Yeesh.  But see, the very fact that the literal reading of the story feels so austere and so besides the point--despite being factual--means that Asano did a great job.  Jokes play a big part in keeping this story grounded.

Asano milks a lot of humor--both in the words and the visuals--from the fact that things are so shitty for young people right now that getting a call back from a job is a surreal experience.  Kato is so shocked that he got a call that he insists they must have the wrong person.  Then, after hanging up, he gets a little panel of celebration, subdued both for comedic effect and for the fact that, well, it probably still doesn’t feel that real to him because it’s just so unbelievable.

Another thing I like about this page is the way Asano builds the meaty elements of the transition one on top of the other: the largest part of the building sits right in the middle, followed vertically by Kato’s fingers playing bass.  A lot of that kind of stuff is way more technical than the average reader will probably notice or care about, but Asano can be anal with the placement of objects on his pages.  The vertical profile of his pages lines up or juxtaposes objects and people frequently throughout the book.

  

Asano's humor is textbook in its use of setups, punchlines, repetition, and callbacks, and he does it all visually.  Occasionally the gags--especially with Kato and Rip--just lean on absurd behavior.  But many other times, that absurdity is locked into the visual rhythm.  Using the chopsticks and the potato to transition here is not only a really balanced, visually appealing move: it puts extra attention on the chopsticks, amplifying the gag on the page's bottom half.

Often stories as tragic as this one are saturated with optimism or pessimism.  I did not find Solanin to be guilty of either.  Any time the story suggests something negative--that relationships are too much of a pain, that being alone is best, that your dreams aren't worth chasing, that life just is what it is and then you die--some part of the world laughs it off, without ever tipping the scale so far in the other direction as to suggest that everything will always be okay forever.