Summer Books
Recent Graphic Novels: Tezuka's Final Epic
Buddha Vol. 2: The Four Encounters
by Osamu Tezuka
published by Vertical, 2003
Osamu Tezuka (1928 - 1989) is credited by many as the godfather (or even the god) of manga. His influence on the Japanese comics industry is incalculable; imagine Walt Disney and Charles Schulz as the same person. Yet, even with the recent surge in the popularity of manga in America, almost none of Tezuka’s voluminous catalog has been available in English until the last few years. “Black Jack” and “Adolph” were the first to appear, and seminal works like “Astro Boy” and “Phoenix” are now in the process of being released in a multi-volume series from Dark Horse and Viz respectively.
The most exciting development yet may be “Buddha,” an eight volume epic which chronicles the life of Siddhartha. The Buddha’s story has been fictionalized before by the likes of Hermann Hesse and Bernardo Bertolucci, but never quite like this. The basic story of a prince leaving home to seek enlightenment is still there, but Tezuka builds on the original scriptures by adding characters and reinterpreting existing characters. Tezuka’s description of the result translates to something like “religious sci-fi.”
The comics mix cartoony caricatures and “speed lines” with the deepest of human philosophical questions. The results seem odd at first, especially to readers not used to manga. Tezuka, working at the peak of his skills in the 1970s and 80s, kept the story believable, entertaining, and interesting.
Throughout his 41-year career (it is believed that he drew 150,000 pages – using a staff of assistants) he reused characters in different guises, as a director might use the same actors in different movies. The young Siddhartha bears a strong resemblance to Astro Boy. Tezuka was not a Buddhist, but this working method, wherein the same person exists in a number of times and places, meshes well with the Buddhist belief in past lives.
In volume one a cast of characters is introduced, and the world of ancient India and its caste system is developed. It is prophesied that a savior like no other will be born, and a monk goes off seeking the child. He finds many remarkable children, but Siddhartha is not even born until close to the end of the volume.
Volume two begins with a bored prince whose father, misunderstanding the prophecy, attempts to mold him into a military leader. The prince leaves home with Tatta, a man who can inhabit the minds of animals. True to the original version, Siddhartha discovers human suffering. But he and his friend also rescue a bandit queen with whom the prince falls in love. Upon his return, he must grapple with his love for a woman of a much lower caste, and his impending arranged royal marriage. All along, he carries questions about life and death. By the end of this volume, Siddhartha abandons his waiting throne to seek truth on the road.
Manga is usually printed cheaply due to its high page count – each of the eight “Buddha” volumes weighs in at 400 pages. This unprecedented high-end presentation of manga by an American publisher comes from a new publisher called Vertical. Its goal is to translate “the best contemporary Japanese books,” be they manga, fiction, or non-fiction. The hardcover packaging for the entire series is beautifully designed by design-genius Chip Kidd. The results are pricey ($24.95 per volume) but impressive. A sole criticism might be that the translation is sometimes overly contemporary. When characters in ancient India say things like “I hate that lame shit,” it briefly shatters the ancient world that the author has created. Then again, in Tezuka’s “religious sci-fi,” old and new may be the same thing. As Hesse’s Siddhartha observed: “Siddhartha's previous births were no past, and his death and his return to Brahma was no future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present."
David Lasky
Layout and Design Editor
Canvas
By Alex Fellows Fantagraphics Books
This debut graphic novella from writer and artist Alex Fellows deals with the sexual awakening of a 15-year-old girl. While this subject matter is largely absent from comics, and is ambitious for a first-time effort, “Canvas” (which is also the main character’s name) is sadly flawed. The main characters are drawn without pupils in their eyes (a la Little Orphan Annie), limiting their expressive abilities. Supporting characters, inexplicably, often do have pupils. Believability is further hindered by the girl’s parents, who appear as a pig and a frog (perhaps in tribute to the Muppets?) in an otherwise human world.
While there are moments that echo the real life of a teenager, and the author definitely shows promise, the unnecessary use of comic-art metaphor steals any chance at genuine emotion. Finally, it must be asked why a male author is writing about a teenage girl, rather than chronicling the more familiar male teenage experience. More credence can be given to comics written by actual teenage girls, which, while rare, have a few shining examples such as Ariel Schrag’s “Potential.”
David Lasky
Layout and Design Editor
Tell Me Something
by Jason, Fantagraphics Books
People with animal heads have occupied comic books ever since the Japanese invented them (on scrolls) a few hundred years ago. It seems safe to say that there have never been anthropomorphized animals quite like the silent, deadpan creatures that inhabit the comics of the Norwegian cartoonist known only as Jason. In his two earlier American releases ("Hey Wait..." and "The Iron Wagon"), his characters exhibit restrained emotion (much like Buster Keaton) but create tension, suspense, comedy and sadness in their actions. "Tell Me Something" (which has little dialogue) simultaneously tells the stories of two pairs of doomed lovers living in two different eras. The cartoony figures, who seem to live on the page, are both tragic and ridiculous. Jason turns ordinary ink into a wealth of dark emotion in this slim volume.
David Lasky
Layout and Design Editor
“Liebling at Home”
A.J. Liebling
A.J. Liebling was one of the greatest of the “New Yorker” writers. This collection of medium length pieces displays the fabulous Liebling style while describing an unbelievable collection of American characters. The portrait of the con-man Col. John R Stingo in “The Honest Rainmaker” is hilarious and by itself worth the price of admission. Now out of print you can find it in used book shops or, more likely, on line through used booksellers like abebooks.com If you like this one you may be ready to tackle the companion volume “Liebling Abroad”, a war correspondent cum gourmand’s account of France just after WWII.
Chris Jones
Managing Editor
“Moby Dick”
Herman Melville
If you missed it in high school you might as well bite the bullet and read it now. It’s close to being the best novel ever written. With a little off-color punning (“The Cassock”) and a good deal of biology (“Cetology”) the 135 chapters of “Moby Dick” are 135 jewels of ecstatic prose. Two sentences from the story of Pip (The Castaway”), are by themselves worth the price of admission: “…Pip saw the mutidudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot on the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad”
If you’ve read it before, read it again. There’s enough in Moby Dick to reward several readings.
Chris Jones
Managing Editor
Capsule Reviews: John Saul, Madame Mao
“Black Creek Crossing”
by John Saul
This story is about a small town with a shadowy past. It revolves around two nonconformists who involve themselves in the chilling art of harassment which turns into revenge.
Angel was a shy thirteen-year-old girl with a crappy life and an abusive father. Throughout her high school life she was teased and tormented by her classmates, until she met Seth. Seth, as she saw it, was her only friend. He is the only one who will listen to her twisted and tortured dreams which become the shocking, twisted events of this paranormal, horror thriller.
This is Saul’s 35th novel. His first, “Suffer the Children,” was an immediate best seller. Good luck sleeping once you start reading this one.
Carol Brocker
Webmaster
“The Presence,”
by John Saul
“He had to escape. But where? Even as the question had formed in his head, so also had the answer: in his mind he saw the cleft in the ravine above the place where his mother had unearthed the strange skeleton.” This anticipation-filled fiction takes place on the floors of our oceans where we find the volcanic vents supporting life forms that are thriving at 500 degrees Fahrenheit with No oxygen and no sunlight.
The story opens in New York with Michael Sundquist, age 16, geting into trouble with a high school gang. Katharine, his mother, is working on carbon dating of a Homo sapien that she with her (now dead) husband found on a dig in Africa some ten years before.
As funding runs out for her project, Rob Silvers asks her to consult on his dig in Maui. He had been working on this sight for the last five years but has found something that does not look like the Polynesian architecture he had anticipated. This find creates more questions than answers about the source of life on our planet.
Deviously done, it should not be read at bedtime; you would never get to sleep.
“The Presence” is a national bestseller. Saul has written other works such as: “Guardian,” “The Homing,” and “Black Lighting.” All are must-reads and best sellers.
Carol Brocker
Webmaster
Becoming Madame Mao
A Novel - 2000
by Anchee Min
“Madame Mao” is a historical novel about Jiang Qing, the third wife of Mao Zedong, and possibly the most infamous woman in Chinese history. Known as the “white-boned demon,” Madame Mao gained notoriety for her destructive part in the revolution. Min provides a fascinating glimpse into Qing’s early life. The product of an unhappy childhood, Qing shunned her mother’s advice to have her feet bound. Instead, she traded tradition for a glamorous life in Chinese theater.
Success did not come easy for Qing. She wasn’t respected as an actress and had to seduce and connive her way into more prominent roles. After a series of disappointments, Qing runs off to the mountainous region of Yenan where she meets and falls in love with Mao. Her transformation from a refined Shanghai actress to a tough revolutionary is captivating. The story starts to stumble as Min moves into political intrigue. We begin to tire of Qing’s constant complaining about Mao’s indifference to her. As the intrigue increases so does Qing’s paranoia.
Despite some choppiness towards the end, “Madame Mao” is still an interesting account of Qing’s rise and fall during the Cultural Revolution. By delving into Qing’s inner thoughts, Min tries to humanize Mao’s much despised wife. She ends up providing a complex portrait of a woman who defied cultural expectations.
Ericka Berg
A&E Editor
“The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”
T.E. Lawrence
Lawrence of Arabia in his own words. Lawrence’s account of the desert fighting which today lies at the base of the problems of the Middle East- a masterpiece of history, adventure, prose and imagination. Winston Churchill said, “it ranks with the greatest books ever written in the English language. Seven Pillars is the story of a guerrilla war fought on camel-back and told by a man posessed of an extraordinary gift for language. There’s no shortage of sensuality and even a little sex- but perhaps not the kind you might expect:
“The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies- a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual coefficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort.”
Now if that doesn’t hook you maybe you better go back to Harry Potter.
Chris Jones
Managing Editor
“Black Lamb Grey Falcon”
by Rebecca West
Mistress to H.G. Wells (“The War of the Worlds”), Rebecca West fashioned this huge book out of material collected during three trips to the Balkans just before the outbreak of WWII. Witty, erudite and heavily opinionated “Black Lamb” offers an in-depth tour of the battleground between East and West from the time of Herodotus through the rise of Hitler. It’s one way to get your ancient and modern history in one out-sized dose. At 1181 plus pages it’ll take a good portion of your summer- but well worth it; both for the insight into the clash between Muslim and Christian cultures as well as the great writing..