Gantz - a walking tour

I'm a huge fan of Gantz - quite possible the most nihilist manga out there that is still running. As I mentioned in a previous post, it's now being published in Tankobon format (collected volumes). One of the big reasons I enjoy it so much is not the ultra-violence, the fan service S&M gear everyone is wearing, the borderline pornography or the lack of a socially-redeeming question - no, the reason I like it is that it's very much based in the real world of Tokyo's city streets. I used to live there, fully integrated into that society as a tax-paying, commuting, white-collar working individual. And after a hard night's heavy drinking (which was quite common), it thrilled me to see some of its neighborhoods rife with demons and blown apart with science fiction weaponry. Some of the neighborhoods and districts of Tokyo were explicitly known, others I've had to guess based on the visuals provided:

Ikebukuro - scene of the battle between the Gantz players and the Oni Aliens, where regular humans could finally see the bad guys and the common masses really started to freak out. Ikebukuro is not much more than a shopping district, sort of a lower class Shinjuku. It has its own red light district and similar to Shinjuku, is pretty much its own self-enclosed city.

Shinjuku West Gate - where Shion Izumi gunned down tons of innocent victims in a fucked-up effort to recruit new Gantz members. West Gate is Shinjuku's main shopping arcade, with connections to gay town 3-chome, the "Little Korea" Okubo and the hardcore red light district/Chinatown of Kabuki-cho. Shinjuku's East Gate is skyscraper-ville so its West Gate where all the action is. I tended to not stay there too long or else the place gave me massive headaches.

Gokuku-ji Temple - I'm *not sure* if this was the actual temple where the Gantz team fought the Kappa aliens and his dinosaur demons. The problem is that as far as massive Buddhist temples are concerned, Tokyo doesn't have that many. And from layout and architecture, Senso-ji in Asakusa, Zenpuku-ji in Azabu and Zojo-ji in Daimon don't match up. I am convinced that Oku Hiroya made this one up but used elements of Gokuku-ji to do it.

Minato-ku - this is another guess. But from every time the Gantz members are in the apartment with the big black ball, they look out the window and see Tokyo Tower pretty closeby. From the distance which looks like 2 or 3 km away, there really can only be a couple of places that make sense - Shimbashi, Kamiyacho, Shirogane, and Takanawa. But for sure it's in the harbor borough, which means that Gantz must have a pretty good income in order to pay for the lease.

Dotonbori River - this is in Osaka (and obviously where the Tokyo Gantz team encounters the Osaka team), which for those that don't know is a day's travel from Tokyo by shinkansen (bullet train). The scene where people like to jump off the bridge and into the river whenever the local baseball team wins the pennant (which has not been much) and home to some pretty awesome neon.

Does this sound like a tour-spiel? Yeah maybe, but you know what, check it all out for your Japan pilgrimmage. The place is cool and I miss it tons.

Giant Gundam statue - final day, Odaiba

Thx to Mike C, from Shiokaze Park, Odaiba. 18m tall, full scale. Today is the last day before it will be taken down and most probably, serve as a member of Japan's parliament.

Our own cosplay photoshoot

Behind the scenes of our upcoming project.
Location: VanArts Studios, Vancouver

Enough quality - let's post some Garth Ennis crap!

I have a love-hate with Garth Ennis... well, mostly love. But I have to admit that the stuff that he can write is utterly hateful, wrong-headed garbage. But it's so much damn fun to read - the laugh-out loud type of fun - that well hell, you wouldn't want to watch Masterpiece Theatre all the time, would you?

THE PRO

What would happen if a single-parent prostitute without a shred of normal middle-American values was given superpowers? The answer is The Pro. In this obvious and profane satire of the Justice League, a down and out hooker is given superpowers by The Voyeur (a spoof of Uatu the Watcher) and inducted into a good ole gang of superheroes. Without the fighting ethos of her other spandexed compadres (BTW, she does note the spandex is "lame" especially when her boobs can't stop popping out), she pisses golden showers on her enemies and punches off their jaws. And to leverage her newfound powers into a little money making venture - blows a thousand men in one night at super-speed to grant herself a year's worth of salary. Well, why not? But the best scene is where she gives Boy Scout (the Superman parody, obviously) a quickie and his ejaculate blows off the wing of a passing plane. Come to think of it (pun intended), how does Lois Lane survive these things? There's also a brilliant clumsy lesbo come-on by the Wonder Woman pastiche. It's all drawn by Amanda Conner (who now does Power Girl, but The Pro was following her stint on Archie comics, so look for that distinctive style)

ADVENTURES IN THE RIFLE BRIGADE

I have no idea what Garth Ennis was trying to do here except show his contempt for the British military and its school system, the Scots, the Germans and the Americans. I guess he hates them all by reducing them to one-liner cliches that never rise beyond their stereotypes or given any development. Of course he makes fun of the Nazis, he's got the Prussian horn-dog, the little vanker Gestapo kraut, and his SS torture bitch with huge tits. But he really sticks it to his "heroes" - 1) an overly "Jolly good, ole chap" bullshit brigade commander who admits buggery is part of growing up upper crust English, 2) a public schooled, flower-smelling second-in-command whose dream in life is to be given a handjob by his commander, 3) a mentally-retarded working-class English behemoth who is also a cannibal and has only one line that he repeats incessantly: "Ee-yoop!" 4) a violent Northern English Yorkshire yob who is ace with knives but only has one line that he repeats incessantly: "Yer aht of ordah!" 5) an East Coast American demolitions thug who only has one line that he repeats incessantly: "Gawd dammit!", and 6) a scrawny but totally balls-out insane old Scot who is deadly with his bagpipes made out of someone's face. Those charming Celts. Basically more of a tale of six assholes being played off each other than a true narrative, it's what MAD magazine would come up with if they were adult-oriented.

Fables of Deconstruction Part 2 - League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Today was a tough call, do I cover one of the finest series ever penned by the uber-author Alan Moore, or utter crap like Ikki Tousen or Tantric Stripfighter Trina? Admittedly, I do like reading fan service bullshit once in a while (and I *may* write about it another day). But ever since I put down the first Fables of Deconstruction covering Planetary recently, this second entry has been nagging me.

Okay. Now. For all of you five or six people out there who didn't know, LXG was not just a terrible film starring Sean Connery that was widely panned by critics and filmgoers alike. It was not just a terminal flop that was responsible for the career downfall for its director, Stephen Norrington (who has not made a movie since, and he directed the first Blade). No, it was actually based off one of Alan Moore's best pieces of writing (along with Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and The Killing Joke), believe it or not. Moore himself distances himself from any of his works turned to celluloid in the assumption that Hollywood hacks ups the crap factor to his stories, but there was no finer time in history that proved him right.

The printed form of LXG is in reality a monument for people who love literature. The storylines are literally stuffed to the gills with literary references, so much so that I'm only going to touch on some of them here. There are entire websites out there that attempt to source every inclusion they can find. If the lead Victorian Age characters themselves are based on icons from Bram Stoker (Mina Murray), H. Rider Haggard (Allan Quartermain), Robert Louis Stephenson (Dr. Jekyll), H.G. Wells (Hawley Griffin) and Jules Verne (Capt. Nemo) in the first volume - then for sure the villains, settings, and obscure cameos are themselves literary references. In the first omnibus, the main villains are Professor Moriarty of Sherlock Holmes fame and Fu Manchu (of whose name is never given) and an early ally is the fat and slimy Campion Bond, a predecessor of Agent 007.

Volume Two of course goes further by adding the entire plotline of The War of the Worlds. The tripods come to Earth after having had their asses handed to them on a plate by an insurrection on Mars led by John Carter and Gullivar Jones. It's only through the involvement of a deranged hybrid-making geneticist who we all know is Dr. Moreau (and whose menagerie is savage versions of Rupert the Bear, Wind in the Willows and other beloved children's anthropomorphic tales) that Earth has a chance of survival.

Chronologically (albeit not in published time) Volume Three takes place in 1910, with the original team down to Murray and Quartermain. New allies are the eternally young she-male Orlando, the awesome ghost hunter-who-deserves-his-own-movie Thomas Karnacki (rather like today's Johan Krauss from the BPRD), and the smooth criminal E.W. Hornung's A.J. Raffles, an early type of Thomas Crown. Villains include Nemo's daughter, Jenny (the Pirate Jenny from Three Penny Opera), Mack the Knife, and a metaphor of the very real Alesteir Crowley, Oliver Haddo. The three storylines of a mass murderer, the rise of Jenny and the possible birth of the anti-Christ are interwoven here.

The Black Dossier takes the largest leap by being set in 1958. Interestingly (and wonderfully) taking place after the fall of INGSOC (the totalitarian government of George Orwell's 1984). Murray and Quartermain (Quartermain himself is now made younger from bathing in the light of She, from the story of H. Rider Haggard) are on the run from the government. They are pursued by the sniveling and psychopathically inept Jimmy (as in James Bond), Emma Night (to become The Avenger's Emma Peel eventually) and the aging Hugo Drummond. Murray and Quartermain attempt to flee the UK to make it to The Blazing World, where Prospero (from Shakespeare's The Tempest) had fled. Prospero himself was the leader of the very first League in Elizabethan times.

So as you can see - with very volume filled with literary allusions and with previous Leagues that have not received any print (going back to the mid-1600s with characters like Lemuel Gulliver, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Reverend Christopher Syn, etc) plus other countries such as Germany and France having their own versions, the possibilities are endless. There is, however, a final volume coming, taking place in London 2008. The Antichrist foretold in 1910 will come to pass. I wonder what that will look like, and moreso, what characters will show up in that tome.

Giant Mecha Spider in Yokohama

Kind of like the one from Appleseed. Thanks to Mike C... To see it move, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqolwulVlsc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCIzVYCfWX4&feature=related

Yet more shots from Comiket

Final batch, and thx to Phil C from Odaiba...

An End to All Things - 20th Century Boys

Touted as the Japanese equivalent to the original Star Wars trilogy or the Lord of the Rings saga - a closer trilogy metaphor is the Matrix. A series of three movies are filmed in one go with a significant amount of praying done during the first movie's showing to see if the whole series will fly, box office-wise.

It is assumed that most Western audiences have never heard of it, as unless you were a big fan of the original manga by Naoki Urasawa the amount of time duration the live film had was relatively short. Part one was shown in August 2008, the second in January 2009. But as of August 2009 the series draws to a close.

Taking its title from the T-Rex song, story line-wise it's comparable to It by Stephen King. In part one, four young boys form a secret club complete with a mythical apocalyptic prophecy of the planet that they write themselves aside from the usual things like playing games, talking shit and viewing porn. Oh come on - for all those pre-adolescents who played D & D, who hasn't come up with the ultimate nightmare scenarios to pass the time? In part two, they eventually they grow up incredibly banal and meaningless lives as adults, such is the fate of most Japanese citizens. However, as one friend mysteriously commits suicide a doomsday cult starts to arise and events that were written in their silly book of prophecy begin to take shape. A masked demagogue with a very cool and creepy looking head dress named Friend starts to create more influence for himself as he saves (we think) Japan from the increasing amounts of horrors that start to occur, including saving the Pope from assassination. Friend's influence become so great that the naming of the days are in reference to himself (eg., 3rd year of the Friend Era). The remaining group try to figure out who he is and how to stop the prophecies from coming true. The third part firmly takes place in the Friend Era, with an Earth Defense Force in preparation for an alien invasion. The children of the original group now form the resistance to his rule of zealotry.

Asian Superheroes part 2 - The Great Ten

While I'm very supportive of any attempt for a large publishing house to take a Great Leap Forward (pun intended) in absorbing Asian stories and being a global community - the potential for screwing up The Great Ten as far as cultural and political sensitivities is concerned is pretty jarring. Now I'm not saying that the Chinese Communist Party or even the non-English reading population of the PRC are going to be offended or even aware of this upcoming title (coming Nov 4 this year), but there are enough overseas Chinese who are avid readers of DC Comics to take notice of this one.

Chinese comics are nothing new - themselves inspired by Chinese myth and legends on one side, and stories of criminal honour on the other. Notable titles are Feng Wan (Storm Riders, made into movie in 1998) and Chinese Hero - probably the breakthrough title showing a line-heavy pencil style that set it apart from the more simplistic Japanese style of, say, Lone Wolf & Cub. But this is a subject for another post (ayah, my blogs-to-be list is piling up!)

DC Comics actually preceded Marvel with coming up with a Chinese superhero team by about 2 years. Introduced during 52, the year long crossover event, The Great Ten is China's official team of "superfunctionaries" ("hero" connoting a level above the masses of the people). They have been both fighting on the side of Western heroes as well as against them, for while they protect the people of China - they are public servants and all orders and doctrine must come from the CCP bureaucracy. In their first fight, several of them were unable to take part as they had not filled in the proper paperwork. It is assumed they are named after the literal translations of the character set they were given, and they consist of:

Accomplished Perfect Physician - in the past, an outlaw named Yao Fei, who is their equivalent of Dr. Strange, in being a practitioner of mystical arts. This actually puts him in conflict of the Communist Party as there are cults and religious societies in China like Falun Gong that are not exactly on the good side of the authorities themselves. But then Chinese history itself is replete with horrendously bloody religious rebellions like the White Lotus or Taipings killing millions of people.

August General in Iron - certainly one of the coolest-looking characters in the set. Fang Zhifu has been reshaped by alien DNA into being turned into a living steel statue and functions as their field commander.

Celestial Archer - with clothes resembling Chinese comics, he is their Hawkeye or Green Arrow, coming with the same off-kilter, irresponsible and irascible personality.

Ghost Fox Killer - you have to have your female assassin somewhere and this one is it. She is a Ghost Fox spirit, from Chinese mythology and she kills all evil-doing men plus she has a poisonous touch. In some ways, she has the least potential for any interesting back-story unless she truly isn't human at all.

Immortal Man in Darkness - I LOVE the name of this one. A jet fighter pilot bonded with a black alien fighter-craft that can turn into dark smoke. Not too sure if this was voluntary but considering that his real body is eroding due to the bonding process, they probably failed to mention that fact. Or they can blame it on excessive lead poisoning.

Mother of Champions - this one is particularly clever, as how many times have you ever heard of a living birthing chamber being referred to as a hero? Niang Guan Jun has the ability to give birth to 25 super soldiers every 3 days. Now of course this could lead to a population problem even if China wouldn't have that gender imbalance of 2 men to every 1 woman in about 10 years thanks to female infanticide.

Seven Deadly Brothers - a guy who can split into seven duplicates. Each one a kung fu expert. Sort of like X-Men's Madrox the Multiple Man, except with actual fighting skills. Sort of liked pwned cloning...

Shaolin Robot - although I'm sure it is an expert in the monkey, tiger, mantis, etc etc kung fu forms - it speaks in I Ching hexagrams. This may sound cool, but considering that most Chinese themselves have no idea how to interpret hexagrams I can imagine the difficulty it can have in relying useful information to the team during combat. It's like someone speaking morse code.

Socialist Red Guard - an old radioactive racist fogey who dreams of killing old skool pre-Taiwan Chinese Nationalists/KMT and forcing all urbanites into working on collective farms and reciting from Mao's Little Red Book. I'm sure he is popular during diplomatic meetings even if he wasn't permanently wearing a giant suit of thermal-shielded armor.

Thundermind - a Bodhisattva. Yes, a Buddhist. Yes, Buddhism is the religion of Tibet. What the hell is he doing on a team that serves the Chinese Communist Party? They should also include an Imam to represent all the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang if using that logic.

It is noted that these people are based on a real nationality and culture. The Immortal Weapons are based on mystical cities and frankly speaking, the authors can do whatever they want with them, their homelands never having actually existed. With the Great Ten, some of them have some pretty bad political and cultural issues that need to be explained in order for the worldwide Asian community to take them seriously. No joke.

Asian Superheroes part 1 - Immortal Weapons

Iron Fist seems to have been getting a renaissance treatment these days. Having recently being written by Ed Brubaker, who is more known for crime stories like Gotham Central, Catwoman or other Batman titles. So taking the Chinese martial arts would seem to be a strange departure. But in some ways it's not to be totally unexpected that a top-notch writer has been hired on to write kung fu. The Asian superheroes subgenre itself is getting some momentum. DC Comics and Grant Morrison came out with the Great Ten in their Justice League titles and Crisis crossover and that got a lot of attention. (I will be covering the Great Ten in part 2)

The Iron Fist series has always been second-rate until now - Danny Rand, Marvel Comics' greatest martial artist, was paired up with an inner city urban warrior named Luke Cage in the 1970s to fight thugs and non-too threatening lowlifes. His mythical origins from the fabled city of K'un-Lun was nothing more than an exotic token to Asian martial arts and a hurried explanation as to why his kung fu was the best. But now he has been given a rich mythology, where his spiritual homeland is now known to be one of seven mythical cities, each one of which has their own champion similar to himself. And they kick ass. Seriously.

They first meet in a tournament to fight against each other to see which of the seven cities has the right to have open access to Earth. But then they discover that it is all a sham to destroy all of them and they team up. Now you would think, a supreme martial artist is usually partnered up with other super-beings in most comic books, but finally he is paired up with a superteam who are ALL supreme martial artists, each with their own set of specialty skills bordering on the supernatural.

Now accompanying Danny Rand is Fat Cobra, a sumo-looking giant who has the expected strength and endurance, but also lightning fast strikes that bely his appearance. Bride of Nine Spiders - a gothic wraithlike teenager whose upper torso launches swarms of spiders that engulf and confuse her opponents while she whirlwind kicks them into oblivion. Dog Brother #1 - an armoured assassin resembling the terra cotta warriors of Qin Shi Huang, who commands packs of wild dogs and is an expert with all swords. Tiger's Beautiful Daughter, a scantily-clad babe with two folding fans that also function as twin giant scythes and aid in limited flight, and has unexpected super strength. And lastly there is Prince of Orphans, the ultimate warrior. His real name is given as John Aman, previously known in Marvel Comics in the 1970s as Amazing Man. No one knows how he went from a lesser-known superhero to a facially-scarred ass-whupping martial artist who Rand considers to be far superior to his own skills. Aman's abilities to turn himself into a green mist storm on top of his considerable martial arts abilities makes his own teammates tremble at his potential.

There is now an Immortal Weapons limited series of 5 comics, each one giving an origin story to each of the Weapons, starting with Fat Cobra.

More shots from Comiket

Again, thanks to Phil C

The Golden Age of Space

This is one of those topics that make me smile - the Golden Age of Space. This concept was conceived back when people had little to no understanding of the real rigors of space travel and scientific understanding was poor. Other worlds bred incredible cultures, a rich variety of alien civilizations grew but required human input and empathy, and the flora and fauna ripe for hunting and civilizing influences. Little did humanity actually realize that space was disease and danger wrapped up in darkness and silence.

However, the ideas that came about from space being a fun way to spend an afternoon brought about some wonderful titles from people who imagined that Alpha Centauri was no less difficult to get to than Johannesburg. And although the bulk of these titles fell out of favor, they do tend to come back as retro-appreciation and even in some cases, modernized to catch up to our more cynical times.

JOHN CARTER - by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and brought back to life by Alan Moore in the second volume of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He's a good ole Southerner who has been transported to Barsoom (the name Martians give their own planet). Because of the lighter gravity of Mars, he is much stronger and tougher than its native inhabitants - whether they are the hulking many-armed savage green Martians or the naked and voluptuous randy red Martians with whom Carter tends to mate, go figure. What is cool about the John Carter stories is not only were they written by Burroughs to begin with, but the fact that he took the time to expand upon the Barsoom universe - developing many races, cultures, and habitats that flesh out the Martian experience despite being as fantastical and grounded in science as a H.P. Lovecraft story. There is always talks of a John Carter movie and it could be fair to say that Avatar by James Cameron is inspired by it. John McTiernan and Jon Favreau have made attempts, but it looks like Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo and Wall-E) is the current option holder. If that's the case, then John Carter will be a CG flick.

GULLIVAR JONES - I would never have heard of him if it weren't for the fact that he too was included in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a fighting compatriot for Carter on the battlefields of Mars. Sort of like Carter's much less successful kid brother, Jones didn't always get the girl or defeat his enemies. In this sense, he could have been developed as a much more complex character if anyone felt the need to take his stories and develop them further. Roy Thomas and Marvel Comics gave it a stab (they probably could not get the rights for John Carter) in the 1970s but that didn't last long. It was only Alan Moore who brought him back and only as a bit player.

FLASH GORDON - I think most people remember blonde football player god Sam Jones wearing that red tanktop fighting Max Von Sydow, who himself was majorly slumming it as Ming the Merciless to a soundtrack by Queen. Actually, I think everything was red in that movie. First published in 1934, there was a TV show broadcast in 2008 on the Sci Fi channel which thankfully didn't last long. The porn movie, Flesh Gordon, probably nailed (no pun intended) the idea of Flash Gordon the best - garish, cheap-ish, kind of racist, but overall something that you absolutely could not take seriously. However, there is a current Flash Gordon title written by Brendan Deneen which understands the overall Flash Gordon sensibility probably should only exist on the pages of comics.

BUCK ROGERS - most of us probably remember this as the Gil Gerard TV show where everyone wore skin tight white flightsuits and that stupid robot Twikki walking around with no purpose whatsoever - the show itself was a rip-off of Flash Gordon. He was originally created in 1929 by John Flint Dille and was named after Dille's dog. Conveniently falling into a coma, former air corps veteran Rogers wakes up in the 25th century to fight for advanced civilization humanity with some 20th century gusto against the "Mongol" hordes, which again makes for some pretty nasty racist metaphors - particularly as Buck Rogers grew in popularity during the Cold War versus the Red Menace. Dynamite Comics brought him back in 2009 with a completely new and unique visual style as part of the current theme of bringing space retro-back.

ADAM STRANGE - created by Gardner Fox in 1958, Adam Strange was DC Comics' version of John Carter, with similar origins but instead of Barsoom, the planet in question was Rann. He had his peak in the Cold War with simplistic stories but was brought back in a big way in 2005 during the Rann - Thanagar War, a precursor to the even larger Infinite Crisis crossover event. He was updated, given a real personality, and made a staple character in the DC scheme of things - eventually teaming up with Animal Man and Starfire of the Teen Titans against elements of Jack Kirby's New Gods.

AETHERIC MECHANICS, MINISTRY OF SPACE and IGNITION CITY - it seems a little wierd that Warren Ellis jumped on this genre but he did indeed with these three titles, starting with 1) Aetheric Mechanics, a steam punk space-age Victorian adventure starring Sherlocke Holmes and James Watson, 2) Ministry of Space, which ran in the mid-2000s and 3) Ignition City, which is still ongoing. I include a panel page of Aetheric Mechanics rather than a cover shot as its the inside artwork that is more impressive.

I'll focus on Ministry of Space and Ignition City as they were less a presentation of ideas like Aetheric Mechanics and more actual narratives - Ignition City focuses on pastiches of characters of Dan Dare, 2001, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and many more source materials. Basically, Earth has closed off space travel and its many astronauts and space explorers are now vagrants drinking their lives away in the last remaining space park, trying to figure out why it all happened and cut off from the truth. In contrast, Ministry of Space shows the high age of space exploration from the UK's point of view - as it races to the reaches of astral colonization and imperialism against other superpowers.