Scenes from the Tokyo Game Show

Full pictorial article: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/09/gallery-tgs-cosplay/

Negasonic_ultratokyo_popexplosion!! - Supermarket

One of my all-time faves off the IDW label - Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson's Supermarket. A literal explosion of colour, culture and Generation Y angst mixed with some porn, yakuza and crass consumerism thrown in. An electro-pop fable for everyone of us who have visited Hong Kong or Tokyo (or want to), overdrawn our credit cards, measured the worth of a souped-up Japanese import versus a German piece of automotive engineering, and felt that illegal music downloads off our mobile is as good as life is gonna get.

The protagonist is Pella Suzuki, a hapa (half-Japanese) born of a Japanese dad and a Swedish mum. She goes to school in your typical Catholicized private institution and works in a convenient store, conveniently ripping off her customers by letting them donate credit card charges to her charity of the day, meaning herself. A bit spoiled and with values mirroring her upper middle-class suburban lifestyle created by her enigmatic parents, all of that gets whacked the day she finds her folks assassinated.

She is forced to flee from the suburbs to the Supermarket - the ultra-city: a fantastic mish-mash of Shinjuku, Roppongi and Akasaka districts of Tokyo, and Yau Ma Tei and Central districts of Hong Kong with a little Pudong of Shanghai thrown in. Bearing in mind that this is still supposed to be in California. 70-story hotels, Acuras, sushi, chicken tikka, Paul Smith, Prada, Gucci, public transit, wi-fi networks, and dog massage parlors make up the background for an essentially fast-paced chase story that ends all too quickly. Unfortunately, memorable dialogue that reads hip like a Joss Whedon teleplay is counterbalanced by a glaring problem. Much like a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson novel, it ends too abruptly and the reader is actually left wanting more.

But what makes up for defects in the story is the ART. OMG, talk about art for our new century. It captures the pace, the mood and the groove of our current Internet-savvy, denim and dim sum-fed, virtual fast food nation. I once commissioned Mr. Donaldson for some artwork several years ago trying to get him to re-create the magic of Supermarket. The colours are electric, creating a new style that goes beyond anime or normal comic book form. Each page is to be savoured and soaked up, and try to catch the pop culture references if you can.

Cosplay Model - Marie-Claude Bourbonnais

Call Name: Marry Bardot

Status: Cosplay Model/Pin-up

Real Name: Marie-Claude Bourbonnais

Profession: Glamour/Adult Model, Pin-up

Does: Mortal Kombat, Gen 13, Fetish, BDSM

Noble Savages - Brian Wood's Northlanders

I seem to have a thing for relishing topics and themes rather unpopular by current standards. Case in point, Northlanders - a very well-written series by Brian Wood (DMZ, Supermarket) which focuses on that most trendy of subjects - Vikings. Why, you would ask, would anyone be interested in reading about folks who slaughtered each other, wore fancy helmets adorned with horns and wings, and drank themselves silly before battle? Or did I just answer my own question? First off, that horns and wings thing was just a myth, they never wore fancy helmets. Intricate hair braids, yes - but never winged helms. Second off, well unlike other hack and slash tomes, this one gets into the culture and socio-politics of the Viking era. You see, too often has that period of time been glossed over as bad-smelling barbarians leaping off a boat, gutting some hapless monks, and then getting rippingly drunk over their spoils of war. It's been few and far between that Norsemen (classifying those of Jutland, Varangian, Normans, Danes, etc) are given some depth and 3-dimensional characteristics atypical of this age. Oh sure, there are dismemberments, skull-cleaving axes, monks getting torched and all that, but without that they wouldn't be Norsemen.

Take for example the first story-arc - "Sven the Returned" (which would make a great epic film). An outcast from childhood, Sven leaves the Orkney Isles to Constantinople where he makes his fortune as one of the Varangian Guard (mercenaries in service to the Byzantine Empire). Or does he? Nevertheless he returns home to the savage Orkneys of his birth, and is disgusted by the backwards, superstitious, simple people that he had originally left far behind. No longer defining himself as one of them, he is torn between his birthright and heritage and his desire to be out where he truly belongs, being the civilized and educated man he has become. But let no one think that he is a sissy just because he shaves his beard and cuts his hair, oh no. No one gets away with that shit, lemme tell you.

Another classic story-arc that also hits its mark is the short and concise "Lindisfarne", an amazing tale of the old ways of the Norse Gods vis a vis a newfangled, slightly hypocritical and pretty impractical belief system called Christianity. Lindisfarne marks the start of the Viking Age and sets up the conflict between the Norsemen vs. the Celts and Saxons, or the Pagans versus the God-fearing. This religious conflict takes places again in "The Shield Maidens" and "The Cross + The Hammer". But Lindisfarne offers a snapshot of that special age, a Dark Ages childhood, and a unique situation when a boy has the choice between supplicating himself between Our Father The Lord, or The Gods of War and Thunder. Let's just say that he choose the practical over the pious.

In Case of Vampire

Paul Dini's Fetish

Paul Dini is probably most famous for being one of the original producers and writers for Batman The Animated Series, and for having helped launched the DC Animated Universe, itself having the nickname of "Diniverse". Today he is still active in the comic world for being the current writer for Gotham City Sirens and Batman: Streets of Gotham. He just penned the script for the game Batman: Arkham Asylum (although the original concept was done over a decade ago by Grant Morrison in the now classic Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth). His writing style can best be described as solid, compelling, and knows when to take light and serious steps in his writing, anchored by strong characterizations in his dramatis personae. IMHO, the only other writer of similar ability is James Robinson.

What he is not as known for is his eternal appreciation for sexy, garter belt-armed magician women. Being himself a bit of an amateur illusionist, no doubt being in the circles of performing magicians led to a relatively healthy fascination with said type of fine women. Starting with an infatuation with DC Comics' homo magi character Zatanna Zatara, he no-doubt coincidentally eventually married a magician by the name of Misty Lee, who then took on some of the trappings of Zatanna (or vice versa, well Zatanna was chronologically around longer). He then wrote his own creator-owned comic series called Madame Mirage on Top Cow Comics, about a vengeance-fueled illusionist superheroine which coincidentally and admittedly was based on his wife.

I include pictures, in order, of: 1) DC's Zatanna, 2) Zatanna as portrayed by the actress/model Serinda Swan in Smallville, 3) Misty Lee, Paul Dini's wife, and 4) Paul Dini's Madame Mirage. See the resemblance?

Masters of Horror - Pt. 3, Junji Ito

According to Google Analytics, I notice that traffic increases every time that I post scantily-clad women on these blogs, whether they are comic/anime women - such as Bomb Queen, or real-life bodacious women - such as Yaya Han or the ladies from the cosplay photo shoot. So with that knowledge in mind, I thus completely and intentionally ignore sexy women for this outing. In fact, I am going to post the exact opposite and continue on my series of The Masters of Horror. This time around concerns the all-time grand champion Mister Disturbo gross-out king Junji Ito. Most of his works have now been converted into television shows (one starring Miho Kanno) and movies in Japan but in truth, it's his manga that stands apart for just how completely sadistic and balls-out creepy they turn out to be. It would be of no surprise that Ito-san is probably the most normal looking bloke in Japan and favors cheesecake while listening to The Carpenters. Those people have dark dark secrets, let me tell you.

In his collection of short stories - Flesh Coloured Horror, I would guess that he rather dislikes cute girls, especially the cutesy-kawaiiiii! Japanese schoolgirls that are the fetish of many a salariman. When girls kill each other simply because one of them *thinks* killing each other would work to stem off their own deaths by disease, I would guess there is some little neuroses at work. In fact I would guess that he hates society as is, enough to show how it decays from some abstract and nameless horror that only by cannibalizing each other is there some form of escape. Another particular favorite has a girl's long black hair come to life and with a homicidal will of its own, go to extreme prejudice in order to maintain its own survival from say, a much-needed trim at the hair salon.

In his opus, Uzumaki, there is no escape from the doom of the Spiral, as each issue shows how a little village slowly descends into ultra-disgusting horror and madness. One week, people are turning into snail creatures, the next week, people are now eating those snail creatures, cuz... well, they're yummy, I guess. The next week, people who ate those snail creatures are being contorted into the spiraling shapes of those snail shells and on it goes. There is no way out, no redemption, no shelter from some rather barf-inducing concepts.