The Eastern Edge

I just couldn’t resist writing that title after mentioning Sin City in my first Billy Bat post.

No, Urasawa has not gone All Star Frank Miller on us (thank heaven!), but he did toss another of this trademark slurves in chapter two of Billy Bat this morning.

Chapter two started off in the same style as chapter one. It is cartoony, with English onomatopoeia (some are questionable, but I applaud the effort) and in full colour that is slightly washed out to make it feel old. In a really nice touch, they'd even yellowed the edges of the pages to make it feel like you're reading an old comic. The dialogue was again cheesy-cool with all the typical trappings of a period, comedic hardboiled detective comic that doesn’t take itself seriously.

So, part way through the chapter, when the colour started to fade out in the middle of an action scene and suddenly transitioned to black & white, and then even the paper changed to regular newsprint (they were using bleached premium paper for the colour pages), for a second I didn't know what was going on until I saw the inking pen sneak into the panel.

Check it out：

The next page reveals that Billy Bat is a comic-in-a-comic and the real protagonist is a Japanese-American artist named Kevin Yamagata who draws Billy Bat for "Marble Comics" (nice touch, again).

Shortly after they transition to the artist in his studio with his assistant, two actual detectives, who look like Laurel and Hardy in Dick Tracy era suits and trench coats, knock on the door and appropriate Kevin's room for the purpose of conducting surveillance on a room in an adjacent building. One of the detectives, the skinny “Laurel” (Laurel and Hardy are not the defective character’s names, by the way, but that’s what I’ll call them for now.), sees Kevin's work and it turns out he's a Billy Bat fan. The other chubby "Hardy" detective picks up a page and says that the characters look familiar and accuses Kevin of translating an old "Jap" comic. They're really getting into the era with he "Jap" slur, too!

As Hardy remembers the comic he thinks Kevin is ripping off, we make another Urasawaesque time jump to 1949 Tokyo and the chapter ends.

Damn, It's only chapter two and I'm frickin hooked!!
Not one many creators can keep readers into the story but still constantly off balance like Urasawa can. He's not called a master for nothing.

Unfortunately for Urasawa fans who can't read Japanese, if his work is only going to be translated and released in chronological order like he requested, it'll be a long time before Billy Bat sees the light of day in English.
The 22 volume 20th Century Boys and 2 volume 21st Century Boys won't even start coming out in English until next year, and who knows what's up with Pluto.
This time the Japanese publisher is different, too.
Billy Bat isn't Shogakukan like Urasawa's other comics are, this one is in Kodansha's Weekly Morning magazine. Hmmm...

Anyway, it's probably gonna be a long wait for the English, folks.

Btw, someone who commented on my first Billy Bat post nailed it when they started off by saying, "I'm still hoping that this is just a "comic in manga" introduction."

Good call, Rorimack!