With both Vagabond and Billy Bat on hiatus for the next seven weeks, I will be deprived of my little bit of Weekly Morning entertainment to break up my dreary workweek. I'll have to survive until Urasawa and Inoue get around to giving me a reason to bother with the weeklies, because if I wanted to look at comics with shittily drawn people with photo realistic backgrounds and close-ups of food (Japan is obsessed with food!), I'd trace some photos, draw in some people, and publish my own damn comic!
I don't mean to take a dump on comics created for adults (okay, I do!), but the art tends to suck so hard that it actually creates a black hole on the pages where a real artist's work should be. It's part of the problem with the one-man (plus any number of uncredited assistants) shows that Japanese comics are expected to be. Very rarely is an amazing writer also a top-notch artist, and vise versa. The kids comics, like Shonen Jump, tend to have very strong art, but - with the obvious exceptions and understanding that they are intended for kids - have much weaker writing.
Comics for older audiences, on the other hand, tend to be dialogue and story driven, but have art that's so bad you don't even want to bother reading it.
What I'm trying to say is, although Japan is praised by fans for having comics about everything, it doesn't mean they are any good. The good ones are brilliant, I think a lot of these creators should have their art supplies confiscated and be forced to work with real illustrators. Either that, or have their comics made into books (remember those?).
In fairness, however, writer/artist teams are not necessarily the best way to go either. You can still team-up a superstar artist with a megastar writer and produce a big steaming pile of All Star Batshit .
Well, now that I've got that off my chest, and while I wait for my two favorite Japanese creators to get back to work;
⇒ I'm going to borrow the original Dragon Ball series so I can finally read the work that created the Shonen manga mold.
⇒ I also intent to tackle Master Keaton and see if I can identify the point at which Urasawa claims he began to write the story alone after a falling out with the original writer. I've heard this comic is excellent. No English edition is out, or scheduled as far as I know, possibly because of said conflict that eventually caused the comic's demise.
⇒ Something I do NOT intend to check out, is this Macross madness , which shows us the horrors that result from crossing language education with otaku culture in Japan.
⇒ Little boys in Japan love this. Why, I'll never know...
⇒ This comic strip from Dilbert.com may have finally revealed to me what's wrong with my computer, too.
My firewall has been self-aware, and fully aware of how to annoy me, for some time now
⇒ How many Japanese does it take to change a light bulb? Japan Probe shows us.
⇒ If kids here spent a little less time with their noses in comic books or staring at the TV, and if parents weren't so over protective of their little darlings, we may not need safety crews and instruction manuals to change light bulbs. However Japan, along with many other "developed" countries, is turning into a Wussy Nation that comes up with stuff like this.
If kids can't learn to take a fews falls off a chair or a bicycle, or learn to navigate doors, then there was never any hope for them anyway!
And, that just about clears the cache of everything suitable for mixed company.
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