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Metropolis (Osamu Tezuka) manga review

Another Osamu Tezuka manga! From 1949 too! After Dororo, Metropolis is probably the least bad Tezuka work I’ve read, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that good either.

The blurb:

From Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy, comes Metropolis, the legendary 1949 graphic novel that inspired the animated fame that floored audiences and critics alike. In a not-so-far-off future a beautiful, artifically created girl — unaware of her non-human background — wanders alone in a world populated by humans and by the slave-driven robots who serve them as she searches for the non-existent parents she believes must exist. Tezuka’s key theme of the nature of humanity in a technological society is framed in bold relief, as well as his wry allegorical observations of the Cold War that was escalating when he created Metropolis. A brilliant work of wit and wisdom — and guest-starring some friends you may recognize from Astro Boy! — Metropolis is one of graphic fiction’s most enduring tales.

As with Lost World, he also claims to be unfamiliar with the 1927 movie of the same name that the manga is suspiciously similar to. But since Tezuka is the “god of manga” or whatever they like to call him, no one bothers to dispute his claim. Personally I think he copies both originals, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s just evaluate the manga as we have it.

TBH I don’t remember any observations on the Cold War, except for the part where a scientist speculates that humans become too advanced they might end up destroying themselves. I wouldn’t have realized it was linked to the Cold War if the back cover hadn’t pointed it out. The part about Michi “wandering alone” is not quite accurate either, since for most of the manga s/he is in the constant company of friends.

That’s the other thing – strictly speaking Michi is neither male or female. There’s a switch in her throat that changes her gender when pressed, but s/he spends most of the game in male form, so I’m going to call him ‘he’ from now on. Michi is an artificial created by an evil Red Party …. ohhh, Red Party. Communism! D’oh, now I get it. Is Michi supposed to represent nuclear power gone out of control? Interesting.

Anyway, this fact is hidden from Michi for most of the story. He seems to be a mild-mannered sort of kid, but when he finds out the truth he goes totally berserk and destroys much of the metropolis before meeting his end. This turn of events is rather sudden because Michi had been such a happy, friendly child before, but I suppose the signs were there early on. Besides he wasn’t really human and he’s immature to boot, so it’s not quite fair to expect him to react with human rationality. “When science is misapplied, innocents suffer,” is what Tezuka seems to want to say.

My overall opinion of Metropolis is “Unrealized potential.” There were a lot of things that didn’t get the attention they deserved. Duke Red and the motivations of the Red Party, for example. The reason for Duke Red’s obsession with the statue that Michi looks like (no, it’s not his kid like Wikipedia claims). The friendship between Ken and Michi needed a little more exploration. The character of Emmy kind of came out of nowhere and went nowhere. Just because Duke Red is dead doesn’t necessarily mean the Red Party is done for. The ending is cheesy and rather abrupt. Poor Michi killed a lot of people but it’s okay ‘cos he was just misunderstood, aww. NOT.

In the author’s notes at the end of Metropolis, he mentions that he had to cut out a lot of things at the end of the manga, which goes a lot way to explain how sudden the events of the last third of the book are. There’s a lot of time wasted fighting giant Micky Mouse lookalike rats and running from KKK-dressed henchmen that would have been better served focusing on Michi, IMO. So the explanation that Tezuka meant to devote more attention to more important matters but never got around to it is a plausible one. I just think he cut the wrong things out of the manga when he had to, but I’ll buy his excuse that he was pressed for time.

So yeah Metropolis an interesting little story that doesn’t really go anywhere. At least it doesn’t contain any offensive content like Ayako, plus it’s a complete story in one little volume. It’s worth a read if you like standalone graphic novels or just want a light introduction to older scifi manga. I’m still on the hunt for what makes Osamu Tezuka so special, though.

Lost World manga review

Another day, another Osamu Tsuka work. I declined to read MW after seeing the trashy blurb and opted to try the more reader-friendly (I thought) Lost World instead. It was pretty bad. Apparently it’s one of his earliest works, and it shows. He claims he didn’t steal the idea from Arthur Conan Doyle’s work of the same name, but I highly doubt he wasn’t at least influenced by what he’d heard of Doyle’s work. But leaving matters of copying or otherwise aside, what’s Lost World about?

Summary: From the creator of Astro Boy comes Lost World, the first of Osamu Tezuka’s cycle of groundbreaking science-fiction graphic novels – including Metropolis and Future World – published in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When a rogue planet approaches Earth, a team of scientists voyages to the world and discovered a land out of the ancient past – a planet populated by dinosaurs! But a group of crooks has stowed away aboard the spacecraft, and the scientists must fight for their survival against both mobsters and monsters!

First off, all the stuff in the description only happens in the second half of the book. The first half is some Tintin-esque hijinks involving energy stones, a gang of thieves in a secret hideout and a plucky old detective who just won’t quit. That part actually wasn’t too bad, though it did read like something cobbled together by a high-school boy who has read too many newspaper comics (which is exactly what Osamu Tezuka was when he wrote that stuff).

The second half is where he really hits his stride – Tezuka being Tezuka, the scientists nonsensically find their way into space, people good and bad drop like flies all over the pages and then he adds one of his usual downer endings and boom, instant “classic.” Except not really. It most likely got published in the 40s and 50s in Japan because there wasn’t much better out there. And I dare say it only got a western release because of this author, because Lost World is so mediocre no publisher in his right mind would publish such a violent, schizophrenic, poorly-drawn and poorly-written manga if the author wasn’t famous already.

The sole consolation is that 1) it was written by a young man who later went on to write better things (or so we are told, but I have yet to see it) and 2) Tezuka does offer some explanation for the uneven nature of the manga in his afterword. So at least you aren’t left guessing why the mood changes so rapidly from childish humor to unpleasant violence and back again several times within the same chapter, or why the hero has a love interest who is actually an edible plant, etc.

As an aside, this “romantic” relationship is cleared up by having the two character declare that they’re actually like brother and sister. Unfortunately anyone who has read Ayako and has thus seen some of Tezuka’s depictions of a brother-sister relationship will derive very little comfort from this revelation. Especially when the commentary goes on to suggest that the two characters are going to have lots of little plant-man babies in future. Oh, Tezuka.

If you’re a Tezuka fan or maybe you’re interested in very early manga Lost World might be worth a read from a historical point of view. Despite the cute cover it’s not very kid-friendly, so I wouldn’t get it for anyone very young. Readable but not actually good, that’s about it.

Ayako manga review

Ayako by Osamu Tezuka is supposed to be a classic of the genre by the supposed greatest mangaka of all time. Or so one would suppose to hear the way people go on and on about him. To be honest I’m not that familiar with Tezuka’s works apart from a little Astroboy (the new movie) and a little Black Jack, but if Ayako is anything to go by, I’m not missing much.

Btw, I’m not using the cover as a featured image as I usually do, because the front cover is a naked girl and the back cover is a silhouette of a woman hanging herself. When a ‘classic’ manga has to resort to cheap titillation to sell itself, that should tell you everything you need to know. Anyway, on with the official blurb:

Opening a few years after the end of World War II and covering almost a quarter-century, here is comics master Osamu Tezuka’s most direct and sustained critique of Japan’s fate in the aftermath of total defeat. Unusually devoid of cartoon premises yet shot through with dark voyeuristic humor, Ayako looms as a pinnacle of Naturalist literature in Japan with few peers even in prose, the striking heroine a potent emblem of things left unseen following the war.

The year is 1949. Crushed by the Allied Powers, occupied by General MacArthur’s armies, Japan has been experiencing massive change. Agricultural reform is dissolving large estates and redistributing plots to tenant farmers—terrible news, if you’re landowners like the archconservative Tenge family.

For patriarch Sakuemon, the chagrin of one of his sons coming home alive from a P.O.W. camp instead of having died for the Emperor is topped only by the revelation that another of his is consorting with “the reds.” What solace does he have but his youngest Ayako, apple of his eye, at once daughter and granddaughter?

Delving into some of the period’s true mysteries, which remain murky to this day, Tezuka’s Zolaeqsque tapestry delivers thrill and satisfaction in spades. Another page-turning classic from an irreplaceable artist who was as astute an admirer of the Russian masters and Nordic playwrights as of Walt Disney, Ayako is a must-read for comics connoisseurs and curious literati.

All right, let’s get one thing out of the way first – this is no “sustained critique of Japan’s” blah blah blah anything. For the first three or four chapters, yes, Tezuka does cover some of the tensions brought about by the occupation and the conflicting interests of conqueror and subject.

But that’s just in the very beginning, after that Ayako devolves into a bodice-ripping page-turner in the vein of Sidney Sheldon or V.C. Andrews. Sex, incest, betrayals, conspiracy, more sex and then Tezuka throws in a typically Japanese nonsensical downer ending and bam, we have a classic.

The tl;dr version of the story is that Ayako, the title character is born when Ichiro Tenge offers his wife Su’e up to his dad Sakuemon in exchange for an inheritance. Ayako is unlucky enough to learn too much of a crime committed by her uncle/half-brother Jiro Tenge and is locked away in a basement for 23 years to keep her quiet.

During that time she manages to have an affair with her uncle/half-brother Shiro Tenge, but she eventually breaks out, makes her way over to Jiro, acts crazy for a while, hooks up with the son of Jiro’s sworn enemy and then everybody except Ayako dies in a cave-in caused by Shiro, his way of purging the land of the treacherous, incestuous Tenge clan.

All that took about 600+ pages, but as I said it was quite the page-turner in a train-wreck kind of way, so I read the whole thing in one night. And I suppose it IS a classic, in the way some of Sidney Sheldon’s books are classics – classics of beach literature, that is. I’m comparing it to Sheldon’s stuff because Ayako contains the same mix of sex, crime and tragedy that he was so famous for.

If that’s the kind of drama that appeals to you, Ayako is right up your alley. It’s a different kind of classic from what I was expecting, but I suppose 70’s manga fans like a good twisted drama as much as the next person, which is why this manga is (undeservingly, IMO) famous.

For all that the main character is female, though, the women in this manga come across very poorly indeed. It might have been deliberate, to show how post-war Japan was, and in many ways still is a man’s world. Either way the women in Ayako are all helpless victims and sex objects relegated to one of two roles: housewife or whore (and in one unfortunate case, both).

Oh, but it gets worse. Not only are they helpless whores and housewives but also any attempt they make to break out of those roles is almost immediately punished with death as if to say “Stay in the kitchen/bedroom, woman!”

For example Su’e, Ayako’s mother, spends years as a quiet housewife and the family patriarch’s sex slave. When she finally tries to leave with Ayako, her husband kills her. End of her story.

Then there’s Jiro’s temporary squeeze Michiko (or was it Machiko?). She’s fine when she’s obediently sleeping with military officers on his orders, but the minute she tries to rebel against that, boom kaboom! No more Michiko.

Or let’s take Naoko, the Tenge little sister who spends years as a dutiful housewife. The minute she tries to get revenge on Jiro for killing her old boyfriend she gets drawn back into the family cesspit and alas, no more Naoko.

The two women who do survive the whole fiasco, Ayako herself and her stepmother/grandmother, seemingly only do so because they don’t bother fighting against their roles or against the men in their lives. The stepmother because she never even attempts to resist and Ayako because she gave up after a brief struggle. Sure she runs away from home eventually, but it’s all a matter of jumping from the care of one man (Shiro) to another (Jiro) and to another (Hanao). Just when the manga is about to get interesting, when Ayako is finally all alone, it ends. So… yeah.

Long story short, if you want something tasteful and classy, don’t get Ayako. If you want a trashy page-turner that will leave a bad taste in your mouth and leave you wondering what’s so great about Osamu Tezuka, get Ayako. End of story.