By Shaenon K. Garrity
In Naoki Urasawa's manga
20th Century Boys, a bizarre underground cult is rising in Japan. The protagonist sees signs of the cult here and there: a symbol scratched on a wall, a crazed cultist spouting gibberish about his "Friend." These brief encounters feel strangely familiar, and gradually he realizes why: the cult is based somehow on the secret games he and his friends made up as kids, games that as adults they only half remember. Later the cult takes over society, bringing with it ray guns and giant robots and arcane slogans of friendship, effort and victory: the hero's childhood fantasies transformed into towering, gibbering adult parodies of themselves.
I think I like
20th Century Boys because it's about my life.
When I was sixteen, my mother was horrified by my
Sandman comics; she couldn't understand why I read such gory stuff, or even why I read comic books at all. Now she asks me if I recommend the
Coraline movie and what I think of Neil Gaiman, the Newberry medalist.
Watchmen was a secret, thrilling thing passed around the college coffeehouse; now it's the biggest movie in the country and one of the greatest novels of the last century, according to
Time. And manga. Don't get me started on manga. In the manga business, we knew we were winning when we no longer bothered to keep score.
The impossible has happened, the most impossible thing: teenagers think I'm cool. It's just happened fifteen years too late.
And it feels so wrong.
Last week, Evan Dorkin
wrote in his LiveJournal, "…my younger self would have shit himself when he heard that not only would there be films out called Iron Man, X-Men, Hulk, Spider-Man, Dark Knight, Watchmen, etc, but I wouldn't go see them. Younger self would kick older self in the crotch and tell him to get the fuck outta here." I don't know if Young Shaenon wanted to see movies based on all her favorite comics, but she definitely wanted people to love them as much as she did. To understand. But at some point, probably after she left the Ohio suburbs and made friends and started drawing comics of her own, she lost that aching need.
Wondercon was in San Francisco this past weekend. Like the San Diego Comic-Con, it advertises itself with the slogan, "Celebrating the Popular Arts." Andrew and I like to say that the full slogan is, "Celebrating the Popular Arts with the Unpopular People." But the geekly arts really are popular now, even if geeks themselves may never be.
The classic Gainax geek-fest anime
Otaku no Video, loosely based on the history of the Gainax studio itself, ends on an over-the-top fantasy of nerd triumph: Japan sinks and the
otaku heroes build an undersea high-tech paradise, Otakuland, on the submerged ruins. Then they fly into space, of course. It's exactly this type of fantasy that
20th Century Boys criticizes and subverts.
Otaku no Video was made before
otaku culture took over Japan; in fact, it was arguably Gainax's next big project, the hit TV series
Neon Genesis Evangelion, that was responsible for pushing
otaku staples like giant robots, space battles, and naked thirteen-year-old girls into the Japanese mainstream.
20th Century Boys was made by the people who have to live in the resulting society.
I've built my own little Otakuland around myself like a snail shell. I wake up in an apartment stuffed with comic books, my prized
Bone sketch hanging over the bed. I walk downtown to meet my husband for lunch at the Cartoon Art Museum, where he's on the phone with Dave Gibbons about the
Watchmen show and getting ready to frame a stack of Nell Brinkley tearsheets. Then I go in to work at the manga publisher. Publishing manga. In the evening it's pizza, DVDs, and inking webcomics. I couldn't be more perfectly sealed within my comics world if it lay at the bottom of the sea.
But I don't know how I feel about seeing these things join the mainstream culture. They were
my things. They belonged to me and the other people who understood. Now that the popular arts are popular, I realize how much fandom is a private thing, its secret symbols shared among true believers as a mark of trust. Having the design of my gang's secret flag plastered on billboards and T-shirts and city buses is missing the point, somehow. Movies called Iron Man, X-Men, Hulk, Spider-Man aren't Iron Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, or Spider-Man.
I didn't have a lot of friends back then. I'm not sure if I'm ready for the whole world to be my Friend.
I saw the
Watchmen movie. I think it's probably the best movie that could be made of
Watchmen, unless you count
The Incredibles. I watched it, and then I went home and cracked the paperback for the hundredth time. Popular or unpopular, there's an intimacy to the comic book. When I'm deep in a comic, I'm the only one who understands, and that's fine.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
