By Shaenon K. Garrity
I don't seek out untranslated manga. I can't read Japanese, I'm too lazy to hunt for scanlations, and most of the interesting stuff doesn't get scanlated anyway. Beyond that, I fear that collecting manga I can't read would push me over the event horizon into total weeaboo-hood. When I started work at Viz, I made a solemn pact with myself: I wouldn't get into untranslated manga, I wouldn't travel to Japan, and I'd never, ever pay money for yaoi.
But just last month I bought
Red Blinds the Foolish, the frikkin' sweet matador yaoi by est em (one of the backup stories in the volume is
soccer hooligan yaoi). And somehow, especially since my two visits to Japan this year, I've accumulated a stack of untranslated manga. Sigh.
The good news is that, even in the current constricting manga economy, a lot of good stuff is getting translated—possibly more good stuff than at the height of the American manga boom. Vertical keeps chugging along (
Black Jack!), Drawn & Quarterly published
A Drifting Life, Viz launched its SigIkki titles and is beefing up its Signature line in general (
Saturn Apartments!
Oishinbo!
Pluto!), and Dark Horse has editor Carl Gustav Horn working his magic (tricked-out CLAMP reprints? For me? Why, thank you!) So I have faith that eventually I'll get to read most of this stuff and can stop staring at the untranslated pages in slack-jawed incomprehension.
5. Soil, by Atsushi Kaneko
Most of the manga on this list are old manga, because less of the classic stuff gets translated into English, and also because I think old manga is better than new manga. But
Soil is recent (launched in 2004, still ongoing), and I'm surprised no American publisher has picked it up. It's basically a David Lynch series in manga form. Two mismatched detectives—a foul-mouthed, stinky old pro and a hipster-nerdy young woman—descend upon a pristine suburban planned community. Their investigation turns up endless weird conspiracies beneath the town's idyllic surface, all spiraling further and further away from the case that brought them there. To give you a sense of the manga's tone, the case in question is the disappearance of an entire family, including the hamster, on the same day an enormous pile of salt materialized in the school parking lot.
Kaneko's earlier manga
Bambi and Her Pink Gun, a surreal, hyperviolent fantasy strongly flavored by American underground comix, was partly translated by DMP before disappearing into the ether.
Soil is more restrained and focused, digging into its bizarre mysteries with a deadpan tone. I can't think of another manga artist remotely like Kaneko; the guy's a mad genius.
4. Galaxy Express 999, by Leiji Matsumoto
Way back when, Viz published the
Galaxy Express sequel series, but they never translated the original 1970s manga or, as far as I can recall, anything else by Matsumoto (although one of his short war comics was translated by Fred Schodt for his indispensible history
Manga! Manga!). I really like Matsumoto's loopy artwork, and the shared sci-fi universe he created for such series as
Galaxy Express 999 and the
Harlock saga is one of the great comic-book settings, not to mention a major influence on later artists like CLAMP. Also, he draws the longest eyelashes in the business. I have no deeper reasoning behind my Matsumoto love.
3. Noboru Ohshiro's Trilogy of Awesome Old Mangas
Yoshihiro Tatsumi's glorious manga autobiography
A Drifting Life, which, let us all give thanks, is available now from Drawn & Quarterly, includes a sequence in which the teenage Tatsumi corresponds with Noboru Ohshiro, who was essentially the top name in manga until Osamu Tezuka came along. Ohshiro published the first book-length comics in Japan, notably the three graphic novels
Kisha Ryokô (Train Journey),
Kasei Tanken (A Voyage to Mars), and
Yukaina Tekkôsho (The Delightful Steel Mill, although I like the translation suggested by one of my coworkers at Viz, "The Happy Cog Factory"). All three are peppy journeys through semi-educational settings (
Kasei Tanken includes photos of Mars pasted into the artwork, while
Yukaina Tekkôsho features monkeys teaching you how to smelt steel), drawn in a style reminiscent of early American newspaper strips and colored in vivid watercolors.
These books look nothing like modern manga, and, although it was probably for the best that a beret-loving medical student would soon blow the collective minds of Japan's youth with
New Treasure Island (a development also covered in
A Drifting Life, as an awestruck young Tatsumi gets to visit the barely older Osamu Tezuka at home), looking at these pages does make me a little sorry that no one draws like Ohshiro anymore.
2. The Compleat Moto Hagio
Moto Hagio is my favorite, of course.
A, A', still the only book-length Hagio manga published in English, was one of the first manga I ever read and remains among my very favorites. The most celebrated member of the revolutionary Year 24 Group of shojo artists, Hagio has dabbled in science fiction, Gothic horror, psychological drama, and, of course, some of the earliest shonen-ai.
There's a seventeen-volume Moto Hagio retrospective collection, reprinted a few times in Japan, that provides a good overview of her classic 1970s work, including the melancholy vampire series
The Poe Family, the pioneering boys' love melodrama
The Heart of Thomas, the much-loved (and translated long ago by Viz) sci-fi story "They Were Eleven," and a selection of early Hagio from back when she drew like a frilly old-school shojo artist. That'd be a good starting point for Hagio translation. After that we can move on to
Marginal,
A Savage God Reigns, and the deeply peculiar
Otherworld Barbara, the last of which I bought at Nakano Broadway last week and cannot stop staring at.
1. Atagoul, by Hiroshi Masumura
My current obsession. Nobody has heard of this damn manga (also sometimes romanized as
Ataghoul or
Atagoal) and it's the greatest thing in the world. Since I cannot read Japanese, and there are no English-language websites about
Atagoul, I have only the fuzziest idea what it's about. It's set in a forested fantasy world populated by anthropomorphic cats. The lead cat is a big yellow guy who loves to drink sake
and eat squid and almost never stops smiling, not even when he and his androgynous human friend get impaled on icicles or rays shoot out of their bodies or something equally disturbing. Which happens a lot, but somehow things always work out okay.
Typical plot: the characters go hunting for snails at a lake, but the snails start levitating, which troubles them. Everyone finds their way into a disturbingly vaginal cave, which transports them to an equally phallic tower. There, they're attacked by a gypsy woman who shoots slime at them from a flute, then rides around on the head of a dragon. Fortunately, a cat with an eyepatch shows up to fight her. The fight takes them back to the cat village, where they burst into the local pub (which is shaped like a giant apple), but somehow they've shrunk and they plunge, dragon and all, into someone's beer glass. Part of me doesn't want this manga to get translated because I'm afraid it might start making sense, which would kind of ruin it for me.
Anyway, from what little I can piece together,
Atagoul first ran in the 1980s, but there's a sequel series from the 2000s that follows the tradition of alternating between whimsical, dreamlike fantasy (at one point Studio Ghibli considered adapting Masumura's work) and HOLY CRAP WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED. The characters are cats because Masumura is aware that he's much better at drawing cats than humans. The one Masumura-related work that's been translated into English is the haunting anime
Night on Galactic Railroad (put out by the now-defunct CPM and, sadly, long out of print), based on Masumura's manga adaptation of the classic children's novel by Kenji Miyazawa. If you've ever seen
Night on Galactic Railroad and wondered why the main characters are drawn as cats, that's why. Because it's based on Masumura's version, and Masumura likes cats.
As do I.
Runners-up:
The Rose of Versailles, by Ryoko Ikeda. The seminal "Why hasn't this been translated?" manga. From what I've heard, the answer to that question is that Ikeda is asking, quite rightly, for a lot of money. Two volumes of this cross-dressing shojo manga set in the court of Marie Antionette were translated, way back in the 1980s, for an edition published in Japan. This just whetted the nerd intelligentsia's appetite for more.
GeGeGe no Kitaro, by Shigero Mizuki. This oddball monster manga about a one-eyed boy who lives in a graveyard and fights
yokai (traditional Japanese monsters) enjoys eternal popularity in Japan. Like a lot of other old manga, it was partly translated for the Kodansha Bilingual manga series, published in Japan a few years ago for students learning English, but is basically unavailable in the U.S.
Saint Young Men, by Hikaru Nakamura. Otherwise known as "that manga where Jesus and Buddha are nerdy twentysomething roommates in Tokyo." I'm sorry, I just find the whole thing impossibly cute, especially when they go to Disneyland or some girls on a train mistake Jesus for Johnny Depp.
Nijigahara Holograph, by Inio Asano. Viz has already published the disgustingly young Asano's two earlier works,
Solenin and
What a Wonderful World!, so I have some confidence that this twisty,
Donnie Darko-like ghost story will get translated too. I hope so, because I broke down and read it in scanlation, and it's one of the best graphic novels I've ever read.
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
Yoshihiro Tatsumi's glorious manga autobiography A Drifting Life, which, let us all give thanks, is available now from Drawn & Quarterly, includes a sequence in which the teenage Tatsumi corresponds with Noboru Ohshiro, who was essentially the top name in manga until Osamu Tezuka came along. Ohshiro published the first book-length comics in Japan, notably the three graphic novels Kisha Ryokô (Train Journey), Kasei Tanken (A Voyage to Mars), and Yukaina Tekkôsho (The Delightful Steel Mill, although I like the translation suggested by one of my coworkers at Viz, "The Happy Cog Factory"). All three are peppy journeys through semi-educational settings (Kasei Tanken includes photos of Mars pasted into the artwork, while Yukaina Tekkôsho features monkeys teaching you how to smelt steel), drawn in a style reminiscent of early American newspaper strips and colored in vivid watercolors.
Moto Hagio is my favorite, of course. A, A', still the only book-length Hagio manga published in English, was one of the first manga I ever read and remains among my very favorites. The most celebrated member of the revolutionary Year 24 Group of shojo artists, Hagio has dabbled in science fiction, Gothic horror, psychological drama, and, of course, some of the earliest shonen-ai.
My current obsession. Nobody has heard of this damn manga (also sometimes romanized as Ataghoul or Atagoal) and it's the greatest thing in the world. Since I cannot read Japanese, and there are no English-language websites about Atagoul, I have only the fuzziest idea what it's about. It's set in a forested fantasy world populated by anthropomorphic cats. The lead cat is a big yellow guy who loves to drink sake and eat squid and almost never stops smiling, not even when he and his androgynous human friend get impaled on icicles or rays shoot out of their bodies or something equally disturbing. Which happens a lot, but somehow things always work out okay.
