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Monday, November 23, 2009. New Comics in 2 days

 

Five Good Things about Felipe Smith's MBQ (And One Bad Thing)

By Jason Thompson

Friday June 20, 2008 09:00:00 am

On June 21, about the same time this goes online, the Japanese magazine Morning 2 will carry a new manga by Felipe Smith, best known as the creator of MBQ. Smith's series had its three-volume run from 2005 to 2007, and stands as one of the greatest and weirdest titles in Tokyopop's original English-language manga line—its line, that is, up until the 2008 shakeups, which have seen many of their "global manga" titles either canceled, published online, or apparently, returned to their creators in an equitable-seeming decision. The reasons for Tokyopop's troubles have already been whispered by countless bloggers, like high school students whose classmate came to school with a black eye. Massive returns from the financially strapped Borders? Less than ideal Japanese licenses, and business problems affecting other parts of the company? Or a public which hasn't embraced OEL as much as it could have? (Of course, my own book excluded manhwa and OEL, mostly for reasons of space and my own sanity, so I can't criticize anyone else for this.)

But MBQ, this bizarre comic about a bunch of cops, gangstas, fast food employees and a megalomaniacal comic artist in L.A., was always a labor of love. Despite good reviews and a featured interview in the book Mangaka America, sales were never at the level of Fruits Basket or Tokyopop's OEL superstars such as Bizenghast, Van Von Hunter and Dramacon. "These bookstores! Why don't they carry my shit!" Felipe railed self-referentially in an 8-page comic on his blog. The easiest answer is "because it's rated 18+", an economic fact which can cut bookstore orders drastically (more so for a company like Viz or Tokyopop, whose mainstay is in tween manga, than a company like Dark Horse or Vertical, which has a greater focus on the direct market and art-house comics publishing). But the truth is, MBQ is just so original, it's ahead of its time. Smith's seinen art style and attitude comes from a different tradition than most translated manga, and his most obvious influence, the great Tatsuya Egawa (Golden Boy, Tokyo University Story) is, shockingly, still unavailable in English. Other influences and possibly coincidental similarities suggest themselves: Santa Inoue. Gahan Wilson. Fred Noland. Paul Pope. These are not artists who produce safe, clean fantasies for teenagers. These are artists who run and shout and scream and produce dirty, shocking fantasies for adults. One difference between Japanese and American attitudes towards manga can, I think, be summed up as: Japanese readers appreciate the importance of grotesqueness. Pretty characters are popular all over, of course, but Japanese manga more freely dips into grotesqueness, into ugly and startling imagery, warts and all, like a hot spice for our eyes.

Smith has this method down pat. Here are some things that, if I were an editor at Kodansha, would have told me that MBQ was the real deal.

1. It's Realistic. The most popular manga in America tend to be wild fantasies set in pirate-land or ninja-land or, if they're shojo, place little emphasis on setting. But there's plenty of manga with an impressive sense of real-world places, manga which are very distinctly set in Japan—at worst, the Japan of generic traced photos, but at best, a Japan which comes to life as if you could walk onto the page. MBQ does the latter for Los Angeles. The backgrounds are incredibly detailed, and Smith spends plenty of time setting up each scene, making the suburbs, the streets, the fast food restaurants, look gritty and alive. At one point Smith gives a shout-out to Santa Inoue (Tokyo Tribes), but Smith is, frankly, a better artist.

2. It's Cartoony. Scott McCloud famously said in Understanding Comics that manga is cartoon characters inhabiting realistic settings. This is mostly true, but the problem with lots of manga characters is their stiffness—that chiseled feeling as if they're trying too hard to be three-dimensional, that lack of originality which makes everyone look the same except for different outfits and hair. On the other hand, there are some manga artists who realize that this is just a drawing—it can look however you want! Felipe Smith's tutorial on drawing facial expressions in Mangaka America only scratches the surface of MBQ's rogue's gallery of twisted poses, crazy faces, and stereotypes (really, all the characters are stereotypes in some way).

Every character looks totally different: Dre, the gangsta. Brian, the karaoke parlor attendant. Omario, Felipe Smith's alter ego, the aspiring cartoonist. The sniveling little kid at the strip club who could have come from a John Kricfalusi cartoon. Big Bro, the bestial mass of muscle. The interchangeable cast of gorgeous women with full lips and big oval eyes and bodies that reinforce that, yes, this isn't shojo. Perhaps most memorable of all, Jeff, the gentle giant employee of the fast food restaurant McBurger Queen, who's so big that you'll be hypnotized watching him operate normal-sized devices with his two-foot-wide hands. Of course, the situations are cartoony too, as when the vaguely Middle Eastern store clerks watching a porn video distractedly sell cigarettes to a seven-year-old, then get disastrously robbed at gunpoint. Even Omario rolling around in bed becomes a four-page exercise in wordless squash-and-stretch animation. An exaggerated story demands exaggerated artwork.

3. The Timing is Perfect. I don't know how Felipe Smith plots out his comics, with what combination of script, layouts and thumbnails, but I want to know. The flow of the story is excellent. The dialogue is never redundant—it's either minimal, or it's hilarious, carrying the pages on its own. Of course, you can have great panel-by-panel timing in a story about filing paperwork…so luckily MBQ always makes sure…

4. It Gets Your Attention. Each volume, indeed each chapter, of MBQ starts out with something designed to startle. Why is an angry Omario carrying a gun, and who is he going to cap with it? Why are we suddenly watching a brutal cage match with a massive thug who rips sandbags in two with his bare hands? Why is Omario's apartment flooded? Why are Korean gangsters suddenly showing up and killing everybody? Why are we in a strip club now? At some level, the answer has got to be: so you'll keep reading. Felipe Smith never forgets this important fact, and so each volume is vastly different from the next. It almost feels like he's going through a checklist of things which are fun to draw, and I mean this as a compliment: gunfights! Fistfights! Strippers! Beds full of writhing groupies! And craziest of all, in volume 2, a lengthy manga-within-a-manga parody which ends with Felipe Smith himself crushing Superman in his fist, not to mention the massive two-page spread showing nothing but two enormous boobs. The violence—indeed, all the action scenes—are drawn with some of the best speedlines and blur effects I've ever seen, and as for the sex, the low sales of MBQ make it sadly clear that even the best T&A isn't enough to sell books in the American market. The only problem with Smith's wild shotgun approach is that, by the end of the story, it doesn't always come together, instead reading like a bunch of goofy vignettes. At the end of the story I found myself still wondering "Why was Omario carrying the gun?"

5. It's Pure Id. A lot of people read manga as an outlet for extreme and socially unacceptable behavior; characters who are plucky and optimistic (Fruits Basket, Ouran High School Host Club), fiery and passionate (name any shonen manga), or flaunt society's rules (GTO). And by manga standards, all these fantasies are relatively tame; look a little farther and you'll find manga like Wounded Man, whose mostly naked hero is on a quest to get revenge against the world's greatest porn producer, and Bastard!!, whose sex-crazed fantasy-wizard protagonist lives up to his name and bukkakes in the face of the Archangel Michael. (Or was it Gabriel?) In this tradition falls MBQ, full of gangsters smashing people's faces, thugs having massive orgies, and all sorts of imaginable slaughter, greed, mayhem, and near-rape. Our generally cheerful hero, Omario, is also a maniac of sorts: he's an aspiring comic artist with the insane bluster of Iron Wok Jan. ("Get ready to be blown the fuck away! 'Cause I'm a fucking genius! Ha ha ha!") It's amusing that Dee, the hardcore ass-kicking gangsta who we previously saw kicking in a man's face, tells Omario the sensible truth: "Doing what you want may be one of the most rewarding things in life. That's what we should all aim for. Just don't expect a lot of money." This is the semi-autobiographical moral of the story, as it were; it helps to find a balance between id and reality, between a 9-to-5 job and indulging your mad ambition.

I said there was one problem with MBQ, and what was it? I already mentioned it—the story never completely comes together. Felipe Smith creates a fascinating setting, and weird, weird characters to inhabit it, but a fair amount is left unresolved at the end of the series and large portions of the manga exist just to freak out the reader with what Smith is capable of drawing (not that there's anything wrong with that). The series concludes with a page-long epilogue by Smith, in which he basically explains that he could tell more stories with these characters, but he's made the points he wanted to make. Japanese comics, of course, are also infamous for less-than-satisfying endings, so the roughness here (what is up with the Korean gangsters?) is a shame but not a disaster. Now that Smith is producing works for a Japanese audience under the editorial guidelines of Kodansha—doing what Paul Pope in the 1990s ultimately could not do—it's going to be fascinating to see how his already amazing talents change and grow. I'm looking forward to it. Revolt! •

Jason Thompson is one of the best-known manga critics in the US. He currently writes for Otaku USA and is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide. His website is www.mockman.com.

Manga Salad is © Jason Thompson, 2009

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