Category Archives: Comics

Comics, Manga, Reviews

Great Teacher Onizuka: A Review

This was originally published in Rolling Stone India, November 2009. Dusted and put up here because I plan to do a mega-reread of the series in the next few days.

Writer/Artist: Tohru Fujisawa
Publisher: Tokyopop
Rating: Four and a half stars

Meet Eikichi Onizuka, a bottom-rung university graduate (barely), whose primary interests are peering up girls’ skirts at local malls and getting into trouble – not mutually exclusive activities, those two. But fate has different plans in store for virginity-challenged young Eikichi – circumstance makes him leave his delinquence behind him and opt for a new career, that of an educator. Eikichi Onizuka, 22 years old, sets out to become Great Teacher Onizuka, the greatest sensei in Japan. His mission: to make school fun again. His secondary mission – getting to fourth base with someone. Anyone.

That is the premise behind this beloved shonen manga series, that traces Onizuka’s explosive – and often ludicrous – adventures in teaching. At first glance, it seems humanly impossible for a man of his calibre to really do much with his career choice. He cheated his way through his own academic career, seemingly has an IQ of 50, and the only legitimate qualification on his misspelled resume is that he has secured a second dan black belt in karate. He is perverted, being more than a little obsessed with young girls and their underwear. And he lets his fists do the talking most of the time. The first arc of the series establishes how Onizuka, beating all these odds, manages to get through a teacher training course at a public school and becomes a temporary teacher in the Holy Forest Academy, a prestigious private institute. He is put in charge of Class 3-4, whose students have terrorized the previous three home-room teachers into ending their careers – one committed suicide, another developed an eating disorder. It would take a very foolhardy, or a very determined educator to take up the responsibility of cleaning the school’s Augean stables.

But determination is what Onizuka has in spades. “You are a cockroach”, one of his students shrieks at him with disgust, right after the would-be teacher pops up where he wasn’t really supposed to. This analogy echoes throughout the series. Like a cockroach, Onizuka wiggles himself into his students’ lives even as they hurl expletives at him and threaten (and often perpetrate) violence against his self. Just as a cockroach skitters away from all attempts to stomp it out, our hero manages to best all the traps his devilish students cook up – from publishing morphed porno pictures of Onizuka to having him framed for embezzling money from student funds. And slowly, one by one, our hero wins them over using a combination of his perversely inappropriate world-view and his incredible physical prowess.

All long-running series by single creators run into similar teething issues – an initial rush of heady ideas that slowly slides into a predictable graph of highs and lows, where the creator struggles not only to find the voice, but to etch out a character’s life-story in a way that builds on its premise, instead of stagnating into repetitive cliche. Maintaining the momentum of a series, without over-stretching a story-line is a tough call. It would have been very easy for writer/artist Tohru Fujisawa to stumble. The second arc, that of the students being set straight by the teacher, resolutely avoids falling into the trap. Sure, it is long, but there are two aspects in which Fujisawa scores top of the manga-ka class (if you will pardon the school-based metaphor) – the delineation of the individual characters that make up the Onizukaverse. Every student in the class has a unique personality, a standalone voice which makes the reader identify with them. Partly because they are there in every classroom in any school in the world – the quiet, shy video-game-playing geek who is bullied at every turn; the computer whiz who knows more than he lets on; the headstrong yet confused loud-mouth who takes offence at minor quips; a girl whose parents are influential bureaucrats, a fact that she uses to her advantage; another with a dark secret involving a previous teacher. Sure, they are all genre archetypes, but it is Fujisawa’s genius that breathes new, fresh life into them.

The second thing that elevates the series to greatness is the sheer unpredictability of the central character. Eikichi Onizuka is a man of hidden surprises, whose heart of gold is matched only by his complete irreverence and lack of respect for authority. Early on in his career, Onizuka figures out that he really loves teaching, and he takes it on himself to be the kind of teacher that his generation did not have. At the crux of every decision Onizuka makes, however frivolous and played-for-laughs it seems to be, there is an important life-lesson that he imparts to his students. But Onizuka being the way he is, any attempt to take him seriously usually backfires, with hilarious results.

In addition to changing the way his students feel towards school, Onizuka also takes on the strict authoritarians that make up the faculty of Holy Forest Academy. His primary whipping-dog being the perennially grumpy Vice-Principal Uchiyamada – a running gag involves the Vice-Principal’s Toyota Cresta. The third arc of the series, in particular, involves a final stand against a new Principal who ousts the support of Chairman Sakurai, whose tacit approval had made a large part of Onizuka’s brushes with authority seem minor in the past.

Great Teacher Onizuka made me laugh, it had me gasping with incredulity, it made me come up with excuses to avoid work just so I could tear through the twenty-five volumes as soon as I could. It is not without its faults – a great deal of fan-service persists throughout the story, and let’s face it – if you have seen To Sir With Love and Munnabhai MBBS, you realize that the premise of GTO is hardly original. But even with all its over-the-top antics, it’s not just a fine comedy series, but also a drama that’s an indictment of the pettiness that afflicts today’s education system. It’s a scathing denouncement of self-serving, vainglorious modern-day teachers for whom teaching is nothing more than a way to make money, rather than the life-altering position it is meant to be. Hey, it made me want to go back to school, and that’s quite something!

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Books, Comics, Myself

Hard drives, Trilogies and an Omnibus

A few nights ago, a friend and I were Skyping each other. Since it was a little past dinner-time for me, the laptop was on the kitchen counter when I was making myself some healthy cauliflower and carrot curry. I was also Team-viewering my way into his computer, because he had one of my old hard-drives and I wanted to peek into it.

Looking at old files on a forgotten disk is a sort of perverted self-archaeology that is both life-affirming and creepy. Things that used to be seem relevant once upon a time are now distant, embarrassing. The documents folder yielded old resumes, stray downloaded pictures and half-written Rolling Stone reviews. Most of the other folders had been stripped clean before I left, or had backups of backups in other drives that are here with me. There was the dump of comics that I had transferred temporarily from the piles of CDs and DVDs I had lying around, and my friend was a little overwhelmed by the content. I have never been too tidy with my downloaded files.

We talked about Kyle Baker and Army@Love, remembering old comics and new manga and everything else on our pop culture plates right now. Yes, almost all my conversations morph into variants of this, so don’t judge. At some point, my friend mentioned that he wanted to read an old-school horror book, something that would creep him out and be unputdownable at the same time. I thought about Joe Hill, but he had read all of Hill, most of it before I did. Both of us could not think of anything else at the moment.

I finished Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain last night. And this is what we were talking about. It starts with a plane landing in JFK airport with everyone but four people aboard the flight dead. The Center for Disease Control gets involved, and the plot proceeds like a tight medical thriller, only with fantastical elements. You can easily find out for yourself what it’s really about, because the first line of the Wikipedia summary gives it away. But I went in without knowing anything except that it was a horror book, and I loved the conceit of the plot. Halfway through the book, I was fairly sure it could not be a standalone story, and I was right! The first reaction was disappointment  – I had not finished The Passage, a book based on a similar premise, because the second and third books are due to come out 2012 and 2014. Happily, both sequels to The Strain are out already, the third came out this November. I have now begun The Fall, the second book. Things are proceeding swimmingly. The survivors of the first book are doing well. The dead ones – oh dear. I better shut up right now.

But it’s heartening to find out that my distrust of trilogies seems to be going away slowly, thanks to good content.

I should also mention that you should probably go check out this British movie called Cashback. It’s about break-ups, love, nudity, art and freezing time.

In the middle of the day today, there was a knock on the door. Another USPS package had arrived in my name. ‘Drea the Awesome looked up when I bring it in and open it up, knowing already what it’s going to be. The X-Statix Omnibus, by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred, along with a whole bunch of guest artists like Darwyn Cooke, Philip Bond and Paul Pope. It’s 1200 pages long, and when I pass it over to ‘Drea, she nearly keels over with the weight. “This is a comic?”, she asks. She flips through the pages and then looks up at me. “So you’re going to spend time reading this thing?” “I’ve read this before, but I will probably reread it in a bit, yeah”, I reply, grinning. She shakes her head, mumbling about starting a blog on her experiences with living with a nerd, with a special mention of the many packages that arrive every week. It was not a prudent time to mention that she had been playing Plants vs Zombies the last few nights with the TV on, with an obsession that puts my magpie complex to shame. But I did anyway.

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Comic Art, Comics

Comic Art Update

For most of the later part of 2011, I had stayed away from Comicartfans, that great big time-sink of a site. Last year was fairly decent for my art habit. I streamlined my addiction quite a bit, paring down the collection to minimize the chaff. Yes, that means I sold and traded a bunch of pages that would have never really gone up on the wall, but which I bought just because it seemed like a good idea at that time. This has had the fortunate effect of making me feel contented about the pages that I own right now, being on a plateau of sorts, where I can just relax and not worry about art-related expenses. Pages come and go, and nothing really grabs my attention unless it’s really cheap or truly one-of-a-kind. The former makes me wonder if I really need one more portfolio-warmer, the latter inevitably makes my bank account whimper.

This may sound zen, but the art-habit seems to have settled down from a burning “I-want-this-page-now” feeling to a gentle simmer of a “Do-you-really-belong-in-my-collection?” question.

High points:

A Kelley Jones Sandman page and a Dave McKean Sandman commission. ‘Season of Mists’ is one of my favorite Sandman arcs, as I have mentioned before, and I already have a Dringenberg page from it that fills my heart with joy every time I look at it. A bulk of the art from the run though was by Kelley Jones, who does not sell most of his originals. Whatever’s available in the market comes from Jones’ inkers, Malcolm Jones III and John Beatty. This page came up for sale on Scott Eder’s gallery at a mind-numbing high price during Wondercon last year. It did not sell. He put it up on eBay a few weeks later, and I emailed to ask if he would accept time payments. Long story short, I bid on it, won it for a little less than my final bid, and much less than the original asking price.

The Dave McKean commission was bought at San Diego, thanks to my friend Joe’s contacts with McKean’s agent Allen Spiegel. McKean himself did not make it to the con, thereby putting my plans of asking for a personalized commission on hold, but he had sent a few pre-done pieces to Allen’s booth, and I got a chance to select and pick one of them up. This conveys just the right amount of grandeur and melancholy associated with the Lord of Dreams. Also, it did not involve me paying $25000, which is the price that one of McKean’s covers usually go for.

 

Kelley Jones - Sandman 22, page 6 and Dave McKean - Sandman

Two Batman pages by Kelley Jones again. One of them was the promotional poster image from a Batman and Dracula crossover, which is one of the most recognizable images of Batman from the nineties, if you were buying comics back then. Jones, in my opinion, is one of the top 5 artists that have worked on Batman, his neo-Gothic, somewhat-surreal style meshing perfectly with the tone of the character. The other one is a cover pencilled and inked by him, and knowing what I just mentioned about him not selling his art, I have no idea how this came into the open market. I saw both of them on a dealer’s page a few days before San Diego Comicon, and jumped on it without hesitation. They were priced well below-market, and also, I fucking love Kelley Jones’ art, man.

 

Click on each image to enlarge

Three Preacher pages. I owned a Preacher page before which was a self-proclaimed placeholder – quite cheap, but not really something I would put on the wall. It got traded away this year. One of these came from eBay, from the collection of Albert Moy, dealer extraordinaire. It encapsulates the story of Preacher so far in a single-panel spread that caught my eye. The one with the bar scene from a collector who was, in his own words, cutting himself to the bone to get money for a Bolland Killing Joke page. And the third from a close friend. The three of them represents three different art styles through the series, as Dillon drastically stripped down his line-work as the issues chugged by, sort of evolving as an artist and also increasing his output to meet his deadlines.

The third also has an interesting history – it came up on eBay one fine day a few years ago at a ridiculously low Buy-It-Now price, so ridiculous that most of the usual Preacher-maniacs were wary of pulling the trigger. That ensured that my friend saw it and bid on it, and was deluged with higher offers over the years from the ones that missed it. I had asked him to let me know if he was selling it any time, and he made up his mind recently. Needless to say, I pounced on it.

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Three Preacher Pages (Click to Enlarge)

And finally, something that came in a few days ago. An Adam Hughes painting of Jean Grey as the Black Queen from the Hellfire Club. Now I could give you a manic foaming-at-the-mouth rave about how Adam Hughes’ work combines early 20th century pinup-girl aesthetics with a distinctive art-deco-influenced style and how it is so gosh-darned beautiful and so on and so forth. But I’ll just let you go take a look at his site to decide for yourself. If you collect comic art, getting an Adam Hughes page is a trial in itself. But getting your hands on a good Adam Hughes pinup without breaking the bank? Forget it. He used to do special sketches for fans at conventions – with rates at 200-400$, the pinups would fetch 10 times the amount on eBay when collectors went around to selling them. Due to some “fans” selling their pages a day after a convention was over, Hughes stopped those sketches, causing prices to jump even more.

So I do not exaggerate when I say that this piece fills a very important hole in my collection, and does so in style. It’s 26 inches by 19 inches, and drawn using a combination of crayons, colored dyes and markers. Adam did it as a commission for a collector, and made it extra-large because he made the guy a long time. The collector went on to sell it to someone I know because he was getting married and he needed to raise money quickly, and I bought it from the latter recently. Not cheap, but not that expensive either. And it makes me really, really happy.

Click to Enlarge

Adam Hughes - Black Queen

So yes, happy happy.

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Comics, Reviews

Pop Culture Update: Locke and Key

One of the genuinely distressing news of 2011 was the failure of the pilot episode of Locke and Key to be picked up for regular programming. This is bad for three reasons – because Locke and Key is one of the finest comic-books being published right now, and the success of the TV show would have no doubt brought in more readers to the series (consider how many people have read Game of Thrones this year, to get an idea of what I mean). Because from what I gather off internet reviews, the pilot episode is really well-made, with superb casting and a great script. But most of all, it sucks because a lot of shitty TV series got green-lighted at the cost of this. Seriously, makes no sense.

But still, the comic stands on its own. It is written by Joe Hill,  a man who, under normal circumstances, be known as Stephen King’s son; but right now, he’s known as the guy behind ground-breaking  genre novels such as Horns and Heart-Shaped Box. It is drawn by Chilean artist Gabriel Rodriguez. Together, the two are magical. This book happens to be one of the most perfect collaborations I’ve seen, where the art enhances the story and vice versa.

Among the things that I love about Locke and Key is that it’s among the most structured comics I’ve read. Not a wasted, throw-away chapter, page or panel on this one. It helps that the story was already planned out into three acts, each act made up of 2 miniseries. This ensures that Hill knows exactly how his story is being framed, giving us just the right amount of information, teasing us with flashbacks and tertiary characters that flicker into the overall plot at the right time. Currently, we are on miniseries #5, entitled Clockworks, where the mythology of the world is being explained by a series of flashbacks. Which brings me to –

The fact that Locke and Key is one of those rare horror comics that gets horror. Which is not surprising, considering Hill’s literary antecedents. But really, do you have any idea how hard it is to do horror in comics without falling back into icky-gore-territory or ho-hum-shock-ending cliches? This book manages to creep into your head in strange ways – through childhood fears, unexpected plot twists, and by a genuinely frightening Big Bad Villain, one that manages to stay one step ahead of the protagonists at nearly every turn.

The first miniseries, Welcome to Lovecraft, introduces us to the principal cast of characters, the Locke family and the three siblings – eldest brother brother Ty, the sister Kinsey and the youngest, six-year old Bode. The death of their father brings them and their mother to their ancestral family home in Lovecraft, Massachusetts, where strange things begin to happen. Bode, for example, finds a strange lady calling for his help from beneath a well. This is also where we start understanding that the tragedy that has befallen the family is not a random incident, but is connected to keys. Keys that do stuff, like turning Bode into a ghost. Or letting people go anywhere they want, or doing distressing things to their psyches.

Finally, Locke and Key is one smart comic that brings unexpected things to the fore on repeated reads. Small example: the second volume is entitled Head Games, and all the covers have a common theme.

In case the image on the right looks a little familiar, here’s why – it’s a riff on an iconic cover from the 1950s that was used by the US Senate to ban horror and crime comics. This particular cover was printed by EC Comics, run by publisher William Gaines, who founded Mad magazine later on. There is this legendary story of Gaines trying to defend this cover as tasteful in court. He did not do a good job of it – in his defense, he was completely doped up on cough medicine when invited to testify.

Oh, and the college the Locke kids go to in San Francisco, before they move to Lovecraft? William Gaines Academy. Ha!

But the smartness lies not just in homages or sly winks at the audience – the smartness lies in the way Hill seems to know exactly when to let certain characters take center-stage, or to subvert a known trope at just the right time, or to let a throwaway part of the scenery become a crucial cog in the battle between good and bad. The two, writer and artist, seem to have fun when telling their story, and that fun is infectious! One of my favorite single issues deals with epic battles and mundane day-to-day affairs, and there are those single-panel settings that hide worlds and untold stories in them, the kind that would make lesser writers milk them through crossovers and back-stories. Hill and Rodriguez do it in single wordless panels, the magnificent bastards!

All said and done, what is the series all about? It helps that every chapter starts with a one-page cheat-sheet, that tells you the bare bones of what’s going on and where we stand.

Locke and Key, ladies and gentlemen. The best fucking comic being published right now, BAR NONE. It helps if you get all the chapters and read them at one go, because every miniseries ends with cliff-hangers. And these are not your everyday, how-do-they-get-out-of-this-level cliffhangers, these are the holy-shit-this-did-not-just-fucking-happen kinds, the ones that make you grab for the next book in the series at 4 AM in the morning, even though your eyes are puffy and you’ve got to be at work at 9.

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Comics, Conventions

Going APE part 2

To recap: I had spent half the day at APE hunting down serendipitously meeting Craig Thompson and had then bought some art off Steve Oliff. Umm, that was it. On to part 2.

So Kate Beaton was due to sign at the Drawn and Quarterly booth. Agenda #1: Find out where the D&Q booth is. Attempting to do that in the hall was a problem because (a) there were no helpful numbers on booths to figure out where you were, at a given moment, and (b) it was hard not to get distracted by the shiny-ness on display. I mean, how can you pass by Stuart Ng books without looking through their collection of artbooks and the out-of-print European comics that they mysteriously manage to keep in stock? How do you control the urge to go spend some time with Richard Starkings and tell him how good the entire Elephantmen run is? (Not to mention the fact that I’ve been reading them on the iPad, and would probably just burst into guilty tears and buy the entire set of 4 hardcovers, which he was selling at the Expo at a sizable discount.) Oh well, I’ve gazed into the abyss, fellas. It’s not pretty. But you just close your eyes, think of beatonna, and scurry to your destination. That’s Kate Beaton’s twitter alias, by the way, and it never fails to make me smirk to myself. I wonder if she selected it for the Japanese reference.

So I find the D&Q table, and sure enough, she’s signing there. Just about three people there clustered around her, so I relax, and ask the guy standing there if he’s in line. “I am”, he says. “And so are they” He gestures behind me. Holy guacamole, there’s an insane line for Kate Beaton! They were cordoning off people three at a time near the table, to keep the crowds moving. The line actually warps around the center of the hall, and there’s an end-of-the-line volunteer waiting to tell people that, yes, that is the end of the line, and no, Kate won’t be signing any sketchbooks – pretty de rigeur for all the artists attending that day. But the line moves ahead merrily, and I take some time to chat with the lady standing behind me, who’s totally getting it on with her dog-eared copy of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (a brilliant analysis of fairytales, a must-read). The guy in front of me is hard-core, carting around – yes, he actually had a cart – a few long-boxes of comics. Of course I get totally judgmental about him – he’s  getting every single Beaton appearance signed, including the APE program guide.

When my turn comes, Kate takes some time to flex her fingers. She asks me what my favorite strip is, and in my head I go “shit, do I mention the Nancy Drew covers? No, that’s too generic. Hmm, I liked the Bronte strips, but hold on, there’s something else I am missing”, while out loud, I say “ba-bah-bu-ba”. And then I take the safe way out and say “All of them”.  Which probably means that I fail her test, and after having slotted me as “clueless generic comic-book fan”, she proceeds to draw Wonder Woman in my book. In the middle of her sketch, I remember that I loved the Javert strips, and tell her so. I don’t think she hears me.

I totally get my program guide signed too, hah!

In the meantime, I meet a few friends, a few art collector buddies. We laugh about the fact that nearly all of us had mailed each other saying we won’t make it to APE this time, and changed plans at the last minute. For a second or two, all of us look funny at each other, each one wondering if the other’s here for some hitherto undisclosed art deal. The moment passes. We do not kill each other.

Craig Thompson is signing again at the CBLDF booth, and I head there, pick up some books from them. I pick up a few others with a 20% discount from a retailer nearby. “Never ignore a discount” is the corollary to my family motto. (Which is “Carpe Omnius”, before you ask, and um, yeah, I am the only practicing member of my family.) This time the line is longer, probably because people are starting to surge in. I think Craig gets a little spooked when he sees me again, but that could just have been my imagination. I tell him about my friend who cried after reading Goodbye Chunky Rice, and we both snicker a bit. Actually no, he sort of understands.

Last signings of the day – Adrian Tomine and Dan Clowes, who are both signing at the Drawn and Quarterly booth at the same time. I do not realize why until I read this, much later. Their line is longer than Beaton’s, obviously. By the time I get to the front, there’s a crowd around Tomine while Clowes is relatively freer. I spend a few minutes getting some books signed and talking to him, after which he takes a restroom break. Completely unrelated, I assure you. He gets back, and I start talking to him again, both of us taking a moment to scoff at mainstream comics together. We totally bonded, man. I introduced myself to Tomine with a request from a friend who, in a fit of high perversion, wanted me to get a drawing of a blonde girl from Tomine. “I will be your bitch forever if you get that for me”, he said, and who am I to refuse an offer like that? Having inked a quick headshot in my copy of Sleepwalk, Tomine does a self-portrait in Scenes From An Impending Marriage, which I totally love.

And with that, I come to an end of my APE adventure. There is some more wandering around the venue, an excellent dinner at a Spanish restaurant afterwards, and a magnificent Thai chilli lemon sorbet after that. 

And this is what I lugged home from the show.

Only 5 of these are mine.

 

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