Things I Love About Comics: Urusei Yatsura by Rumiko Takahashi

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Image: Rumiko Takahashi(VIZ)

So Viz just started putting out these huge chunks of Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura series.  It’s a series I really only vaguely knew about through the years just from seeing Lum around.  Recently they released the anime movie Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer  which is directed by Mamoru Oshii in one of his early works.  I watched that and pretty instantly fell in love.  

I think fundamentally what draws me to this world that Takahashi has created--well let’s back up.  So Urusei Yatsura is a harem comic about this boy Ataru who is extremely unlucky and ends up in a duel with this alien Invader Lum for the sovereignty of earth.  He wins the duel(a game of tag) but accidentally proposes marriage to Lum when he meant to propose to his high school crush Shinobu and for Lum it is love at first sight.  So Ataru ends up in all of these weird insane situations that usually end with him getting shocked by Lum or beaten up by Shinobu.  It is basically a slapstick comedy comic with this harem element, and it really is a delight to read.

Part of what really makes it work is just how deranged Ataru quickly becomes.  He is a womanizing philanderer who only has that one thing on his mind, and basically chases after whatever pretty girl he happens to see in that moment, while trying to escape from Lum.  Unfortunately he is an idiot, and incredibly unlucky which earns him the enmity of everyone in the world except weirdly Lum.  The degree to which he really isn’t so much a sympathetic character as a complete lunatic puts you in this interesting place of enjoying when he gets his comeuppance, but also sometimes you see how things always kind of fall apart for him where he comes off the worst looking out of everyone, and so you have a degree of comedic sympathy for him.

The main reason it works so well though is because Takahashi is such a master of body language and comedic acting.  Also her forms are really appealing to look at with their almost peanuts like heads, and sort of skinny but compact body shapes.

She also draws these great facial reactions.  This page I really laughed at because it shows how Ataru is almost this buddha of perv, and I love Princess Kurama’s face at the end.

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Image: Rumiko Takahashi (VIZ)

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Image: Rumiko Takahashi (VIZ)

Generally Takahashi has this compositional sense of push and pull between characters where everyone is almost on a string around each other.  You can kind of see that in this panel where Ataru is leaning in towards Kurama, who is upright at this diagonal that fits with the shock and horror of the background characters, coupled with the crow goblins flying around the page, it gives it this real cyclonic force.  But generally she constantly has this thing where if one character is leaning in, the character they are leaning into is leaning back.  It’s like watching a dance.  She just really has this pleasant sense of body weight and sense of space where you feel like characters are really moving into and out of personal space.

Also texturally she has a really great balance between blacks, tones, and white space.  Which is something I don’t think enough people really have an understanding of whether in black and white or color.  Just the way you visually balance the values of a page in a way that feeds dynamic composition.

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Image: Rumiko Takahashi (VIZ)

And then also as I said, the way she draws figures has that kind of thing I really like from this era of cartoonists.  It’s appearing in the same way that a Franquin drawing might be, but I feel, slightly more malleable. It is the weight and the balance that you feel in the figures which is really insane.  This shit isn’t easy!  I read a review somewhere online that compared her early work on the series to Tezuka, but I think she has something stranger than Tezuka in her lines and forms.  She feels more youthful and slightly looser, bouncier.  Maybe a little more punk.  Her characters are addled in a way that is I think fairly unique to her, but also of this time too. Even though this comic isn’t cyberpunk, it has the same vibe as the biker gangs in Akira I think.  Series is good enough that I guess now I’m going to finally check out Ranma  ½ while I wait for the next book from Viz.  I ask forgiveness to the gods for sleeping so long on her work (same with Clamp).

For me, this is kind of something I would like to see more with modern western comics, who I think have gotten too mired in realist forms, or are too indebted to things like Steven Universe that they lose edge.  There’s an expressiveness with Takashi that also has this edge to it, that I really envy.  I mean look at this above image of Ataru sprawled on the ground.  It’s so beautiful the way his body pretzels over his large head.  He’s got those cool two stripes on his shirt to give him a bit of style, as well as the colored cuffs on his sweatshirt.  And that heavy but assured line weight on his figure contrasted against the textures for the ground and wall behind him--it’s such a pleasing mixture.  

I am actually really aware that Takahashi is super influential on a particular generation of Western cartoonists, and indeed she was recently recognized by the Eisners for her body of work— but an example of this is someone like Brandon Graham, who…I don’t think his work has ever had as much edge as Takahashi does(in fact quite the opposite, his work relies more on smooth sedate qualities), either graphically or narratively.  And he doesn’t really do the kind of manic insane characters that Takahashi can do, which for me is mainly what I vibe on with her work.  It’s not the smoothness that attracts me, it’s the bent-ness.  This is punk in a way that creators of her school have never really tried to capture.  She’s an anarchist as an artist, and I think this is a quality that distinguishes her.  To put it all in terms of Urusei Yatsura, I think everyone glommed on to Lum, but the essence of Urusei Yatsura’s appeal is actually Ataru. I love it.  I want more.  

Some last bits of credits: Urusei Yatsura is Published by Viz, written and drawn by Rumiko Takahashi, with translation and English Adaption handled by Camellia Nieh with lettering by Erika Terrriquez. It is probably available wherever fine comics are sold, or whatever.

Best Comics of 2018

Only one of these comics was made by an American, and it was the only book on this list that wasn’t published by an American publisher. All but one of these comics reprint material that came out earlier in other countries. Which I got some pushback to on twitter this week, but my approach is that these are the comics that were published in 2018 here where I live, in America; like I can look into the publication info on the book, and it says 2018, and within that framework they were the best ones that I read.

That last bit is always the biggest caveat. Especially as I mostly just read what I am interested in reading. Usually if I try to read books that others are hyping up, I just end up wasting hours of my life on books I lo-key hate. This is the best way I know how to do this sort of list, and it is the way that best represents 2018 for me in comics.

And, besides, for me, if you aren’t going to recognize a book in 2006 because it’s not been published legally in English, and then you aren’t going to talk about that book in 2018 because it’s a reprint--then you are really saying books that aren’t initially made in English, are never going to get talked about and never going to enter the canon. Including these books as they are legally published is the most correct and ethical approach to this problem. And if you say this invalidates this as a snapshot of 2018, I would disagree.

2018 to me was defined by these books. Like last year I think about Happiness, Goodnight Punpun, or the year before I think about Peplum by Blutch--it is a significant moment to get to read these books, in your hands, in a language you can understand, and if one wants to encourage more great works to arrive in one's native language, a good way I think is to recognize these books as they arrive for the importance they reside in.

2018 itself was the same old shit show within comics itself. A steady parade of men being shitty to kinda everyone, but especially women. So many of us get into this because we are excited about the medium, about reading comics, about making comics, about being a part of this--we get in with these pure intentions, and the landscape is just littered with all of these traps. These festering pustules of just human rottenness waiting for you to accidentally enter their orbit. 2018 was the year my trust in others in the industry broke. Which is an important moment in any young lady’s journey through comics.

But it was also a year where I had some really wonderful times. The BBQ that Bobsy of Mindless Ones threw after Thought Bubble was genuinely one of the most special moments I’ve had in comics. Good company, good food--a heady mixture of intelligence and kindness. Plus the food was perfect. It was one of those things were I was absolutely starving by the time we got there, and the food was perfect. When you are hungry and you get something tasty, it’s almost a spiritual experience. That I was able to spend a month in Europe surfing couches was entirely thanks to comics (shout out to Roque, MJ, Emma, Victoria, Ellen, Jung, Marcel, Alison and Kaveh!).

And through my own comics, I’ve been able to meet or hear from so many interesting people I wouldn’t ordinarily get to. I get some of the most interesting emails in my inbox about all manner of things. So there’s that kind of yin and yang of comics. It’s terrible, but also I need it, and it’s good too.

So with that in mind, these are the actual comics, well the 10 best--these are the comics that kept the fires going in 2018:

10. Haikyu! By Haruichi Furudate (Viz)

A huge chunk of Haikyu Comics by Haruichi Furudate came out this year.  If you watched the anime first, the chunk this year is the first part that is after where the Anime’s last season was.  Starting at Vol. 22 I think. While I think the Anime gets the sports action down better, and there are some times where it is a little confusing what is happening on the page, it’s worth it for the little characterizing details Furudate draws.  Like take the panel up there. You have the impact of Hinata’s spike mirroring his own hair, the “FWIF” sound of Tobio’s set, and then Tobio’s surprised eyes all saying to you “WHOA”--it’s good fun. And Furudate is great at balancing what at this point is a cast that must be getting close to 60 or 70.  Watching Hinata be the ball boy at a camp he crashed, and start evolving as a player was really riveting stuff, as was Tobio taking back his crown as king of the court, but in a way that the rest of Karasuno could understand and work with. If you’d like to dip your toes into a nice slice of life sports manga, that while not super heavy, still makes you care a lot for what is going on in the page, this is a wonderful series to track.

9. An Invitation from a Crab by Panpanya (Denpa)

This collection of stories from Panpanya have a quality that can best be described as elusive.  It’s like trying to grab at a wisp of smoke and as your hand begins to grip it, it flits from your grasp into nothingness.  Graphically it does that tried and true thing of putting cartoonish figures over heavily rendered backgrounds, which literally always works on me.  I love the way Panpanya creates these bendy warpy neighborhoods, and the pleasant nature of our large headed Avatar and her friends the kinda dog thing, the guy with the thing on his head, and the other woman.  The best story here involves this character missing her train stop and in alarm getting off the train without her body. She wanders around a strange slightly off dimension lost until someone tells her she is a ghost.  So they give her a stick and a bun and tell her to go to this one area where they can summon other ghosts and find out what the deal is. They then determine that she’s an astral projection from her body, so they take her back to the train station lost and found to find her body which is this creepy husk thing that she has to put on before going back on her way.  That’s the kind of story you get one after another in this collection. I would say it is a book about perception, objects, places and being mindful of all of these strange things to the point of abstraction. A book as fascinating narratively as it is virtuoso graphically.

8. Die Laughing by Andre Franquin (Fantagraphics)

Die Laughing is a collection of dark humored one pagers from comics master Andre Franquin.  It’s really stunny what he can do with hatching and shadow in this book, and I love his spindly limbed pear people.  It’s kind of sad how much of the concerns of this book, which contains work that is like...several decades old, are still relevant.  Franquin was screaming about the planet decades ago, and now we, living deeper in the fire, can read those screams in english, and really feel the idiocy of our present doom underscored.  Humanity has not improved much if at all since Franquin made these comics. At this point our laughter is a scream is laughter. We’re really screwed. Pretty comics though.

7. Happiness by Shuzo Oshimi (Kodansha Comics)

Happiness by Shuzo Oshimi was one of my books of last year, if not my book of the year last year.  It drops down my list this year because most of the year was a very slow section of the story based around a weird blood cult (which sounds more exciting than it is--really this is kind of a handbrake section of Happiness, similar to that chunk of Flowers of Evil where things time skip and then slow way down for a few books).  The most recent volume finally paid off on the Cult with the horrific imagery I get up every day for. Oshimi has with Happiness made himself into a truly stunning artist. Where before he was an artist who knew how to nail the climax artistically, now he’s doing this book where every page is pretty amazing. He’s on twitter as well, if you want to see lots of cool sketches.  As with any Oshimi work, you read his books faster than most. His work forces a kind of breathlessness while reading, you turn the pages so fast that sometimes you forget to breathe, and so while you blow through his books faster than normal comics, you feel the physical toll of them more than other books. But this and the number 1 comic on my list are the two comics that when I get them in the mail I get the most excited for.  I don’t know if I’d say Oshimi would be top five favorite artists for me, but his comics are probably my favorite, I feel like he has the juice right now and is just dropping amazing comic after amazing comic. And his art just keeps getting more and more compelling. Now if only we could get a better more mature translation of Flowers of Evil that doesn’t include the word “Shitbug”....

6. Inside Mari by Shuzo Oshimi (Denpa)

A second comic from Shuzo Oshimi started up this year: the print release of Inside Mari from Denpa comics.  This is actually an earlier comic of Oshimi’s than Happiness, and was at one point available digitally on crunchyroll.  But I’m a print snob(thus why this list doesn’t include Grappler Baki), so this is newwww to me.  Inside Mari is a gender/body swap comic about this guy ending up in the body of this high school girl he stalks and then trying to come to terms with all that entails.  It’s Shuzo Oshimi so you know it won’t be that straight forward. I’m really interested to see what Oshimi does with a story that is basically a good chunk of the kind of thing you would have read on Fictionmania back in the day.  I should do a gender swap/body swap comic someday. I mean Oshimi has this. Almodovar did a whole movie that was one. I need to get in there before the subgenre gets too legitimate. This will almost certainly end up on my end of the year list next year too.

5. Devilman by Go Nagai (Seven Seas Entertainment)

Seven Seas brought us two glorious volumes collecting the classic Devilman run from Go Nagai this year.  Apocalyptic, inky, and meme-worthy. The story lags a bit in parts, but the parts that work are of such high quality that it deserves its spot on the list, and the end has lost none of its potency.  A truly seminal work of apocalyptic literature reproduced and released for an era in which it has lost none of its relevance.

4. Soft X-Ray Mindhunters by A. Degen (Koyama)

Strange, sad, beautiful, defiant...book of the summer.  The best time I had reading a comic this year was when I plopped A. Degen’s Soft X-Ray Mindhunters across my lap after getting back from TCAF.  The ideaspeed of the book is pretty insane, but I remember being struck by the elegiac tone. I know one of the reasons that people have been hyped on that Sabrina comic this year has to do with how “now” it is, but where I thought that book did a poor job of describing what is going on now, Soft X-Ray Mindhunters was more a book describing a painful opposition to now.  Truly an experience.

3. Mort Cinder by Hector Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia (Fantagraphics)

One of the truly momentous artists to be ignored by english audiences in recent times is Alberto Breccia.  Someone on par with the giants like Kirby or Tezuka. Fantagraphics sought to fix that this year, by bringing out Mort Cinder for its english language debut.  I wrote at length about this book here. This is also the second major work from Hector Oesterheld to make it into english in the last two years, there’s a wonderful write up on his contribution over at TCJ.  You can read my extended thoughts on the book here.  It’s a good one.

2. Mobile Suit Gundam: Thunderbolt by Yasuo Ohtagaki (Viz)

At times lurid, at times deeply nihilistic, and at times breath stealing--there’s not a book that I rip through every few months with more eagerness than Mobile Suit Gundam: Thunderbolt by Yasuo Ohtagaki.  Even if you never seen or read anything about Gundam before, this series still works and can stand toe to toe with Gundam the Origin by one of the true masters of comics Yoshikazu Yasuhiko.  Functionally it is an interrogation of the role of the ace within the context of the trauma of war.  It is about the ways humans find to express themselves within the medium of war, when everything else has been taken away and destroyed.  I think it is also the first series I’ve read where one of the main protagonists for a Gundam series is a quadruple amputee.

But even more than that, it has some of the best giant robot fights I’ve seen in comics.  Which is important too. And were it not for a collection of one of the great works of Nihei dropping in the final weeks of the year, it would have been my comic of the year.  Read more of my thoughts here.

1. Abara by Tsutomu Nihei (Viz)

I’m glad I held off until the last few weeks of 2018 to finish with my list, because this deluxe collection of Tsutomu Nihei’s masterpiece Abara dropped on my porch about as late as you can get.  This is the debut in english of work that was done in the early 2000s and it is all collected in an huge edition ala the Blame! Master editions. It also includes the Digimortal short. And while I think Blame! Is narratively heavier; with Abara, Nihei gives his version of a kind of Kaiju/Kaimen Raider kind of comic where human bodies explode into these skeletoned razor edged knights to fight giant blobs of bone and muscle called white guana.  It of course all comes within a glob of barely explained history that is at the end of its dusty excess--a world like many of Nihei’s that lives at a final nexus of occult, political, and post-human forces.  Q Hayashida was an assistant on this book, which you can feel her dirty textures coughing through the thing. For me, Abara represents the artistic highpoint of Nihei so far.  And seeing as he is one of my favorite artists, it is impossible not to have this as my best book of the year.  This is a major work beautifully presented. Though I would say Thunderbolt is more complex narratively, and Ohtagaki has more interesting characters who can interact with each other in believable ways--but then that’s not what you show up for a Nihei book for.  This is jagged edge fuck you comics in epic spread excellence. There’s no one who made it seem bigger on the page, no matter how big or small the page is.