MANGA REVIEW: SHUNA'S JOURNEY (1983, 2022)

Written/Drawn/Colored by Hayao Miyazaki

English language translation by Alex Dudok de Wit

Edited by Mark Siegel and Kara Valdez

Cover designed by Kirk Benshoff

Interior design by Kirk Benshoff, Sunny Lee, and Angela Boyle

American edition published in 2022 by First Second

Original Japanese language publication in 1983 by Tokuma Shoten

. . .

“Spotting the slave traders’ vehicle, Shuna got in front of it and unleashed a burst of fire at point-blank range. The attack caught them completely off guard. Shuna kept firing with wicked composure, as he would when hunting snow leopards. By the time he had run a ring around the vehicle, he had shot them all down.”

-text from page 62 of Shuna’s Journey

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Shuna’s Journey is a manga-adjacent work from the master animator Hayao Miyazaki, whose most recent feature length film is The Boy and the Heron, and whose other works include Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I refer to Shuna’s Journey as manga-adjacent because even though it will most likely be shelved in the manga section at the bookstore it apparently is considered an emonogatari-an “illustrated story”-as per translator Alex Dudok de Wit’s afterward. Indeed, Shuna’s Journey is much more “compressed” in its storytelling than other manga works which often allow the action scenes to play out cinematically-almost moment to moment-across many pages and panels. Shuna’s Journey evokes the widescreen majesty of John Ford and Sergio Leone, as opposed to the hyperkinetic action of contemporary shonen sagas such as One Piece, Chainsaw Man, and Kaiju No. 8. Having said all this, I still personally found Shuna’s Journey to be very manga-like: it’s fast-paced, full of beautifully detailed environments, and inhabited by incisively stylized humans coexisting with fearsome, outsized monsters and bygone ruins of forgotten empires.

A boy named Shuna leaves his fading village to seek power and adventure in a vast, harsh world full of magic and cruelty. Shuna wanders the ruins of dead empires, battles slave traders, and comes face-to-face with bizarre powers which humankind can never hope to tame. Shuna’s main quest is for some magic seeds-a fairy tale element-but he is forced to do battle with the evil forces of the world using a variety of guerilla warfare tactics. All this is rendered in evocative watercolor art in a sort of storybook style which lends a peculiar grace to this hard-boiled fantasy adventure. Long time Miyazaki fans will perhaps see in Shuna’s Journey a kind of roadmap for many of the themes, character designs, production designs, conflicts, and strange creatures that would go on to achieve global pop culture iconography status. Shuna’s Journey is so dense with the primal material of Miyazaki’s subsequent work that it almost seems like the artist conjured a prophecy of his future glory via the power of a maniacal work ethic. 

Shuna’s Journey also works as a story all unto itself. It is not merely of interest to Miyazaki obsessives and collectors. If you have never even heard of Hayao Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli Shuna’s Journey offers an experience complete unto itself. The main ideas here have to do with survival and power. Shuna leaves his fading agrarian village to seek a better life for himself. Shuna is also tantalized by the prospect of finding the source of magic seeds which promise a future of abundance beyond subsistence farming, beyond hunting and gathering. To this end, Shuna manufactures his own bullets to feed the rifle handed down from the previous generation. Shuna’s a very model of rugged self-sufficiency, and yet he seeks ever more power. This restless seeking comes at a terrible price. Shuna’s adventures are grand: he kills slave traders with the bullets he himself crafted; he liberates slaves; he stands his ground against ghoulish night raiders; and, much like the player characters of The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, he’s persistent and intuitive enough to see the way forward through bizarre, formidably occulted terrain. The cost is that Shuna suffers trauma from violent battle, sleepless exhaustion, exposure to the elements, and deprivation of nutrition. Shuna’s capable, yet also mortal. 

Late in the narrative, there’s a change in perspective which suggests Shuna’s single minded pursuit of the magic seeds must be tempered by ethical connection to other people. His personality and agency are evacuated by his experience of a terrible otherworldly power which requires him to enter another’s care. This level of hardship and the complexity it entails brings a sense of gravity into the fantasy. Unlike with Marvel Cinematic Universe products-where endlessly malleable computerized action figures get iterated across endless potential product outputs- in Shuna’s Journey great power comes with both great responsibility and consequences. The power Shuna attains might be wielded responsibly, but it will always do some violence to its wielder. Shuna’s hope lies in his allying himself with the oppressed who endure injustice while also fighting to expand their domain of autonomy.

Shuna’s Journey is an engaging fantasy about power, self-reliance, and finding a place in the world against oppressive regimes of both nature and humankind. Its seemingly happy ending is shadowed by a certainty of future conflicts against the powers of the world. One is left with the sense that Shuna and his allies will endure no matter the hardships.

MOVIE REVIEW: ZEDER (1983)

Directed by Pupi Avati

Photographed by Franco Delli Colli

Music by Riz Ortolani

Edited by Amedeo Salfa

Written by Pupi Avati, Maurizio Costanzo, and Antonio Avati

Starring

Gabriele Lavia as Stefano (Novelist)

Anne Canovas as Alessandra 

. . .

“Don’t you realize I’m telling you about insane things!”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

There are places known as K-Zones. If you bury the dead in one of them then they will come back to life. A conspiracy involving academics, priests, police, and politicians evolves to conceal the existence of K-Zones since they kinda transform the basic reality of existence. A civilian investigator-a struggling horror novelist-chances upon the secret of K-Zones and tries to unravel their secrets. 

Zeder lays it all out for the audience pretty directly, and then lets us observe its protagonist sink deeper into danger. The horror novelist isn’t hapless. He’s actually quick to realize people are lying as part of a vast cover-up. A would-be whistleblower fails to appear at a secret meeting. Everybody he talks to is obviously choosing their words a little too carefully. Most people, if confronted with the situations in Zeder, would simply go home, but the horror novelist cannot resist becoming a Full Protagonist just like he’s been trying to write in one of his rejected manuscripts. It felt to me like his failure as a pulp author had metaphysically displaced his mundane reality with a genre reality. Artistic frustration might be the truly eldritch power at work in the deepest background of this low key saga.

Zeder is a horror mystery centering on a fantastic premise that’s set exclusively in concrete, real world locations, which are all photographed with an unnerving clarity. The look isn’t nearly as shadowy as one might assume. It ends up being about how a t-shirt and jeans Everyman navigates mundane spaces that have been infused with otherworldly dread. It’s light on the blood and gore. Zeder leans into dialogues of interrogation and atmospheric traversals. By accident it resonates more with point and click adventure games than contemporary horror movie trends. The soundtrack emphasizes a tightly looped motif of tension and danger much like a video game soundtrack. It also vibes with trendy Terminally Online aesthetics: Urbex, Dead Mall shit, Liminality-I wouldn’t be surprised if a YouTube or Nebula grifter has done a video essay on Zeder. 

Zeder is an engaging film experience if one doesn’t get too caught up in the plausibility of the K-Zone idea, which is not overtly explained in detail-nor should it be. Zeder works best as a chronicle of a t-shirt and jeans guy’s odyssey into the unknown despite the best efforts of creepy, aggressive gatekeepers-the church, the cops, the academy, the state-to keep him puttering about upon the surface of things. It might not even be a conspiracy about policing the borderline between the worlds of Life and Death so much as it is about enforcing the border between being a Protagonist of a grandiose narrative and just settling for being a nobody in the great crowd of nobodies.

COMICS REVIEW: BIOTECH COMIX (1983)

Writer and artist unknown.

Published by H. T. Philbrick Associates in 1983. Biotech Comix is their only known publication so far as I am able to determine.

Available on the Internet Archive.

. . .

“Oh hell. I’m sick of e.coli and selective anthrax. What I want is a really good lover . . .”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Here we have an anonymous comic book-Biotech Comix-with no credited author or artist. I would like to tell you that I found it out in the wild in a quarter or dollar bin, but that’s not what happened. I found it looking through the Internet Archive’s scans of various obscure comic books. I prefer to read physical copies of printed works, but I’ve gotten used to reading things on a screen. I still have that twinge of desire for an actual book in my hands, but it’s not an overriding lust as it used to be. I grow more accustomed to my existence as an extension of online platforms by the day. So it goes.

As for Biotech Comix itself, it contains two stories:  the one page curtain raiser “Sordophage” and the thirty page main story “Biotech Comix.”

“Sordophage” is a mock advertisement aimed at housewives for a self-replicating enzyme called Sordo that promises empowerment even within the confines of wifely duties. Now, you can clean those fucking dishes faster, which will leave you more time for other shitass forms of domestic drudgery. Truly revolutionary. It’s a sketch comedy level spoof on a well worn cliche of advertising campaigns which condescend to women by speciously equating gimmicky conveniences with a vague, toothless form of pseudo-feminism. While not necessarily connected to the main story that follows, you could interpret it as functioning in a similar fashion to the Media Break segments in Robocop or commercial spoofs on Saturday Night Live or Second City TV. The last panel punchline is that the housewife is using her newfound abundance of free time to assemble what looks like a Kalashnikov assault rifle. You’re left to imagine what happens next when hubby comes home from the salt mines . . . “Honey, I’m home!” RAT-A-TAT-TAT! “Honey, I’m dead!”

“Biotech Comix” tells the story of disgruntled geneticist Dr. Victoria Topple, who works for the distinguished Stoat Skittering Institute (an obvious parody of the Sloan-Kettering Institute) in New York City attempting to cultivate strains of anthrax that target communists. Dr. Topple is bored by her research. She’s also fed-up with the mediocrity of heterosexual men, so she decides to fuck-off her assigned projects, and set her mind upon the task of using biotechnology to Frankenstein herself a dream lover. Dr. Topple wants a lover who can dance, who can cook, who can clean, and who can fuck. Dr. Topple also has a thing for panda bears. She clones the brain of a dead man from the Pathology Research Department and then proceeds to weave human neural tissue into the cells of a panda bear. After some trial and error and a lucky lightning bolt Dr. Topple has herself a keeper: a pandaman named Tom. 

Dr. Topple takes Tom out on dates. At first, people gaze with perplexity and loathing upon this coupling of woman and beast, but this all changes once the ladies see how attentive, charming, and skilled Tom is as a dancer, a chef, and a lover. Dr. Topple’s girlfriends ask her how much for a pandaman of their own. The word-of-mouth is killer. Soon enough, Dr. Topple’s a millionaire off the first batch of pre-orders. She cuts ties with Stoat Skittering, and uses her riches to construct her own pandaman facility. Women all over the US abandon their human hubbies for that pandaman action. Dr. Topple institutes a sliding scale for payments so these furry lovers aren’t just for the super rich. American women leave their old lives to form a feminist breakaway republic, ditching shitty jobs and shitty men to live like Amazons in those old Wonder Woman comics. Without secretaries, nurses, teachers, research assistants, librarians, and housewives the Reaganite economy implodes, property values plummet, and the men fall ever deeper into macho paranoia and incompetence. Dr. Topple uses her economic superiority to buy Northern California, Utah, Colorado, and the failing aerospace industries. The menfolk try to use domestic violence to control the women but the pandamen just beat their asses. So, the menfolk create their very own pandawomen-but these pandawomen reject domination and instead opt to become a dangerous biker gang. The useless men resort to McCarthyite Red Scare rhetoric and militarism but only succeed in tripping over each other’s dicks as they fight over defense budget appropriations for overly complicated weapons systems of dubious functionality. Dr. Topple and her Neo-Amazons prepare for an apocalyptic showdown with the men . . . but the men end up killing each other as cooperation is sabotaged by macho territoriality. 

A lot happens in Biotech Comix. It’s a sarcastic, gleeful boot up the ass of Ronald Reagan’s conservative, militaristic America. It takes the perviness one finds in, say, Robert Crumb and reconfigures it from a feminist perspective. A comics historian might fruitfully place it in some kind of relation to other adventurous anthropomorphic comics of the 1980s: Omaha the Cat Dancer, Albedo Anthropomorphics, and Usagi Yojimbo. The art is derpy looking, but the satire is delivered head-on. If the visuals had been more accomplished Biotech Comix might have caught on, but who can say. 

Overall, Biotech Comix offers a perverse satirical counterattack against Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority’s mission to devalue and emiserate womankind. The visuals aren’t quite up to the ideas, but it gets the point across. The back cover promises another issue, but that might’ve been just a mockery of the endless serializations of Marvel and DC superhero soap operas. There’s just the one issue of Biotech Comix for better or worse.

And you can read it on the Internet Archive if you want. I did. It was great. It did not waste my time. Which is always nice.

BOOK REVIEW: CITY AT WORLD'S END (1950, 1951, 1983)

by Edmond Hamilton

First published in the July 1950 issue of Startling Stories. Published as a hardcover novel by Frederick Fell in 1951. 

This review is based on the Del Rey Science Fiction paperback edition published in July 1983.

Publication information is sourced from The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and the copyright page of the Del Rey book. 

. . . 

"And the released force of the first super-atomic bomb did it. It blew this town into another part of the space-time curve, into another age millions of years in the future, into this dying, future Earth!"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

City at World's End is a cornball redemption of America's angst over inventing nuclear weapons. 

Let me see if I can explain.

The allegorically named American city of Middletown gets blasted by an experimental nuke and catapulted into a bizarre future. Middletown is home to some kind of Top Secret atomic research and development project. The husbands do the science shit, and the wives stay home, in the kitchen, and in the dark. Middletown's importance as a military asset has painted it as a target, or there has been a horrific accident. The text is somewhat ambiguous on this point. Instead of destroying Middletown and killing all the people, this new kind of nuke blasts a hole through the fabric of space/time causing the city and all its residents to be transported into the far future. 

In the far future, the Middletowners seem to be the only humans left. There's an eerie abandoned shell of a futuristic city just down the road full of fantastic technology. The Middletowners relocate to this more secure location. Soon, future humans and extraterrestrials arrive in space ships. It is revealed that humanity abandoned the Earth to establish an interstellar dominion, one made possible, in the fullness of time, due to the groundwork laid in the 1940s by the advent of nuclear weapons and all of the attendant scientific advances that grew from harnessing the power of the atom. 

So, uh, the logic-if you can call it that-at work here is that as horrific as the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, and as terrorizing as the proliferation of doomsday weapons was to everyday people on planet Earth . . . eventually . . . somebody somewhere made a bomb so powerful that it skipped over Genocide and just went straight to Space/Time Warp. And, luckily, Middletown and its people got blasted by one of these "special" nukes as opposed to the bland and boring "incomprehensible slaughter" kind. It's rather convenient.

Now, City at World's End is told from the perspective of a nuclear physicist named Kenniston-possibly named for the Lensman Kimball Kinnison-who must maneuver from one chapter to another, all the while performing significant Protagonist Actions until the story ends. These actions include learning extraterrestrial languages, giving stirring speeches to doofus crowds of Middletowners that seem like set-ups for The Simpsons jokes, and ditching his Earth Wife for a bodacious Space Babe on the very last page. Along the way, he saves the Earth and wins the respect of an intergalactic coalition of humans and extraterrestrials. At one point, Kenniston has to convince the intergalactic future folk to let him use an even more special kind of nuke to restart the rundown core of Earth. So you see, nuclear weapons seem scary to Earthfolks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but who knows? Maybe in the far future, a super-duper nuke can be used to reignite the core after running down to fumes.

Yeah . . . City at World's End isn't terribly convincing. It is painless enough to read, though, coming as it does from the prolific science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton who had written scores of sword and planet tales for the sci-fi pulps by 1950 when this story was first published. Hamilton's prose style is concrete, no tricks, and he even generates some creepy mystery vibes in the early chapters. Later, when the Middletowners deal with the intergalactic folks, the writing loses some of that tension, but it is easy enough to follow. No mention is made of Communism, the USSR, and the USA doesn't seem to have any real politics, aside from fully normalized misogyny. Technology drives everything. Ultimately, City at World's End is more of an attempt at a dramatic techno-allegory than a swashbuckler, so give it points for ambition. If one looks at science fiction as a way of processing anxieties about the future, and the disturbing potentialities of advanced technology, then I guess City at World's End is a way of using storytelling to make sense of nuclear weapons. We use religion to make sense of suffering and death. City at World's End seeks a deeper purpose for The Bomb.

One of the more amusing episodes involves the Middletowners' first contact with extraterrestrials who are described with a chimerical mixture of human and animal traits. Nothing too alien. I could picture the action figures, the Saturday morning cartoons. The adults of Old Earth react with fear, but their unbigoted children love these beings from beyond the stars. I wondered if young George Lucas read City at World's End and got a nuke-induced future prophecy of a fortune hustled from mass produced action figures. I guess that's one more reason to stop worrying and kiss The Bomb. If it helps, you can imagine one of those "special" nukes as being shaped like a pair of gleaming steel ass cheeks.