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 Mangalife Spotlight on: SolaninWritten by Park Cooper My mom and I saw the movie REALITY BITES at the same time. I saw it in the theater—hey, what can I say, I used to like Winona Ryder; Ben Stiller used to be funny. When the movie was over, my mom was horrified. “Now I understand why your generation has it so bad!” she said. “There are old people everywhere who get to criticize everything you do and make you do all the boring work! You can’t enjoy your work, you have to pay your dues until you are an old person first!” (It was the most horrified I’d seen her be about anything until I recently explained to her that some people are proud of being stupid. “Oh, no! That explains everything that’s bad these days!”) Anyway, if you enjoyed REALITY BITES and other post-John-Hughes, I’ve-grown-up-and-everything-sucks-now movies like SINGLES (remember that one?), you’ll be primed and ready for SOLANIN, the latest in Viz’s Signature line of titles. If not, you may well enjoy it anyway, but if you’re between the ages of 18 and 34, odds are you’ll come away with some serious soul-searching to do about your own life. Meiko Inoue is a recent college grad working at a sucky job. Her live-in boyfriend, Naruo, also works a job that is less sucky but just as boring. Near the start of the story, Meiko quits her job. What’ll happen now? Her job has sucked all the enjoyment and life out of her, and so her mid-life crisis has come about 10, 15 years early... and that starts to spread to other people she knows. Will her boyfriend be able to finally make something of his band and their signature song, “Solanin”? The art and feel of this large/thick manga are extremely Miyazaki—not exactly fantastic, but pastoral, thoughtful. No—Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki’s studio, really, more than the man himself: ONLY YESTERDAY, OCEAN WAVES/I CAN HEAR THE SEA, and WHISPER OF THE HEART, specifically. Or, if you want to go this way, and you’ve seen the anime, a FLCL in which aliens with guitars never show up. (In fact, I found myself humming the best of The Pillows’ soundtrack to FLCL starting the first time Solanin’s band showed up.) Like Naota, Mamimi, and Eri from that series, only 7 or 8 years later, Meiko and her comrades are constantly asking themselves “How did I end up here? Wasn’t I supposed to be a big success? If you want something badly enough, doesn’t that mean you can have it?” All three questions having to be asked are the fault of society, but the answer to the last one is No. It’s much more complicated than that. This manga was sent to me by a person who does PR for Viz as a comp copy. He put a post-it on the front reading: “Hey Park— You should check our this new manga—It’s a really cool story!” My wife: “It’s slice-of-life? That’s no fun.” Well, yes, it’s true that slice-of-life comics are in fact no fun—as we in America know the wretched things. But this is something that doesn’t quite fit in that category. This is more Huge-Story-of-End-of-Life-Beginning-of-New-Life. Imagine if the guys in the movie CLERKS actually said to themselves “You know what? I like myself too much to keep being a clerk here. I’m out of here.” And then showed just how hard figuring out an alternative to that really is. And then showed how, without indulging in a fairy-tale fantasy too-good-to-be-true type of happy ending, they could maybe feel like they might have made a sufficiently rewarding choice. Not a super-success-story choice, but one they can live with. The art is shaded throughout, unlike the way manga normally is. Normally, one of manga’s super-powers is the speed that you can execute stories with when you just draw lines in a simple style. But this is art with which even a fan of American comics can feel fairly at ease—lushly detailed, at least by comparison with other manga. And it, too, has what I feel is a Miyazaki influence even in the character design. A great story? No, I thought to myself, it’s not that it’s a great story, it’s great writing. Great writing that pulls you in, which if it was written poorly, even full-color art wouldn’t do. But the post-it on the front didn’t say that, I realized later—I’d remembered it wrong—it said it was a COOL story. Well... it isn’t that, either. It’s about some really uncool people that, if they were any less cool, would be downright losers, losers as big as any I’ve known in comics fandom, and that’s saying a LOT. But it is a POWERFUL story, and that’s true in spite of refusing (thank heavens!) to become a TRAGIC story. At least, I didn’t feel it was tragic when I got to the end. This actually could be really inspirational for anyone, even pre-high-school-grads (it’s rated for Older Teens, not Mature) or people who really are having their mid-life crisis when they’re supposed to have it. For one thing, it could convince them to make a master plan before walking out of their workplace and crying all the way home. On the other hand, it actually might be just the kick in the pants someone needs to commit themselves to their dreams. The book has plenty of cautionary warnings for people about to tell their boss to shove it as well as people who don’t believe in themselves enough. A word about the $17.99 price tag: Solanin is not a series. It is a large, 425-page stand-alone work. Think about it—that’s more than two full volumes of a regular manga, and you’re getting it for roughly the same price as two volumes of your cheapest regular manga, and certainly with better art and, taken on average, better writing as well. Which is saying something. It’s also nice to see Viz continuing to offer some diversity for those who want something more than Shonen Jump fare, great though such fare often is. I thought I didn’t know much about Viz’s Signature line, but a quick visit to the website (after repeatedly calming Chrome down about the risk of malware etc.) showed me I know more about it than I thought: Maison Ikkoku, Real, Uzumaki. Some of what Viz Signature offers really turns me off, such as Sexy Voice And Robo. But Real and Solanin are contenders strong enough to make me consider maybe picking up The Drifting Classroom, too, the next time I see it. This is stuff that can fight the impression that some people have of manga (well shoujo manga, anyway... but then some people think that that’s all that manga is, period), that it’s all about “going out with the cute guy.” Besides REAL, which I reviewed a few months ago without ever noticing that it was Viz Signature, another manga that this made me think about was EAGLE, which I recently reread cover to cover (to cover to cover to cover and so on, as it’s not a work that fits in one husky volume like Solanin does). EAGLE, the could-not-possibly-be-more-topical right-now fictional story of the first Japanese-American president of the United States and how he gets elected, like REAL and SOLANIN, offers readers—the CASUAL readership, which doesn’t know much of anything about comics aside from the Spider-Man movies or manga aside from their kids liking Naruto—stories they can sink their brains into, which tell stories about people who have challenges that draw you in without having to take you to fantastic magical worlds. There’s nothing wrong with those, but the Casual Readership may likely feel that they don’t have time for stuff like that what with their boring jobs that suck all the energy out of life. Reading HUNTER X HUNTER or DEATH NOTE can, at times, make one FEEL quite grown-up, but EAGLE, REAL, and SOLANIN have the power to trick actual non-fan grown-ups into reading them without alarming them or scaring them off. When I got this, I felt it would be a B, because I didn’t think anyone could pull off Miyazaki-level slice-of-life in a manga. I was wrong. I can see this being nominated for, I can even see this getting, the Eisner (this is a big comic book award, and they have a manga category [It was just “Foreign,” but we wanted France to have a chance, too]). I’m giving this an A. |
14 October 2008 8 October 2008 30 September 2008 23 September 2008
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