Have you actually read "Seduction of the innocent"?

[samurainoir]

-Reiko the Zombie Shop. WAY insane levels of T&A, and lots of disturbing violence; but kinda funny. Almost a parody of comics where kids collect things and make ‘em fight; in this one the kids collect the souls of the damned.
-DeathNote. 12 volumes, and one of the few stories where the characters are supposed to be super-intelligent and actually ACT that way.

Both on my list as well. Reiko is currently on sale at BMV for six bucks a volume.

Without giving too much away. For me, the best parts of Deathnote are about the first 2/3rds before there was a bit of a "soft reboot" on the status quo. While I admire that ballsy move on the part of the creator, the conflict felt a little less personal after that and the stakes didn't seem quite as high in some regards. Not exactly a bad thing given the fact that it is a series which was completely unpredictable at times, but more to do with what a completely riviting character the original antagonist was to the anti-hero of the book. It's head and shoulders above most of the stuff out there.

Deathnote is also a live action movie and anime, but I prefer the manga incarnation.

I also really love Drifting Classroom. Lord of the Flies through a uniquely Japanese horror filter.

[ctc]

>Reiko is currently on sale at BMV for six bucks a volume.

But they sort of stopped mid-story! At least last I saw. *sigh*

>the conflict felt a little less personal after that and the stakes didn't seem quite as high in some regards.

Hmmmm..... IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT; STOP HERE!!!


You mean with Near? I thought that worked pretty good, 'cos the idea seemed to be all about putting the ol B-slap on Light. To show that he'd already been rendered obsolete.



OKAY; YOU CAN READ NOW.

>Deathnote is also a live action movie and anime, but I prefer the manga incarnation.

Definitely; although I liked the tv show too. Probably 'cos it's pretty much dead-on to the comic.

>I also really love Drifting Classroom.

Oh yeah! That's another weird one!

Don C.

[samurainoir]

Deathnote ***SPOILER ALERT***

You mean with Near? I thought that worked pretty good, 'cos the idea seemed to be all about putting the ol B-slap on Light. To show that he'd already been rendered obsolete.

I was talking about the final fate of L. Although it was really fascinating how he was able to eventually find victory through the machinations of his two proteges. I loved the second act cat and mouse between Light and L so much, that the third act of Light's complete descent seemed a little anti-climactic because of how less up close and personal it was prior. Still some awesome twists and turns before the end though.

Did you end up reading Dragon Head?

[B-Lister]

Wertham was wrong, and we lost an entire generation's creative energy as a result.

I've read the book, and Wertham and Jack Thompson are cut from the same cloth. A whackjob with too much credibility. Far more than he deserves.

the unenlightened, and ignorant will always fear the artistic and creative. Because the artistic and creative are able to express the emotions and feelings that the ignorant consider taboo, and are too afraid, or numb to express themselves. So they seek to exploit, and if they can't exploit, they seek to control.

Which is why free expression is so sacred, and absolute free expression should always be embraced.

[ctc]

>the artistic and creative are able to express the emotions and feelings that the ignorant consider taboo

Plus, people don't react so good to things that are even a little bit different. (Case in point; I'm surprised this thread hasn't degenerated into "Japanese comics suck!" yet....)

Don C.

[thunderbolt]

^^^I'm still trying to figure out how it became a manga love fest.

[ctc]

>I'm still trying to figure out how it became a manga love fest.

Wertham=are comics for kids? Comics not for kids=Japanese or Eurpoean comics, and not too many folks are familiar with European comics 'cos they never really had a big wave hit here.

Ta-dah!

Don C.

[samurainoir]

Just to bring the discussion full circle, I just attended a really interesting lecture presentation this weekend at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival, on Manga and Censorship.

Japan faced it's own censorship controversies in the late eighties when the press latched onto the fact that notorious serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki was an avid manga reader (and anime and horror movie fan).
Tsutomu Miyazaki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[ctc]

>Japan faced it's own censorship controversies in the late eighties when the press latched onto the fact that notorious serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki was an avid manga reader

Interesting ‘cos it used the same logic Wertham did; a psycho read comics, so comics made him a psycho.

Japan is an interesting case study, since they never really had their inquest like we did. They came close a few times; but it didn’t really carry over until the 90's. Even so, their comics developed similarly to ours, except their equivalent of the 60's undergrounds was very mainstream. Makes me wonder how OUR industry would have developed had the Code not been put in place. Would the early 80's independent boom happened earlier? Would it have taken?

Don C.

[samurainoir]

I think Japan is a good case study on how Censorship (in both comics and other media like film and amime) never works to the benefit of anyone on either side of the fence.

My understanding is that all the oddball fetishes we attribute to many Japanese adult work is a direct result of a creative response to Japan's censorship laws stating that they cannot depict pubic hair nor can they show penile penetration. Thus the whole hairless "Loli" aesthetic and "Tentacles" as the graphic stand-in.

It also seems that the labeling system instigated after the sensationalism of the Miyazaki murders had the exact opposite effect of curbing the more extreme material... now with an umbrella that they could legitimately produce material under, there was an explosion of adult oriented manga into the market in the nineties.

In a similar way that XXX became a marketing standard in North American mainstream pornography in the seventies, and Hong Kong (and chinatowns in North America) benefited from the "rating" of Cat III in the eighties.

You cannot ask for a better publicity campaign than this kind of censorship movement and subsequent ratings implementation.

With the video game ratings for example, there are kids who will instantly want the ones rated for Teens, and Teens of course will want the ones rated for Adults.

In marketing, you are often actually pitching your "Teen" brands for "Tweens", and so on.

[ctc]

>You cannot ask for a better publicity campaign than this kind of censorship movement and subsequent ratings implementation.

HAW! Too true! I’m reminded of the “D&D is satanic, Metal is evil, Mortal Kombat is violent” flaps that only served to expand the market for the targets.

>My understanding is that all the oddball fetishes we attribute to many Japanese adult work is a direct result of a creative response to Japan's censorship laws stating that they cannot depict pubic hair nor can they show penile penetration. Thus the whole hairless "Loli" aesthetic and "Tentacles" as the graphic stand-in.

Sort of. It goes back a lot farther though. (Back to “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.”) I think ultimately Japan has (and always had) such a huge audience for comics that durned near anything could sell. The sex and violence got ramped up in the 60's.... again, paralleling our own underground movement, but totally mainstream. Because comics were seen as a medium and not a genre. Adult books weren’t seen as weird because it wasn’t weird to see adults reading comics. That’s where I think the Wertham bit really hurt our comic industry. It put the idea in people’s heads that comics were just for kids.

>now with an umbrella that they could legitimately produce material under, there was an explosion of adult oriented manga into the market in the nineties.

Hmmmm.... Japanese comics are like entertainment media anywhere; they move in cycles. The adult stuff was around WAY before the 90's, but became flavour of the month for a bit then. Especially HERE; where it was so different than anything we’d ever produced. Consequently, once “Pocket Monster” made a LOT of money, the Japanese animation market shifted towards more kiddified stuff.

Comics still show some variety though, ‘cos the huge audience is still there and in the minds of a lot of readers comics and cartoons are two different things. (Kinda like how post-Wertham we saw comic BOOKS as kids stuff, but comic STRIPS as more general audience.)

Don C.

[Mod Style]

Censorship works! Just ask the experts....Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Glenn Beck.

[samurainoir]

Hmmmm.... Japanese comics are like entertainment media anywhere; they move in cycles. The adult stuff was around WAY before the 90's, but became flavour of the month for a bit then. Especially HERE; where it was so different than anything we’d ever produced. Consequently, once “Pocket Monster” made a LOT of money, the Japanese animation market shifted towards more kiddified stuff.

I think the problem we saw in the nineties with both North American and Japanese industries was the creation of the Pornographic Berlin Wall as a result of the various ratings implementations and obscenity related arrests of comic store staff (defended by the CBLDF).

The end result was an explosion of comic/manga porn led by all the specialty imprints like Eros, but a watering down of mainstream work aimed at a grown up audience by stripping away the element of human sexuality within a more rounded framework of character and story.

Thus ANY subject of sexuality or even casual nudity was relegated to the top shelves and back corners of the comic shops. Watchmen, American Flagg, Omaha the Cat Dancer, Yummy Fur, Heavy Metal, Julius Schwartz's ill fated Science Fiction Graphic Novel Imprint, Moonshadow, Peter Bagge's Neat Stuff, Crumb's Weirdo, Speigelman's Raw, and dozens of other important works of the eighties wouldn't have had the same kind of mainstream access in the nineties climate.

As a result we had the explosion of Malibu, Image, Valient, Marvel, DC etc all peddling the same kind of material that was acceptable across the board to the so-called "local obscenity standards" that were holding the comics retailers hostage in court. Which of course meant that the PTA or concerned parents were absolutely shocked at anything naked or sexual, but good ol' fashioned EC style decapitations and injury to eye motifs were by this time, perfectly above ground.

On the other hand, you have eighties work like American Flagg and Watchmen addressing head on the issues of Leather and Domination sexual fetishism that have been inherent in the medium since Wonder Woman pulled out her magic lasso. In the nineties we get XXX-Women from Eros (Fantographics) on the Porn side, and in the mainstream "Headlights" are now perfectly acceptable as long as you don't show nipples, so we get the "Bad Girl" movement led by the likes of Lady Death and the return of Vampirella.

Meanwhile in Japan, creators like Lone Wolf and Cub writer Kazuo Kioke and his artistic collaborator Ryoichi Ikegami suddenly abandoning any kind of sexuality that had been a staple of mainstream work like Crying Freeman, Wounded Man, Madbull 34, Offered, Mai the Psychic Girl, Auction House etc in the eighties.

Even a relatively tame manga like City Hunter (best described as Remington Steel and Benny Hill rolled into one) ended his spying-on-naked-girls-showering-erection-popping-bodyguard/private eye schtick by the nineties (but not before Jackie Chan had a shot at playing him in a live action movie).

[samurainoir]

Just switching back to the Wertham track, it occurs to me that he wasn't the first Pop Psychologist to attack comics in the press.

One of the earliest critics was a famous psychologist who wrote in Family Circle Magazine about the harmful aggressive masculinity that typified the popular comics of the early forties.

So what happened to this guy's campaign? Well it seems that Max Gaines decided to contact him and gave him on offer to write his own comic book. The psychologist decided that his comic book heroine would show the young impressionable audience how to change the world with the power of Feminine love, naming the character Suprema.

Editor Sheldon Mayer convinced psychologist William Moulton Marston, that Wonder Woman was a better name, and thus Marston started writing the adventures of the star spangled fetish laden superheroine under the pen name Charles Moulton, and the rest is history.

Now imagine if Max's son Bill had taken a page from his Father's playbook and offered Wertham the opportunity to write his own brand of wholesome comics for disadvantaged inner city boys based on his own values of social justice and racial equality that he had been fighting so hard for within the health care system of the fifties?

[ctc]

>I think the problem we saw in the nineties with both North American and Japanese industries was the creation of the Pornographic Berlin Wall as a result of the various ratings implementations and obscenity related arrests of comic store staff

Hmmmm.... I’d disagree with this, since the “offensive” books were around WAY before the 90's. I think the ratings and arrests actually had something of a cooling effect overall.... but in a weird way. Yes; there became a more stratified line between “adult” material and non, but I don’t think it led to a proliferation of sex and violence. It gave the existing material more exposure (*ba-DUM-dum!*) and made it more accessible, but it also put it in competition with more mainstream books. So you had an overall decline in the AMOUNT of sexually charged books, but an INCREASE in the sexual content, since they were competing for a suddenly specialized audience.

>in the mainstream "Headlights" are now perfectly acceptable as long as you don't show nipples, so we get the "Bad Girl" movement led by the likes of Lady Death and the return of Vampirella.

And this was the reaction on the other side. Books like this saw an opportunity to increase sales/appeal/whatnot with more sexualization, BUT they were careful not to cross the now well defined line into “sex books.” So costumes got skimpier, boobs got freakishly large, poses got borrowed from “Swank” magazine, but they never quite crossed the actual nudity line. Doing so would have limited the potential audience.

>the PTA or concerned parents were absolutely shocked at anything naked or sexual, but good ol' fashioned EC style decapitations and injury to eye motifs were by this time, perfectly above ground

The ol’ N. American “sex bad, violence good!!!” thing. (Ever see Zardoz? “The gun is good, the penis is evil....”) But even the violence got watered down in the 90's.... but likewise in a weird way. There was more.... I don’t want to say “realism,” but more detail added to the fights: blood, injuries and such; but they were still as superficial as the old superhero days. Weird streaks of stuff the MIGHT be blood, injuries that don’t have any actual effect, stuff like that. Like the sex, the 90's mainstream books made you THINK you were getting something you weren’t, for the sake of still being sellable to the 14 year olds.

>dozens of other important works of the eighties wouldn't have had the same kind of mainstream access in the nineties climate.

Oh, HELL yeah! But I think a lot of that is because of the audience too. Perception is everything, and as the comics stratified themselves into very narrowly defined categories, so too did the fans. A lot of those 80's books wouldn’t have found an audience ‘cos nobody would have known how to take them.

>The end result was an explosion of comic/manga porn led by all the specialty imprints like Eros, but a watering down of mainstream work aimed at a grown up audience by stripping away the element of human sexuality within a more rounded framework of character and story.

Yeah, that I agree with too; and I think it was the result of comic genres becoming so rigid during the 90's. (No doubt ‘cos the 90's boom was a SALES boom and not really a content one, like the early 80's.) If you were doing an “adult” book it had to be WAY adult. If you were doing a superhero book you had to have J-Cup+ boobs, but don’t you DARE show erect nipple topography.... (Wether either added to the story or not.)

>Meanwhile in Japan, creators like Lone Wolf and Cub writer Kazuo Kioke and his artistic collaborator Ryoichi Ikegami suddenly abandoning any kind of sexuality that had been a staple of mainstream work

A lot of that had to do with the animation. The technical level needed for a cartoon in Japan to be accepted by fans is very expensive, and by the early 90's the Japanese animation industry was starting to collapse. Because the comics and cartoons are so closely linked, this affected the books. The bigger publishers started aiming for more middle of the road stuff, so’s to expand their audience; especially for the toons. Then “Pocket Monster” hit, and, well.... you know.

Don C.