What’s Michael? Volume 1

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By Makoto Kobayashi. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Morning. Released in North America by Dark Horse.

I’ve mentioned Kobayashi before, usually in the context of the weirder than weird Ero Comedy Chichonmanchi, aka Stairway to Heaven. But that’s more of a pipe dream. What he’s really known best for here is What’s Michael?, which Dark Horse released ages ago in 11 volumes. While many of the volumes are out of print, it’s continued to make an impression on readers who come across it. So I thought I’d take a look at Volume 1 and see what it is about Michael that makes you want to read more of him.

When you’re talking about Kobayashi, his faces are what people usually think of first, even more than the cute cats. (And really, with Michael and company, the word ‘cute’ is debatable.) He has a very rubbery-faced character design that lends itself well to caricature and comedy, but means that few of his characters are what one would call conventionally pretty. This was also a problem with his other major (if unfinished) release over here, Heba! Hello-chan, which was released as Club 9 by Dark Horse. The combination of striking features (I hesitate to say ugly, though many of them certainly are intentionally drawn as such – they’re just far from the manga norm) and strange, strange people made for a hard sell, especially as both came out in the ‘pre-manga’ boom.

Certainly What’s Michael? has its large amount of weirdos. Michael and his fellow cats, bizarre as they are, usually end up being the normal ones in the cast. This is especially true in this first volume, where we get very little of the ‘cats playing humans’ humor that is the other side of What’s Michael? Aside from one story featuring Michael as a criminal being grilled by police, everything here is very much about cats being cats. It’s their owners who are strange, ranging from the guy who wants his cat to be like a dog and run with him every morning, to the scatterbrained young Office Lady and her five hungry cats, to a yakuza who has to hide the fact that he’s secretly a huge cat lover from all his underlings.

What’s Michael? doesn’t necessarily provide a lot of belly laughs – you might look to Garfield for that, a comic strip that Michael has been compared with frequently. But its humor is wry and observational, and while you aren’t laughing all the time you read the entire volume with a smile on your face, and sometimes a snicker or two. The fact that Michael does not have a designated ‘owner’, but instead revolves from person to couple to whoever depending on the needs of the plot gives the manga a certain freedom, and part of the appeal is simply never knowing what kind of story you’re going to see next. It’s a blank canvas where Kobayashi can draw whatever he wants, as long as it has cats in it somewhere.

I picked up the Japanese omnibus release of this title recently, which seems to be in 4 volumes. (Be warned if you get them, they’re small – even smaller than regular manga volumes, more like a light novel size. Dark Horse uses a much bigger size. Of course, they also are about 220 pages each (36 chapters per volume), which is a nice improvement on the initial 96 pages we see here. This is a late 90s title from Dark Horse, which means there’s a greater chance of missing material here – much like Viz with its 90s releases, where they dropped chapters that were just too Japanese to flip and translate. There are several chapters that were part of the volume in Japanese that were dropped from this Volume 1 here. The first chapter of What’s Michael? had the cat shoved off a building to his death; the second had him doing a photo shoot with a nude woman, and defecating in front of her (she returns the favor later by farting in his face, in one of the funnier things I’ve read in Kobayashi manga); in another, an assassin’s profession is discovered by his girlfriend, and he then kills her, Michael, a bunch of baby kittens, and then sets out on a cat massacre; a Japanese game show imagines what the world would be like if humans behaved like cats (including women with eight breasts); and Michael is the subject of a scientific experiment on whether cats like girls’ underwear. Dark Horse also drew a bra onto the sleeping office lady’s breasts in one chapter they did release here. I’m not sure if Dark Horse added any of these chapters in later volumes (I’m still tracking down OOP copies), but certainly they all seem to have been edited for content, in an effort to make Michael more appealing to a broad range of readers.

As noted, What’s Michael? is no longer in print, the last of its 11 volumes having come out in 2006. It’s also flipped, being very much a product of what American manga companies were doing in the mid to late 1990s. I’d love to see Michael released uncut and unflipped in an expanded omnibus edition by Dark Horse. Do I think it will sell? Mmmm, probably not – especially if it is unedited, which means they’d lose the kids’ market (remember, this was published in a men’s magazine in Japan). But hey, I want it anyway. A man can dream, after all.

Karakuri Odette Volume 5

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By Julietta Suzuki. Released in Japan by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine Hana to Yume. Released in North America by Tokyopop.

It’s time for the Manga Movable Feast! Which means I finally get to talk about Odette. I read this 3 weeks ago but have been patiently waiting for the time to arrive so that I can review it and tell you all what a fun series this is. (For those interested, my prior reviews are here: http://suitablefortreatment.blogspot.com/search/label/karakuri%20odette)

One thing I found highly interesting about this volume is the way that it handled Chris. He was introduced to us in the second story as one of a series of killer assassin robots, but after Odette and Dr. Yoshizawa subdued him, he hasn’t really developed quite as well as the other cast members. We see that he has a certain jealousy at Asao’s easy interaction with Odette, but it comes to the point where he’s actually sidelined for the better part of two volumes because his battery life is lowering (which the author has implied – for both he and Odette – is due to stress). I’d often thought that his story would be very similar to Odette’s, and that she was simply more advanced and a bit ahead of him.

As we see in this volume, however, Chris’s problems are uniquely his own. We get a side-story dealing with one of the other Chris-Assassin-Bombs, who is sent to Italy to kill a professor. Unfortunately, he finds that the Professor is already dead, leaving him without a purpose. He then finds one as he not only bonds with the Professor’s cute daughter, but discovers that her uncle, the professor’s brother, is far more knowledgeable about the “accidental” death than is really allowable. The Chris shown here, his clone, may also lack outward emotions, but is shown to be caring and kind, even to the point where he sacrifices his own life for that of little Nicoletta’s. (And by the way, the expression on his face right as he explodes is fantastic, a sort of “You lose” grin.)

Meanwhile, we run into another advanced robot, this one named Travis. The comparison between Travis and Odette is striking – both are advanced robots who have a bit more ’emotion’, and have an extended family featuring their creator as well as another robot who is more deadpan and less advanced/emotive. Like attracts like, and it’s no surprise that he and Odette bond fairly quickly. Of course, he is a bit ahead of Odette in one area – he’s searching for a bride, and becomes convinced that Odette is the right one for him. Odette still hasn’t quite worked out the whole love thing yet.

And then there’s Odette’s wonderful younger sister-older brother relationship with Asao, once again the highlight of the volume. For all that he seems to hate having to be her mentor, his advice remains fantastic. The first chapter sees Odette once again upset at her robot strength, in a call-back to Volume 1. She’s not about to have the Professor alter it again, but she is depressed that she’s never going to be seen as ‘cute’ like her fragile friend Yoko. Asao, despite being stressed out as Odette is clearly feeling bad but not opening up, notes that being cute is not NEARLY as important as being cool – which Odette certainly is.

All of this ties in to the final two chapters of this volume, where all of this comes together. Chris has returned to Odette and school, but is as undemonstrative as ever, and Odette finds it frustrating, especially given that she’s had the occasion to meet Travis. She even bluntly notes that she wants Chris to be more like Travis. Of course, this also leads to one of Odette’s faults – she can get so carried away with discovering her own emotions and feelings that she doesn’t take in what other people are feeling. It’s up to Asao to set her straight, and it’s typical of him that it’s with a verbal gut punch. He notes she didn’t bother to think how CHRIS felt about things at all, only what she felt. Asao is especially irritated as Chris has been hit by a car, and Odette is off flirting with Travis (even though she’s likely unaware it’s flirting). “You playing around like that… is not something I care to see.” And just like that, she’s devastated. (She’s also still crying out of one eye, a nice bit of continuity.)

I still don’t see Odette and Asao as a romantic couple. But he’s clearly become the most important man in her life right now – more important than Chris and Travis, and perhaps even more than the Professor. (The Professor gets a moment of utter awesome mid-volume here, which I apologize for not getting into. Odette’s terror when she imagines his response is very telling.) The preview for the final volume shows Asao’s graduation, and may be leading to a final crisis of sorts – though I also doubt Travis is going away anytime soon. But really, once again I find this review doesn’t say enough because there’s SO MUCH I want to talk about. Every volume of Odette leads me to want to babble on and on about its plot, its characters, its art, what it says about humanity, what it says about robots. Much as this is supposedly about a robot trying to be human, much of what Odette goes through strikes me as a teenager trying to grow up. It’s a fantastic pickup for Tokyopop (so much so that I’ll forgive them the tacky back cover motto), and I am very happy it got to be in a Manga Movable Feast.

Cross Game Volume 2

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By Mitsuru Adachi. Released in Japan in 2 separate volumes by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

The first thing I would like to note is that the mangaka who can wring emotion from the art on the page is rare. But the mangaka that can wring emotion from the LOGO is even rarer. Just the sight of the four-leaf clover, one of the leaves now dimmed to a duller green, made me melancholy.

After setting up his cast and setting in the first 3 volumes of Cross Game, Adachi spends most of these two doing what he does best: writing baseball games. From Chapter 23-35, we get a faceoff between Ko’s ‘portable’ squad and the regular varsity team, featuring ace slugger Azuma. There’s a lot going on here: the varsity coach’s stubborn jerkishness, which banishes comic relief pitcher Senda to the other team early on. Koh facing actual batters in a game for the first time, including people who actually hit off of him. And Aoba, in the stands, offering running commentary and managing to cheer Ko on while at the same time maintaining her usual skeptical disbelief.

Ko, needless to say, is good. Very good. But he’s not the best starter in Japan yet, or even the best starter in the group. He still has trouble wearing himself out easily, and only gets over that hump when he sacrifices his control to concentrate entirely on speed. And he can sometimes get too full of himself, which leads to the final run that decides the game. Still, as was noted, it was the sort of debut that makes the rest of the team want to play harder just to live up to their teammate.

There is comedy here, of course. Most of it is in the sort of wry grin type – I loved Aoba’s reaction to “No fair!”, as she cradles her bruised hand. Likewise a few times during the game, Adachi cuts back to the Tsukishima’s cafe, where the other two sisters provide fun humor and untranslatable puns. (Credit to Viz for just going with them as best they could.) And yes, Adachi breaks the fourth wall a couple more times, though at least he isn’t advertising his old manga anymore.

But there’s also some incredible emotion here, all the more amazing by what ISN’T revealed. Adachi and Rumiko Takahashi call each other ‘best friends and rivals’, and it fits very well, as they each fill in the other’s weaknesses with their strengths. In particular, Adachi is a master at letting the reader fill in the blank rather than spelling everything out. Chapter 36 features Ko waiting hand and foot over the shallow manager of the varsity squad, carrying her things and putting up with her degrading comments – as well as intense anger from Aoba, who noted earlier that “that’s the kind of guy he is”, then got even more annoyed when she saw it, as that ISN’T the kind of guy he is. (Lies between Ko and Aoba dominate the entire series.) Takahashi would milk this misunderstanding for all it’s worth. Adachi defuses it three pages later, as Aoba’s two friends happened to see the real reason he was doing this. They’re confused, but Aoba immediately knows what’s going on.

Wakaba is still a major presence in this work, of course. Besides the previous chapter, which ends with Ko putting the Cat Teapot he got by degrading himself into her present box (only 4 years to go till the engagement ring), but things get even scarier when Ko and Senda have to go find Aoba, who has gotten the wrong directions and ended up lost in the woods. Ko, trying to find her, finds instead her shoe. By a roaring river. In the middle of summer. Any self-respecting shonen hero would be having a nervous breakdown by now, given Ko’s past memories of Wakaba. Instead, after two panels of panic, we fade back to see… this is actually a video of his panic being shown to Aoba, who is fine.

So Adachi does not have the strength of showing raw emotions the way that Takahashi does. On the other hand, he can use his own staid, unhurried style to let the reader create their own tension, and then get the same release. It works well during the baseball game, and it works doubly well in the summer chapters here. Ko is an undemonstrative hero, but that’s why we get the occasional dialogue like “It’s good to be busy during the summer… keeps you from thinking too much.” It shows us that both Ko and Aoba are still having immense trouble letting go of the past.

At the end of this omnibus, things are much the same place they were last time. The portables have come together as a team, and Ko has shown that he can pitch well in a real game, but they aren’t going to varsity anytime soon unless they either convince or ditch the sadistic coach. I can’t wait to see how this plays out in Vols. 6 & 7, aka Vol. 3 here, in April.