License Request Day: Yankee-kun to Megane-chan

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Once again, I end up looking at Kodansha properties, even though Del Rey is not exactly rushing to license new things, Dark Horse seems mostly interested in reissues, and pure long-running shonen is not quite Vertical’s thing. I guess until Kodansha USA gets its act together, this will just be pure hypotheticals.

Looking at currently running series in Kodansha’s flagship Weekly Shonen Magazine, there isn’t much that’s actively licensed right now. Negima, Air Gear (which is already in ‘omnibus’ format), Zetsubou-sensei, Fairy Tail, and Code: Breaker. 5 series out of about 30 that Wikipedia notes are still running at the moment in the magazine. Kindaichi Case Files was once licensed by TP, but was pulled when the Kodansha titles vanished, and was likely already canceled due to low sales even before that.

We can also leave out Hajime no Ippo (a 90+ volume boxing manga) and Godhand Teru (a 50+ volume medical drama) as being far too long to seriously recommend, and of course we can leave out all sports manga. For Magazine that’s pretty rough, as it culls Ahiru no Sora, Ace of Diamond, Shinyaku “Kyojin no Hoshi” Hanagata and Area no Kishi, all best-selling titles in Japan that won’t see the light of day here unless Cross Game somehow turns everyone’s heads. Lastly, I’m leaving out 4-koma and gag manga, so no sign of Mou, Shimasen Kara or Seitokai Yakuindomo.

(I’d personally love to see SYD over here, but that’s also unlicensable for another reason – it’s utterly filthy.)

Cut all those back, and also eliminating series too new to really be considered, and you’re left with precisely one title that’s unlicensed yet has potential. It’s called Yankee-kun to Megane-chan, and has been running in the magazine since 2006. It’s at 19+ volumes and still running, which is considerable but not so large as to be unprofitable. It has two very strong lead characters. It’s also very funny. It has a live-action series that ran in Japan earlier this year. And it’s been a big success in Singapore, where it’s called Flunk Punk Rumble.

What’s holding it back? Well, first off it doesn’t have an anime. Live-action series are all very well and good, but far less marketable to the West than a nice anime tie-in. Secondly, it features that dreaded word that sends publishers screaming to the hills: delinquents. Not quite on the level of your typical Young King title, and at least they try to keep the cast vaguely attractive-looking, but teen gang titles haven’t really been seen here since Tokyopop had to let go of Shonan Jun’ai Gumi and GTO.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it has zero elements of fantasy. The boy is not a vampire, the girl is not a ninja. These are high school students, getting into high school comedy. Even School Rumble, the title’s closest equivalent, played around with girls who could read minds and men who could talk to animals.

The premise, which I suppose I should mention at some point, is that Daichi, our hero, is trying to slouch through his high school life as a typical Yankee (a Japanese term broadly used as delinquent). Sadly, the class rep, Hana, has taken notice of him, and is making it her job to force him to shape up. Of course, as he quickly finds out, she has more than just personal interest in him at stake here, as she is highly influenced by her own past. Could this glasses-wearing annoying girl have really been one of the most terrifying delinquents in all of middle-school?

Besides School Rumble, there’s a lot of GTO to this, in that much of it is teaching gang-loving apathetic Japanese kids that there’s a more productive way of doing things. I happen to be a big fan of that sort of thing, another common Japanese trope. Could this appeal to Western readers? I think so, given the right push. It has a likeable cast, a lot of good comedy and fights, and some mild romance between the leads.

Urusei Yatsura Volume 1

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By Rumiko Takahashi. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

(n.b. – I’m going to be reviewing these volumes as they came out in Japan’s V1, rather than in Viz’s Lum Perfect Collection. Hence this review covers chapters 1-9.)

I’ve been reviewing Rin-Ne, and while I enjoy it, one of my complaints was that Takahashi had made her two leads far too nice. Sure, they’re occasionally grumpy or protest when something stupid happens, but they’re generally nice people. You can imagine hanging out with them. This is not Takahashi’s usual schtick. She specializes in mining comedy out of horrible, unlovable people and making you enjoy it. So I thought I’d go way, WAY back to 1978, where she got her first big series for Shonen Sunday, which translates broadly as “Those Obnoxious Aliens”.

It strikes me that while Takahashi is a household name, UY is not necessarily one, so I will give a brief summary. Ataru Moroboshi, a luckless boy trying to hold a steady girlfriend in cute but untrusting Shinobu Miyaki while still finding time to look at other girls, is picked to represent Earth against a race of invading aliens. He has to play a tag race against the beautiful oni Lum, and if he loses the Earth will get invaded and he’ll be an outcast. But no pressure. Even worse, he wins, and through a series of wacky misunderstandings, Lum ends up thinking they’re engaged. Now Lum is living with him, Shinobu hates him, and he *still* has his horrible luck ensuring that bad things happen to him every chapter.

It’s immediately striking how simply awful the entire cast is. Ataru is the most sympathetic, and even that’s just because of getting so much crap piled on top of him, not because of any innate likability. Shinobu is ready to mistrust him and storm off at a moment’s notice, even when it’s clear from his words and the scene in front of her that he’s not guilty. Now, one can argue having read most of the series that she is justified in that Ataru is a perverted lech, but we don’t see that here. We mostly just see a normal guy who occasionally likes to look at gorgeous women in a ‘hey, hot babe’ sort of way. The *real* Ataru only shows up in Chapter 8, which casually introduces space-biker babe Benten, where he drops everything and leaps up a tall pole to start macking on her. But in the first few chapters, it’s actually rather startling to see Ataru trying to stay faithful to Shinobu, and her hair-trigger temper doesn’t help in the least.

And then there’s Lum. Oh my god, what a harpy she is in these first few chapters. The mind just reels. The oft-told story is that UY was supposed to feature Ataru and Shinobu as the main character, with Lum as the ‘other woman’, but Lum’s insane popularity caused the editors and Takahashi to rewrite things to make Ataru and Lum the main couple. It’s so often told that it reeks of publicity, but I’d buy it judging by this volume, where my main wonder is how Lum got so popular just from this. Must have been the looks and bikini, as she is awful. Clingy and jealous, with a hair-trigger temper even worse than Shinobu’s, there’s absolutely no question why Ataru wants nothing to do with her. (At one point, his parents are away from home, and warn Ataru not to try anything while home with Lum. He genuinely sounds annoyed they’d think that of him. Oh, Ataru, where are you?)

That said, the last chapter of the volume, showing Ataru and Lum having to deal with fallout from Lum’s cooking (legendarily bad, in the best manga tradition) shows them bouncing off each other quite well, certainly better than he does with the normal Japanese girl Shinobu. I suspect this, more than any popularity contests, might be why Takahashi turned towards Ataru and Lum; they just click together.

There’s a lot of the major cast introduced here. Ataru’s horrible parents, Lum’s gruff father, Ataru’s 4 school friends (who Takahashi would quickly write out of the manga but who would be major characters in the anime – especially Megane). I’d mentioned Benten already, and we also meet Lum’s handsome-sometimes fiance Rei, who cares only about food and drives Lum crazy because of this. (Seeing her dealing with a bit of what Ataru has had to suffer from her makes you feel warm and happy.) We see the Shinto priestess Sakura, who I’d actually forgotten had been introduced as suffering from various heart conditions, diseases, and maladies, all of which vanish after her introductory chapter thanks to Ataru’s bad luck being stronger.

And then there’s Cherry. I’ve been going on and on about how unlikable the cast is in this series, but every Takahashi series seems to have one character whose mere presence causes the reader *and* the cast to react in irritation and loathing. In Maison Ikkoku it’s the freakish Yotsuya, in Ranma 1/2 it’s the perverse Happosai. And here it’s Cherry, the world’s worst Buddhist Monk, a short, ugly man whose main job seems to be annoying Ataru as much as is humanly possible and leeching food off of anyone he can find. Every line of dialogue he utters, from his portents of doom to his ludicrously awful puns makes you want him to vanish and never come back. He will be with us through the entire 34-volume series.

I feel I should note that the series was quite a hit, and not just because of young boys looking at shots of Lum in her bikini. Takahashi creates horrible people and makes them suffer horrible things because she’s an expert at making it funny, and this volume is funny. It’s not funny in a way where you identify with any of the characters, or share in their pain. It’s funny in a ridiculous, how-much-more-can-she-pile-on way, where you tune in next week to see if everything will finally snap under its own weight and fall into a pit. It is barely controlled chaos, right from Chapter 1. It’s also laden with puns, as I noted before, both subtle and blatant. Viz does a fairly decent job of trying to find Western equivalents for most of the weirder ones (Cherry’s are especially difficult to translate, as they’re so genuinely bad.)

If you can track down a copy of the Lum Perfect Collection somewhere, I do recommend it. Especially if you only know Takahashi from her Inu Yasha and Rin-Ne series, this is a great example of what happens when she just pushes on the accelerator and drives the entire manga careening out of control from the start. Sure, the art is terrible compared to her recent work, but it has its own late-70s shonen charm. More to the point, UY was a big influence on a double-dozen other series, and you’d say it was a parody of the hot magical girlfriend series (Tenchi, Oh My Goddess) if it didn’t come before *all* of them. Recommended with caution (UY can be hard to take, sort of like a loud Osaka comedian who can’t stop), but still recommended.

Walter Lantz Cartoons Part 7: Mother Goose on the Loose, Ace in the Hole, Juke Box Jamboree, Pigeon Patrol, The Loan Stranger

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1942, and the country is at war! Here at Walter Lantz studios, however, it’s business as usual. Lantz really didn’t do nearly as many wartime cartoons as Warners or Disney, though we will see one here. Instead, he worked on defining Woody Woodpecker further, aging Andy Panda a bit, continuing the Swing Symphonies, and doing the occasional one-shot.

We start off here with the weakest cartoon of the five I’m getting to, Mother Goose on the Loose. It’s the old standard modernization of Mother Goose with gags, this time at least free from celebrity caricatures (Disney’s Mother Goose Goes Hollywood was only 3 years earlier), barring an impersonation of Frank Morgan as the narrator. The cartoon is oddly disjointed, even for a spot gag entry, and halfway through the narration seems to be replaced by a choral singing group for about two minutes. Lots of shots of hot cartoon babes, though, so we get to look at some legs, at the very least.

Meanwhile, Woody appears to have joined the Army. Drafted would be my guess, judging by his sour grumpiness about it. Ace in the Hole deals with his battles with his sergeant, as well as attempts to fly a plane. Given Woody can already fly, I’m not sure why he’d want to fly one of the fighter planes we see there, though I suppose it could be for the thrill. Certainly not for his country, as patriotism is barely mentioned here (I suspect Woody would be a bad example at this point, though he is noticeably less insane in this cartoon). He has a new voice, by the way, Kent Rogers, who also did a lot of work for Warners. Kent is most famous for originating Beaky Buzzard’s voice. Notably, this is the first time we see the cartoon end with Woody losing.

Another Swing Symphony follows, this one nominated for an Academy Award. This cartoon benefits from the soundtrack beginning right at the end and never stopping, so there’s no long pause while the plot gets going. This one has a Latin flavor, with several Carmen Miranda-esque numbers played throughout. The premise has a mouse being woken by a jukebox, and attempting to get it to stop. But then he’s tossed into a bottle of alcohol, and starts drunkenly hallucinating a whole bunch of ghosts and spirits jazzing things up. The pacing is fairly sedate compared to future Swing Symphonies, but the music is well times to the gags, and it’s pretty fun.

I’d mentioned we had a wartime short this time around, and this is it, Pigeon Patrol. It stars Homer Pigeon, another attempt to create a character that didn’t quite work out for the studio. Homer is sort of a hyuck-hyuck yokel country boy who’s trying to court his fickle girl. Sadly, she only has eyes for the carrier pigeon pilots, completely ignoring the fact that he’s brought her a bouquet of corn. (Great gag, btw.) He attempts to join up, but the other recruits are huge, strapping young pigeons, while he is a Charles Atlas before picture. Depressed, he mopes away, but soon sees a Japanese vulture shooting down a pigeon with an important message. (The vulture is bucktoothed and racist, but at least doesn’t speak, so as wartime racist caricatures go it’s pretty minor). Homer seems out of his league at first, but soon shows that vulture what for and wins out in the end! As a reward, he gets his girl and has several kids, apparently in the space of only a few days. Well, I suppose they are pigeons…

Lastly, we’re back to Woody, who is driving along in his broken-down jalopy when it explodes into ruins. Luckily, he’s right next to a shyster loan company, offering him loans if he’ll put up his car. I was amused to see the wolf who runs the loan office say outright, “Aaaah… a sucker!” without e3ven bothering to correct himself and say customer. Clearly this wolf is bad news. Sadly for the wolf, he’s up against Woody, who after a brief one-cartoon break, is back to being essentially nuts. Woody forgets all about the loan, so the wolf goes to collect, but finds the main problem may be getting in the door. Best gag of the picture: “I DON’T LIKE CHEESECAKE!”. In the end, Woody’s playing dead panics the wolf, who tears up the loan.

These cartoons aren’t bad, but I get the feeling that the Lantz studios are spinning their wheels a bit. Alex Lovy has come on as a director, but he’s just too sedate, and doesn’t work well with Woody. What we really need is a new director to come in and shake things up a bit. Hrm. I wonder if we’ll get that next time? ^_-