Quarantined Comics

On the surface, the samurai epic Blade of the Immortal is all about the violence, with its gorgeous splash pages of kaleidoscopic dismemberment. Created by Hiroaki Samura, a manga artist about whom very little is known, Blade of the Immortal follows a familiar outline: a young girl named Rin seeks to kill the group of swordsmen responsible for the murder of her family. But Samura's ambitions are greater, and as Rin and her hired hitman Manji make headway into her quest, her feelings about her vengeance grow more complicated.

Blade of the Immortal is a 31-volume epic that ran from 1993-2012. In this episode, we'll scratch the surface and take a look at the first six volumes.

A is for...AKIRA. For 2023 we're reading our way through the alphabet!

AKIRA, the seminal Japanese cyberpunk post-apocalyptic manga series written and illustrated by Katsuhiro Otomo. This revolutionary Japanese comic ran from 1982 to 1990, serialized biweekly in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Young Magazine, with its 120 chapters collected into six tankōbon volumes. The work had an outsized influence on not just comics east and west, but its landmark anime film adaptation from 1988 shaped a generation of storytellers. Almost across between Blade Runner meets Mad Max — with a little bit of 2001 A Space Odyssey thrown in, the FILM Akira was listed as one of the 10 essential animations. And it wasn't until the early 2000s that Dark Horse finally adapted the original manga for western audiences like us to READ.

Akira takes place some 30 years after the 1988 Japanese government atomic bombing of Tokyo after ESP experiments on children go awry. . Kaneda, the leader of a Japanese youth biker gang — and his pal Tetsuo are cruising the border of OLD Tokyo, where they have an strange encounter, which leaves Tetsuo hospitalized. Tetsuo is whiskey-a-go-go'ed away to a secret government project and Kaneda finds himself subsequently battling anti-government activists, greedy politicians, irresponsible scientists and a powerful military leader. Ultimately, Tetsuo's supernatural powers manifest, and all hell breaks loose. The action culminates at the site of the modern day Tokyo Olympiad exposing the experiment's secrets.

Otomo has stated that Akira reflects the essence of his views toward life and death, and the world which surrounds us. And joining us to help us make sense of the world which surrounds us (or at least this comic), is the very man who introduced Ryan & Raman oh so long ago, the one and only Bob Arnold, who apparantly named his cat after the lead character in Akira, who is really Canadian.

As the year comes to a close, we reflect on more than a few new adaptations of comic book stories in the Cinematic Universes, multiplexes, and streaming services of our hearts — like the dutiful corporate citizens of the republic we are.

longtime friend of the pod and frequent guest Paresh joins us for our shenanagins of hot takes and reflections of the years nerd/pop culture adaptations, including (listed in order of 2022 release):

Hawkeye

Special Guest: Paresh Jha.

Last week, we discussed how awesome FABLES is. And it's still a rip roarin' good time, but also... how does it hold up in a modern context, almost fifteen years after the first volume was published? Its debut was just a few short years after 9/11, so it has a certain political and Euro-centric sensibility that was more fashionable at the time. How does that read today?

FABLES, by Bill Willingham, is a multi-Eisner award-winning comic telling THE modern-day story of the legends of folk and fairy tales - living in our modern, mundane — or mundy — world. We're talking Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, Rose Red, Prince Charming, Cinderella, Jack, Goldilocks, the 3 little Pigs, Santa Clause, Beauty & the Beast, Pinnochio, and many more. And while Fables definitely sounds like some weird shit - don't worry it is - Fables combines the narratives of many characters from popular literay legend and smooshes them into a multi-versal tale with stakes and consequences, unlike a lot of modern superhero comics.

This is a 2-part episode reading, where this weeek we cover FABLES Vols 1-6 - setting up almost all of the major characters - living in exile from their countless Homelands, after a mysterious villain known only as “The Adversary” appeared with an unstoppable army and began conquering Fable worlds one after another. Hundreds of our years ago, the main Fables of our story came up with a desperate plan: to hide in a world The Adversary would never even want—a world so boring and utterly mundane that magic doesn’t even exist there: our own. New York City, to be more specific.

Fables finds itself mostly set in the oft-overlooked, and soon-to-gentrified neighborhood known only as "Fabletown" - but spans the centuries and worlds, to weave a long tale. While the first couple of volumes get off to a slow start world-building and setting up the main characters, it soon starts to speed up the stakes and drama for an entertaining romp. The first 2 volumes are a slog, but then shit gets real...really good.

The cartoonist Kate Beaton is known for her incisively funny and parodic takes on everything from Aquaman to Hamlet in her series "Hark! A Vagrant!"

But earlier this year, she released her memoir "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands," a harrowing account of the isolating, infuriating, and at times terrifying job that Beaton took after graduating in order to pay off the $40,000 debt from her arts degree. Even as a young woman in her early 20s, Beaton is tough and confronts each conflict with wit and biting sarcasm — but when you're in an environment where men outnumber women 50 to one, that only goes so far.

If you're like us, you've not taken your Birthright Israel tour. But you know who did The cartoonist Sarah Glidden. And you know what else she did? She chronicled it in her 2007 memoir “How To Understand Israel in 60 Days.” Glidden is Jewish and progressive, living in New York City, when she departs on her tour. She goes in with some preconceived notions and by the end she’s far less definitive in her point of view. Using rich water colors, Glidden details the day-to-day aspects of her tour where she learns about Israel’s history, but also can’t help questioning what she’s learning, or the way in which that history is communicated. This may just be the episode that gets us cancelled.

Post WWI Berlin was both a place of great creative energy and a city about to tear itself apart.

In a 700 page opus 20 years in the making, the artist Jason Lutes chronicled Germany's embrace of the Nazi party through the lens of then men and women working and toiling, celebrating and politicking, throughout Berlin. It's a book both exhilarating to read and frightening, given how closely the society that Lutes chronicles mirrors our own troubled world of America in the 2020s.

Since Ryan's stuck in a well saving puppies while battling conniving co-op boards, and Raman's buried in the demands of fatherhood and an international life of crime, we enlisted friend-of-the-pod BRAD BERENS to fill the gap (and your earholes). Like us, Brad's a sophisticated nerd with a way with the words. In Brad's latest "weekly dispatch" e-newsletter, Brad dropped some interesting thoughts about the state of the modern comic book industry, and how it tracks against the broader trends in the fragmenting media industry. If you like what you here and want to hear weekly big ideas, cool stories, and what it all means subscribe @ BradBerens.substack.com.

And we'll be soon to talk about one nation's descent into fascim. You know, happy stuff.

Jeff Lemire's "Essex County Trilogy" is one of those rare books that's quiet, with very little happening from a narrative standpoint, but that leaves a tremendous emotional punch. At the time, Lemire was working as a line cook from 4pm to midnight, and he'd work on his comics from the morning to afternoons.

"I had been struggling with my work, it was all very derivative and lacking," he said in a previous interview. "And I just stripped it all down and decided to work on a story that was much more personal and autobiographical, and it felt like a real breakthrough."

And it was a breakthrough, both artistically and in terms of Lemire's career. This week, we'll talk about what makes Essex County so special.