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Friday, September 3, 2010
The Best Medicine
After making it through the entire cold and flu season without so much as a runny nose, I spent the last week laboring under some random crud that required an antibiotic, two separate cough medicines and as much bad daytime television as I could stand. It wasn’t pretty, so I tried to supplement the prescribed medications with that time-honored remedy, laughter.
Fortunately, I had a small slush pile of preview copies of manga series that promised giggles. Results varied, but the cure was ultimately successful.
First up was a dosage of Mizuki Kawashita’s Strawberry 100% (Viz – Shonen Jump Advanced). Alas, as with penicillin, I have an allergy to fan service, which is the principal attraction of this dimwitted affair. Young Junpei is on a quest to find the girl in the strawberry panties and, if possible, recreate their first, memorable encounter on film for the ages. He wants to be a moviemaker, you see, and feels that a cinematic masterpiece will surely fall into place with this up-skirt moment as its emotional core.
Do I need to go any further? I do? Really? Fine. Anyway, Junpei presumes that his fruit-adorned dream girl is Tsukasa, the cutest girl in his year. Improbably, and completely insensitive to his best friend’s crush on the girl, he convinces Tsukasa to date him. (He makes her laugh. I wish I could say I had the same reaction.) But is Tsukasa his panty dream girl? Or is it bespectacled Aya, a budding novelist whose uninspiring appearance hides a budding novelist with real feelings for Junpei?
Does it matter? Not really, because Junpei is such a fumbling dork that it’s hard to conceive how he could inspire anything beyond pity in a girl with any sense. If panty jokes and panty shots are your thing, then the promise of 19 volumes of Strawberry 100% should fill you with glee.
Recuperative value: None.
Side effects: Intermittent eye rolling, mild headache.
I’m not entirely convinced that life under occupation is fertile ground for comedy any more than life in a prison camp was, but Hideaki Sorachi’s Gin Tama did give me a few chuckles. Sorachi takes a somewhat lackadaisical approach to little things like narrative logic and theme, but that ended up being part of the book’s charm.
It’s set in an anachronistic quasi-Japan that has been taken over by aliens of the interstellar variety. They’ve disarmed the samurai and are living it up at the natives’ expense. Under these reduced circumstances, what’s a former samurai to do?
Sakata “Gin” Gintoki completes odd jobs to make ends meet, or at least drag them marginally closer together. He’s not a long-term thinker, so the work suits him, and he’s reckless, so he’ll take jobs that would make most people pale. By chance, he meets Shinpachi, the son of another samurai who passed away while trying to keep the family dojo afloat. Shinpachi’s workplace skills aren’t any more portable than Gin’s, and he sees enough in the curly-headed ruffian to join up in the odd job business.
The jobs are decidedly odd and often amusing, whether it’s reigning in the rampaging pet of interstellar royalty or finishing up a delivery that turns out to be a terrorist bomb. When not trying to earn the rent, Gin and Shinpachi are busy trying to avoid the wrath of their dragon-lady landlord. Or they’re recruiting a third employee, a brutal (but cute) alien mercenary who came to earth to make her fortune but found that working as hired muscle for a local kingpin wasn’t to her taste.
Amidst all the high-concept comedy, Sorachi works in some politics. In spite of his fecklessness, Gin has a highly charged past in forces that resisted the growing alien influence. There’s undoubtedly something larger lurking under the low-brow episodes, effective as they are on their own terms, and I’m interested to see where it goes. At the same time, there’s something vaguely xenophobic about the proceedings, so I’ll keep my eye out for that as well.
For now, though, Gin Tama is an energetic, amusingly wooly romp with some promising characters and sprightly action-comedy art.
Recuperative value: Moderate.
Side effects: Slight swelling of the glands responsible for political correctness.
Do you love manga but hate sports? Is your idea of a competitive activity an on-line, multiplayer video game? Does the thought of strenuous physical exercise make you just want to lie down? Ai Morinaga knows where you’re coming from, and she’s crafted My Heavenly Hockey Club specifically for your needs.
Hana Suzuki has worked hard to get into her high school of choice, not because it will position her for college or help her make the right social connections. She slaved to pass that entrance exam because the school is a three-minute walk from her home, allowing her to sleep in. Her dream has come true, at least until the first day of class when she’s run over by the limousine of fellow student Izumi Oda. She’s unhurt, but Oda uses the encounter to coerce Suzuki into joining the school’s field hockey team.
Aghast as she is at the prospect of early morning practice, Suzuki is relieved to hear that the hockey club never actually plays. They don’t have a full roster, and there aren’t any other local schools that have teams of their own. They do travel for away games, but the usually end up forfeiting and staying at hot springs. That inspires Suzuki to some quick mental algebra: “*Bath>food>sleep>bath>sleep>food>bath>sleep*Repeat.” She’s in.
From that starting point, Morinaga sends things spinning in hilariously ridiculous directions. I don’t usually find myself laughing out loud at a comic, but I did with My Heavenly Hockey Club. The cast is across-the-board charming, the art is spot-on effective, and the situations are often priceless. Just watching Suzuki doggedly pursue her right to laziness is worth the price of admission. She’s a shôjo heroine who really speaks o me.
Recuperative value: High, though chortling didn’t do much for my sore throat.
Side effects: Giddiness and the inability to operate heavy machinery.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
