Highway 62

First off, Gyo doesn’t do a good job of being a horror story. It’s atmospheric, and kinda spooky at times, but the central premise ends up not eliciting fear and dread, but rather laughter. Gyo seems on its face to be a “nature strikes back at humanity” kind of thing, with mutant fishes assaulting our protagonists and finally escalating to an icthyoid invasion of a coastal Japanese town. But these aren’t any ordinary fish. These are mutant, land-walking undead fishes powered by what amounts to flatulence. Farts. The gas we pass.

I didn’t make this up. I wish I had, ‘cause it’s a comic goldmine.

And what’s more, the gas disease gets passed to our protagonist’s highly annoying and irritating girlfriend. Yeah, I know, she’s under a lot of stress and probably isn’t that bothersome when the mutant fishes aren’t attacking, but geez, her neuroses got on my nerves from the first page. In what’s supposed to be a scene of utmost horror, I’m laughing my head off. I dunno, maybe I’m deeply disturbed and need some professional help. There’s plenty of people who wouldn’t argue with that assessment.

Our protagonist is capable enough, I suppose, and not content to merely let the mutant fishies overrun everything, but there doesn’t appear to be a lot to be done about it. I suppose that’s horrible, right? And the part where his crazy uncle has to chop off his own arm because part of one of the mutant fish creatures attached itself to him, that’s horrible, right? Well, uh, no. Kinda icky, I guess, but certainly didn’t elicit any dread or fear from me. I mean, the uncle was a little touched to begin with, and he didn’t do anything that really helped the atmosphere other than calmly relating how he had to chop off his own arm.

I’m sorry, but even the mutant undead sperm whale with arachnid legs grafted onto its body so that it could walk the land and feast on the flesh of the living wasn’t scary. It was simply ridiculous. The great white shark, however, given similar treatment was pretty cool and a little bit scary as it sought to chomp down on our protagonists while they huddled in a seaside house. But that was a really tiny bit of scare in what amounted to a sea of ridiculousness. Un-scary but would make for a pretty awesome popcorn movie if handled correctly (and with necessary tongue in cheek).

I’ve heard that vol. 2 of Gyo has killer clowns. I might check it out, but don’t feel like paying full price for it. Nuh-uh. I hold out hope that Umazaki will be scary and an actual horror piece, but based on Gyo, I dunno.

And oh yeah, vol. 1 of Gyo ends on a big fat cliffhanger. I thought that manga collections were supposed to be more oriented towards self-contained stories? Or maybe I was just imagining that.

My other forays into manga so far include Nausicaä vol. 1 and the first volume of Lone Wolf and Cub (which I read long, long ago when First comics put them out in a more western presentation, large format, monthly chapters). Nausicaä is great so far, but then I’ve enjoyed the work of Miyazaki that I’ve already been exposed to (and I generally think that most anime is pretty blah.) So it wasn’t unexpected that I’d get into Nausicaä, though I’m daunted at the size of the whole series (the place I was at had 6 volumes or something).

Spoilers follow. No whining.

What works in Nausicaä? Pretty much everything but for some of the annoying storytelling shortcuts and the introduction of stuff like the prophecy towards the end of the first volume (which apparently even Nausicaä knew about but never thought of until way into things.) There’s also more than a few moments of telling as opposed to showing so that we can see what drives the characters, but for all I know, that’s convention in the form that authors generally try to do away with now.

In terms of creating a living, breathing world that extends far beyond what is shown on the page, Miyazaki is a master. The designs and technology and even the cultures of the various groups portrayed are all fully-fledged and believable (within their setting). And I’m a sucker for technology that isn’t seamless and flawless and generally high-tech, if you can catch my meaning.

Sure, there’s the feeling that there isn’t anything that Nausicaä can’t deal with, and that she’s never really in danger in any of the crazy situations that she finds herself in, but I don’t really care. I want to see more of this spectacular world and get to the bottom of the various intrigues being played out against a backdrop of humanity in a pastoral apocalypse.

Sadly, the manga format makes it hard to follow some of the action that happens on the page. Battle scenes get jumbled and confused quite easily. Character likenesses sometimes get muddled as well as similar face/body types are often very easy to confuse. But then I suppose that you could say the same thing of Darwyn Cooke’s artwork were you not raised on a diet of occidental culture (aka “I’m just another silly gaijin who’s not otaku enough for all the gosu flavor.”)

I’d really love to see this published in a western size. I don’t know how Nausicaä was published originally, but it doesn’t seem to have been reconstituted out of small chunks, and as a matter of fact, there’s no chapter breaks in the first volume, some 200 pages in. Aside from those few minor quibbles, I’m pretty happy with it and want more (which there seems to be no shortage of.)

There’s a pretty huge difference in how I see these two books (duh, they’re totally different books.) I’m wondering how much of it has to do with the universality of various genres. Adventure/Fantasy seems to translate much better (based on my ultramicroscopic sample population of two books) than horror. It seems to me that horror is more often than not more directly rooted in the larger culture with various taboos and the like than epic fantasy is.

No, Nausicaä is not science fiction. It’s fantasy, just like Star Wars is, only both are dressed up in the trappings of sci-fi with spaceships and the like. Just so we have some kind of understanding on the definitions.

And perhaps horror is among the more difficult genres to translate because it’s ultimately personal, if not utterly individual. One reader’s horror is another reader’s laugh-fest. Humor is an essential component in horror, not surprisingly. You have to regulate the tempo a bit. If it’s horror after horror after horror, then the reader just gets bored and deadened. You need a moment or two of relief for the big scare to really work. Of course, if you stick to that pattern, then you’re just going to be predictable, but that’s a subject for another time.

Epic fantasy doesn’t suffer the same rocky translation problems (and I’m not just talking literal translation of the dialogue, but translation as in readability across cultures and vastly different audiences.) Probably because fantasy plays to more universal ideals of good versus evil, personal growth, etc (though in Nausicaä, it’s tough to tell who the real adversary is other than the bumbling schemer Miyamoto). Fantasy is a more largely externalized genre than horror, which always, always looks within.

Ah, but you’re bored. I’ll stop now.

Perhaps next week I’ll talk about all 67 of Marvel’s new titles from the year so far.

Sixty-seven new books. That’s just nuts.