Archive for the ‘Manga’ Category
Bug spray is not optional!
Monday, August 10th, 2009Icky body horror
Monday, August 10th, 2009
In the horror manga Manhole, a worm-like parasite squirms up the infected’s face and attaches itself to an eye, rendering it useless, before burrowing into the brain. It spreads between people via an exchange of blood, and raises the host’s body temperature to attract carnivorous insects like mosquitoes, resulting in one of the nastiest panels yet, when the skin of an infected girl, confined to her apartment, is literally swarming with mosquitoes and horse-flies. The humid, sticky stench is palpable. Why call it ‘Manhole’? When the summer cools, flies retreat to darker, danker places, like the sewers.
The world is not beautiful, therefore it is
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
Is apathy reason enough for revolution?
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
The premise of Sanctuary is easy enough to grasp: revolution, but why? Ostensibly, there’s nothing wrong with living in a first-world country like Japan. The standard of living is good, while education, health and technology is all fine. In other words, life is easy, but that’s precisely the problem.
We live in an apathetic world, we get our kicks from movies, anime and manga. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t real, either. It’s just escapism. I know it’s easy for me to write this now, living in comfort and with nothing serious to complain about, it’s not like I’m dissatisfied with life or anything, but at the moment it’s just… vanilla, which is kind of the point of Sanctuary. These two guys want to shake up Japan, not because it’s governed by men with evil intent, but because the younger people seem to be willing to apathetically live out their lives within a long established system of business, where there’s no ambition in their eyes, no desire to change things, no nothing, and the question is, is that how people should live?
The fictional Hojo and Asami survived the Cambodian genocide, where they saw thousands of people die for insane reasons. This is important because it grants their burning ambition a hellish context. Having survived the killing fields of Cambodia, they have no intention of wasting their lives sitting behind a desk every day; they understand that life is short and that youth is no boundary; all you need is a dream and confidence enough to back it up. So, is apathy reason enough for revolution? Hell yes.
Art with a political agenda
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
It’s difficult to know how to react to art with a political agenda. I couldn’t say if Sanctuary is swinging towards the right or left, but that it is developing an ideology at all has left me feeling a bit concerned, because when the characters start arguing about how Japan is good at this and America is bad at that, it’s like the art itself is trying to influence my real opinions of these countries, and considering the origins of the debate (i.e. Japan), I feel a bit uncomfortable about it all.
Perhaps the problem is that I’m not used to reading nationalistic text that isn’t of Western (as in UK and North American) origin? Obviously I’m not Japanese, so my views are a tad more objective when it comes to reading things like this; any sign of aggression seems to set off my internal alarm bells, but at the same time, it is fascinating to read and understand how some Japanese have come to view their country’s state (and the world at large) from the inside looking out.