I think we’ve established that Sanctuary is cool. It’s the way he holds his cigarette, the way he’s staring up at the stars. He’s lost in thought, remembering something sad. Great art doesn’t need words, it’s evocative, it has personality. A scruffy beard and his hands in his pockets. The night sky.
You don’t need to understand the context of this strip, just take in the visceral attitude of the guy, the glasses and the slick hair-cut, and imagine.
Earlier today, I started reading Sanctuary; last night I finished Bokurano and the week before that, it was Pluto. All three have turned out to be great reads, not least of all Bokurano, which, for what it’s worth, I think is a lot better than its anime adaptation ever could have been. Mohiro Kitoh’s style is such that it’s difficult to replicate perfectly for TV, but I would have loved to see some of these later chapters animated; a fine example is Kanji’s battle, which has a long range style, meaning that his opposition (a giant, transforming canon) fires missiles at him from Hawaii!
Also interesting is Sanctuary, which follows these two men dedicated to reversing Japan’s ailing health from within. One intends to become the country’s Prime Minister by the time he’s 40 years old, while the other, in order to support his friend, has to become the strongest yakuza in the criminal underground. Their goal? To clear the government of old men and fill its halls with bright-eyed 30 year-olds. How fucking cool is that? We’re essentially following these guys from their early beginnings, as they climb up from the streets to the very peak of Japan’s high society; it’s all about sacrificing anything for your ambitions and dreams.
Manga to live action isn’t always a good thing. Be it budgetary constraints or just terrible film-making, it doesn’t usually work out as well as we’d hoped. Death Note is a good example of that; great manga, poor films, but there are always exceptions.
Old Boy, Blue Spring and Ping Pong are three of my favourites, all of them manga adaptations. I guess it just depends on the motivations of the film-makers, hence I’m not exactly thrilled by this news of a live action Beck.
It bothers me that the press release refers to the musicians as “handsome”, and that the story will be altered to focus more on Ryusuke than Koyuki, probably for no other reason than that the former is much, much cooler to look at; regardless of whether or not it totally destroys the essence of the source, the grungy poster boy is bound to sell more tickets, right?
Having dumped Shojo Beat just days previous, manga publisher VIZ has launched a really cool, online, English language version of IKKI magazine, with the intention of publishing new chapters of certain manga every month, for free! This is a really cool thing because IKKI makes a point of serialising ground-breaking, challenging seinen manga series, not least of all Mohiro Kitoh’s disturbing sci-fi Bokurano.
The first edition of this English IKKI begins with the first chapter of Children of the Sea, as well as an interview with mangaka Daisuke Igarashi (check-out his work-space). Having caught glimpse of its oddly mesmerising cover-art a few months back, I’ve long been intending to read this series, so now’s as good a time as any to give it a shot. Much of IKKI’s output is subversive in the sense that, despite featuring serene backgrounds and innocent-seeming characters, a grotesque, hairy violence lurks just beneath the surface; ready to disgust the morally sound at any given moment.
A full list of IKKI’s Japanese serialisations can be found on Wikipedia. I’d absolutely love to see them publish something by Taiyo Matsumoto, but regardless, I can’t wait to see how this develops in the future.