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Apollo's Song, Osamu Tezuka - It's hard to read Apollo's Song without every page needing the subhead, "By the way, your ticket has been booked to misogynyfailland. Please enjoy the ride!" Women must be saved! Women who are independent get kicked around by spurned exes! Women are fixated on Shogo's amazing, love-teaching penis! Though it's humorous generalizing, every story boils down to the formula of:
1) Shogo does not have love.
2) Female appears to teach him about love, sometimes forced against the grain of her character by the narrative to do so (No Man's Land, looking at you).
3) Woman ends up dead.
4) Shogo is sad and still loveless, but wiser!
Tezuka wants to drive the reader to a great, over-arching conclusion about the nature of relationships and attraction, but the women in all of the pieces are so wildly unrealistic as to be merely empty vessels through which Shogo can have Magical Healing Relationships. The art is classically brilliant Tezuka--specifically, the page of Shogo running from the cops is fantastic. Yet that same page also really drives the inescapable reality home: Tezuka's strength is in the shounen framework. Tezuka has a keen understanding of action and movement, that ineffable sense of the filmic which made his such an innovator. As a writer, however, he's hit-or-miss.
I've got higher hopes for Buddha, of which I just finished the first volume. Tezuka's got his hands on something great here, but the work is so clearly and intentionally EPIC that one can't really speak about volumes as individual works. He's clearly playing fast and loose with both history and historical myth, but it's not really a concern for the clueless.
And now, a nugget of fanfiction malapropism goodness: "John Shepard was the only man she had let past the berries of her heart."
1) Shogo does not have love.
2) Female appears to teach him about love, sometimes forced against the grain of her character by the narrative to do so (No Man's Land, looking at you).
3) Woman ends up dead.
4) Shogo is sad and still loveless, but wiser!
Tezuka wants to drive the reader to a great, over-arching conclusion about the nature of relationships and attraction, but the women in all of the pieces are so wildly unrealistic as to be merely empty vessels through which Shogo can have Magical Healing Relationships. The art is classically brilliant Tezuka--specifically, the page of Shogo running from the cops is fantastic. Yet that same page also really drives the inescapable reality home: Tezuka's strength is in the shounen framework. Tezuka has a keen understanding of action and movement, that ineffable sense of the filmic which made his such an innovator. As a writer, however, he's hit-or-miss.
I've got higher hopes for Buddha, of which I just finished the first volume. Tezuka's got his hands on something great here, but the work is so clearly and intentionally EPIC that one can't really speak about volumes as individual works. He's clearly playing fast and loose with both history and historical myth, but it's not really a concern for the clueless.
And now, a nugget of fanfiction malapropism goodness: "John Shepard was the only man she had let past the berries of her heart."
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Rather like an army had conquered and plundered her vagina!