Truth That Goes Crunch

Q-Pop, a gallery in Little Tokyo, is running a Kamen Rider vs Super Sentai show, and the art looks fantastic.

Some of the pieces are up for sale here: I'm this close to buying the Big One print.

Naochika Morishita's new artbook, Hagane Bito, is out, and it is glorious. Nothing but beautiful, high-detail mecha and toku art.

HQ Gundam images can be found here and here, with most of the toku images (most easily recognizable from the CardAss series) from scaned pages on Flickr.

Yes, I might be having a nerdgasm.

(Also, I have a date! For my letter! Finally!)

Without meaning to, this post basically became a long-form essay on Western cultural appropriation of Eastern Asia sphere cultures in American comics, the nature of costumed superheroes as a media commodity, and why exactly I hate the Great Ten and what they represent.

( 'It’s like English-Chinese food, take away the spices and add sweet-sour flavour.' )

It's no secret I love Saint Oniisan. What's better than Buddha and Jesus living together as poor roommates in Tokyo?

Buddha and Jesus as secret toku-style superheroes fighting against the forces of evil.

Evil being supervillains trying to forcibly join social networks.

Fuck. Yes.

"Oh fuck, I feel like I just got a movie lobotomy."

There really isn't enough beer in the world to make The Spirit a good movie. There's not enough beer in the world to make The Spirit a bad movie, either. Instead, The Spirit is a turd movie--composed of once-good things which have been so highly digested as to no longer be recognizable.

(It may then be fitting that before I was watching The Spirit I was listening to Lady Gaga, whose minuscule bit of talent has been autotuned into a coma from backbeat overdose. Then again, I'm also a queer, which means I am (according to our culture) genetically hardwired to love anything with a singable-but-insipid melody line and beat strong enough to knock out an elephant. See: disco.)

I did not actually see The Spirit to mock it, however. A while back, I read a review of The Spirit which pointed out that "[i]f there's any zone of action movie Miller's project looks toward, it's probably the Japanese tokusatsu film of the costumed hero type, very self-evidently artificial in special effects and gangly in action stylization - realism is often not the goal." Me being me, I decided it was imperative to see The Spirit and test this theory.

The author chose the remake of Cutey Honey as his example film, but I chose instead Takashi Miike's Zebraman. Though the author's point about Hideaki Anno is well-taken, Miike has a lot of Miller's same quirks with regard to violence and masculinity, without the whoreswhoreswhoreswhores.

(It's important to note that I don't think any tokusatsu film would automatically be better than The Spirit by virtue of being toku--Kamen Rider The First was by and large KR-As-Done-By Miller, up to and including the unnecessary grimness.)

( If only Miller had given the Spirit a theme song... )

PS: See Zebraman if you haven't. It's a brilliant film for anyone who likes considering the many ways superheroes evolve, and it stays very true to the Ishinomori hero, who just happens to be a lot like the very early American hero archetype.

PPS: I has made kamenrider on DW for all one's KR needs.