Comicade

Yukito Kishiro is one of the youngest manga artists to ever reach nationwide acclaim in Japan. The Shogakukan publishing company nominated him for the Best New Artist award in 1984 when he was just 17. Kishiro wouldn't see widespread fame, especially outside of his native Japan, until several years later when he released Gunnm, known in the anglophone world as Battle Angel Alita. For Battle Angel Kishiro created a vivid, post-apocalyptic world that transformed middle American into a violent wasteland. Much of the story takes place in Scrapyard, an isolated portion of the desert territory that has fallen to lawlessness and chaos. Battle Angel is an orgy of violence and bizarre existential questions, though not without an artful touch. In 1997, Yukito Kishiro created a small but punchy manga set in the same world as Battle Angel though featuring entirely new characters. This was Haisha, localized as Ashen Victor.

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Last week I accused the Preacher comics of being squeamish about sex. It appears I spoke to soon, sort of. The issues that comprise the second trade paperback compilation of the series skew much more toward overall seediness rather than just to violence, though I'll defend my statement about the issues in Gone To Texas because they do shy away from nudity and sexually explicit language more than Until the End of the World. But I think that may be intentional. A lot of the second book focuses on Jesse and Tulip, and especially what their love represents. I imagine Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon held off on sexual content so they could draw the stark parallels between different kinds of love present in later issues.

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By the late 1970's most of the comic titles that we today consider the bronze age classics were publishing on a monthly basis, loaded down with advertisements and circulating in the millions. For most of the 60's and all of the 70's there was a growing underground comics scene that made its bread and butter selling raunchy counter-culture books to hip adults. They quickly became characterized by an almost religious devotion to depicting sex, violence, drug use and anti-establishment sentiment. By the time the Love Generation grew out of even these blue themes, the market for comics about things other than super heroes expanded to favor a much less overtly political edge. From the passe ashes of the underground scene, alternative comics were born.

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I'm usually pretty forgiving when it comes to the premise of a clearly fictional story. Comic books require a lot of suspension of disbelief from the get-go, especially as a modern reader. The X-Men were invented during a time when nuclear radiation was the answer to every conceivable problem and the source of all super powers. Spiderman was bitten by a radioactive spider, the Fantastic Four were struck with cosmic radiation and the mutants of the X-Men world were originally the children of people who worked on the atomic bombs used in World War II. Looking at older issues of The Uncanny X-Men it's clear that modern audiences may just be a lot harder to immerse in the story.

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