Review:
I'll review this like I usually do anthologies, one story at a time.
"Damiyan!" - A yakuza member hires a weird duo, one of whom supposedly has supernatural abilities, to kill someone. This was quirky and weird, but didn't quite feel finished.
"Throw Toward the Moon!" - A psychic homeless guy tells a kid that he's going to win a Pulitzer one day. The kid grows up bitter and angry because the prediction led him to expect better things, but now he's stuck as an obituary writer for a small paper. When he learns that the psychic wrote up his own obituary and expects to die soon, he decides to get back at the man by proving that his claims are false and correcting his obituary. I thought this was one of the better stories in the collection. Not great, but not bad.
"The Old Guys" - A Bob Dylan appreciation comic, I guess? There's no story here, just nostalgia. And not my brand of nostalgia, so this one didn't end up appealing to me at all.
"Henry and Charles" - Two mice, one of them dumb and one with a tendency to lie about his accomplishments, go on an adventure to sneak past a cat and steal a piece of cake. This was a fun little comic that reminded me of old school cartoons like "Tom and Jerry" - no wonder, since apparently Looney Tunes cartoons were part of Urasawa's inspiration for the story.
"It's a Beautiful Day" - A tribute to Kenji Endo (Enken), a Japanese folk musician. The comic features an experience that Enken once described to Urasawa, in which he and his bandmates saw a stripper with a snake one evening and then saw her again during the day, pushing a stroller (which they assumed contained the snake??) and looking much like their album cover. Again, there was an element of nostalgia here that I didn't share.
"Musica Nostra" - Urasawa's LA music travelogue, with some Beatles stuff and observations about rock guitarists. Meh. This read like a bonus author's note manga at the end of a volume.
"Kaiju Kingdom" - A French kaiju otaku travels to Tokyo to see kaiju and falls for a kaiju researcher whose parents were killed by kaiju. This was another weird and quirky one that I, for the most part, enjoyed - there was some joy in the moment I realized that the main character wasn't just a delusional nerd who thought fictional characters were real. This was a world in kaiju actually existed. The story didn't manage to stick the landing for me, though.
"Solo Mission" - Some sort of sci-fi guy has to go out and save the universe, and his wife is terrified for him. This one turned out to be the setup for a ridiculous little joke and was mildly amusing.
Some of the stories were stronger than others, but overall this was just so-so. After reading Urasawa's much heavier and darker Monster, the humor and general quirkiness here took me by surprise.
Extras:
Includes author's commentary for each of the stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment