Manga Thoughts: Bakemonogatari 1
Oct. 31st, 2019 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI watched the anime series Bakemonogatari a while ago now, long enough ago that I did start it thinking “if I’m as impressed with it as ‘everyone else’ seems to be, as impressed as I was with Puella Magi Madoka Magica, I’ll buy its premium box set from Aniplex of America just as I did with that other series.” While that box set would have wrapped up a plot arc left hanging by the episodes made available for streaming, I fear that when I ran out of them I’d decided that whatever was so compelling to “everyone else” was whooshing by over my head, leaving me thinking most of all of ostentatious visual style and lengthy smart-alecky discussions in between the arc resolutions, letting me diminish their impact. This could just be sour grapes, but I’m afraid I’ve grown very good at bottling that vintage when it comes to Aniplex’s series; these days I don’t know just how impressed I’d have to be to buy one of them.
However, where with the other two long-running franchises Aniplex has control of I do seem to be getting through life without having seen any of Sword Art Online or the whole Fate/“whatever” cycle, I am a bit aware of how Bakemonogatari has been followed by numerous other “whatever-monogatari” stories and some people do keep bringing them up. The original novels by Nisioisin the anime was adapted from are being translated into English by Vertical, but I have to admit that the tough going I’ve found certain other less ambitious translated-from-Japanese novels had me intimidated in advance. When I heard their comics arm was releasing a manga adaptation, though, I did take notice. I knew it wasn’t going to be one of those oft-dismissed after-the-fact manga that get assigned to an artist who doesn’t seem to have a track record and struggles to get the characters looking as good as the original art.
Maybe it gives too much away just to say that at a certain point, I started thinking manga was a more effective delivery vehicle for “fanservice” than anime. It might not have been that long afterwards, though, that the artwork in certain manga titles being retouched, as if to keep it selling in North American bookstores, became a recurring scandal among fans. An effort by DC to broaden past “superhero comics” just happened to pick a launch title caught by that nervous bowdlerization, and CMX wound up under the cloud of swift, curt dismissals for the remainder of its existence. So far as the “fanservicey” artwork of the manga who goes by the pen name Oh!Great went, I bought some of Air Gear from Del Rey Manga, who’d been challenged on some impending retouching just starting out and then made a public pledge not to tamper with any of the artwork inside their covers (their knuckles still got rapped for altering one of the Air Gear covers), and that publisher became just about the only one I’d risk buying manga from for years, the titles I bought from them sometimes seeming “substitutes” for ones with better reputations but which lay under the constant threat, impending or actual, of editing.
Years went by; I just sort of drifted away from the “extreme roller blading” action of Air Gear. CMX was shut down amid the convulsions of a general “manga bust”; I rushed out and managed to buy up every volume of their release of (Victorian Romance) Emma before they vanished. Then, though, Viz “license rescued” Tenjo Tenge, the title that had caused all the trouble in the first place, and despite my twice having managed to stop buying all (or nearly so) releases from them in huffs over them editing artwork too, they were releasing the martial arts manga in shrink wrap. I wound up buying it even if the artwork sometimes had an early “those faces on those bodies” awkwardness and the story wasn’t that compelling by the end. After all of that, perhaps knowing a Bakemonogatari manga would be a matter of adapting an existing story wasn’t that bad.
The first volume just about works through the first plot arc still familiar to me from the anime; the artwork isn’t anything like the anime’s (which I understand hewed to the covers of at least the translated novels) and yet, along with capturing the characters and the story’s skewed, supernatural-afflicted reality, does manage its own crystallization of a form of “fanservice” that might have a different sort of power imbalance than the usual grind. Too, the discussions along the way don’t seem to have the same risk of showing incomprehension by calling them “tedious.” I do wonder how long the manga releases over here will take to adapt even the episodes of the first anime series (with an awareness of both that my disillusionment with “talkiness” might have built up over time and some additional controversy in the immediate sequel), but right now I am interested in buying the succeeding volumes.
However, where with the other two long-running franchises Aniplex has control of I do seem to be getting through life without having seen any of Sword Art Online or the whole Fate/“whatever” cycle, I am a bit aware of how Bakemonogatari has been followed by numerous other “whatever-monogatari” stories and some people do keep bringing them up. The original novels by Nisioisin the anime was adapted from are being translated into English by Vertical, but I have to admit that the tough going I’ve found certain other less ambitious translated-from-Japanese novels had me intimidated in advance. When I heard their comics arm was releasing a manga adaptation, though, I did take notice. I knew it wasn’t going to be one of those oft-dismissed after-the-fact manga that get assigned to an artist who doesn’t seem to have a track record and struggles to get the characters looking as good as the original art.
Maybe it gives too much away just to say that at a certain point, I started thinking manga was a more effective delivery vehicle for “fanservice” than anime. It might not have been that long afterwards, though, that the artwork in certain manga titles being retouched, as if to keep it selling in North American bookstores, became a recurring scandal among fans. An effort by DC to broaden past “superhero comics” just happened to pick a launch title caught by that nervous bowdlerization, and CMX wound up under the cloud of swift, curt dismissals for the remainder of its existence. So far as the “fanservicey” artwork of the manga who goes by the pen name Oh!Great went, I bought some of Air Gear from Del Rey Manga, who’d been challenged on some impending retouching just starting out and then made a public pledge not to tamper with any of the artwork inside their covers (their knuckles still got rapped for altering one of the Air Gear covers), and that publisher became just about the only one I’d risk buying manga from for years, the titles I bought from them sometimes seeming “substitutes” for ones with better reputations but which lay under the constant threat, impending or actual, of editing.
Years went by; I just sort of drifted away from the “extreme roller blading” action of Air Gear. CMX was shut down amid the convulsions of a general “manga bust”; I rushed out and managed to buy up every volume of their release of (Victorian Romance) Emma before they vanished. Then, though, Viz “license rescued” Tenjo Tenge, the title that had caused all the trouble in the first place, and despite my twice having managed to stop buying all (or nearly so) releases from them in huffs over them editing artwork too, they were releasing the martial arts manga in shrink wrap. I wound up buying it even if the artwork sometimes had an early “those faces on those bodies” awkwardness and the story wasn’t that compelling by the end. After all of that, perhaps knowing a Bakemonogatari manga would be a matter of adapting an existing story wasn’t that bad.
The first volume just about works through the first plot arc still familiar to me from the anime; the artwork isn’t anything like the anime’s (which I understand hewed to the covers of at least the translated novels) and yet, along with capturing the characters and the story’s skewed, supernatural-afflicted reality, does manage its own crystallization of a form of “fanservice” that might have a different sort of power imbalance than the usual grind. Too, the discussions along the way don’t seem to have the same risk of showing incomprehension by calling them “tedious.” I do wonder how long the manga releases over here will take to adapt even the episodes of the first anime series (with an awareness of both that my disillusionment with “talkiness” might have built up over time and some additional controversy in the immediate sequel), but right now I am interested in buying the succeeding volumes.