Manga Thoughts: Dirty Pair
Jan. 26th, 2020 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen I first watched the Dirty Pair anime, it was with a “finally” sense of satisfaction. The science fiction “girls with guns” title had caught my eye years before then in the common currency of online references as I started watching anime, back when it was a little too easy to fall into the self-pitying mood “anything everyone else has already seen won’t be shown by my university’s anime club”; there was also the problem Dirty Pair was only available “fansubbed,” and in those final analog days seeing those mythical tapes seemed a matter of ingratiating yourself with “the right people” I didn’t have the courage to ask about (although the digital era that followed did have its own problems). More than that, perhaps, the most notable work of fanfiction to feature Dirty Pair’s main characters ran up against the “anime MSTings” I also got to reading to seem a terrifying exercise in “self-insertion” wish fulfilment... After all of that, though, it has been a while since I finished watching the anime, given there’s always something else to get around to.
Hearing Seven Seas had licensed a “Dirty Pair manga” did get my attention, though. There seemed something a bit odd about the latest artistic interpretation of “the Lovely Angels” on the cover image shown, but I was willing to take a chance on the complete work. Getting a copy of it meant making a special order through the area bookstore, and while waiting for that to arrive I noticed the manga’s artist Hisao Tamaki had also drawn the manga adaptation of Star Wars: A New Hope I’d read years before (and thought its Princess Leia character-design tweaks quite appealing, although since then I might have warmed up a bit more to Carrie Fisher’s original “cinnamon buns” hairdo). While waiting, though, I also ran into a capsule review on Manga Bookshelf where Sean Gaffney got kind of queasy over the “fanservice” being amped up in the psychic flashes of the main characters Kei and Yuri. Still, I was committed now, and started reading the manga myself.
In trying to define what seemed a bit odd about the artwork, I can get to thinking of faces crowded with big eyes and lips well-indicated even in black and white, with hairdos less voluminous than those of the 1980s fitting close all around. I suppose that as I saw argued, the “girl on girl” contact of the psychic flashes was kind of over the top, and the second one of them in the second big story of the omnibus led into a different sort of coy explicitness about the unfortunate backstory of the latest villain (Yuri complains afterwards “I really wish we hadn’t seen any of that,” which might spark a similar comment from the audience). While I know Kei and Yuri’s outfits are both in the “exhibitionistic battle costume” tradition of anime (which I’ll admit to not disagreeing with in every case) and based on Japanese female wrestlers, in this interpretation things get too “bulgy-squashy” for me. Perhaps too, in addition to all of those artwork oddities, the “idea of the Dirty Pair” I picked up on before seeing any of its stories, where the duo accomplish the letter of their mission but some small accident overlooked in the mayhem explodes into a vast catastrophe they escape but many others don’t, never sits quite right with me when it does show up. That may, of course, amount in the end to “you just don’t get it.” (A short piece just before the midpoint colour plates, where “the Lovely Angels” escape a time loop close around a black hole that would have had them shoot themselves down but just perhaps manage to trigger the eventual “Big Crunch” of the universe, was grandiose enough to seem entertaining even so.)
Along the way, anyway, I did get to considering how this manga was an adaptation of the original novels, where Kei and Yuri have psychic flashes and throw razor-edged “Bloody Cards,” things only shown in one OVA out of all the animation as far as I remember. There were also comments they just happen to have invisible protective coatings over their abbreviated outfits and exposed flesh alike, and that third distinguishing feature had me thinking of the fanfic I alluded to. That the nascent “Eyrie Productions” was aware in some fashion of the Dirty Pair novels at the beginning of the 1990s might be a small note in their favour, although with the way my opinion is set in general “small notes” do seem the sort of magnanimous gesture that doesn’t affect anything.
Hearing Seven Seas had licensed a “Dirty Pair manga” did get my attention, though. There seemed something a bit odd about the latest artistic interpretation of “the Lovely Angels” on the cover image shown, but I was willing to take a chance on the complete work. Getting a copy of it meant making a special order through the area bookstore, and while waiting for that to arrive I noticed the manga’s artist Hisao Tamaki had also drawn the manga adaptation of Star Wars: A New Hope I’d read years before (and thought its Princess Leia character-design tweaks quite appealing, although since then I might have warmed up a bit more to Carrie Fisher’s original “cinnamon buns” hairdo). While waiting, though, I also ran into a capsule review on Manga Bookshelf where Sean Gaffney got kind of queasy over the “fanservice” being amped up in the psychic flashes of the main characters Kei and Yuri. Still, I was committed now, and started reading the manga myself.
In trying to define what seemed a bit odd about the artwork, I can get to thinking of faces crowded with big eyes and lips well-indicated even in black and white, with hairdos less voluminous than those of the 1980s fitting close all around. I suppose that as I saw argued, the “girl on girl” contact of the psychic flashes was kind of over the top, and the second one of them in the second big story of the omnibus led into a different sort of coy explicitness about the unfortunate backstory of the latest villain (Yuri complains afterwards “I really wish we hadn’t seen any of that,” which might spark a similar comment from the audience). While I know Kei and Yuri’s outfits are both in the “exhibitionistic battle costume” tradition of anime (which I’ll admit to not disagreeing with in every case) and based on Japanese female wrestlers, in this interpretation things get too “bulgy-squashy” for me. Perhaps too, in addition to all of those artwork oddities, the “idea of the Dirty Pair” I picked up on before seeing any of its stories, where the duo accomplish the letter of their mission but some small accident overlooked in the mayhem explodes into a vast catastrophe they escape but many others don’t, never sits quite right with me when it does show up. That may, of course, amount in the end to “you just don’t get it.” (A short piece just before the midpoint colour plates, where “the Lovely Angels” escape a time loop close around a black hole that would have had them shoot themselves down but just perhaps manage to trigger the eventual “Big Crunch” of the universe, was grandiose enough to seem entertaining even so.)
Along the way, anyway, I did get to considering how this manga was an adaptation of the original novels, where Kei and Yuri have psychic flashes and throw razor-edged “Bloody Cards,” things only shown in one OVA out of all the animation as far as I remember. There were also comments they just happen to have invisible protective coatings over their abbreviated outfits and exposed flesh alike, and that third distinguishing feature had me thinking of the fanfic I alluded to. That the nascent “Eyrie Productions” was aware in some fashion of the Dirty Pair novels at the beginning of the 1990s might be a small note in their favour, although with the way my opinion is set in general “small notes” do seem the sort of magnanimous gesture that doesn’t affect anything.