Manga Thoughts: The Men Who Created Gundam
Sep. 3rd, 2022 06:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen Denpa announced they would translate and release a manga presenting “the true (yet comedically skewed) story of the making of Gundam,” that got my attention. I have to admit part of the reason there was because I’d read a “scanlation” of that very manga a while ago. It had been interesting and amusing, but recollections of that fan translation having the stilted and awkward flavour I get from a good number of such far from upright versions had me as glad as ever to have the chance to make up some, but not all, of my karma. With the way volumes of Denpa’s “Inside Mari” release took a long time to become available for purchase, though, I also have to admit to certain thoughts there’d be no resting easy until a copy of what was now titled “The Men Who Created Gundam” was in my hands.
Time passed and passed, and at last I was convinced the manga was indeed on its way and I ought to get an order in even if I’d missed the chance to “help show it would be successful with an early pre-order.” I used the online site of an area comics store I’d been trying to support in the past few years, ordering several other titles to qualify for free shipping. As weeks passed and that order didn’t ship, however, I did start wondering if I ought to try something else. When the online anime store Right Stuf finally couldn’t offer regular free shipping across the border at any threshold, I had happened to notice a comment or two about a third-party service that would give you an address at the border and bring the parcels across for a fee. Although I didn’t work out if this would actually be cheaper than just paying the shipping fee at last, I did decide to try it at least once, ordering the manga and a few other items for a less formidable package than I’d kept piling up in the days of high free shipping thresholds. When the order shipped I spent a while worrying I hadn’t got my border address just right, but the package showed up in the shipping service’s system and I managed to get it cleared through customs, paid for, and picked up at last. (After cancelling my order at the comics store, I did learn this particular manga hadn’t been the one they couldn’t get from their distributor.)
For all the twists and turns of getting that copy of The Men Who Created Gundam in my hands, actually reading it did not pale in comparison. It is, to be sure, for someone who’s seen the original anime, and knowing something in advance about the “making-of” anecdotes that float around in English could help too. The first chapter opens in media res, with the voice actor for the series’ lead character Amuro Ray (who’s drawn to look just like Amuro) trying to deliver a notable line. (Watching animation with subtitles does not seem to be a matter of “waiting for memorable one-liners,” but for all that that risks “drawing distinctions between anime and ‘regular fan-targeted live-action,’” maybe that’s also one thing that points out Gundam being the sort of anime that can have this sort of manga made about it.) Director Yoshiyuki Tomino, drawn as a lean, shaved-headed figure in black glasses and a collarless black pullover, goes to absurd lengths to get just the right reading. Then, as if to further provoke “Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be,” he grabs the rear of a female worker. It’s possible the original objections to that might have drawn “but he gets knocked for a loop by the harassed woman every time he does it, so why are you complaining?” It’s more possible this doesn’t help things.
If that’s not the end of things for any particular reader, though, the story returns to Tomino’s first plans to make an anime that will transcend “selling giant robot toys.” A few other series of the time, not all giant robot anime, also get mentioned; I have had the chance to make the foolish boast of having seen some other anime from around then (if not everything I could have seen just yet), even if I recognize the additional risk of making a big deal of “other series could be argued to have been working towards greater seriousness themselves.” The struggles of making the animation (which may provoke dangerous shrugs about how animation production in Japan has balanced on knife edges for decades) don’t take up quite as much of the manga as might first be thought; things move on to the struggle to mobilize what fans did pick up on the show, shift from “inaccurate toys” to “the first model kits” (this was one moment where one line from the “scanlation” sticks in my head in opposition to the professional translation, even if Tomino has gone from the compromise of painting bright colours on the Gundam with intimations this ran interference to get the drabber design of the opponent Zaku mecha past the sponsor to complaining the first model kit has no colours), and work towards making a theatrical movie. There is a flashback in later chapters to the mechanical animator Ichiro Itano, who I’d first picked up on in connection to the later production of Macross; this might add to an amusing sense of the manga being stretched along chapter-by-chapter so long as it maintains attention. Things end all the same with the premiere of the first Gundam movie. That moment had featured in Matt Alt’s Pure Invention, which had reminded me Tomino’s design in the manga was “a considerable exaggeration for the sake of ‘coolness’”; on the other hand, the final festival in the manga did surprise me with a wardrobe alteration for Tomino I hadn’t remembered from before.
There are some bonus chapters that hadn’t been “scanlated.” Space Battleship Yamato had been brought up throughout the manga as “the previous big success in anime,” but where “spotting the visual reference to Gundam” had been an amusing challenge before, a bonus chapter draws Yamato producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki as a villain from his anime (even as existing characters mention having heard “nasty rumors” about him). Another chapter mentions the Gundam novels, which were translated by Frederik L. Schodt and released by Del Rey just after their Robotech novels wound down at the beginning of the 1990s. I did encounter them on bookstore shelves at the time and read Schodt’s introduction to the animation with slight interest, still sorting out more slowly than people older than me and able to link up with other fans that not only had Robotech “come from Japan,” but that there was “more animation like it over there” (even if the novels might have only given a sense of that being far beyond my reach). I suppose this manga’s efforts to mythologize Gundam as “transcending what the establishment thought anime to be” contrasts with certain impressions of just how far anime fans over here were once ready to talk up “animation in Japan” (which might have led to a counter-over-reaction insisting on “what we take in here rests on the fraying reed of a handful of creepy yet overspending fans” and even, perhaps, a sort of later synthesis). There was a moment in the chapter where Tomino’s efforts to write Gundam novels are scoffed at as “a giant robot, bipedal no less, isn’t real science fiction.” I can also admit I didn’t buy the Gundam novels when I first saw them, although I did manage to get all of them from used book stores towards the end of the decade when anime was coming into my reach, if still perhaps just before I really understood they’d made an assortment of changes to try and make the story “more mature.”
While this manga in the end is as ready to burnish its subject as any more serious and official “making of” book or documentary, in accepting that I found it entertaining and I’m glad that Denpa did get it translated and published. I am back to waiting for the final volume of Inside Mari, although that does feel closer than it once did. Then, as it turns out, they announced some manga from Mitsuru Adachi not that long ago. It would be another change to “the sort of manga I get from Denpa,” but one I can get to hoping for as well.
Time passed and passed, and at last I was convinced the manga was indeed on its way and I ought to get an order in even if I’d missed the chance to “help show it would be successful with an early pre-order.” I used the online site of an area comics store I’d been trying to support in the past few years, ordering several other titles to qualify for free shipping. As weeks passed and that order didn’t ship, however, I did start wondering if I ought to try something else. When the online anime store Right Stuf finally couldn’t offer regular free shipping across the border at any threshold, I had happened to notice a comment or two about a third-party service that would give you an address at the border and bring the parcels across for a fee. Although I didn’t work out if this would actually be cheaper than just paying the shipping fee at last, I did decide to try it at least once, ordering the manga and a few other items for a less formidable package than I’d kept piling up in the days of high free shipping thresholds. When the order shipped I spent a while worrying I hadn’t got my border address just right, but the package showed up in the shipping service’s system and I managed to get it cleared through customs, paid for, and picked up at last. (After cancelling my order at the comics store, I did learn this particular manga hadn’t been the one they couldn’t get from their distributor.)
For all the twists and turns of getting that copy of The Men Who Created Gundam in my hands, actually reading it did not pale in comparison. It is, to be sure, for someone who’s seen the original anime, and knowing something in advance about the “making-of” anecdotes that float around in English could help too. The first chapter opens in media res, with the voice actor for the series’ lead character Amuro Ray (who’s drawn to look just like Amuro) trying to deliver a notable line. (Watching animation with subtitles does not seem to be a matter of “waiting for memorable one-liners,” but for all that that risks “drawing distinctions between anime and ‘regular fan-targeted live-action,’” maybe that’s also one thing that points out Gundam being the sort of anime that can have this sort of manga made about it.) Director Yoshiyuki Tomino, drawn as a lean, shaved-headed figure in black glasses and a collarless black pullover, goes to absurd lengths to get just the right reading. Then, as if to further provoke “Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be,” he grabs the rear of a female worker. It’s possible the original objections to that might have drawn “but he gets knocked for a loop by the harassed woman every time he does it, so why are you complaining?” It’s more possible this doesn’t help things.
If that’s not the end of things for any particular reader, though, the story returns to Tomino’s first plans to make an anime that will transcend “selling giant robot toys.” A few other series of the time, not all giant robot anime, also get mentioned; I have had the chance to make the foolish boast of having seen some other anime from around then (if not everything I could have seen just yet), even if I recognize the additional risk of making a big deal of “other series could be argued to have been working towards greater seriousness themselves.” The struggles of making the animation (which may provoke dangerous shrugs about how animation production in Japan has balanced on knife edges for decades) don’t take up quite as much of the manga as might first be thought; things move on to the struggle to mobilize what fans did pick up on the show, shift from “inaccurate toys” to “the first model kits” (this was one moment where one line from the “scanlation” sticks in my head in opposition to the professional translation, even if Tomino has gone from the compromise of painting bright colours on the Gundam with intimations this ran interference to get the drabber design of the opponent Zaku mecha past the sponsor to complaining the first model kit has no colours), and work towards making a theatrical movie. There is a flashback in later chapters to the mechanical animator Ichiro Itano, who I’d first picked up on in connection to the later production of Macross; this might add to an amusing sense of the manga being stretched along chapter-by-chapter so long as it maintains attention. Things end all the same with the premiere of the first Gundam movie. That moment had featured in Matt Alt’s Pure Invention, which had reminded me Tomino’s design in the manga was “a considerable exaggeration for the sake of ‘coolness’”; on the other hand, the final festival in the manga did surprise me with a wardrobe alteration for Tomino I hadn’t remembered from before.
There are some bonus chapters that hadn’t been “scanlated.” Space Battleship Yamato had been brought up throughout the manga as “the previous big success in anime,” but where “spotting the visual reference to Gundam” had been an amusing challenge before, a bonus chapter draws Yamato producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki as a villain from his anime (even as existing characters mention having heard “nasty rumors” about him). Another chapter mentions the Gundam novels, which were translated by Frederik L. Schodt and released by Del Rey just after their Robotech novels wound down at the beginning of the 1990s. I did encounter them on bookstore shelves at the time and read Schodt’s introduction to the animation with slight interest, still sorting out more slowly than people older than me and able to link up with other fans that not only had Robotech “come from Japan,” but that there was “more animation like it over there” (even if the novels might have only given a sense of that being far beyond my reach). I suppose this manga’s efforts to mythologize Gundam as “transcending what the establishment thought anime to be” contrasts with certain impressions of just how far anime fans over here were once ready to talk up “animation in Japan” (which might have led to a counter-over-reaction insisting on “what we take in here rests on the fraying reed of a handful of creepy yet overspending fans” and even, perhaps, a sort of later synthesis). There was a moment in the chapter where Tomino’s efforts to write Gundam novels are scoffed at as “a giant robot, bipedal no less, isn’t real science fiction.” I can also admit I didn’t buy the Gundam novels when I first saw them, although I did manage to get all of them from used book stores towards the end of the decade when anime was coming into my reach, if still perhaps just before I really understood they’d made an assortment of changes to try and make the story “more mature.”
While this manga in the end is as ready to burnish its subject as any more serious and official “making of” book or documentary, in accepting that I found it entertaining and I’m glad that Denpa did get it translated and published. I am back to waiting for the final volume of Inside Mari, although that does feel closer than it once did. Then, as it turns out, they announced some manga from Mitsuru Adachi not that long ago. It would be another change to “the sort of manga I get from Denpa,” but one I can get to hoping for as well.