I’ve been doing this column for over a year! That would be hard to believe, if it weren’t for the enormous amount of manga that now crowds my bookshelves. Today I’ll take a look at several OEL (aka “World Manga”) titles, all from Tokyopop, in honor of the recent release of Dramacon volume 2. I reviewed Dramacon volume 1 in November last year.
Fool’s Gold, Vol. 1
by Amy Reeder Hadley
distributed by Tokyopop
Who would like this book: Younger girls, probably from ages 11-15
Who would hate this book: Boys. My boyfriend.
I had been looking forward to Fool’s Gold after seeing some sample pages at New York Comic Con earlier this year. Of all of Tokyopop’s OEL titles, Fool’s Gold had the best looking art (even better than Dramacon, in some ways). Fool’s Gold hit the streets on July 11th and I picked it up immediately.
Fool’s Gold is the story of a girl named Penny who is more interested in designing original clothes for her aunt’s store than in keeping up with her schoolwork. When Penny’s best friend is hurt by an untrustworthy boyfriend, Penny turns the school Geology Club into a secret organization of girls who identify cheating/lying boys at their school blacklist them as un-datable. Or more precisely - in order to fit in with the geology theme - the girls name jerks “pyrites,” or fool’s gold. In a short amount of time Penny has created a high school dating utopia where girls at the school are no longer attracted to jerks.
Penny used to be a loser at her high school, but thanks to her Geology Club she is suddenly in the center of the social scene. Will she go mad with power? The Geology Meetings seem to be quickly devolving into McCarthyist witch hunts.
I have almost no complaints about the art of Fool’s Gold. The style isn’t trying to mimic Japapnese manga, there are no “super-deformed” moments or ill-placed giant sweat drops. The only art complaint I have is a minor one - Penny just doesn’t seem expressive enough. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what she’s thinking or feeling. However, that could be the artist’s intent. I’m not entirely sure that the audience is supposed to know what Penny is thinking at any given moment.
I’m more weirded out by the fashion in Fool’s Gold. Penny wears some fairly outlandish things to school - outfits which I’m sure could’ve gotten her beaten up at the high school I attended, or at the very least excommunicated. It’s no wonder Penny was upopular before she started her male witch trials (or in this case, warlock trials?).
At another point in the story, Penny’s younger aunt digs out Penny’s mother’s old clothes and they take turns dressing up “retro” wherein retro means the leggings of 1990-1991. I remember those days of unwise fashion well, as I was in 6th grade in ‘91. I found it somewhat jarring that Penny’s mom could’ve been a teenager when I was in junior high - just like how it was jarring to hear Pearl Jam on a classic rock station in 1998. Later in the book Penny and her friends dig out the old “puff paints” and decorate some clothes. I’m no fashion mogul, but I’m pretty sure that puff paints were never really in style, and have never and will never be cool. Somehow I can believe the plot of Reborn but I can’t believe puff paints could be cool in any context.
My biggest complaint about Fool’s Gold is that it can be hokey at times. The “pyrite pirate” dolls that Penny’s cronies hang up in honor of jerks are well drawn, but I can’t help thinking how corny those dolls might look in real life. The wronged girls take turns throwing darts into the dolls while chanting:
“You fooled me once,
But that news is old.
I swear to shun you…
Fool’s Gold!”
I don’t think I could get my high school friends to say that chant sincerely. Perhaps we were all jaded hipsters who wouldn’t sink to that level of sincerity.
Even though I have a lot of complaints about the fashions in Fool’s Gold, and some questions about it’s poetic merits, I don’t have complaints about the plot. It is fairly compelling and I will check out volume 2. I could totally see a school library shelving this. If you are a younger reader interested in reading more domestic work, Fool’s Gold is not a bad place to start. Dramacon may have had higher highs and lower lows, but Fool’s Gold is a very even read.
Steady Beat, Vol. 1
by Rivkah
distributed by Tokyopop
Who would like this book: Junior high kids, probably 11 to 14-year-olds (cover age rating is 13+).
Who would hate this book: Girls who aren’t me. People willing to overlook the art. Texans?
Steady Beat has a strong premise and a poor everything else. The art is very novice, and the plot unfolds in an awkward way. I can imagine that in a few years, with more practice, “Rivkah” might put out a book that I would enjoy, but I suspect that book will not be in the Steady Beat series.
Protagonist Leah finds a love letter to her sister Sarai (I’m not sure how to pronounce either name, maybe that makes it more manga-like, or maybe it’s a Texas thing). The love letter turns out to be from another girl. Is Leah’s sister secretly gay? That would be enough of a plot on it’s own, nevermind that Leah and Sarai live in Texas - and nevermind that their mom is a Republican Senator and this might be OMG controversial.
In my opinion, there is plenty of conflict in finding out as a high school student that one’s sibling is gay. How will the rest of the family react if and when they find out? What is Sarai going through? How does Leah feel about all of this? How will their peers at school react if the secret gets out? I went to school in a small rural community where it was not OK to be to be openly gay. My friends who were gay struggled every day at school with unaccepting classmates and teachers and dealing with their parents reactions at home. There is a story about gay high school students waiting to be told in manga/comic form, but Steady Beat is sadly not that story.
We don’t get to find out the inner turmoil of Leah’s family because Leah quickly gets entangled in a series of bizarre hijinks that sidetrack the real meat of the story. Leah goes to meet a mysterious person alone in the park - a risky enough scenario without talking to a bum on the way. Did I mention this scene is happening at night? You’ll want to keep that in mind since there is very little indication within the artwork itself that the scene is happening at night, in the dark, although this is important to the plot. The bum who confronts Leah speaks in one of the worst lettering decisions I’ve seen in any graphic novel. It looks like he (she?) is speaking in the “Sand” font, one the fonts I loathe most. As Leah tries to escape from the horrifying genderless ugly-font-spewing bum she gets hit by a car.
Leah wakes up in the home of Elijah, a hot teenager living with his stereotypically gay step-dad/veterinarian named Paul. There’s already a lot wrong with the story at this point. Having characters who otherwise wouldn’t cross paths meet via car accident seems painfully contrived. Additionally, Leah is no longer driving the plot forward as the protagonist. Stuff keeps happening to her, but she is not driving the action forward. This makes for a weak narrative.
I’ve read some shoujo manga (Absoulte Boyfriend) that skimped on the backgrounds and used larger panels and more screentones and bubbles in lieu of detailed art, but Steady Beat is a much worse offender. The toned backgrounds seemed forced, the large panels seem like time-saving shortcuts. If I knew more about drawing anatomy, I’d swear that the characters were disproportionate at times. The way the eyes are drawn in “anime-style” just doesn’t seem natural. Rivkah is only 25, and she probably drew this a couple years ago as her first book. I’m sure Rivkah’s art will only get better in the future, but she could’ve used more help for volume one. To be fair, maybe she was really rushed, maybe she had a terrible editor, maybe it wasn’t Rivkah’s fault so much as Tokyopop’s fault.
The book itself is about 192 pages, but it is deceptively thick - it includes a two page ad for the next volume, nine “sketchbook” pages with commentary, six pages of ads for other books, and a 33 page preview for Mark of the Succubus, which comes out next month (wow, I’m not interested in the Succubus). So there are 50 pages of “extras” that have little to do with Steady Beat.
Plastered all over the webpages about Steady Beat and the back cover is the boast that Rivkah won “Manga Academy’s Create Your Own Manga” competition. In light of how Steady Beat turned out, I would like to see a competition for “Best Manga Editor” and read the winner of that contest instead.
Van Von Hunter, Vol. 1
by Mike Schwark & Ron Kaulfersch
distributed by Tokyopop
Who would like this book: Webcomic comedy-fantasy fans already familiar with the Van Von Hunter universe.
Who would hate this book: Most people not covered above.
My first exposure to Van Von Hunter was their winning short in Rising Stars of Manga volume 1. The Van Von Hunter short was hilarious, and the art, although clearly not professional, was pretty decent. I even liked it better than the Grand Prize winner of the first contest. Apparently the creators had had years of experience publishing gag comics on the web.
I was given a free copy of Van Von Hunter by Tokyopop as an example of a book toned entirely with the Manga Studios 3.0 software. Maybe Van Von Hunter is a poor example of the software’s abilities, as only one thing stuck with me as I read volume one was that every shape, every character design, and even many of the backgrounds, are made up of closed lines. Allow me to explain: Whenever you use the paintbucket tool, say in Photoshop, or even older software like Paint, the lines you are trying to color between need to be closed. You could use the paintbucket tool within the letter “O” for example, but you couldn’t use it to fill in the space inside of the letter “C” because the lines don’t meet. It’s an open shape, so the paint bleeds out and covers the entire canvas. There are absolutely no open shapes in all of Van Von Hunter - not even in the characters’ hair! Once I noticed this detail it drove me crazy and I couldn’t focus on the book at all. I understand that closing all the shapes must save a lot of time in their production process, but their art really suffers from the restriction.
Volume one of Van Von Hunter is not even a fraction of the amount of funny as the Rising Stars entry. Even a random sampling of their early webcomics turns up funnier jokes. I suspect the authors tried to move away from gags in order to build a plot arc that would cover three volumes, which is exactly what Tokyopop wants from all of it’s OEL authors. The three-volume arc might work well for something like Fool’s Gold, but it seems like a big mistake for Van Von Hunter. I would much rather have read a compilation of their gag comics from the original webcomic than the plot they came up with for these books.
Interestingly enough, Van Von Hunter was syndicated in newspapers for six months last summer - but only the gag strips. In the end, I suppose that Van Von Hunter is probably OK for a webcomic, but I’m really not into webcomics.
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