Tekkon Kinkreet: Black & White (All in One)

By Taiyo Matsumoto
Viz, 624 pp.
Rating: Mature

Ed Chavez of animeondvd and the mangacast taught me everything I know about manga. At San Diego Comic Con this year Ed got his advance copy of Tekkon Kinkreet before anyone else – including the Vice President of Publishing at Viz, a young man named Alvin. At one of the Viz panels Ed pretended to lick his copy of Tekkon while Alvin watched, his jaw hanging open in surprise and jealousy.

Now that I’ve read Tekkon Kinkreet, I can say without hyperbole that Ed’s actions at the time were totally reasonable and appropriate.

The Story
Black and White are brothers and members of team Cat, a youth street gang with a chaotic neutral alignment. They live in Treasure Town, a run-down neighborhood in futuristic Osaka. Treasure Town is being cleaned up Rudy Giuliani-style by yakuza and alien real estate developers. Black feels a sense of ownership and fights to defend “his” city with a dose of the ultra-violence. White is prophetic and semi-retarted, and urges Black to take on the philosophy “Don’t worry, be happy!” About halfway through the book team Cat is being hunted to the death by alien assassins, and White is taken in by kindly policemen in an ad hoc witness protection program, breaking Black’s heart.

The Art
Tekkon looks like no other manga you’ve ever read – unless you’ve read Matsumoto’s other titles. Blue Spring is available in English, and Viz printed No. 5 several years ago. Viz is releasing the movie Ping Pong based on Matsumoto’s manga of the same name.

Tekkon’s art is fantastic. Matsumoto studied comics in France for several years, and completely changed his art style. Reading Tekkon is less like reading manga than it is like reading the best zine or underground comic ever created.

Matsumoto rarely uses screen tones (those gray dot patterns in manga) in favor of simple black and white lines. The line quality is thick, deep, dark, and interesting. The camera angles are amazing – much of the comic looks like it was shot with a fish-eye lens (like the Wong Kar Wai movie Fallen Angels). Buildings and landscapes bend in every direction, yet the perspective is never compromised.

The characters are not designed like “typical”¹ manga characters. You won’t find big eyes and small mouths here – the characters have little piggy eyes. Although everything in Tekkon is very stylized, Black and White are drawn with remarkable realism. They pose between chapter breaks like very real children. This realism makes the violence resonate disturbingly.

My Review
I really, really loved this book. It’s hard to tell right now if I’m just spazzing out about the title at the moment or if Tekkon really is a classic forever. Normally I’m not into police stories or gangster stories or stories featuring a 98% male cast, but Tekkon had all three and I still really loved it.

The dialog is masterfully done. I can’t say how much of that is the work of a careful translator and how much is Matsumoto being awesome. When the characters say philosophical things I totally buy it. The Grandpa character who gives the boys priestly advice might come off as a cliche in other stories, but in Tekkon he’s original and appealing.

I recommended Sexy Voice and Robo, but I’m requiring Tekkon Kinkreet as a title that you must own. It’s accepted in the comic book community that among the greatest graphic novels of all time are Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Maus – if you want to add some manga to that short list, I recommend Nausicaa and Tekkon Kinkreet.

The Presentation
Originally published in three volumes in Japan, Viz has collected the short series into one big omnibus edition. The paper quality is outstanding compared to the average manga volume. Although not quite up to Japanese standards of fancy-pants paper, the American edition is a lovely white paper with fine ink quality. A dust jacket features cover art that looks like the movie’s artwork, but underneath the dust jacket is the original Japanese cover design.

The book is flipped, and reads left-to-right. It was originally published left-to-right when it first came out in the 1990’s.

My only qualm is that the large size of the volume means that teenagers reading the average-sized manga paperbacks in bookstores may miss Tekkon, as it will be shelved closer to the graphic novels and oversized books.

Tekkon is so good I almost expect it to be in hardcover. I think Drawn & Quarterly fans and indy comics readers would enjoy Tekkon, and I wonder if they would take it more seriously if it was available in hardcover.

The Book and the Movie
You can read my longer review/essay of the Tekkon film in Otaku USA Magazine issue 2. I reviewed the film without reading the manga first. Many of my complaints about the film structure are not problematic in the manga. Regrettably, one sour Village Voice review may have hit the nail on the head; the episodic nature of the manga made the film adaptation bulky and oddly paced.

The film is not a straight-up adaptation of the manga. Although it is spelled out in large bold letters in one panel of the manga “FLYING CHILDREN”, Black and White fly a lot less in the book compared to the movie. The reader must assume that Black got to the top of those telephone poles somehow, but the flying is much more obvious in the movie.

The manga backgrounds are odd and wonderful, and Arias’s adaptation of the backgrounds to the screen do them real justice without being identical. The CG and 2-D blend flawlessly as Black and White move through the streets of Treasure Town.

Although the book takes place in Osaka, the Treasure Town of the film is could be any city in any Asian country, and it’s also reminiscent of New York.

I can’t decide which media one should consume first. I really, really loved the Tekkon manga, but the film left me feeling a little cold. I can’t say I would’ve liked the movie better had I read the book first. I might have been disappointed, or I might have had low expectations and been impressed. I’m interested to hear what other people think.

Some Cultural Context
There are some things about the cultural context of Japan that the layman might miss on a read of Tekkon Kinkreet. Perhaps the most important of these is that crows in Japan are freaking huge. These monstrous crows sometimes attack garagemen and can peck people to death. When Black stands outside an office window with a crow on his shoulder, that is a huge crow and it’s f-ing terrifying, but you might not get it without seeing these giant birds for yourself.

The Japanese love uniforms, and every minor position in society has it’s own – even yakuza have a sort of uniform. In Tekkon’s futuristic Osaka, street gangs all have names and silly outfits. The Cats face off against the Dawn and Dusk brothers, a chocolate-themed gang, and a gang wearing black bodysuits with the numbers one, two, and three painted on the front. It’s a little like the move The Warriors.

The other thing you need to know about Japan is that they continually tear down old buildings to replace them with new ones. New Yorkers might think we know a thing or two about gentrification and urban renewal, but our city is very quaint next to Tokyo, which goes through urban upheaval at an alarming rate (when it’s not being destroyed by earthquakes, fires, bombs, typhoons, or Godzilla). The themes of loss and re-zoning will probably be lost on rural American audiences who have never had a similar experience.

In Japan the relationship between cops and yakuza are very different from the relationship that American police and the mafia have here. Yakuza crimes “don’t count” in the larger Japanese society. Yakuza businesses are accepted as at least semi-legitimate. Japanese cops do not carry guns. One character in Tekkon laments that he became a police officer instead of a yakuza (in Japan, being yakuza is an actual career choice).

The same cop whines throughout the story that he has not yet had permission to carry or fire a gun. Despite being a story about gangs and violence, Tekkon has only one gun, and when it’s used, it is a very powerful scene.

Recommended.

This review is based on complimentary copies provided by the publisher. The Tekkon Kinkreet manga will be available in the U.S. on September 26th, 2007. The DVD of the film will be released by Sony on September 25th.

¹ Like most anime/manga fans I have a problem explaining to outsiders that there is no “typical” manga style. Outsides often claim it “all looks the same” even when faced with Pokemon and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure side-by-side!