In Review Of: Genshiken 9 by Kio Shimoku

Knowing that this is the final volume is a good thing. No really, especially when you've started to have a real emotional attachment to the characters, it gives them a chance to say goodbye to you, and you to them. Sasahara and Ogiue continue their relationship, but it becomes dicier when she solicits his advice on her possible entry into the ranks of Manga professional. Ohno is still President of the club, and Madrame still hangs around, but things are changing in the senior year of Sasahara, Kousaka and Saki.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Kio's work is that of a great storyteller, one who is certainly so confident in his craft that he takes chances, and almost always those chances pay off in big ways. A final chapter here is presented solely in pictures, allowing us, the dedicated readers, to fill in the dialogue in our heads. Its beautifully presented, and needs no word balloons. We know the characters; we've lived with them now for a number of years. We can hear their voices, we have no need for Kio to put the words into Saki's mouth as she discovers Ohno doing to worst possible thing: distributing pictures of her doing cosplay to Madrame in the hallway. It sandwiches in between the quiet touching moments one last scene of the way things were when we started: Saki at most furious, Ohno at her most mischevious, Madrame and Sasahara and rest along for the ride. It is hysterical, and like all moments from the end of college, taken in with the knowledge that this is a time that will end, and that things will never be the same again. On pages 138 and 139 we see Madrame looking up at the ceiling, trying desperately to ignore the fight between Saki and Ohno at his feet, Sasahara and Oguie holding back Kucchi, and he's smiling. We know that he seeing, in his mind, the moment of the Genshiken as it is now and never will be again.

If there is a tightrope to walk here, it is one covered with grease and done in high, dangerous swirling winds. Doing the bittersweet finale to any popular series is so fraught with the potential to slide into saccharine that its a wonder that some authors never want to undertake it, (Jerry Seinfeld should never have done it certainly.) and others can't wait to wallow in it. The middle part of the book, the real emotional meat to the volume, is the chapter with Oguie and Sasahara negotiating the minefield that is trying to work professionally with one's significant other. Oguie has a thin layer of civility on her emotions on her best day, and she's barely going to be able to handle the tough personal criticism that the professional artist has to endure, much less from her boyfriend. Kio has the camera as an unflinching eye on them as they work to reach a personal and professional understanding. It is not given "happily ever after" treatment. The narrator is given the last line in the chapter: "Sasahara couldn't stop worrying about the future of their relationship". Its a realistic, adult assessment and ending.

There are plenty of other moments that show the maturity of the characters. Madrame is given plenty of opportunity and time to finally reveal his secret love of Saki to her... and in the end doesn't. What is beautiful is the he realizes how much better it was that he didn't say anything. The younger Madrame would never have come to that understanding.

I'll admit that the final two chapters left me confused, so perhaps someone can explain them to me and I'll suddenly end up feeling fairly stupid. Sasahara's sister shows up at the graduation and says that "she's in the Genshiken", when we know that she's not in school there. Perhaps she thinks that she's "in" because they all went to beach two years ago. And at the end of chapter 55, we see three people walking in to the Genshiken room, saying, "President, we've got a new member." I'm taking it that we're getting a glimpse of the new Genshiken members that start to come during Oguie's term as president. The picture on the outside of the door might be one of the cosplay shot's of Saki as the President, but if it is, then I'm not sure what it is supposed to signify. Last, Del Rey handily translates the word Tsendere for us, but not the term Moe, which is, of course, an integral part of the conversation that takes place at the final graduation party. Any help here?

All in all, the nine volumes of Genshiken sit on the bookshelves of my studio waiting to cracked open again and again. Its a great piece of work, and despite what some people might think, the Otaku culture translates far too well for american comic fans. I'll miss these characters. They've become buddies and I'll wish that I knew what they were up to 5 years from now, 10 years from now.

Perhaps I'll just have to Google "Madrame-san" and see what shows up in 10 years.

in Review of: Genshiken #8 by Kio Shimoku

i've praised the Genshiken series before for the accuracy of its portrayal of comic and anime geeks in a college setting, as well as for Kio's wonderful sense of comic timing and inventive structure, and the newest volume, Genshiken #8 here in the States, is no exception. Cool.

Interesting how the series has moved from the broad comedy of the group from the earlier issues to finally devoting an entire book to the dreaded "relationship" issue. How many series simply drop dead at this point, their plotlines slowing down into a morass of drippy sentimentality? Fortunately Kio's sense of pacing doesn't fail him here, as the resolution scenes take the right amount of time, stretching the moments that would appropriately gut wrenching to a potential young couple to a suitable length, before moving forward again. Finally we see some resolution to the tease of Sasahara and Ogiue.

Ogiue, as a character, has been relatively undefined for a while, and, like Kuchiki, used for comic relief relatively early, but has been stealing the show with Ono for some time now. The comic, while still centered on Sasha as the main character, has really been female driven for some time now, changing the balance from the early issues that teetered back and forth from Sasha, Madrame, and Kousaka vs. Saki and Ono. We're finally given the chance to see what makes Ogiue tick, and its certainly a time bomb in terms of her personal relationships.
So what are we left with? some wonderful scenes of fumbling college age relationships between the geek and the uber-geek, and a growing sense of where Sasha, the manga editor, might be going as a man. Kio wouldn't throw his characters under a bus for a cheap laugh, thank god, and we end up with no easy resolutions, but natural ones. Far more so than most romantic comedies, which, oddly enough, is what the Genshiken series has become.

I salute kio, whose work I find amazing and so effortless that it must take a hell of a lot of work to produce. Thanks. I have no idea if there are volumes to follow, but what we have now is one great read.

Storytelling Decisions: The moment or the moment before

Away from the scanner, so I'm not going to pepper this with any images, but the verbal will have to suffice.

So there are more than a few thoughts on the art of storytelling that I have as I work my way through the story of Pistoleras. And I recall an article by Jim Steranko many years ago, accompanied his pre-production painting from Raiders, where he made a point that while other artists preferred the moment of the balloon exploding, he prefered the moment just before the balloon exploded, the pregnant pause.

I've thought a lot about this over the years, and nowhere is it more interesting that trying to decide how to use a panel that shows a passage of time, perhaps during a conversation. I think that usually we see a panel isolate a moment in time, where Peter Parker expresses an opinion to Mary Jane, but there are other examples where, in a two shot, the Ben Grimm will ask Reed Richards not to do something, and Reed Richards will press the button opening the negative zone anyway. Fairly straight forward, but the image will be of Reed pressing the button. So we, as a reader, are asked to ignore the right side of the panel with Reed pressing the button and we need to read left to right and only pay attention to Ben gesticulating in the right side of the panel. Kirby was the master of making sure that we could read across properly to "get" the pacing of the story. Eisner was great about that as well, obviously.

So how much do you compress the story, and how much do you expand?. Bendis is considered the king of decompression in these modern times, a storytelling method that I tend to find almost a "tick" and stylistic choice, and one that I enjoy in Powers tremendously. The compression inherent in, say, the early Justice Leagues by Sekowsky and Fox, is so tight, that it almost offends my modern sensibilities. Hey, the original Starro attack on the JLA would at least have been worth two issues of the Avengers as layed out by Kirby and drawn by Heck.

I enjoy the decompression of the Manga that I get in Genshiken (my favorite manga of all time), but it would be foreign to me in, say, Spider Man or Fantastic Four. Pistoleras is as much a story of place to me as much as it is the story of the four girls and feminine empowerment. I want people to feel the heat of the desert of Mexico, and the crash of waves. I want them to get as much as they can in black and white and grey.

There are as many approaches to this as there are stories. Given a little more time and my scanner, I'll post some different examples. Any thoughts?