Lyn Jensen's Blog: Manga, Music, and Politics

Random Lengths News - Last Women's Conference?

2012-02-10T12:07:00.000-08:00

Random Lengths News story by me from 2010 online - Women's Conference, Shriver and Minervas 11/10: http://t.co/aAmPrxCl

2010 is the last time California saw a women's conference. Since this story ran, Gov. Jerry Brown has definitely transformed the event: He has not held a Women's Conference. This event outlasted three Republican governors--and one Democratic one--but our current Democratic governor shows no interest in continuing it.

Womens Conference Will Remember Shriver and Minervas www.randomlengthsnews.com

Note: the third paragraph of this story was added by Random Lengths editorial staff.

Debut Manga Review, 2005: BLU

2012-01-26T12:23:00.000-08:00

GAY ANGELS IN LOVE, FINALLY
BLU Lauches With Three Manga

MANGA by Lyn Jensen

Note: the following review was my debut manga column, which ran in LA Alternative, Dec. 2-8, 2005. Since then both LA Alternative and TokyoPop/BLU have become defunct.

"Are those guys making out?" fans wondered when the anime Earthian was released in the nineties. Actually the two locked in embrace were angels from another planet (obviously) but the video first introduced Americans to the Japanese series about gay angels who watch over the "Earthian" (us) while concealing what they are--in more ways than one.

Now TokyoPop, through its BLU imprint, is releasing an English translation of the Earthian manga--the print series--by Yun Kouga. It's one of three current titles for BLU that specialize in a genre called "yaoi" or "shonen ai" in English and "Boys Love" in Japan.

"We use the Japanese, they use the English," Alexis Kirsch of TokyoPop explains.

"The manga series was originally published in the eighties and re-released in a special edidtion format in Asia in 2002. Ours is the English version of the special edition with only minor differences. Our Earthian releases will be four books long, though the main story concludes in book 3. Book 4 has some side stories including chapters that were drawn in 2002 especially for the book," said Kirsch.

BLU is also currently offering two other titles, Love Mode by Yuki Shimuzu and Shinobu Kokoro: Hidden Heart by Temori Matsumoto. "We see the market is out there for these things," says Kirsch, following the surprising success of Fake and Gravitation, two yaoi series in TokyoPop's back catalog.

Earthian is for fans ages 16-up but the other two are more explicit, for adults, ages 18-up. Kirsch calls Hidden Heart "a little hardcore." It's not a single volume of a series, it's a collection of stories where the plots are thin and the gay sex explicit.

Love Mode has more in common with Fake, having been originally published in 1998 by Be X Boy, the Japanese magazine that brought Fake to the world.

As Kirsch describes Love Mode, "No big plot, starts with a case of mistaken identity. A high school boy thinks he's going on a date with a girl, but it's a guy." The guy, meanwhile, thinks the innocent schoolboy's a male hooker with the same name.

Over the next three years [until 2008], BLU will distribute subsequent volumes of Love Mode, focusing more on the nightclub owner who set the two up. Take a look at www.blumanga.com for other upcoming series. [As of Jan. 2012, site appears defunct, so check book retailers for subsequent yaoi manga published by BLU.]

2008 Interview: Ghost Towne's Blues

2012-01-13T14:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a link (hope it works) to an interview I did with Japanese-American rock group Ghost Towne for Random Lengths in 2008:

Ghost Towne Blues

http://www.randomlengthsnews.com/content/view/646/129/Art

You can find their music on MySpace.

RLN 2/11/11: Who Will Replace Oropeza?

2012-01-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

Here's an online version of a news story I did for the Feb. 11, 2011 issue of Random Lengths. It was about Ted Lieu's (and his opponents') campaign to replace the late Jenny Oropeza in the California State Senate:

RLN Reporter Lyn Jensen explores...
Who Will Replace Oropeza?

http://tinyurl.com/4zgqs9j

Phil Ochs and News in Random Lengths

2011-12-29T12:29:00.000-08:00

Random Lengths, Nov. 18-Dec. 1, 2011:

Phil Ochs: Even by the standards of the 60s, few singer-songwriters combined music with political activism to the extent Phil Ochs did. His music was a reflection of the times. Read more on page 11 of http://tinyurl.com/RLn111711

If you care to scroll through this link, you'll find my review of the Phil Ochs There But for Fortune DVD and also my news report of a major fire that swept through part of a mobilehome park and a construction site in Carson on October 27:

http://tinyurl.com/..RLn111711

You'll also find more of my reviews and news stories at the http://www.randomlengthsnews.com/ site.

Manga/Anime Review: Vampire Knight

2011-12-14T12:11:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to my online Vampire Knight review: http://lnkd.in/RVXGvS

I discuss both the manga and anime series. The article's posted on the www.randomlengthsnews.com site, timed for manga fans' holiday gift-giving. If the link doesn't connect, please feel free to do a copy-and-paste to your browser.

Resume Highlights

2011-12-07T12:41:00.000-08:00

Summary: Individual with over 10 years of experience in writing, editing, proofreading and the preparation of materials for print and on-line publication. Superior news judgment with experience reporting and writing news. Strong news-writing background and multimedia skills.

Random Lengths, San Pedro, CA (circulation 56,000) 2001-present
Carson Reporter (2001-present)

· Contribute biweekly to the paper's "Carson City Limits" section. Cover the Carson community including local government, civic organizations, sports complexes, Congressional District, state legislature, and the arts. Turn in beat copy and seek out enterprising stories.
· Cover other community news regularly within the newspaper’s coverage area.
· Produce short-form and long-form stories between 250-1800 words, including writing, editing, and publishing more than 500 by-lines in more than 200 issues over the past decade.
· Credits include more than seven cover stories about Carson politics and other subjects.
· Manage time and meet deadlines. Experience writing on deadline. Write, edit, proofread, and submit copy by deadline.
· Research information and verify facts. Interview sources when appropriate. Interact with all internal and external sources necessary to successfully complete assignments. Take photos and provide other graphic material as appropriate.

Editorial Assistant (2001-2003)

· Worked as editorial staff assistant, writing and editing in-house stories and columns in approximately 100 issues.
· Edited writing projects as assigned. Raised awareness of issues of strategic importance. Researched information and verified facts. Interviewed sources when appropriate.

Carson Venture Magazine, Carson, CA (circulation 70,000) 2008-2009
Editor

· Edited all editorial copy in four issues of bimonthly regional magazine.
· Supervised six freelance writers, assigned stories and deadlines.

Rape in Yaoi Manga

2011-11-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

This is an updated version of a review of Ayano Yamane's Target in the Finder, now reissued by DMP and retitled Target in the Viewfinder, that originally appeared in LA Alternative, Dec. 23-29, 2005.

During its brief time on the manga scene, Be Beautiful specialized in yaoi (gay-themed manga by and for women) and the New York-based publisher's selections seemed intent on testing what the American market found acceptable. The company appeared to pay little or no heed to possible cultural conflicts between Japanese and American views of what may be appropriate for comics. All the manga they published had an 18-up age rating, and some titles such as Ayano Yamane's Target in the Finder were hard to stomach even for adults.

Since the demise of Be Beautiful, DMP has resurrected the Finder series (now called the Viewfinder series) which remains one of the darkest and most disturbing manga ever published in America, and also one of the most popular. The plot--such as there is one--stretches over at least five volumes and concerns the sadistic Japanese gangster, the sadistic Chinese gangster, and the innocent kidnap victim who spends most of the series getting raped and tortured by one or the other. The first volume, which DMP now calls Target in the Viewfinder, features five graphic male-on-male rapes along with assorted murders, torture and slightly more consensual sex acts. That's a lot of activity for a graphic novel that's less than 200 pages long.

Although Viewfinder is an extreme example, it's not atypical for yaoi manga. Dozens of yaoi manga available in English have at least one scene of either rape or attempted rape. Fans often casually call such material "non-con," short for "non-consensual."

Like almost all yaoi, the Viewfinder series is created by a young woman whose art is often praised. More disturbing than the content itself are the outdated attitudes towards rape these works exhibit: in dozens of yaoi manga, rape is an act of passion, "No!" means "Yes!" and it's supposed to be completely acceptable because the victim (uke) secretly enjoys it. The rapist never ends up in jail, the victim never suffers lasting scars. In the first volume of Viewfinder, the victim opens his door to his rapist and gets raped again, so many fans argue it must be true love. Of all the yaoi so far published in the US, only a few exceptions even bother to show a darker interpretation of non-consensual sex.

Of course artists have the right to probe into dark corners and adults have a right to seek out such material if they choose. However, publishers owe consumers a better system than indiscriminately marketing violent rape fantasies--in comics--with no regard for either realism or what may turn out to be very serious real-world consequences. Recently there have been cases of people getting in trouble with the law for manga they ordered through the mail or took through customs.

When I first reviewed Target in 2005, I suggested publishers might want to separate consensual and non-consensual material between different imprints, to provide customers with more guidance than just an age rating in selecting reading matter. No publisher has stepped up to structure their yaoi lines this way, however. In fact DMP is now publishing the Finder series as part of their June line, which was originally created as a home for soft yaoi--the genre at its most innocent and childlike. Obviously that's not the case anymore.

Manga Reviews: "Off Beat" and "Steady Beat"

2011-10-27T12:06:00.000-07:00

This review is updated and revised from one originally published in LA Alternative, Dec. 30, 2005.

Working in the manga style allows American artists a wider range of subject matter than traditional comics. Gay-themed plot lines, for example, are still rare in the US. Doonesbury occasionally broaches the subject--but that's Doonesbury. There are comics by and for the American GLBT community--but those are for a specific community. Marvel and DC Comics have brought forth a few GLBT characters in superhero comics--but those are superhero comics.

TokyoPop jumped to the forefront of the American manga trend with two fairly realistic stories of everyday teens encountering turbulent same-sex relationships and other mysteries in Off-Beat by Jen Lee Quick and Steady Beat by Rivkah. Both series met sad fates, as they were planned as three-volume stories and TokyoPop allowed both to lapse after two volumes. There has been talk of both series continuing as Web-only comics, but the creators have yet to see such talk become action.

In Quick's Off-Beat, schoolboy genius Tory Blake is obsessed with a new boy in his New York neighborhood for reasons he can't explain. Convinced that some deep mystery that only he can unravel is afoot, Tory becomes an Internet-surfing detective in sneakers. He even persuades his mother to enroll him in the new kid's elite school--purely for the superior academic opportunity, of course.

Finally he wrangles an assignment to tutor the other boy, and even invites him home. Now he's got a chance--but what exactly is that chance he so wants? What's even more fustrating about seeing this manga lost in a publishing limbo is how vol. 2 ended on a cliffhanger, a newfound friendship perhaps destroyed by something inexplainable.

Steady Beat concerns Leah, the teenage daughter of a conservative Texas politician, who finds a romantic-sounding letter written to her older sister and signed, "Jessica." Attempting to unravel the mystery behind the letter, she encounters a teenage boy being raised by his gay father. Vol. 2 burned down a few closet doors and found Leah struggling to accept people soley for the quality of their character. Vol. 3 was met to be told from the older sister's point of view.

The series' artists took different paths to developing their subjects. Quick found some inspiration in Sanami Matoh's Fake, but wanted to tell a more realistic and authentic New York story, while at the same time making a departure from her usual fantasy creations. TokyoPop described the result as "not your average boy-meets-boy story." Rivkah won another publisher's "Create Your Own Manga" contest, catching the attention of TokyoPop. She has expressed a preference for working in girls' comics.

A source inside the manga industry tells me TokyoPop has yet to release the licenses they hold so other publishers may pick up on former TokyoPop titles. Why isn't clear, unless the company plans to revive its publishing venture some day, some way. Whether Off-Beat and Steady Beat are included in this stew of languishing properties is unclear. If no comics publisher wants them, perhaps a GLBT publisher will be kind enough to express interest in finishing Tory's and Leah's stories.

Review of Felipe Smith's MBQ

2011-10-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

This review is revised and updated from one that originally appeared in LA Alternative, Dec. 16-22, 2005.

Felipe Smith leads a wave of artists who are incorporating elements of American, European, and Japanese comics into a still-evolving style often called "American" or "global" manga. Smith's big break came when he was chosen for Los Angeles publisher TokyoPop's Rising Stars of Manga 3. His darkly humorous winning entry, "Manga," was inspired by a job he wasn't paid for. That led to a contract with TokyoPop to do the three-volume MBQ, one of the few original English-language manga series that TokyoPop stayed with until its conclusion.

MBQ focused on Los Angeles' South Bay region, and was inspired by real people and actual locations. It follows six major characters through a night and day of life and death. Smith says the dreadlocked artist, Omario, is autobiographical. Being character-driven, the plot is episodic, akin to a Robert Altman film or Bertolt Brecht play.

"Most stories, and manga, have one linear character. I have six," Smith explains. "They don't know each other at times, and they're from different parts of town. I need to cover all their stories at the same time because as the story progresses, their paths start to merge."

"I basically want to have an overall sense of what's going on in LA at any time," he adds. "So the reader comes away picking up on certain coincidences," hence the reason why the plotting appears so disconnected in the first volume. It's worth bearing with the developments in subsequent volumes, however.

Smith came to Los Angeles to work as an animator after attending art school in Chicago. "After a while I realized that was not what I wanted to do," he says. "I wanted to be able to do different kinds of drawings, for adults."

He counts the realistic manga Tokyo Tribes as an influence. In his efforts to bring a similar style to the screen, he found "a lot of studios told me that animation is very limited, style-wise. What I was doing was too complicated," so he moved sideways into manga.

As to why he works in manga instead of a more traditional type of comics, he explains, "I think it's the storytelling. Manga--obviously--being about 200 pages, has more time to tell the story. I have a chase scene [in MBQ, vol. 1] that's about 30 pages. [A traditional American-style comic book] comes out once a month and it's 22 pages. My chase scene is a whole story."

Smith has now found a new home in the Japanese comic scene. His follow-up to MBQ is Peepo Choo, an entirely new story about a gathering of anime fans, which was originally published in Japan. Vertical is publishing an English-language version that currently runs three volumes.

Rock Manga

2011-10-04T12:08:00.001-07:00

This review is updated and revised from reviews that originally appeared in LA Alternative, Feb. 17-23 and March 3-9, 2006.

Rock and manga create a mash-up completely different from rock and traditional comics. Japanese manga-ka (comic artists) are freely inspired by both scenes, and they have given us works as diverse as Nana, Beck, and Gravitation. During TokyoPop's existence, the company made the phenomenon a truly global one by publishing such works as Road Song (an American manga), Yonen Buzz (a German one) and Princess Ai (a true international manga collaboration).

Unlike some rock star projects, readers didn't need to be a Courtney Love fan to enjoy Princess Ai. The original three-volume series was credited to four collaborators:

Misaho Kujiradou drew the manga, working from Ai Yazawa's character designs. DJ Milky wrote the goth-rock songs that brought an extra dimension to the action. Love, the controversial (on so many, many levels) rock singer, and a longtime manga fan who once lived in Japan, was credited with the concept and writing. However, she "had nothing to do with the manga or any of the ancilliary projects. Her choice," said a TokyoPop spokesperson in 2006.

"Ai" is "love" in Japanese and just like love, Princess Ai conquered all in the epic story of a fallen angel from another planet (shades of Yun Kouga's Earthian) who became a rock star in two worlds. All the characters showed multiple dimensons, including Ai herself, whose transition from lost soul to "the second revolution" was spellbinding. The freer she got, the bigger her angel wings got, and that brought her into conflict with big bad music-biz gangsters who thought the only good rock star was a dead one.

TokyoPop originally envisioned a marketing plan that involved a film, novels, toys, downloads, and clothing. That would have put this female-driven manga on the same commercial footing as the most popular shonen manga. However, the franchise never gained the commercial momentum needed for such far-reaching ventures. It tapered out with a spin-off comic strip Princess Ai of Ai Land targeted to young teen girls, a coloring book, a few dolls, art/fan books and digital versions, and a manga sequel Prism of the Midnight Dawn that died when TokyoPop did.

While Ai was targeted to a shojo audience, Road Song was marketed more to a traditional comic audience, and was originally presented as a poignant comedy-drama about a band that really was on the run. The creator, Allan Gross, said of his lead characters, "Monty is probably how I see myself, and Simon is probably more like I really am!" Joanna Estep did the art. It was one of the few OEL (original English language) manga series that TokyoPop actually stayed with until its conclusion, at three volumes.

In the first volume, two troubled teenage boys fled to Cleveland after their families were destroyed by a Japanese gangster who was feuding with one boy's father. Simon, the punky kid from the wrong side of town was the classical violinist, while his brother-in-law Monty was the egotistical rich kid into Elvis, guitars, girls, and baseball. Unfortunately the story deteriorated over the next couple of volumes. The second volume, set in Tennessee, had absolutely nothing in common with that state's music scene. The final volume was set in San Francisco but was nothing like that city either--not its streets, music, baseball, or even hippie culture. The crime sub-plot strained credibility, even by manga standards. Even the songs (penned by Gross) were a distraction, entirely the opposite effect from the fine work Milky did that enhanced Ai.

Christina Plaka's Yonen Buzz was like Ai in that it was an international creative effort. TokyoPop offered an English translation of a German manga about a Japanese rock band. Plaka attempted to bring the energy of a grunge band to the printed page. The story and characters wound through familiar territory: the band member who can't make rehearsal, the romance that becomes a distraction, the art-versus-commerce dilemna. TokyoPop stayed with the series for three volumes but the fourth and final one was never published in English.

Wounding Words: Yun Kouga's Platonic Manga

2011-09-28T11:32:00.001-07:00

This review is updated and revised from one that appeared in LA Alternative, Feb. 24-Mar. 2, 2006 edition.

Welcome to the world of an abused, mentally disturbed and sexually confused 12-year-old boy where, for starters, virgins have cat ears and tails. He battles "fighter units" whose words are literally deady weapons capable of wounding. Almost against his will, he's drawn to one young man who is both a protector and a seducer. That's the rabbit hole Loveless falls into, descending into the gaps between fantasy and realism, pure and tainted love, sci-fi action and yaoi-like male-male relationships.

TokyoPop started publishing the Yun Kouga manga series Loveless in America in 2006, and described it as part mystery and part psychological thriller with a little shonen-ai (yaoi or male-male elements) mixed in. "Its very tame but very suggestive," said a TokyoPop spokesperson at the time. That said, those who find a suggestive relationship between a 12-year-old boy and a Byronic man disturbing are advised to avoid Loveless.

"Kouga is a magician of the first order and has crafted an entire series around the concept that thoughts are energy and words are spells," wrote Christine Boylan in the first TokyoPop volume's epilogue.

A very popular and long-established Japanese manga artist, Kouga shows a new level of maturity in her art and storytelling here--Loveless is clearly superior to her earlier Earthian, although American fans of that anime (and manga) will recognize many similarities, especially in her lead characters. It's easy to see how the little black angel in Earthian is a predecessor to the troubled but innocent cat-eared Ritsuka, the lead character in Loveless. Likewise the innocent's protector, the vengeful cynical white angel, in Earthian is much like Ritsuka's mysterious older friend Soubi in Loveless.

In Earthian the characters struggled fairly explcitly with a forbidden homosexual relationship. In Loveless the struggle is more an internal one, as 12-year-old Ritsuka attempts to discover how much of his world exists beyond the words that define it. His brother was murdered, he says, but the details he gives us are bizarre and obscure and may not be connected to reality. Likewise Soubi could possibly be seen as an imaginary friend, as he variously is presented as godlike and just an art student. His offer of love and his attempts at a very different kind of seduction, much more complicated than an erotic one, however, are part of the reality of the Loveless universe.

Recently Mark Miner has offered an interpretation of Loveless based on Plato's Phaedrus, noting how Soubi and Ritsuka resemble a Platonic relationship, and how their "spell battles" of words with other "fighter units" make for a graphic version of Platonic debate. Throughout the series various couples try and fail to break Soubi and Ritsuka apart. It's part of an education befitting an "army of lovers," a Platonic ideal that was actually realized by the "300" of historical legend--and inspiration for the recent popular graphic novel and movie 300.

With the demise of TokyoPop, Loveless is stalled at eight volumes in America. According to Wikipedia, ten volumes have been published in Japan, with five more planned before the story finally concludes. Given the popularity of Kouga and the anime version (which is available in the US), it's likely another manga publisher may revive the series. That publisher, however, will probably have to start over from vol. 1. American fans will have to wait a long time to learn the ultimate fate of Ritsuka and Soubi.

Felipe Smith: “Surprise the Reader as Much as I Can”

2011-08-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

American Manga Artist Interviewed on the Creation of MBQ

By Lyn Jensen

A few lines from this 2005 interview with manga artist Felipe Smith (MBQ, Peepo Choo) were published in my "Manga" column." What follows is the complete interview.

Q: Could you tell me a little bit more about the places in your MBQ manga and what they mean to you?

A: Omario, he lives in my apartment, which is in West LA. The In-and-Out Burger on Venice Blvd. next to the Blockbuster is actually the MBQ where Omario’s roommate works… [There’s] the LA River on Sepulveda which is the opening scene where Omario’s going to throw his gun out, then he decides not to because he needs the money for that gun. Then there’s Yuu Yuu’s Karaoke where his friend Brian works at, and where I used to work at--for three years.

Q: This book [MBQ vol. 1] is urban street Los Angeles. How did you come by that?

A: Basically it’s hard not to when you live in West LA, when your transportation is a bicycle, a skateboard, a bus. So pretty much the situations I see every single day, working at different jobs, restaurants, postal centers, and karaoke clubs. The most exciting thing to do when I tell a story is to tell my own personal experience.

Q: For MBQ, how did you develop the characters and experiences? Did you have real people in mind?

A: Some are actually real people, the name and the way they look… Brian, the Japanese-American who works in a karaoke bar, is a friend of mine. MBQ tells the story of how we first met, how we worked at karaoke bars in the same neighborhood… He raps in English and Japanese. … As [the series unfolds you see] the live shows he did on Sunset Blvd.

My roommate Jeff…He worked at Blockbuster, the Blockbuster right next door to MBQ [but] this story, because it’s about American culture … I wanted it to revolve around a fast food place.
Omario is based on me, he’d like to be who I am and what I’d never want to be [and] so Mario is not just Felipe. He wears my clothes, rides my bicycle, he has my roommate and a lot of the ways he thinks are the ways I think. [But] sometimes he makes choices I would never make.

Officer Finch is an actual police officer by the name of Finch… a retired New Jersey cop… Because the story takes place in LA, he’s an LAPD officer. Writing about characters I know, these stories as they unfold, they … write themselves. I know the way these characters think… Put a couple elements in there of fiction.

[Officer O’Malley is completely fictitious.] This book is for people who have an open mind, are ready to be surprised by things they’re not expecting in a book, because basically that’s what I want to do, surprise the reader as much as I can.

Q: You do a cops-and-crooks story in MBQ, but you don’t handle it the way such stories are usually handled, it’s more episodic, more an alternate way of storytelling. What made you decide on that type of structure?

A: Most stories and manga have one linear character and follow this one character’s story. I have six characters. They don’t live in the same place. They don’t know each other at times… I need to cover all their stories at the same time because as the story progresses, their paths start to merge.

Q: What type of process do you follow when you’re drawing?

A: Basically I do some sketching to get an idea of what kind of story I should tell. Then I script the story. Then I proceed to draw the actual pages. Then I do the screen tones, all the grays on the pages on the computer [using PhotoShop]. The drawing’s by hand. The tones are done on computer.

Q: How did you choose to do the manga style?

A: I started reading actual manga from Japan [around 2002-2003]. If you look at books in Japan there’s a wide range of styles. There are so many ways of telling a story graphically. I’d say my style is a combination of things, I wouldn’t say it’s a manga style. I grew up reading European comics as well… Things I’ve seen out of real life in West LA influence and inform my style, a lot of real things, as the fashion of the people, what they’re wearing right now, streets, places, cars.

Q: Could you tell us more about your favorite manga and artists?

[He names Shama, Roku de Nahi Blues, Gorio, Tokyo Tribes—all in one way or another fight manga—and Psycho, nothing like the Hitchcock movie but about a detective with multiple personalities.]

Q: How did you get started in comics rather than in another kind of art?

A: I came to Los Angeles looking to find work as an animator. I worked three years in Chicago, in school and at an animation studio—stuff for kids, Disney kind of drawings… I wanted to tell stories for a more mature audience…

I was born in Akron, Ohio. Then at age 5 I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina. I did all my schooling there. After graduating high school I moved to Chicago to go to … The Art Institute of Chicago. When I graduated from that school in 2000 I worked one more year doing animation in Chicago, then to Los Angeles…

I came out to LA after I saw a lot of Japanese animation… appealing to adults as well, film noir kind of animation. So I came to LA with the whole idea to do something like that with a studio. Do something new and not geared towards kids.

I went to a couple of studios and they said, “No, we don’t handle anything like that. There’s no room for this in animation.” A lot of studios told me that. They told me animation in the US is limited, style-wise. [They said] what I was doing was too complicated to animate. Having seen so many Japanese animations, I didn’t believe that was true. ...When you're fresh and looking for work the last thing you want to hear is that you're too complicated.... Basically they told me I had to draw a simpler drawing style--a waste, if you can draw a lot more detail.

[In 2004 he entered some contests including TokyoPop’s Rising Stars of Manga, which led to the company publishing his MBQ, a three-volume series.]

Q: You don’t retell the plot of your winning TokyoPop contest entry, a quirky short called “Manga,” in MBQ, but there’s an indirect reference in the throwing the gun away—or not. Why?

A: That one’s about Felipe Smith, this one’s about Omario. [The “Manga” one-shot is about “one person’s opinion.”]

Q: How would your drawings be different if they were just done in a regular cartoon style?

A: There isn’t really a difference between manga or cartoons or comics or graphic novels. They’re all forms of visual storytelling. It’s hard to look at a style and say if it’s manga or comics. I think it’s the storytelling. The pacing of the story is what makes the biggest difference. Manga obviously, being a thicker book, averages about 200 pages. There’s more time to tell a story.

I have a chase scene [in MBQ, vol. 1] that’s about 30 pages, a whole chapter. A regular comic is about 22 pages. My chase scene is 30 pages. It exceeds the normal page limit for a normal comic. Mine is a whole story, but it’s a chase scene story. That’s the difference between manga and comics. Comics are forced to limit themselves to what’s occurring in a page count. Manga, you’re a bit more free to be as you like. … I find manga in a lot of ways is very expressive visually. The expressions on the characters’ faces are very vivid sometimes. Backgrounds are drawn, really detailed, specifically like what kind of car, what kind of building. A lot of comics… a building is just a building. [In manga] it’s really important for the reader to look at and visualize this place.

Q: What about any previously published work?

A: The work I did before MBQ was very different style-wise. I did a lot of fantasy, a lot of sci-fi stuff [including Transformers role-playing books and toys]. I did some cover stuff for animation magazines in Europe, [animation] pin-up[s].

Q: How did being of diverse heritages, being raised in Argentina, with your father being from Jamaica, affect you?

A: When I came to the US I just saw different people of every shape, size, background, culture, and that’s one thing I really like about this country. That’s one of the things I depict [in MBQ], a variety of characters that [Los Angeles] has…

Q: Not many people can claim such vastly different backgrounds. Has there been any negative or downside to that in your experience?

A: Any kind of negativity that arises from differences, that’s something I don’t even want to deal with. [It] doesn’t make sense. It’s one of the things people deal with on a daily basis.

Poetry: Haiku

2011-07-22T12:50:00.000-07:00

Now for something completely different! My haiku:

Haiku #1
Do not worry that
You do not know which symbol,
Just wear all of them.

Haiku #2
The big grey kitty
Sleeps lazily in the sun
Of the warm bright day.

Haiku #3 (a work in progress?)
Horses have run here,
I can tell from the ground worn
Down by many hooves.

Thompson Twins: 1987 Interview

2011-06-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

"East is East and West is West…Keep moving out into the gap."

-- The Thompson Twins, "Into the Gap," 1984

Note: my previously unpublished 1987 interview with Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie of the Thompson Twins is part of a sporadic series of interviews from my archives.

Remember how the Thompson Twins blended European synth-pop and World Beat? With three members that mixed gender and race, the band brought a new level of cultural diversity to the MTV age. They began in 1977 at the height of the London punk scene, when Tom Bailey was classically trained, Alannah Currie was much more the angry young punker that took out her emotions on sax and percussion, and Joe Leeway was a black guy who lived in the same squatters' community of starving artists and musicians. Bailey formed a standard four-piece rock group and the line-up shifted around as Currie and Leeway (and others) joined and originals (and others) left, eventually transforming into the totally eighties trio that gave the world such hits as, "You Take Me Up," "Nothing in Common," "Sister of Mercy," and "Into the Gap."

Tom and Alannah granted me this interview during the press tour for what proved to be their last major album, Close to the Bone, in 1987. At the time they were attempting to carry on as a duo after Leeway's departure. They'd just become public about their personal romantic relationship and Alannah had just miscarried a baby. (Wikipedia says The Thompson Twins ended as a musical entity in 1993; in those final years Tom and Alannah had two children, and got married in 1991--but are now divorced.) The conversation that follows stands as a summation of their career peak.

In person I saw the "chemical reaction" they described, beyond what their songs and music videos might show. Like their music, they possessed a connection born of contrasts. They could be compared to the couple in the movie Once, only he'd be the classicist and she'd be the street. Tom answered questions forthrightly, looking right at his interviewer. Alannah, despite her characteristically flamboyant dress and hair, was shy and demure, looked away and spoke softly—except when I asked her about women in music.

I: Your press release says you didn't replace Joe Leeway. Why not?

Alannah: Because Joe's irreplaceable. We don't really feel that we need to have anybody extra. It was really exciting when Joe was there and we were a three-piece. Now that he's gone, I write the words [and] Tom writes the music.

Tom: Joe would watch TV and make a cup of coffee, and then suddenly he'd walk in and after maybe a week [he'd listen] and [say] "What this needs is…" Boom!

I: How did you compensate for his contributions?

Alannah: We just ended up doing more work, but you can't, in a way. There's something about what happens with a band that people outside don't really realize. There's chemistry involved between the people in the band that makes for an extra factor—great songs or rotten songs.

Tom: We've been through about eight or nine different line-ups in ten years … so it comes as no massive shock that we've done it yet again and still carry on.

I: Alannah, let's talk about your songwriting. What patterns do you see in your lyrics? Do you find you often go back to the same themes?

Alannah: The way I write lyrics is just about personal experiences that I've had or that people very close to me have gone through. If I'm not writing lyrics, I'm writing poetry, then I'll write short stories, then back. In this album Close to the Bone we never start off with a theme. It just emerges. Because it's a record of your life, it's a bit like writing a diary. This album is very concerned with animal instincts, a seventh sense of rawness, about following your instincts.

She started writing as soon as she learned to write, writing anything, just to keep writing, regularly, emotionally.

Alannah: I don't sing the words I write. Tom sings. There's this constant search for—I write things from the woman's point of view, that are really for a woman to sing, and Tom sings them, so I have to change them or we have to talk about them. We're constantly searching for this human element that's not necessarily male or female. The song, "Sister of Mercy," originally I wrote it as a piece of poetry that was the sister's point of view. Then in order for Tom to sing it I had to turn it around.

I: One thing I've noticed about your songs, a woman writes them, a man sings them—you don't hear feminine or masculine emotions, you hear human emotions.

Alannah: There are songs that perhaps wouldn't come up if men were writing them. … I'm not interested in, "Come on, Baby, let's get down, boogie all night long, you have a sweet ass."

I: There's a line in "You Take Me Up," about "I know what it means to work hard on machines," that's a working person's statement--not a man's or woman's statement.

Tom: A sort of industrial-gospel song, and we figured the cotton fields of the eighties are the factories.

I: Does Alannah write the words and Tom write the music?

Alannah: It doesn't always happen that way. Often Tom'll do a piece of music and just throw it at me, and say, "What do you think of this?" I'll write something for it. I'll do a piece of words and say to him what do you think? We don't really have a formula. We sit in two rooms, connected or one above the other, and Tom works on melody and I work on words and when one of us has a good idea we throw it at the other, literally. Down the stairs or through the room and leave that other person with it. Loads of stuff that I write he doesn't like, and he writes music I don't like, so when we come together on something we both get so excited. … The best songs we've written, that fact that although we've worked on it for weeks or months [leading] up to it, you can never see what it is you're working up to—will always come in 20 minutes.

I asked about their third-world or World Music influence.

Alannah: I got involved with the percussion thing [after a man told her a woman would never make a good percussionist]. It was after playing saxophone. It was the part that intrigued me. We were living in a part of London where there were a lot of races. You use traditional [non-Western] rhythms then you change it and start using machine rhythms.

I: Even in your lyric structure, Tom mentioned gospel…the call and response… the harmonies. That sort of thing of thing was a part of rock to begin with but it's been buried. So once more it seems like something new.

Tom: Isn't that the trick? Writing great songs? Hopefully you have an experience that can inspire you to do this. Eighty percent of songs are about love, another way of saying, "I love you." It's so boring, so cliché, what we have to do is find a way of making that phrase—say it as a fresh line, as if that's the first time it's ever been said. That's being extremely general, obviously. There's rules, but you hope that [the combination of] the inspiration, the experience, the songwriter's craft, comes into making it alive.

I: Tom, a lot of men say, "I'll work with anybody who's got the talent," but you've actually done it—worked in partnership with a woman and a black musician. Have you ever thought about what makes you do that and not just talk?

Tom: A lot of it comes down to chemistry. We're not alike. We're theoretically a very bad mixture of people. But why me and Alannah got involved—professionally and personally—we found it throws up a third thing, a sort of chemical reaction.

I: But so many white males are surrounded by nothing but white males. You've worked for years in a trio with a woman musician and a black musician, although I'm sure you'll say that's not by deliberate, calculated choice.

Tom: I never saw it that way. People pointed out, we've actually had them tell us, "You guys are the perfect image for an integrated world." We're like, "What?" We were [just] neighbors on the same street!

Alannah asked me about an unnamed documentary program on women in rock that she saw and unfortunately I had to tell her I didn't. (With the silly certainty of hindsight, I now see I should have immediately asked her the title and more about it.) As she elaborated on the topic, her typically British reserve dropped away and she became quite fiery, speaking the language of sexual politics.

Alannah: Basically what everybody was saying was, we struggle, we struggle, it's still a male domain. But there are all these women struggling and they are all supportive. I've never come across a woman who hasn't been supportive. It's this fine underground movement. It's getting stronger and stronger. Now a woman doesn't have to be the vocalist. She can play an instrument; she doesn't have to be up front. No short skirts and low-cut tops in order to make it. But still everybody's suspect because the music business is probably one of the most conventional, for all its bleating about how radical rock music is. It's totally dominated by men. Music's for people, it's not for men.

Tom nodded in agreement as Alannah ventured deeper into feminist language.

Alannah: I think that this myth of female sexuality that is this passive pretty Playboy nonsense--female sexuality is very animal. Women are presenting that. It's a personal thing, when you have an orgasm, you don't lie there looking pretty in false eyelashes. You're like an animal and you sweat. That's what the song, "Bush Baby" [on Close to the Bone] is about.

I: Back to the business side of things—whether or not there's a movement of women in music, changes are being made.

Alannah: Chip away, chip away.

Tom: About our backing band, we have three women and three men. That wasn't like a promotional, "That'll look good." We did that because we wanted to have a balance. It's more fun if you've got a mixture of interesting people. There is no chemistry [in an all-male tour and] I don't think I could do that. It would be so boring!

Alannah: Somebody said to me the other day, the day it all went wrong was the day Tom met me. There's areas that want to see an all-male all-white rock 'n' roll band and wish the Thompson Twins had remained so. It's like trying to invalidate seven years of work.

Tom: It started off with four guys, yes.

Alannah: And then Joe and I joined.

USE AND ABUSE OF NUDITY IN ART

2011-06-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

USE AND ABUSE OF NUDITY IN ART:
Freedom of Expression for Women and Gays

By Lyn Jensen

With the Republicans wielding political power in Congress, the debate about what constitutes art vs. pornography is coming back for another round. Such controversy between public ethics and private art must delve into the social and psychological forces behind nudes in art. That has traditionally been oriented towards female nudity but with talk about so-called "gay" art entering the picture, male nudes are now being scrutinized, too.

In the book and the resulting TV documentary, Ways of Seeing, both classics in their respective media, art critic John Berger discusses the question of whether a painting of a nude body can be art or simply titillation, and what attempting to answer this question says about modern society in general.

Berger's thesis is that the obsession with the female nude in classical art is a symptom of white males' obsession with power. During the historical period that many classical nude masterpieces were created, Europeans (especially) lusted for power and the possession of objects, including slaves and women, who at the time were both property. Men who may have felt inferior in political and economic affairs could still take comfort from a feeling of sexual superiority over women.

Berger's argument extends to the use of the word "nude" in an art context, as opposed to "naked." To be naked means to be undressed but to be seen as nude has a special meaning--to be portrayed as an undressed object in a painting or statue (or more recently, photograph). Such an undressed object, a sight for a viewer, has no identity apart from whatever a viewer imposes upon it. It's like a costume but it cannot be taken off or changed.

Although study of art labeled by modern eyes as "gay" has altered the debate somewhat, major classical nude paintings often exclude male subjects for a reason--to exclude any competition for the nude female object in the painting. These classical paintings pose women in a way that enables maximum display of the female body. The subject or subjects are painted so their eyes appear to make contact with the observer--exactly like the skin models in modern-day men's magazines. It can therefore be concluded that these nude portraits were created for the exact same purpose as today's nude magazine centerfolds.

When male subjects are used in nude art, other factors become involved in the debate. In paintings of female nudes that include male subjects as well, the males are often clothed and looking at the unclothed female(s). Berger singles out paintings of the Biblical story of Susannah and the elders as an example. When a nude male is the principal subject, however, modern-day eyes often label the work 'gay," a factor Berger does not address.

What Berger argues, however, is not that nude paintings or pictures are always the same as today's commercial pornography. He singles out a few exceptions in classical painting. In these pictures the subjects are exposed naturally, not for display, and their expressions do not appear to make eye contact with the viewer. Berger argues that these paintings serve another purpose, one in which the subject has an identity not dependent upon the viewer. These few works were created to make a more realistic comment upon the human condition, to the point where an observer may not even notice the nudity at first.

Applying Berger's observations to paintings of male subjects results in some provocative conclusions. The 1898 oil painting "Salutat" by the American artist Thomas Eakins portrays a male boxer saluting his adoring male fans, looking upon him the way the elders look at Susannah in Berger’s examples. It was included in a recent National Portrait Gallery exhibit of art identified as “gay” or “homosexual.” Some Republicans in Congress objected to taxpayers’ money being spent on such an exhibit.

However, identifying the Eakins work as “gay” or “homosexual” is not the same as labeling it pornographic. It’s intended as a work of realism, not titillation. The boxer is not entirely nude, and his back is to the viewer, so the painting is not appearing to make eye contact with the observer the way a magazine centerfold does. The subject has an identity apart from the viewer.

Will the white males of today's Republican party—or today’s Democratic party, for that matter--find any distinction between female or male nudity as art, and female or male nudity as exploitation, as Berger has done? Some of today's politicians are once again trying to define common ground by maintaining that all artists have the right to artistic expression but that the US government has the right to not support the exploitation of the human body with taxpayers' dollars. One cannot advocate human freedom without questioning whether certain creative artistic works reduce humans to mere objects. The outcome of that debate holds a great deal at stake for both women’s and gays’ freedom of expression.

Manga Review: He's an Absolute Doll

2011-05-10T12:48:00.000-07:00

MANGA: Absolute Boyfriend by Yuu Watase

(This review is revised and updated from one that originally appeared in LA Alternative, 4/21-27/06.)

Women have been putting up with pop culture plots about sexy robo-females for so long, it's about time somebody came up with something the other way around for the girls. We've patiently waited through male-fantasy fetishes ranging from Weird Science to The Stepford Wives to Duran Duran and their "Electric Barbarella." Even the brilliant women of CLAMP joined the wish-fulfillment-for-guys trend with their Chobits manga.

Finally, for once, Yuu Watase has given us a woman's fantasy about a robo-guy, with her six-volume Absolute Boyfriend manga series. As a romance that combines fantasy, sci-fi, and comedy, Absolute Boyfriend may be a gimmick--but what sets it apart from the often insipid shojo (girls') manga is that it's actually funny and poignant at the same time.

"I had this vision in my head, a naked guy tumbling out of a box," writes Watase on her sidebar to the first episode. (As shojo fans know, this genre's artists always include a gossipy sidebar for their fans.) "Normally I'd just laugh it off as the wild fantasies of a single woman, but I'm a manga artist."

Bless the manga artist for turning her wild fantasies into a best-seller. Rika's a flop with guys until she meets a salesman who's not your average suit-and-tie type. He's some kind of fetishist or cosplayer, and he persuades the socially inept schoolgirl to try out his company's "Night Lover" model. Once the life-size, err, action figure comes out of the--box--and puts his clothes on, turns out Rika's stuck with him unless she can negotiate a deal. Further complications include absent parents, a boy next door and a treacherous best friend.

Watase has been one of the most popular of Japanese shojo manga artists since 1989, when she debuted with "Pajama De Ojama" in the Shojo Comics Manga anthology. Since then she's drawn long-running hits including Alice 19th and Ceres, Celestial Legend. Her manga works have spawned novels, anime, and two Japanese TV series.

HARD-TO-FIND MANGA

2011-04-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

If you don't grab an entire manga series within six months to a year of its publication, you may find that you're faced with tracking down rare collectors' items—and those aren't cheap--or just doing without. The first option puts a strain on a manga fan's checking account. The second one puts a strain on a manga fan's heart. Below I've rounded up a few major manga series that are only a few years old but are already disappearing from retailers' and distributors' lists. Let's see if they're worth the trouble to track down:

CLAMP Classics

One good thing about CLAMP is that many of these very popular women artists' books are always available—somewhere. When one edition becomes hard to find, just be patient and another will probably take its place. Cardcaptor Sakura, for example, has been made available to American readers three times. First TokyoPop published a version in the American style (the pages read front to back, left to right), which can still sometimes be found at a normal retail price. Next TokyoPop offered a Japanese-style edition (pages read back to front, right to left) that broke the twelve-volume series in two, making the first six volumes Cardcaptor Sakura and the remaining ones Cardcaptor Sakura: Master of the Clow. Those books can also often be found (used) at ordinary prices. Now Dark Horse is publishing a four-volume omnibus edition that packages three volumes into each book, so a retailer should be able to get them for you.

Reading one CLAMP series like Cardcaptor Sakura leads to checking out related series including Tsubasa and XXXholic, which Del Rey has kindly made available to us.

Whether to rush out and buy those two series before they vanish from retailers, however, is another matter. I loved Cardcaptor Sakura until vol. 6, when I disliked the way the lead character changed from a witty, skilled, and charming little superheroine to a helpless innocent that depended entirely upon others. For similar reasons I couldn't make it through even the first volume of either Tsubasa or XXXholic.

The character Sakura in Tsubasa is nothing like the Cardcaptor—she's not an older and wiser superheroine, she's a damsel in distress who can't even think for herself because she's got that cliché known as amnesia.

Likewise, I went into XXXholic expecting a het version of the witty and charming Legal Drug. (Talk about a series that's also getting hard to find, and has yet to be even allowed a proper conclusion.) But I found the witchy leading lady and her flustered young male apprentice to have no chemistry and I didn't find their bickering sexy or witty. I've since heard hints that, true to CLAMP's fondness for beating around the boy-boy bush, the juiciest parts are between the apprentice and his male friend who shows up in some later volume, but I have no appetite for slogging through the series to find out.

Global Manga

TokyoPop invested heavily in global manga a few years ago, and an illustration of that company's publishing fortunes may be found in the fates of two of their original English-language (OEL) titles: Roadsong and Mark of the Succubus. Both were planned and published as three-volume series, but then slowly began vanishing from the retail scene, even from online sites. Allan Gross and Joanna Estep's Roadsong suffers from much of the weaknesses as TokyoPop's much bigger OEL hit, Svetlana Chmakova's Dramacon. In both cases, the creator(s) hit all the right notes in the first volume, but only about half the time in the second, and not even that often in the third. Gross' portrayal of the music scene shows he knows little about it, and Princess Ai (thanks to DJ Milky) sings better songs, too.

On the other hand, Mark of the Succubus is worth tracking down if you're into romantic comedy with supernatural overtones. California girls Ashly Raiti and Irene Flores pulled off hitting just the right notes in all three volumes. Their story about a virgin succubus who can't bring herself to fatally seduce a nice guy is simple, unassuming, and never tries to be more than it is, hence its charm.

For a completely different genre of global manga--raunchy in-your-face yaoi--Yaoi Press is still offering the three-volume Cain by Le Peruggine. The problem with Cain is that only vol. 2 is good raunchy yaoi. The entire first volume is devoted to simply setting up the thin plot, while the third volume is far more violent than erotic.

Speaking of Yaoi (and Related)

Most anything in the yaoi genre is getting hard to find. Gone are the days when several yaoi books at a time graced major retailers' shelves. Be Beautiful titles including Naduki Koujima's Selfish Love are now high-priced collectors' items. I can never quite get with Koujima but I can never quite get away from her unique style, either.

DMP still sells Koujima's Our Kingdom, which is apparently stalled at vol. 6. Kingdom takes the same plot points as Selfish Love and develops them over a much longer story arc—rich aggressive boy, poor reluctant boy, and the little black lucky charm that comes between them. Like Selfish Love, the story has ups and downs but the first five volumes are essential for a Koujima fan. Vol. 5 is what you read if you're just looking for the sex. However, Vol. 6 takes off on a new story arc, just before the series took a hiatus that's lasted two years now, so only purchase that volume if you like being left hanging.

BLU titles seem especially hard to find—but thank this TokyoPop inprint for making the four-volume classic series Earthian available, even if it may be more interesting as a piece of eighties' nostalgia than as yaoi. The series' creator Yun Kouga (who later did Loveless) has explained she chose a boy-boy story because she wanted to portray a love so great not even the death penalty could stop it. The story reflects its era because the homosexual aspect is overshadowed by side stories about incest, the mafia, secret government experiments, hints about a "black cancer" that could be AIDS, and martial arts clichés about the fate of the world.

TokyoPop originally pitched Kasane Katsumoto's Hands Off to the yaoi crowd but it's more in the paranormal genre, as the three young male leads struggle with being closet psychics. Through eight volumes, the plot wanders far from its original comic-dramatic genre-crossing innuendo and goes further and further into tragic-comic martial-arts clichés about the fate of the world. If you're on a budget, skip volumes 2 and 4. The remaining books are sufficient for the story.

Eerie Queerie is another title TokyoPop pitched to the yaoi crowd before the publisher created the BLU imprint, and it's worth seeking out even if you have to buy it used. Buy it cheap, however, because it's more a curiosity than a classic. As Jason Thompson describes this four-volume series by Shuri Shiozu, it's more a wink-wink nudge-nudge series of guy-guy jokes than a sequential plot. It also mixes genres--part supernatural, part comedy, part yaoi. As such all four volumes resemble a box score—some chapters are hits, some are outs. Vols. 1 and 4 are the best, while vol. 2 is most notable for its story of a gay teen that committed suicide. Maybe you can skip vol. 3—except it does have a sexy and funny Valentine's Day story and a couple of kinky supporting characters.

VIZ doesn't do yaoi unless you count Akimi Yoshida's Banana Fish, which like Earthian, is a pioneering and classic manga from the eighties. I wish I'd started my manga fandom with this series, because it led the way for so many others. It combines crime and relationship drama over nineteen volumes (at least), and it's ready to become a six-or-eight-part mini-series whenever some American TV producer gets bold enough to option it. VIZ has published American-style and Japanese-style editions over the years, and both are getting harder and harder to find. If you find any copies for a decent price, grab 'em.

BOOK REVIEW: War is a Racket

2011-03-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

WAR IS FOR PROFIT: And That's All it's Good For

BOOK REVIEW: War is a Racket written by Smedley D. Butler, Major General, United States Marine Corps (ret.), 75th Anniversary ed. (Originally published 1935) Foreword by Cindy Sheehan, book design and audio recording by Joshua Smith.

by Lyn Jensen

Does a forty-page booklet have the power to change the world? If ever millions of readers apply the lessons to be learned from Smedley D. Butler's War is a Racket, perhaps that will be true. For whether a reader be militarist or pacificist, to read Butler's argument is to challenge mainstream contemporary America's fundamental cultural beliefs about war.

Controversial peace activist Cindy Sheehan sums up Butler's thesis with, "I thought war CAUSED profit--but with my research and through confirmation by this important treatise by one of the most highly decorated "warriors" of all time--I realized war IS FOR profit." She arranged for the printing of a seventy-fifth anniversary edition of Butler's work in 2010 and has already sold out her print run.

At the core of Butler's argument is that, if war didn't make the rich richer, there would be no war. The men (or corporatists, to update Butler's language) who send American troops into harm's way have only one concern--and that's how much money they'll make off those troops being in harm's way. Platitudes about democracy, patriotism, freedom, and liberty only enter the picture because of the necessity for good public relations spin.

Although Butler's book was written in the aftermath of World War One and his data on the material costs of war come from that conflict, his accounts of the human costs remain universal. "Boys with a normal viewpoint were ... made to regard murder as the order of the day," he argues. "We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing of killing or being killed."

"Then suddenly we discharged them and told them to make another about-face. This time they had to do their own readjusting," he continues, and although he's speaking of World War One veterans, the story has remained familiar in the aftermath of World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, and the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Butler offers several ideas on how to smash the war racket but one in particular has enjoyed support from military reformers across the political spectrum for decades: restrict the size and scope of the armed forces to that which is necessary to defend the United States, and close all overseas bases. Even many contemporary conservatives are beginning to see this logic given their desire for limited government spending.

"[What] business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies," Butler asks. "Our problem is how to preserve our own democracy." Substitute Middle Eastern countries for the European ones Butler names, and little has changed since Butler served in the Marine Corps.

Another of Butler's suggestions calls for all nations to get together and "scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane." The United Nations was a first step, but this goal remains elusive and deserves to be more closely pursued.

These are solutions for diplomats and politicians, but there's a simple step any individual can take to combat the war racket. Supporters of the peace movement who missed Sheehan's publication are encouraged to seek out earlier editions of War is a Racket, which remain widely available online and from used bookstores.

Any individual may continue what Ms. Sheehan has started and get Butler's book into the hands of politicians, schools, veterans, and peace activists. Every progressive organization should make thousands of copies of this book available to members without delay. That's how the right puts their toxic propaganda on the best seller lists, and it's up to the left to provide some balance.

Someone--perhaps a prominent peace activist such as Tom Hayden or Daniel Ellsberg--could go a step further and provide an updated version of Butler's data. Butler correctly argues how generations to come must (still) pay the cost of World War One. A book is needed that shows how Butler's thesis remains valid through all the wars and conflicts America has fought since, both in material and human costs.

How one of America's most decorated veterans came to write such a book is a story in its own right. Butler (1881-1940) was a Quaker who just the same served in the United States Marine Corps for thirty-four years. He served in France during World War One and participated in military actions in the Phillipines, China, and Latin America. He went on to spend his final years writing and lecturing about how war is always a racket.

BOOK REVIEW: The Well-Fed Writer

2011-02-28T15:26:00.000-08:00

BOOK REVIEW: The Well-fed Writer by Peter Bowerman
By Lyn Jensen

The Well-fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency as a Commercial Freelancer in Six Months or Less including updated content of both original Well-Fed Writer titles. (2010 ed. Fanove Publishing, Atlanta, Georgia)

When looking for a few dozen jolts of inspiration to get busy with growing your freelance writing business, turn to Peter Bowerman’s The Well-fed Writer, the most recent edition of which was published in 2010 and combines two of his previous book offerings. It’s about the business of writing, a mind-numbingly common topic, but Bowerman’s treatment is rare: a stimulating business read. If Jeff Foxworthy were a business writer instead of a comedian, he might give advice the way Bowerman does.

Many other books advise writers about the craft, to write, write, write and read, read, read. Bowerman instead addresses the business, but in a way that makes writers feel part of a giant creative community. Writing from his perspective as a copywriter with more than ten years’ experience, he never stops urging readers (his fellow writers, that is) to sell, sell, sell and market, market, market. But his folksy casual delivery makes readers feel like there’s a world of opportunities just waiting for us to make our contributions. We’re left wondering what we’re waiting for.

After reading this book, you may be tempted to locate Bowerman’s earlier books and find further advice, but it’s better to take a second look at this edition and actually put its advice to work first. Whenever your writing income isn’t coming in, go back to Bowerman and try another angle, or just re-try something you tried earlier and this time try harder. It’s enough to keep a writer busy for a long time.

The Well-fed Writer could just as easily be titled The Optimistic Writer or The Positive Writer. For keeping up with fresh advice from Bowerman, check his Web site www.wellfedwriter.com where you’ll find his blog, e-newsletter, and latest updates.

DVD Review: Eyes Wide Open

2011-01-28T12:24:00.000-08:00

When a proper married man, much respected by his family and conservative community, cannot resist temptation entering his life in the form of a certain young woman, we know that story. What happens when temptation takes the form of a certain young man and the community is Orthodox Jewish, in contemporary Israel yet?

That Eyes Wide Open is disappointingly absent from the Oscar nominees in the Best Foreign Film category may say more about certain lingering attitudes in the international film industry than about director Haim Tabakman’s accomplishment. More than simply a gay-themed film, Eyes is an outstanding example of contemporary Israeli (and Jewish) filmmaking.

Whether in theaters or on DVD, Eyes Wide Open is a must-see film, not only because it shows us the impact on a traditional Orthodox Jewish community when two men enter into a forbidden homosexual relationship. It’s because it shows us an Israel the news doesn’t. This isn’t the Israel of war and terrorism, nor the Israel of Biblical epics. It’s an Israel where contemporary everyday family life is bound by centuries of unshakable, unbreakable tradition. Along dusty stone streets families eat dinner, men go to Bible study with the rabbi, and those who feel a need for purification go to the healing waters in the desert.

It’s a worthy culture that’s endured for thousands of years but plainly has no place for homosexuality, especially not for a married man whom the local rabbi expects to allot justice to a sinner. While never disrespecting such a culture (or religion), or the gay community for that matter, this film demonstrates why a man cannot live as both an Orthodox Jew and a homosexual. The two worlds can never be made to co-exist.

If the film falls short, it’s that the ending feels forced, unsatisfactory, and leaves too many questions unanswered. Without giving too much away, however, such a conclusion does reflect what happens in real life when a similar situation allows no satisfactory resolution.

Women's Shelter of Long Beach (Article Link)

2011-01-21T12:27:00.000-08:00

Link to my and Terelle Jerricks' article about the Women's Shelter of Long Beach:

http://www.randomlengthsnews.com/content/view/575/129/

I did the original research and about half the writing, he expanded on it. If the above link doesn't work, try to copy and paste it to your browser.

REVIEW: DMP/June/801 Manga

2011-01-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

You've heard of a director's cut of a film, right? Here's a "writer's cut" of my manga review, "Yaoi For Christmas" featured in the Dec. 2010 issue of Blade. (I also have an article in the Jan. 2011 Blade about the Shoreline Squares, a GLBT square dance group in Long Beach.)

Yaoi: Kizuna and More from DMP/June/801
by Lyn Jensen

Enjoy the holidays (or start out the new year) with the latest yaoi manga (gay-themed Japanese graphic novels) from Digital Manga Publishing (DMP). Also known as Digital Manga, Inc. (DMI), the Gardena-based publisher rivals TokyoPop and VIZ as a publisher of Japanese comics in the USA. They’re an industry leader in yaoi, publishing about forty such graphic novels on the June (pronounced “Genet” like the writer) imprint every year, and about six more on the niche 801 imprint.

June brings back to the American market two of the most popular and controversial yaoi manga series ever, Kizuna by Kodaka Kazuma and the Finder series by Ayano Yamane. Together they provide American audiences a look at the work of two of Japan’s greatest female manga artists. Both titles were picked up from Be Beautiful, a defunct American publisher.

Both series are rated for adults, 18-up, as both are grisly far-fetched dramas involving gangsters and rape, with eye-popping explicit homosexual content. However, DMP persuaded Borders (but not Barnes & Noble) to carry both series.

“Yamane wanted people to be able to find the book,” said a DMP spokesperson. The artist also insisted on a different translation from the Be Beautiful editions. Those were released as Target in the Finder, Cage in the Finder, and One Wing in the Finder. The DMP titles substitute Viewfinder for Finder.

Kizuna is being packaged differently from the Be Beautiful edition. The series currently runs eleven volumes in Japan but DMP is marketing a “deluxe edition” of six books, with the first ten volumes doubled up, and the final volume (vol. 11 in the original Japanese edition) becoming vol. 6. June has also licensed a couple more BL/yaoi titles by Ms. Kazuma, Border and Kusatta Kyo Shino Houteishiki.

Good news for fans of softer yaoi such as Little Butterfly is that June has available a similar manga by Hinako Takanaga, The Tyrant Falls in Love. In this three-volume manga, the seme’s a homophobe and the uke’s the gay guy who really, really loves him. It was picked up from the long-languishing Drama Queen.

DMP’s 801 imprint is “fan-based, not mainstream-based,” according to a company spokesperson. It’s only marketed online and in independent bookstores. It publishes such titles as A Foreign Love Affair (another Ayano Yamane manga) and the upcoming Under Grand Hotel, which some fans have branded too controversial for the American market. It’s an explict gay romance set in a prison, need we say more?

As for what’s happening in the new year, DMP is also getting into the yuri market (female-female romance) with the upcoming Hanou Gakuen Misoragumi, a manga about a girl who has feelings for other girls so, to keep her away from girls, her family sends her to a boys’ school.

When Yellow Means Risky Business

2011-01-05T14:23:00.000-08:00

From "Manga" by Lyn Jensen--this review originally ran in LA Alternative in 2006.

At a recent interview in DMP’s Gardena office, Makoto Tateno explained her inspiration for Yellow. She read a lot of different manga but she’d never really come across a story about a gay guy and a straight guy as a pairing before, and she really loved action stories so she wanted to put them together.

“Goh and Taki are strong characters,” she explained through an interpreter, “They pulled the story along the way, there’s no real-life models or anyone that they’re based on.” She’d drawn several one-shot gay-themed stories before, but Yellow was her first multi-volume yaoi manga.

Her polar-opposite protagonists, Goh and Taki, prowl the seamy side of Tokyo, their wit and charm in stark contrast to Yellow’s plotlines that meander through murder, revenge, drugs, rape, theft, incest, hired assassins, and corrupt cops. The guys are double agents, professional thieves who work for the police. No real-life outlaws ever looked this cool, of course, but fans aren’t complaining.

Yellow is the color of risk, caution, between green and red, and in this manga it signifies the risky area between gay and straight. Gay and dark Goh, who normally goes for effeminate teenage boys, is finding himself attracted to a comparatively manly man in his straight(er) blond partner. Both are sexy and 22, one bragging about his men and the other his women, like a same-sex Will and Grace, which is unusual in yaoi where characters tend to obsess on a single object of desire.

Goh’s patience with Taki is eventually rewarded, but murky plot details threaten the lovers’ newfound passion. Vol. 4 concludes unsatisfactorily, with some irrevocable actions that turn out to not be so irrevocable, but getting there remains a thrill.

Tateno said she decided on the basic outline of Yellow before she started drawing it, and admitted she had trouble with the foreshadowing of the big climax.

She’s a self-taught artist who’s drawn “twelve or thirteen” manga series, mostly shojo comics, over about twenty years. Her art, similar to Kodaka Kazuma and Sanami Matoh, combines the shojo and shonen styles.

With Yellow concluded, DMP’s yaoi imprint, June, published Tateno’s second yaoi series, Hero Heel, in November [2006]. It’s about actors in a show that looks a lot like the Power Rangers series. [Since 2006 DMP/June has published Steal Moon and and follow-up's to Yellow.]

2006 Manga Review: Cult Artist Kazuo Koike

2010-12-28T12:26:00.000-08:00

NOTE: This is an edited and revised version of a review that originally appeared in LA Alternative in late 2006.

MANGA by Lyn Jensen

Cult Figure's Torturous Path

Kazuo Koike stands virtually alone among writers in the world of international comics and manga. At a recent [2006] personal appearance in San Diego, grown men swooned over him like groupies over a rock star. (Yes, really—when a panel he appeared at was opened to questions, one guy was typical when he came to the mike and said, “No questions, I just want to tell you I think you’re wonderful.”)

He’s an international cult figure in the world of comics and manga primarily because he wrote Lone Wolf and Cub, which became The Road to Perdition with Prohibition-era gangsters replacing Japanese samurai. He also wrote Lady Snowblood, which by a less direct route became the two-part movie Kill Bill.

In America, comic-strip cartoonists often do their entire strip (often with assistants, of course) but comic books require a script and artwork. This also holds true in Japan. No other manga writer, however, has achieved the cult status of Koike.

Dark Horse has published Path of the Assassin, written by Koike and drawn by Goseki Kojima, the same team that produced Lone Wolf and Cub. The first volume, sub-titled Serving in the Dark, was released in June [2006]. Vol. 2, sub-titled Sand and Flower, is due later [in 2006].

Assassin covers essentially the same history as James Clavell’s classic novel Shogun, but focuses on the lifelong friendship between the shogun Ieyasu and Hattori Hanzo, the legendary ninja who served him. Even those familiar with Japanese history, however, are likely to find this manga rough going.

Koike has said, “If you have a strong character, the storyline will develop naturally on its own …Take two characters that are polar opposites … The struggle between these two characters develops the story.”

In Path, however, the lead characters develop little save their martial-arts skills and their medieval attitudes towards women. One young man gains a wife when he rapes a captive, while the other suffers a sad fate—his bride isn’t a virgin. Such was probably true in medieval Japan, but we aren’t in medieval Japan, folks.

Historical authenticity may explain such artistic weakness, but that doesn’t explain Crying Freeman; another Koike manga, this one with artist Ryochi Ikegami, which Dark Horse is also bringing to America.

In this contemporary gangster manga, the characters appear as merely props in an ultra-violent, sexually explicit video game, without the game. There’s no plot point that can’t be altered by a turn of the page--it makes no difference whether the page features a ghastly corpse falling from a closet is or a woman being raped. It’s all just so much sensationalism that moves from hack work to unintentional humor to worse, piling on the crude racism and sexism and shock non-value as it goes.

Some international cult figures should never break out of cult status, and these manga aptly demonstrate why. Obviously both Path and Freeman are rated 18-up, but they’re not directed at an adult mentality.

Vintage Review: Yaoi Press

2010-12-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

NOTE: This review originally appeared in LA Alternative, Sept. 1, 2006 and was later posted on the Deviant Art site.

NO POINT, NO PROBLEM

by Lyn Jensen

Yaoi—the word—originated as an acronym for a Japanese expression that translates very roughly as, “No peak, no point, no problem.” The story may have no peak, the joke, no point, but the lack of meaning is no problem. The term was originally applied to fanzines (doujinshi in Japanese) that were bizarre parodies of other works, particularly in regard to homosexual content. This element of the bizarre helps distinguish yaoi from gay-themed material in general.

For evidence, take a look at Yaoi Press’ manga, including the publisher’s hottest series, Saihoshi: The Guardian. It’s a sword-and-sorcery manga about the adventures of a “Guardian of the North,” a special class of warrior whose traditional weapon is a giant pair of scissors. The bizarreness just keeps on coming, with a prince, servant, councilor, and mercenary all having the hots for just about every guy they see. Vol. 1 broke Yaoi Press sales records. Vol. 2 becomes available in September [2006].

Unlike other major English-language yaoi publishers, Yaoi Press does not reprint manga from Asia, but instead produces “Western yaoi” by American and European women. Yamilla Abraham founded the Las Vegas-based company in 2004. She has since published more than a dozen yaoi manga.

Another recent Yaoi Press manga, Stallion, gives “Western yaoi” a double meaning. From KOSEN, the same team that created Saihoshi, it’s a cheesy-but-fun one-shot parody about a cowboy and Indian who become partners in more ways than one. Although entirely different from Brokeback Mountain, Abraham admits she couldn’t resist drawing comparisons with the movie’s theme of unconventional romance. (In fact, if you’ve heard the expression, “brokeback manga,” it refers to yaoi.)

Yaoi Press brings together manga artists on a global scale. KOSEN is a pair of popular female artists from Spain. So is Kawaii, who collaborated with Abraham on a parody of the Arthurian legend, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” included in the first volume of Saihoshi. Kawaii’s own manga, Treasure, debuts this month. 2007 will find Yaoi Press offering a manga from the popular Italian team Dany & Dany. Who knew Spain and Italy had manga scenes, and yaoi, too?

Yaoi Press recommends its manga for mature readers (18-plus) but compares the contents to a PG-13 movie. Go on-line for Yaoi Press titles, as they’re not likely to be found on bookstore shelves.

Vintage Manga: Enchanter Review

2010-12-17T12:20:00.000-08:00

NOTE: The following is an edited version of a manga review that orginally appeared in LA Alternative in 2006.

MANGA by Lyn Jensen

When Demons Make Love and War

Haruhiko’s got two women on his mind, his prim young teacher and the scantily-clad demon who wants his body. Her demon lover got knocked off in some metaphysical war and she’s looking for a replacement. So begins Enchanter by Izumi Kawachi, the latest shonen (boys’ action) manga from California-based Digital Manga Publishing (DMP). At ten volumes and counting, it’s a hot acquisition for DMP.

Although more a romantic comedy than the typical shonen action comic, this manga’s been compared to the very popular Fullmetal Alchemist. Absent, however, is FMA’s artistic creation of an alternate futuristic world that resembles early twentieth-century comics. The art of Enchanter is more contemporary-looking. Enchanter is rated 16-up.

Published Article Link (Oct. 2010 Blade)

2010-11-04T12:41:00.000-07:00

Link to my news article in the Oct. 2010 BLADE magazine about the Lambda Democrats' Awards in Long Beach:

http://www.gayblade.com/news1010_lambda.shtml

The issue also contained a review of the novel Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher with the by-line Molly Ian but the link doesn't work. See my MySpace blog for the text of that review or order the magazine from the publisher.

Adam Lambert Review (OC Concert 7/27)

2010-10-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

Pop’s Gay Messiah Plays Orange County

by Lyn Jensen

If some Orange County members of the GLBT community were concerned about how eighties-nostalgia act Joan Jett would be accepted when she played the Pacific Amphitheater on August 11, what about Adam Lambert, who played the same Costa Mesa venue on July 27-28, two weeks earlier? After all, he’s been hailed as pop music's gay messiah.

Wikipedia calls Lambert "the first openly gay mainstream pop artist to launch a career with a major label in America." Most of his fans, of course, know him from his rise to stardom via the TV show “American Idol” and his debut album For Your Entertainment on RCA.

Recently Lambert told Frontiers he wanted to make his tour exist in the world of his song, "Voodoo," like putting a spell on someone--witchy, mystical.

He explained, "I went to New Orleans for the first time last year and I was really inspired by just the culture there and the history. There's something about the city that was really sexy to me. The tour goes from a dark period--almost like a tongue-in-check Goth kind of energy--to very celebratory, light and campy.'

In the same interview Lambert said, "I met a lot of gay men and women who were really excited about what's going on with my record and what I'm doing, and it feels really, really nice for my community to acknowledge it,” but added, "I'm not here to represent a group, I'm here to be an artist."

Lambert also said he wanted to create stage imagery around each song, and that he did at the Pacific Amphitheater on July 27. He lists his influences as classic rock, pop-electro, and pop divas Lady Gaga, Madonna, Christina Aguilera, and Rhianna. He’s more than a singer, he’s an entertainer, and this evening’s concert was a total theatrical performance, with steamy dance routines and glittery wardrobe changes for each song. He belongs to the same rock traditions as David Bowie, Elton John, George Michael, and Adam Ant.

This reviewer's conservative companion called it a drag show. It wasn't, but she demonstrated Orange County attitudes. Opening acts included two rising pop divas: Orianthi and Allison Iraheta. Both evenings drew well, and the crowds looked to represent a widely diverse mainstream demographic, not simply a narrow GLBT audience. Apparently many fans are glad Lambert’s here to be an artist.

NOTE: Sadly BLADE magazine didn't run this music review, so I'm posting it here.

2010-08-27T12:40:00.000-07:00

NOTE: This review originally appeared in LA Alternative, July 14-20, 2006.

MANGA by Lyn Jensen

Higuri Puts the "Gay" in Gay Paris

July brings a double dose of You Higuri’s gay-themed yaoi manga, with DMP/June introducing her Gorgeous Carat Galaxy and TokyoPop/BLU continuing the earlier Gorgeous Carat series. One of yaoi’s most popular artists, Higuri started drawing Gorgeous Carat in 1999. After that series’ four-volume run, she changed publishers and produced a one-volume sequel, Gorgeous Carat Galaxy. (The title refers to jewel theft and uses “Galaxy” as a synonym for “Universe.”)

Higuri once said the Gorgeous Carat stories were inspired by old-time melodrama. “I had plans to make this manga more of a freaky torture-type manga, but it turned out a little different. But at least the contents are wholesome. I guess I really like drawing my bishies [bishonen, pretty boys] getting picked on,” Higuri writes in her notes for Gorgeous Carat, vol. 1. With freaky whips-and-chains torture, and bishies getting picked on, but “wholesome” contents, the result may work better as parody with homoerotic overtones than yaoi. Eye-popping yaoi it’s not, with Gorgeous Carat being rated 16-up and Galaxy getting only a 13-up rating.

If this manga series were a movie, Ebert and Roper would rip it apart for illogical plotting and character development, then give it two thumbs-up anyway. The beginning shows promise. Florian (the leading “bishie”), an impoverished noble in Victorian Paris, becomes human collateral to a loan shark, a distant relative known to Parisian society as Count Courland but to Paris police as the phantom jewel thief Noir.

In most yaoi, Florian would immediately become the count’s sex slave, but Higuri scarcely develops the male leads’ relationship. Instead she spends too much time on flat minor characters. Take the Middle-Eastern serving-girl (please). She’s too obviously a stock character from shoujo manga. Victorian Europe would never have allowed such informality between the sexes, classes, or races.

Speaking of informality, the dialog has Victorians speaking like Gen-X. Higuri’s American fans have expectations, and both publishers are going to take hits for sloppy translations. Even if the original Japanese dialog was cringe-inducing, did the translation have to be?

Yet the series somehow works its charm just the same. Like viewing an uncut gem, fans are rewarded with flashes of brilliance, particularly in the rare scenes between the male leads. May manga fans see more of Higuri and her bishonen.

Vintage Manga Review: "Star Trek"

2010-08-19T11:54:00.000-07:00

NOTE: This review originally appeared in LA Alternative, on 9/6/06.

MANGA by Lyn Jensen

WHERE NO MANGA HAS GONE BEFORE

“To boldly go where no man has gone before,” was the original mission of the starship Enterprise. No ordinary TV series, Star Trek boldly forged new frontiers for TV and science fiction. When the show was abruptly cancelled in 1969, it didn’t just fade away into some TV Land of occasional reruns. Fans the world over kept interest in it alive—a remarkable show of support considering VHS and DVD weren’t invented yet. Four decades later, what began as a controversial TV show has become an enduring and influential multi-media phenomenon, a piece of pop culture that refuses to die.

Although Star Trek has spawned comic books and a comic strip, TokyoPop’s release of Star Trek: the Manga is the first venture into the distinctive Asian-influenced comic format. Luis Reyes, editor for the project, says, “We’ve tried to make the individual stories resonate with the spirit of the original show, with Gene Roddenberry’s interest in social and political dynamics, with the fan fascination with the idiosyncrasies of these characters, and with the way the original series used science fiction as a sounding board for larger ideas.”

Fans should be pleased with how much the resulting one-volume manga remains faithful to the original characters and themes. Five veteran comic writers were paired with five top manga artists to create five stories that could easily be adapted into contemporary TV episodes. The original Enterprise crew—Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Sulu, McCoy, Chekov, Uhuru—is all present and accounted for, and they grapple with some frontiers that weren’t on the cultural map in the sixties.

Consider the contribution from one of the featured artists, LA’s own Jeong Mo Yang, who’s “Modus Vivendi” earned him a place in TokyoPop’s Rising Stars of Manga 5 anthology. In the Star Trek episode he illustrates, the Enterprise discovers a planet that warred between the sexes until there were no people left—not alive, anyway. Other episodes take on such themes as cloning and nanotechnology.

Star Trek: the Manga is rated 13-up, most likely because it’s simply too cerebral for the average elementary-school student. As part of TokyoPop’s salute to the 40th anniversary of Star Trek, the publisher is issuing the manga in three different collectable covers: one for retail book chains, one for comic books stores, and one exclusively for Star Trek convention participants.

Review: 1 World Manga

2010-08-12T12:43:00.000-07:00

NOTE: This review first appeared in LA Alternative, Sept. 15, 2006.

Think Globally, Read Locally

by Lyn Jensen

Remember the age-old argument that comics can educate as well as entertain? The three-volume 1 World Manga series that VIZ is currently marketing is a delightful example. It’s not specifically being classified as an educational text, but it’s very different from what’s commonly found in the manga section of bookstores. Teachers looking for something new this school year may want to order these volumes by the boxful for geography, health, science, social studies, and reading courses.

VIZ rates the entire series for all ages but its slant is more adult than that normally indicates. Parents and teachers would be well-advised to exercise some guidance, particularly regarding vol. 2’s subject, AIDS awareness. It’s doubtful, even given today’s attitudes, that many ‘rents consider condoms and pre-marital sex as age-appropriate as Snoopy.

Rather adults and children can read and discuss these manga together, and adults may be surprised to find they learn something as well.
In all three volumes, the teenage hero, Rei, sharpens his marital-arts skills as he battles global villains. Besides the AIDS epidemic, his foes are poverty (in vol. 1) and global warming (in vol. 3). His master is a mysterious spirit who commonly appears in animal forms ranging from a bird to a horse. Not only that, the master concentrates far more on developing his student’s heart, mind, and spirit than fighting skills, much to his student’s chagrin.

While the stories borrow from the shonen (boys’) style, they’re nothing like standard martial-arts manga, for such global foes require a different kind of fight. In the AIDS volume, for example, Rei meets a girl and finds that AIDS has decimated her family and devastated her village. She wants to marry her boyfriend, but she doesn’t know if she can trust him when he says he’s AIDS-free. The characters learn how fighting the AIDS foe requires education, prevention, and medical tests, along with compassion and care for patients.

1 World Manga is the creation of Annette Roman, a VIZ employee who also writes and teaches at Berkeley City College. She teamed with Leandro Ng, an experienced comic artist whose credits include Stargate: Rebellion and Cinder/Hellins. He teaches at the Academy of Art University. The project was created in partnership with the World Bank. All proceeds from sales go to the charity Reading Is Fundamental.

Manga Review: Eiken

2010-07-14T11:36:00.000-07:00

This review was originally published in the June 2-8 2006 issue of LA Alternative.

MANGA by Lyn Jensen

GIRL TROUBLE

“Hentai” is one of the more controversial terms in a manga (or anime) fan’s lexicon. At one extreme it’s all but synonymous with adults-only porn, at the other it refers to nothing more provocative than glimpses of young women’s underwear. Sometimes it’s applied narrowly to heterosexual content, other times it applies to homosexual content as well. Using the term can create confusion, and also risk the wrath of whatever moral watchdogs happen to be lurking.

Perhaps that’s why examples of (hetero)sexually explicit manga are rarely marketed stateside. (Interestingly, the American manga market seems more open to gay-themed yaoi than straight-themed hentai.) An alternate term, “fan service,” is often applied to the provocative, suggestive, but less explicit comics that service the male fan with eyefuls of young women in their panties (or out of their panties), wildly exaggerated views of women’s busts, and the like, but that material, too, is rare in America.

One popular “fan service” manga series that’s available in the USA is Eiken, by Seiji Matsuyama, published by AnimeWorks Press, a division of Media Blasters. Over eighteen volumes bursting with silly adolescent humor, a teenage student keeps getting into far, far more than his share of girl trouble. Try as he might, young innocent Densuke just can’t stay out of compromising situations with the busty schoolgirls of the Eiken club, or with their faculty advisor, a teacher so awkward the students have to take care of her.

Even though much of the series’ humor depends on schoolgirls busting out of their clothes, the clumsy teacher caught in the nude with the schoolboy (he can explain everything, honestly), and the like, the overall effect is, happily, relatively inoffensive to women. It may remind fans of British comedy about the polite way the British have of getting away with racy humor. It’s so ridiculous and so characteristic of human shortcomings in both men and women, few adults are likely to trouble with being seriously offended by it. Just the same, Eiken is an adult comic, and Media Blasters has seen fit to bestow upon it an 18-and-older rating and a “parental advisory” warning.

In Japan the series was published from 2001 to 2004 by Shonen Champion, which caters to an older, wider range of readers and offers more diverse comics than the world-famous Shonen Jump magazine.

Three Articles in the Blade's July Issue

2010-07-09T14:54:00.000-07:00

Blade (the GLBT magazine based in Laguna Beach) published three articles by me in the July issue. (Bless 'em, they're one of my very best media outlets. )

First, here's the link to my story about Alison Bechdel, her graphic novel Fun Home and her classic long-running Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip:

www.gayblade.com/news0710_bechdel.shtml

Second, here's the one for the LGBT square dance scene in southern California this summer:

www.gayblade.com/news0710_square.shtml

And lastly here's a very interesting account of the second of four installments of the "Out West" series at the Autry Museum (this one featuring a talk by author Patricia Nell Warren) about Calamity Jane, Willa Cather, and others who, in one way or another, lived as Victorian-era gender-benders on the American Frontier:

www.gayblade.com/news0710_outwest.shtml

Stay tuned for new postings and updates of some of my LA Alternative manga reviews!

COFFEEHOUSE MARTINI MAKES TRIBUTE TO MOM

2010-06-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

Carol Martini, queen of the Southern California coffeehouse scene, is readying an independent tribute CD to her late mother, following up her acclaimed The Rose in the Boxcar, an indy CD released in 2005 as a tribute to her late father. That CD was named one of “OC’s Best of the Best” by the Orange County Register in December 2005. Both of Martini’s parents died of Alzheimer’s, her father, Ron, in 2003 and her mother, Dorothy, in 2007.

“Both times we thought they were going to come home but they never came home,” Martini says, and the dramatic effect on her life inspired her to make the music featured on her latest CDs. She informs us that she’s in the final stages on her CD for her mother, preparing the cover artwork. It's tentatively titled Petals of the Red Magnolia. She’s hoping it will be ready for release by July.

Her previous indy recordings are now rare collectors’ items, including Piece by Piece, Modern Loneliness, and The Story So Far, which she’s spotted being offered for $28 on eBay. Her first appearance was on Co-Op, a compilation made up mostly of Los Angeles and Orange County musical artists in the late eighties.

Her style has changed since those early recordings. At the time her songs tended towards beautiful—and beautifully commercial—love songs that could have been big hits had they been released on a major label. She still occasionally performs those older songs like “Wishing Well” or “Build a Bridge to My Heart,” but her current style leans more towards humorous and topical songs like “Surfer Chick,” a song that often gets her audience looking up from their laptops and singing along at South Bay and OC coffeehouses.

“Surfer Chick” is one of several “Chick” songs in her current repertoire, the others being “Skateboarding Chick,” “Skydiving Chick,” and “Biker Chick.” Of her change in style, she explains, “There are a million love songs out there, I wanted to write something different, something people would want to hear.”

Why “Chick” songs? She answers, “It’s not derogatory, I’m a chick—adventurous, a strong woman, that’s what it means to me.”

She plays what may be called the “It’s a Grind” circuit, appearing fairly regularly at branches of that coffeehouse chain in Long Beach, Lakewood, Mission Viejo, Laguna Hills, and elsewhere. She’s also seen frequently at the Coffee Cartel in Redondo Beach, the Library Coffeehouse in Long Beach, and on various Borders and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf stages. Here are some of her upcoming shows:

Friday, June 11, Peet’s Coffee in Seal Beach, (562)640-6377
Saturday, June 12, Borders in La Habra, (562)691-8969
Saturday, June 19, Coffee Cartel in Redondo Beach, (310)316-6554
Saturday, June 26, Peet’s Coffee in Pasadena, (626)795-7413

New Shine On Show Announced!

2010-05-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

We just got the news that Shine On will be appearing in Las Vegas, July 20-25, at the Fremont Street Experience! That makes up for the cancelled Santa Ana show!

Shine On Show Cancelled

2010-05-25T13:13:00.001-07:00

Robin Canada now tells me that the Shine On show on June 25 in Santa Ana has been cancelled. A new date is to be announced.

Shine On, Pink Floyd Experience in Concert

2010-05-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

Shine On, Pink Floyd Experience: "We're Trying to Faithfully Recreate Their Music"
by Lyn Jensen

Pink Floyd's symphonic rock deserves a live experience, such as the one you’ll get at a Shine On concert. Since the eleven-member Orange County band pulled off an amazing and memorable performance of the entire Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon at the OC Pavilion in Santa Ana a couple of years ago, complete with Pink Floyd's original videos and saxophonist Scott Paige, who played with the legendary British rock group in the late eighties, they’ve kept busy providing fans with an unique flashback experience. They’ll return to the Pavilion June 25.

When Bill Lawrence and Aaron Broering performed some Pink Floyd music for a church service at The Crossing in Costa Mesa about five or six years ago, Shine On began. "I don't care for the title, tribute," says Lawrence, who plays drums and sings the Roger Waters vocals. "We title ourselves a Pink Floyd experience ... We're not trying to be them. We're trying to faithfully recreate their music."

As Lawrence now recalls, it went so well they got together "a pool" of several other musicians, most of whom attended the same church, and kept the project going. The budding band’s pianist, Robin Canada, formerly of Exude and NC-17, suggested the name Shine On, after a track on Wish You Were Here.

The November 2008 Pavilion show was Shine On's second live performance of a Pink Floyd album, having previously taken on Wish You Were Here, start to finish, in its entirety, at the Pavilion in early 2008. "I just felt it was time to do all of Dark Side of the Moon, being that it is one of the all-time greatest-selling LPs," Lawrence says. "[and] because Dark Side of the Moon is probably one of the first theme albums. It really is an album that's meant to be played from start to finish."

"It was really a vast open canvas to tonally paint across," adds Broering, who plays guitar and sings the David Gilmore vocals.

Lawrence gives a major share of the credit to Broering for being able to recreate Pink Floyd's music, with, "Aaron took the time to learn the guitar parts faithfully and not just the licks, but [he] has the ability to recreate the emotion and the intensity that David Gilmore performs live, and marry that with his ability to sing it as well as he does."

"Great wonderful borderline symphonic musical landscape," says Broering of Dark Side and its place in rock history. "There's not a lot of bands that got away with it and were successful at it, and will probably never be successful at it again, because of the state of the record industry at this point. The music industry will not allow freedom anymore for a band to ...make an album like Dark Side of the Moon."

Casual fans may know Dark Side of the Moon best by the hit, "Money," not the Beatles' "(Give Me) Money," but the song with the ching-ching beat and the "keep your hands off of my stack" hook, a staple of classic rock playlists. Broering notes its very unorthodox time signature, a combination of 7/4 and 4/4 time, an example of Pink Floyd's symphonic approach to rock.

Lawrence adds "Money" helped make Dark Side Pink Floyd's breakout hit, but not without irony, "they were thumbing their nose at the aristocracy ... So they had quite a conundrum, we were the very thing we were against, what do we do, do we give it all away? Or do we--yeah, I think we'll keep it."

As for what it's like to play Pink Floyd, "only a handful have the luxury of saying they've played that entire body of work," says Broering. "You...stop and gasp for air when you're done."

"It's all of my artistic dreams," Lawrence adds. "Probably the biggest challenge is keeping yourself focused and doing what you're supposed to do and not screwing up and listening to all of the different wonderful ear candy that's going on during the performance and then remembering I've got this cue coming up."

With Pink Floyd being one of the first rock bands to tour with a full media production, Shine On's technical crew attend rehearsals and rehearse cues along with the musicians. Lawrence says the actual Pink Floyd videos used on-stage took about three years to stockpile.

Of what's next for Shine On, Lawrence says, "I'm joyfully looking forward to cherry-picking our favorite songs, and concentrating on songs we do best." Shine On is looking for more shows, but with eleven musicians and a multi-media show, finding proper venues is a challenge. They're looking to get some bookings at Indian casinos, maybe Las Vegas. For keeping up with Shine On shows and other information, the band's Web site is flashbackexperience.com and they also have a MySpace.

DVD REVIEW: Gay in Korea With No Regret

2010-04-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

Last year I sent this review of the DVD No Regret (it's a gay-themed Korean film, the DVD is sub-titled) to several gay papers and some mainstream media, too, but nobody ran it. So I'm posting it here:

DVD REVIEW: Gay in Korea With No Regret

Many people have heard about bar hostesses who drink and socialize and sometimes more with men in sleazy bars in certain Asian cities, but there are also bar hosts who service women or gay men. No Regret, an award-winning South Korean feature film now available on DVD from Here! and Liberation Entertainment takes a realistic look at a gay bar host’s life in Seoul.

“Divided by class, united by passion,” says the DVD jacket blurb, along with, “a romantic drama that interweaves the bliss of love with the harsh realities of class distinction.”

With a plot that juxtaposes homoerotic relationships against class struggle, No Regret is essentially a standard prostitute-and-john story with a few twists. An orphan factory hand perceives himself as dishonored by the boss’ son, so he quits and goes to Seoul where he’s driven into prostitution. The boss’s son comes looking for him. The two men spend the rest of the story trying to overcome the restrictions Korean society places upon them.

This film’s rated R but dances on the edge of softcore NC-17 territory, with raunchy and violent elements as the two male leads undergo a power struggle. There’s no “woman” in this relationship, things are much more complicated than simple stereotypes.

No Regret previously enjoyed a brief theatrical release and played a few film festivals as well. Perhaps its success will prove a breakout for the gay Asian film scene. You may purchase it online at such outlets as amazon.com or check with your favorite DVD retailer.

Link to "Whose Team is it, Anyway?"

2010-03-12T12:45:00.000-08:00

In addition to my own work, I sometimes post on this blog articles that I think are worth keeping the link to and re-reading from time to time. One such article is "Whose Team is it, Anyway?" by Katha Pollitt, originally published in The Nation. It's a very interesting editorial about how some Democrats in Congress are trying to use healthcare reform to restrict women's access to safe and legal abortion: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/pollitt

Peter Mathews, Congressional Candidate

2010-03-02T11:20:00.000-08:00

Taking a look back at some of my published work earlier this year, my interview with Peter Mathews was featured in the Blade February 2010 issue. He's a Democrat challenging the incumbent Laura Richardson in California's 37th Congressional District. The story talks about how he's campaigning on various LGBT issues as well as progressive matters in general. Here's the link: http://www.gayblade.com/news0210_mathews.shtml

Robert Garcia, Long Beach Council Member

2010-02-25T11:17:00.000-08:00

Orange County and Long Beach Blade ran my story on Long Beach's newest council member, Robert Garcia, who's young, Latino, and gay. Here's the link: http://gayblade.com/news0310_garcia.shtml

Links to Published Articles

2010-02-24T16:03:00.000-08:00

Most of the postings on this blog include links to my published articles. (There are a few exceptions, mainly unpublished articles.) I have another blog on MySpace which deals with topics of a more general nature, so readers are encouraged to browse over to that site for random thoughts, announcements, online-only reviews and articles, and whatever else I think is worth posting: www.myspace.com/lynjensen

Sherlock Holmes Graphic Novel Review

2009-12-04T12:50:00.000-08:00

Yaoi fans! Blade (the December 2009 issue) ran my review of Yayoi Neko's Sherlock Holmes graphic novel The Adventure of the Concussoris Magnus. My article also mentions she's working on the fourth volume of her global yaoi manga series, Incubus. Here's the link: http://gayblade.com/news1209_neko.shtml

Anthology Includes Blog on the Politics of CFS!

2009-11-19T11:05:00.000-08:00

Bloglandia 2:2 is on sale, a trade paperback collection of blogs including my article on the politics surrounding Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which was posted here previously! It's edited by Ginger Mayerson and published by Wapshott Press. You may order your copy at: http://wapshottpress.com/j-bloglandia/volume-2-issue-2/

Lillian Diaz-Przybyl Interview: Boys Love Unlimited

2009-11-06T11:54:00.000-08:00

Blade's October issue ran my interview with Lillian Diaz-Przybyl about the current state of BLU, TokyoPop's yaoi imprint. She talks about titles including Junjo Romantica and Gakuen Heaven. Here's the link: http://gayblade.com/news1009_boys.shtml

From the Archives: "US v. Bush" Review

2009-11-02T11:32:00.001-08:00

From the archives of www.altweeklies.com comes the link to my 2007 review of US v. Bush by Elizabeth De La Vega. Perhaps you remember her interview with Steven Colbert:
http://www.altweeklies.com/alternative/AltWeeklies/Story?oid=oid%3A183998
I must see about getting on the altweeklies site more often!

2009-10-06T11:38:00.000-07:00

Recently Life After 50 accepted a couple of my articles for the magazine's leisure section; both just happen to be sports-related. My story about the Baseball Reliquary in Pasadena, "At the Old Ball Game," was run in the August issue. The second, an interview with John McEnroe when he played World Team Tennis in Newport Beach this summer, was posted on the Life After 50 Web site.
Here's the link to "At the Old Ball Game," http://lifeafter50.com/Lifestyles/Leisure/AT-THE-OLD-BALL-GAME.
Here's the link to McEnroe: http://lifeafter50.com/Health-Wellness/Exercise/JOHN-MCENROE and despite his saying that the old days of tennis aren't coming back, I still think a made-for-TV retro event might be fun!

Play Boy Blues in New York Press

2009-10-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

I just checked the link for my 2006 review that ran in the New York Press of the yaoi manga Play Boy Blues by Shiuko Kano, published by the late great BeBeautiful. What's interesting is that the New York Press also ran my reviews of Avril Lavigne's manga, along with the videogame-related Zero manga and several of Youka Nitta's yaoi manga. Those links are now down but the PBB one is still going strong!
Here's the link for my review of Play Boy Blues, which seems to get a lot of hits--could that be why it's still up and active? http://www.nypress.com/19/24/books/Books4.cfm

My Manga Reviews for LA Alternative

2009-05-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

My manga reviews that I wrote for LA Alternative in 2005-2006 are still out there in cyberspace--here's the link:
http://www.laalternative.com/index.php/category/uncategorized/
I probably ought to post them on my Deviant Art space someday.
P. S. Contrary to popular opinion, I didn't just review yaoi, although you'll find titles and series including Gorgeous Carat, Yellow, Play Boy Blues, and La Esperanca here. Yes, you'll also find mainstream shojo titles such as Loveless and Fruits Basket that are beloved by yaoi fans. But you'll also find more general adult and shonen fare such as Path of the Assassin, Crying Freeman, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Golgo 13. I [heart] manga, of any kind!

New Articles Every Two Weeks

2009-04-24T11:48:00.000-07:00

You can keep up with one or more new articles by me every two weeks in Random Lengths, an alternate newspaper published fortnightly in San Pedro, CA. I mostly cover happenings in the nearby city of Carson, but I also do some entertainment and general features.
Just visit www.randomlengthsnews.com and click on the articles for each issue. You can read the entire publication, including my stories, on-line!

Sexual Harassment in the Dept. of Defense

2009-03-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to all those sexual harassment cases that were filed against the Dept. of Defense in the nineties? What was it like for a victim whose rights were violated by employees of the federal government? The below link leads to an on-line article that describes one such case:
http://lynjensen.deviantart.com/art/Sex-and-the-Dept-of-Defense-94756469
Besides being published on-line, this article was picked up and published in the softcover anthology J Bloglandia, Vol 1, Issue 2, ed. by Ginger Mayerson, available now from Wapshott Press.

The Politics of CFS: What it Means

2009-03-27T11:39:00.000-07:00

Some of my own on-line publishing, an article originally called, "What CFS Means: Patients and Doctors Define Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" and you may read it on the link below:
http://lynjensen.deviantart.com/art/What-does-CFS-Mean-94539153
It's an overview of what's happening with studies and treatments for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). This link has had 130 views on Deviant Art as of today's post.

Manga and music reviews: links

2009-03-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here are some links to the Laguna Beach paper Blade, which publishes my manga and music reviews often. The first two links are for manga reviews, the third is for a CD review, a flashback to my days as a music journalist.

Yakuza in Love (yaoi manga) reveiw: http://gayblade.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=265&Itemid=1
It's a manga by Shiuko Kano, whose other works include Play Boy Blues and I'm Not Your Stepping Stone. This series is published by Aurora/Deux, based in Torrance, CA.

Iono-Sama Fanatics (yuri manga) review: http://gayblade.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=269&Itemid=1

And some music, a review of REM's CD Accelerate: http://www.gayblade.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=429&Itemid=99999999

Three manga/book reviews

2009-03-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

Here are three of my book/manga reviews which recently ran in the Blade, you may check the magazine's Web site for more info:

"Adventures in Girls Love" about Erica Friedman and the current trends in yuri manga, which ran in Oct. '08 --
http://www.gayblade.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=501&Itemid=1
Erica asks that we make this correction: "FYI, the Yuri event n October - which I did not attend - was not the country's first. There have been several Yuri events before "Maiden's Garden 3" - Yuriket 1 and 2, Maiden's Garden 1 and 2 and Yuricon in 2005 in Tokyo." Sorry about that, Erica!

Then there's my story on fellow MySpacer Ginger Mayerson and her Wapshott Press, including her Bloglandia project (anthologies of blogs), which ran in the August '08 issue. At least they got Ginger's picture captioned correctly on-line (she was Annie Proulx[!] in the hard copy)--
http://www.gayblade.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=453&Itemid=1
About Bloglandia, vol. 2 is currently out and includes Molly Ian's story about sexual harassment in the Department of Defense, "Sex and the DoD."

Lastly there's my review of John Simpson's erotic gay thrillers, Murder Most Gay and Task Force, in the March '09 issue of Blade, link below:
http://www.gayblade.com/news0309_thrill.shtml

2009-03-06T11:25:00.000-08:00

OC Voice links: Adam Ho, Dean Koontz
Current mood: fatigued
Category: Writing and Poetry
OC Voice has posted a couple of my articles on-line. The major one is a cover story on OC guitarist Adam Ho. The editor has added a couple of paragraphs in the lead but the rest is my work:http://ocvoice.wordpress.com/?s=Adam+Ho
The second one is a book review of Dean Koontz's and Queenie Chan's manga version of In Odd We Trust (published by Del Rey):http://ocvoice.wordpress.com/?s=Dean+Koontz

Currently reading: Maybe I'm Your Steppin' Stone by Shiuko Kano

"Let Dai" manga/manwha reviews: vols. 1, 3, and 5

2009-01-09T13:32:00.000-08:00

My first post of the new year! Hey, lurkers, please leave a comment now and then!
One of my favorite manga (or, to use the Korean term, manwha) series is Let Dai. I wrote these reviews of vols. 1, 3, and 5 after animeondvd.com said they needed a yaoi reviewer, and they didn't have anyone else reviewing these volumes. I went to the work of putting my reviews into the animeondvd.com format, only to be told, "We already have some other people that do yaoi." (After they said they needed someone, and the guy said he wanted to see my reviews because he needed someone, and the vacant template, just waiting for a review, was up on the site--huumm.) Rather than put them into another format, I just posted them on DeviantArt instead. Fellow Let Dai fans, I'd love to hear from you. Here are the links:
http://lynjensen.deviantart.com/art/Manga-review-Let-Dai-v-1-108194232
http://lynjensen.deviantart.com/art/Manga-review-Let-Dai-3-108192472
http://lynjensen.deviantart.com/art/Manga-Review-Let-Dai-5-108190330

"Lights Out!" manga review

2008-12-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

NOTE: When LA Alternative folded, this manga (or manwha, the Korean term) review never got run--so I may as well post it here.

MANGA by Lyn Jensen

Teenage Kicks in Korea

Korean manga (sometimes called by the Korean word manwha) is becoming an ever- more-visible part of the international graphic-novel market. Myung-Jin Lee is one of the most successful Korean comic artists of the past two decades, and TokyoPop is in the process of making what looks like his entire catalog available in English.
Between 2002 and 2004, TokyoPop published ten volumes of Ragnarok, Lee’s sword-and-sorcery series based on Viking mythology. As one of the top-selling Korean comics of all time, it had already inspired a Japanese anime series (a first for a Korean title) and an on-line videogame. (Check iro.ragnarokonline.com for a download.) TokyoPop hints of more Ragnarok manga to come with, “He continues to work on it to this day.”
However, Lee’s American fans needn’t wait any longer for something different. TokyoPop recently published vol. 4 of his debut nine-volume series under the title Lights Out. (The original title has been variously translated as It’s Going to be a Wonderful Night or An Evening Something Wonderful May Happen.) Lee tells readers, “After ten years we’re putting it in the spotlight again… Just as it was …Kind of embarrassing, but I hope you enjoy it.”
Lee’s art in Lights Out has more of an urban street-cred look than his elaborate fantasies for Ragnarok, befitting an entirely different story of at-risk youth getting teenage kicks while trying to escape Korean gang life. The plot appeals to both racing and martial-arts fans, as the lead character takes up motorcycle racing but finds he can’t leave his street rep behind. Volumes 2 and 3 are “full of hot, steamy, hardcore, uh, motorcycle racing,” as one racetrack groupie says. Vol. 4 reverts to martial-arts clichés, the kind where one high-school kid can take out dozens of seasoned hard-core street thugs—yeah, right, whatever. Vol. 5, due in October, is built around a school track competition as the characters continue feuding and romancing.
That’s not all the Lee-related manga that TokyoPop has to offer. The publisher is also introducing American fans to the two-volume fantasy-comedy, Laya, the Witch of Red Pooh. About a present-day witch and an anthropomorphic cat, it’s the creation of Lee’s studio, Dive to Dream Sea. Obviously it’s for a different audience than either of the other two series. All three, however, are rated 13-plus.