Shameful Otaku Secret!

Part of the 12 Moments in Anime 2009, and probably the only one of mine that gets this personal.

Solanin covers the same post-college years as Honey & Clover II that I sometimes get nostalgic for (I call them the “adulthood isn’t really gonna be so bad after all” years). It’s the time when you’re unburdened of the responsibility of school, and the current burdens of work-life don’t seem so bad yet. Doesn’t take long for that to change. But I digress.

Solanin is an empowering, uplifting story that makes following your dreams seem like a realistic and manageable proposition. A small chunk of your dream is still your dream, after all. It’s a feel-good story with lovably flawed characters, and a live performance scene that really makes you feel like you’re in a club watching a band give it their all (which, let’s face it, many bands don’t always do).

But there is a moment. it’s the moment when drummer Billy decides that playing a show is the right thing to do. It’s a mixed bag because he’s also come to the realization that he’s done. The “dream” is over, he’s become that guy who gave up on it. And his only choice left is to reclaim that tiny slice.

This moment haunts me. Dead serious. As a musician, I’ve never planned for huge success — in fact, the types of music I’ve played have never enjoyed widespread notoriety at all — but I always hoped I could get some albums out on real labels, travel around in a van playing music, and hopefully meet some people in other places who’d heard me and were into the same kinds of things. I still don’t know if I’ve given up on that. But that one page of Solanin made me realize that I was Billy too.

I suppose if I lived in a manga it’d be easy to claim that slice of a dream, but my band (who play the most accessible, potentially-successful music I’ve ever done) lives the reality of the situation weekly. We’re no longer the bums that Solanin’s characters are, and jobs, spouses, children, and other commitments threaten at every turn to strike even that small chump-change dream down. But in those moments, I suppose I can always think of Meiko, Katou, and Billy living their moment.

Take a step back in time to the future

Sometime before the advent of translucent cels photographed in a sequence to give the illusion of motion, some folks in a country not far from anime’s homeland invented a revolutionary device that allowed stories to be told, stored, and possibly fansubbed.

It was called paper.

Somewhere along the line, young humans lost their desire to get their entertainment from the material, which I’m told was somehow plant-based. The flashy picture-box holds more sway these days. But in Japan, and the West, there remains a paper-style form of enjoyment that’s still popular with the kids.

I’ve never been a big comics or manga fan myself. I like the stuff, but three volumes into Battle Royale I realized I could have owned the DVD of the movie with the money they cost, and it’s physically impossible to watch a whole DVD film in the 8 minutes it takes to read a manga volume.

And the serial magazines that we get in the US pale in comparison to the choices the Japanese have. But now, we finally have something reasonable.

Yen+ is, unsurprisingly, from US manga publisher Yen Press. It’s a giant hunk of that paper stuff that will surprise you if you’re used to the tiny-sized tankoubon that we usually get over here. The pages are big, there are a metric shit-ton of them, and they’re printed on paper that’s a good deal better than Japan’s newprint issues.

The magazine is split in the middle: Read it from back cover right-to-left until you reach the center, and you get unflipped Japanese titles. Do the opposite, and you’re reading American and Korean comics. Which you enjoy best is up to you, because the titles are really varied and most are pretty good.

Readers on the fansub tip will recognize most Japanese titles right away, especially the cover piece, Atsushi Ohkubo’s Soul Eater. The American side’s cover is graced by the inaugural issue of suspense author James Patterson’s entry to the manga world, Maximum Ride. This is a big post for a big volume, so check out the review after the jump. There might be minor spoilers, but these are all first chapters.

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