Manga Club Week #1 (Link to the Past)

[CourierRice]

It’s [checks watch] Friday! We made it to week one! I got pretty distracted by life this week, but since I make the deadline I can never truly be late. Gaze upon my works and despair.

(Hopefully I’ll have my stuff together by the next thread.)

By the way, I finished the Manga Club guidelines document! It’s like five short pages, look at it here!

Last Friday you all voted on Link to the Past, Shotaro Ishinomori’s adaptation of the titular SNES game. Ishinomori is most famous for Cyborg 009 and Kamen Rider, as is even stated in the end credits of this volume. Also mentioned is his work on Hotel, which is a new one to me.

(I can’t believe they actually squeezed this Nintendo slogan in.)

What did everyone think? Was it entertaining? How did it fare as an adaptation? How was the comicking itself? Does Link talk way too much?

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For next week we’re going to have two volumes to read. First up is a suggestion from @r-i, the single volume manga The Private Report on My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness. It’s a mouthful.

(I…I think I can get away with posting this cover. Am I ban? Am I ban myself?)

quoted from bato.to:

Compilation of a manga essay originally published on pixiv.

The personal story of an aspiring mangaka, college dropout who’s led a lonesome, unfulfilling life.

It should go without saying but if you want to share panels from this, try to keep it SFW, or censor it or something. For whatever reason, the uploads on batoto lack the sixth/bonus chapter. But, mangarock seems to have it. Alternatively, you can purchase it online, since it has an english publication.

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The second volume we’ll be reading is up to a vote, and both options are from multi-volume series.

• Sugar Dark: Umerareta Yami to Shoujo (Volume 1)
• Paros no Ken (Volume 1)

Sugar Dark: Umarareta Yami to Shoujo (aka Sugar Dark: The Buried Darkness and the Girl)
Story: Arai Enji, Art: Ooiwa Kenji and Mebae
4 volumes long. Finished. Based on a light novel.
Content warnings for graphic violence.
There’s no info online about what chapters are in what volumes, but there are nineteen chapters in all, so we’ll read the first five.

The story follows a boy named Muoru who has been falsely arrested and sent to a cemetery to perform forced labor. There, he calls himself the “grave keeper” and meets a beautiful girl named Meria. Muoru becomes fascinated with Meria as he spends his days digging a hole containing the undead monster named “The Dark.”

Paros no Ken (aka The Sword of Paros)
Story: Kurimoto Kaoru, Art: Igarashi Yumiko
3 volumes long. Finished.
Content warnings for themes of sexual assault and probably some outdated gender stuff.

There is a legend in the kingdom of Paros – a legend of the Sword. It is said that if one who is unfit to rule should wield it, it will mean the ruin of the kingdom. As sole heir to the throne of Paros, Princess Erminia must accept the Sword and a husband when she comes of age on her next birthday. But the princess refuses to wed any man who is less of a man than she – which excludes every man in the kingdom!

[CourierRice]

I’m gonna put off giving my thoughts so others can share theirs first, but I do want to share a few great pages:

Master sword effects were great.

Really great.

This is my favorite page altogether (ignoring the fact that this was part of a two page spread and I was too lazy to piece them together.)

[ferrets]

more like a stink to the ass

[r-i]

Positives: it does look pretty great. I don’t have much of a critical artistic eye, but I do appreciate clear panelling techniques like staggered diagonal cuts for dire action + standard grids for brief moments of respite and relying on bleed for imposing sights. Link gets a lot of fun cartoony expressions, and them talking a lot is somewhat tempered by how half of the texture is in dialogue with light side characters. The other half is, as seen above, plenty of grand scenes and vistas.

Altogether, it’s enjoyably breezy as an adventure.

Negatives: …but this isn’t a great fit for a series played as exploring worlds and delving through dungeons, neither of which are any involved in this perhaps-too-meagre 194 page volume. There’s little sense of space past external establishing shots for regular landmarks, and fights are compressed to a few pages each chapter with rote imperilment plus triumph. The Light World and Dark World only get one cross-interaction chapter and Link is trapped in the latter, many bosses and locales are skipped over, and Link doesn’t even get to wield a grand expanding arsenal of tools besides the Master Sword and grenade firecorn. It results in a weaker tone, a standard hero’s journey just incidentally using the trappings of Zelda- decompression into a second volume would have helped a lot. In a certain fashion it works better than other video game adaptations in having a storied purpose, at least?

Conclusion:

also what was with “control one’s emotions in the afterlife / dark world or link turns into a wolf”

Next: a content warning, for those who didn’t read it when it was first coming out. My Private Report on My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness contains suicidal ideation, self-harm, eating disorders, and emotional abuse, in one of the most terrifyingly earnest and frank depictions of depression I’ve seen. Like, Bojack levels (though without the escapist sleaze). Also, as the cover shows, it’s NSFW (mostly contained to the intro and the titular chapter).

[Mikey]

My biggest beef is the character relationships aren’t believable at all with so little time to develop them. Like that fairie has no reason to be fond of Link at all.

I did like that they sort of nod toward how absolutely exhausting his quest must be because the game contains nary a mention of the guy getting sleep

[Tulpa]

wrt next week’s choices, you left out that Sword of Paros is by the author of Guin Saga! A 1979 pulp fantasy series that was considered one of the primary inspirations for things like Berserk.

[CourierRice]

I saw Guin Saga was under the same author, but I didn’t know about the Berserk connection! Very neat.

[stavekoff]

I just love the last bit of this, where everyone has moved on. It’s sombre.

[HOBO]

I didn’t want to buy this comic but I also didn’t want to read it on my computer. So I took a trip down to the local library. I braved the Teen Zone.

I spent like 20 minutes there, searching the shelves for Zelda. I never found it. I suppose I could have asked for help but I’m shy. I didn’t want to look like a weirdo. Even though yeah poking through the YA shelves for 20 minutes…kinda weird. Maybe something a 49 year old real-world version of Bluto (but cute) shouldn’t be doing.

So I gave up, saw I shouldn’t have been packing heat (sorry, library…can’t help it, cuz I’m “always packing”), and went home and read this on my computer. I was hoping for more of an adventure at that library, something I could write about other than this comic but…nope. Kind of a bust. Much like this comic.

I think this mayy have been the first bit of manga I ever read. I remember intensely disliking it. Feeling like there was something very off about it. I thought I’d enjoy it more now that I’m older and way more appreciative of old timey manga but no. I didn’t dislike this cuz I was some closed-minded little shit. I disliked it cuz it’s a really bad comic book.

And I’m not talking about the content. It’s clearly phoned-in work-for-hire. It’s the layouts. I spent the first few pages reading it right to left, which felt all wrong but I figured “This is manga! That’s how it works!” Then I remembered this was a Nintendo Power scan. So I started reading left to right. And it still flowed all wrong. The balloon placements are fucking bonkers.

This page is a nightmare to read. Every single balloon overlaps panel borders, and they guide your eyes down the page in a totally unnatural way, encouraging you to read the panels out of order. Fortunately it doesn’t really matter what order you read this shit in so past page 20 or so I just started skimming cuz otherwise I would have had a fucking aneurysm over some of these layouts. I actually went and marked up a few pages to show how these stupid balloons guide your eye and just doing it gave me anxiety. If you do comics place your balloons first and if you wanna have balloons overlapping panel borders make sure they’re not abutting another balloon unless it’s the next one you’re supposed to read. Ahhhh!!

I thought maybe this was the result of flipping the pages, or not flipping them at all but re-writing the dialogue so it would make sense when read left-to-right. But then botoggle said this was published in English first so…maybe doing left-to-right layouts threw the Ishinomori studio off its game? Which is understandable. But I was totally justified in not liking this as a kid and now I know why: this comic ain’t got no rhythm.

Also the balloons themselves were very odd to a manga virgin. Those short balloon tails combined with things like the shapes of the psychic balloons made things even more confusing to me as a kid.

I meant to read some Cyborg 009 prior to Zelda but I didn’t have the time. This comic was so bad it had me questioning Ishinomori, but I flipped through Cyborg 009 and yeah, it seems pretty great. It’s like they set a 6 year old boy up with a team of professional assistant and lets him go nuts. It has none of the layout issues of LttP and the designs are just fuckin’ hot.

Cyborg 001 is a baby.

This is the big bad guy, I think. I want that tattooed on my back.

I didn’t read a single word on this page but I love it.

In the LttP comic Link fights an eagle dude named Roam. He’s got the same design as Cyborg 002. After they fight the fairy says:

So I guess it’s supposed to be a cameo. That’s kinda weird, since like zero American kids would be familiar with Cyborg 009. Was this eventually published in Japan?

I was surprised by how faithful to the game this was. I was expecting something more off model. But there’s some stuff that I didn’t remember being in LttP but do remember from later games. Like the fairy sidekick. Was there one prior to Navi?

Were there grenade chucking orcs??

You also have the Majora’s-looking moon (which is probably a common manga trope) and Link being more of a werewolf than a bunny. A few things in common with later games. Thank goodness they haven’t given Link parents yet though.

This Zora boyfriend is way hotter than the one in Breath of the Wild. Sorry if you disagree.

The eyeball panels are very good. If only all color comics looked this good. You can tell someone was having fun with a lotta these pages.

This book has the lamest Ganon and the final fight is the most phoned-in aspect of the book. I’d love to know how much Ishinomori got paid for this, and why.

Anyway this book was not fun but I think a series about Link taking a vow to never, ever celebrate the self. By the end of it he’s a mummy. That would be good, cuz mummies are easy and fun to draw.

[Tulpa]

Man now I have nothing to say cause you covered all of it!

[CourierRice]

Yeah I am a huge Ishinomori fan and have been for years, so the uh Quality of this manga surprised me. Sorry to everyone for the slow first week!

[Tulpa]

This particular panel arrangement is also terrible and I’m always shocked that any professional work features it.

It’s so easy to just ignore the lower left panel (and I do it all the time). I like to call this the Aaron Diaz layout because he does it all the time on his shitty webcomic so I strongly associate it with his stuff.

The panel break at the top isn’t good. The art on this page is good but the layout just doesn’t make sense to me and I have no sense of continuity between panels.

I like this panel though. In general, Ishinomori has great facility for cartoon faces even in something as phoned in and hackneyed as this.

The two page spread with the desert tornado is also excellent, I like the before and after of the vulture losing its feathers.

Aside from the 2 vertical panels next to a tall panel layout that crops up on a handful of pages, the actual panel placement seems fine

The eyeball monster was the highlight of the whole thing, but the weird proto-Majora’s Mask bits were great too

[r-i]

I am already sort of looking ahead due to the falling-flat nature of Zelda, I guess?

Loneliness is one of my favourite works, but it might be a bit hard to discuss in analytical rather than relating terms because, like.

…

okay, the real reason I’m posting: the vote for next week.

Tulpa –
just can’t believe there are people out there without my exact taste in comics

- –
the content warning on sword might influence votes a little

Tulpa –
would rather read 80s shojo that tries to talk about gender than some generic LN that has nothing at all to say about anything besides moe feelings.

- –
fair enough
I guess after having re-read Loneliness for the third time I’ll go check the edge of the both of them out
[…]
skimming report: no contest
(…there are in fact Relationship Feelings in the early parts of both series, but “peasant girl admires savvy reciporcating bigender princex while they deal with medieval politick” has quite a ways better of an edge than “soldier framed for a crime he didn’t commit buries the corpses of giant monsters while being stiltedly awkward around ghostly non-socialized Mysterious Girl”)
queer politick shoujo > mystery beast shounen not exactly a surprise, I guess

Tulpa –
see thats what I’ve been saying

- –
maybe I should post such to sway votes??

Tulpa –
yes pls

Star Bison Mk II: The Power –
always politick and make youre feelings known!!!
be the poster u wanna see…

this

versus

this

is indeed a silly choice.

[CourierRice]

Hey I’m finally conscious enough to comment on my own thread.

This manga’s definitely a low point for Ishinomori. Perhaps he never played the games, even. And like… I enjoy combing through flawed art, but I understand why people would rather just consume objectively good things.

Anyway unrelated but please listen to the SNExploration Squad podcast where we play bad games and then I talk about how I love and accept them anyways.

If not for the middle-lower-left panel this would be a solid page. The bottom panel is the best part for how it uses the shape of the frame for the full shot + the slapstick. There’s even a small bonus in Link’s hat’s expressiveness. The hat actually gets a few expressions throughout this, but it’s unfortunately under-utilizes.

This panel is right before Sahasrahla and Link aresurrounded by guards, and even without the speech bubble announcing their arrival, I like the shadow of the pillar giving them away. The fact that it only exists in the coloring almost makes it feel like a hidden detail, but it’s definitely not. I’m okay with media making me feel smarter than I am.

This is just one of my favorite panels again. Like, this could have been a chapter cover.

This is another page I like for how it blends panels together and messes with space, and is also symmetrical. Despite some very hard to follow earlier pages, this is noneuclidean but easy to follow.

Speaking of bad pages this is hilariously hard to follow because of both the bubbles and the text. What is going on in this discussion. If there were no bubbles, this would actually be a good page! Just show Link’s silent wandering through the (really really well drawn) jungle. A lot of this manga would have been better silent but I think being a NP product may have meant it had to “sell” the game by talking about it a lot.

Another really good “Boss Fight” page. Earlier up someone mentioned the fairy partner and the Majora’s Mask moon and the wolf Link and it’s really funny how much this comic predicted!

This is another good Boss Fight page but also shut up Link that’s ableist.

Stavekoff mentioned liking this part, and I like it too, if not just because it’s what made me speculate the most? Ishinomori took the Dark World concept and tried to spin it into an internal conflict rather than a purely external one like in the game.

I would have liked an exploration of Bunny Link, but that may have needed a slower paced comic. So unfortunately that means we got a very brief showing of Link having some angst and possible trauma about dead/missing family, and how it affected the Master Sword (which never goes wrong), as well as his Dark World form (which also never goes wrong and then quickly stops being a plot point SIGH). I hoped Link would have to wrestle more with being stuck in that form, but yeah. Not what we got.

Because we didn’t pursue more of Link reflecting on his anger, the end actually feels a lot more like he repressed those feelings. Which kind of gives it a Bad End feeling? Link shows no feelings in the last few pages, and takes no action when Zelda voices disappointment that they are growing apart. Which, don’t get me wrong, Bad Ends are also interesting to me, though I feel like it’s not what Ninty would be interested in, hah.

[GlamGrimfire]

well,

divorced from the awkward paneling and the weird-o ballons I think this is great and filled with lots of cute art even though its definitely not ishinomori firing all cylinders.

I like the idea of link ending as a voiceless knight errant determined to protect the triforce I think that’s a cool reading of the character and maybe the only real part of the comic that stuck with me. I wish there was a Zelda that still looked like this! next can we read katsuya teradas legend of Zelda comic from Nintendo power

[CourierRice]

@GlamGrimfire

next can we read katsuya teradas legend of Zelda comic from Nintendo power

god if only. I think he just did concept art?

[GlamGrimfire]

my Brain of Brains says there was a link to the past comic but my parents never let me play videogames

[HOBO]

@CourierRice

I enjoy combing through flawed art, but I understand why people would rather just consume objectively good things.

I thought this was a really interesting comic and I wish I’d done a better job of dissecting it. I didn’t wanna get too crazy with the page layout discussion cuz I really woulda gone nutzoid and I’m glad you and Tulpa expounded upon it and did a better job of it than I did.

If I taught a comics class I think I’d use this book. I can’t think of anything similar from a top tier creator. It’s simultaneously super polished and super amateur hour and that’s just fascinating to me.

I think another interesting aspect of it is how compressed it is. Maybe I haven’t read enough failed/mediocre licensed manga but I wonder if the studio* had trouble adapting to a more limited format (I assume this ran over the course of 12 issues but maybe I’m wrong.) Also maybe they just didn’t give a shit cuz it was for Nintendo fucking Power.

Nintendo Power was really fucking cool looking back then though. That Terada art was the first time I saw Moebius-esque shit and it blew my fucking mind as a kid.

• Using studio here cuz I can’t help but think that Ishinomori was spending 99% of his hours on the golf course or at soaplands at this point in his career and only came in once a week to draw some eyes. This Is a totally baseless, likely unfair assumption but…I can’t help but be a cynic.

[Mikey]

@HOBO

Were there grenade chucking orcs??

Yeah bomb chucking cyclops were a pretty common darkworld overworld foe

[CourierRice]

Alright y’all the poll is closed, and the winning manga is Sword of Paros. You asked for a double helping of sad gays and that’s what you’re gettin’. I’m looking forward to it.