"Flopsy! Charlie got my fucking leg!!!"
Unfortunately, nothing quite that interesting is uttered in
Apocalypse Meow Vol. 1 (of 3) by Motofumi Kobayashi
I guess there was some dark corner of my heart that was hoping “Apocalypse Meow” (originally titled “Cat Shit One“ in its Japanese production), should it fail to be an insightful slice of anthropomorphic historical military fiction, would at least turn out to be some jaw-dropping disasterpiece of tasteless camp, with its bunnies and kitties fighting the Vietnam War. The art I saw online (in gorgeous color) emphasized action and explosions, and there is plenty of that in the new digest-sized book from ADV Manga (minus the color). But reading the story in English, in a large dose, reveals only a competently written if extensively researched series of action combat tales, with the occasional character-driven diversion. With bunnies and kitties (and Soviet bears and Japanese monkeys and Chinese pandas and French pigs) .
In his postscript, Kobayashi mentions that he decided to do a war story with animal figures simply because he was bored with the Vietnam story he was working on at the time for Combat Magazine, and he had long fancied the idea of plunking rabbits into a serious war epic. The anthropomorphism is occasionally used to interesting effect, like when an enemy sniper is revealed to be wearing a necklace of severed bunny ears. Some historical figures are rendered in animal form, as is a very well-know execution photograph. But mostly the story proceeds in typical action format, albeit a format pumped up with technical footnotes, a ton of military jargon, and even lengthy text interludes on the history of the conflict. Obviously Kobayashi has done his homework. But there isn’t much lasting effect from the story itself, a series of vignettes featuring Perky, Rats, and Bota, members of a ’Roadrunner’ reconnaissance team taking on missions along the Cambodian border. Perky is the respected leader, Rats the hothead, Bota the nervous one. They get into trouble, stuff blows up, and they live to fight another day. There’s also an R&R trip to Saigon and a peek inside the mind of a conflict-weary Viet Cong, but the battle is never far away. And just as the battle absorbs our cast’s lives, it’s prevalence in the story absorbs the effect the animal figures have; there’s only so many times a fuzzy rabbit can say “Gook” before the effect dulls, and there’s simply not much else done with the stylistic choice.
It’s pretty swell action, all things considered. The art is good, with highly detailed military hardware, authentic-feeling backdrops, and towering, lovingly rendered fireballs. Given the highly technical (though dramatically repetitive) nature of the stories, I couldn’t help but feel that Kobayashi was approaching the work as if building a model kit, pasting every perfectly detailed part together into a sterling, inert creation. Ironically, the bonus feature proves to be the best story in the book. It’s a fragment of the Vietnam story Kobayashi was working on prior to switching to the present animal adventure. His human characters are realistically drafted, although there’s some sameness in their facial features. It’s a meditation on ’expendable lieutenants’, as a young West Point grad tries to establish his authority before a new platoon, despite his total lack of combat experience and the resignation of his men to inevitable chaos. It’s a moody, emotional story, and I wanted to see what would happen, while given the evidence presented elsewhere in the book I’m pretty sure Perky and company will continue to wreak handsome, accurately-presented havoc, cottontails wiggling all the while. I hope they show some more life in the process.
Scrapbook by Adrian Tomine
Really not too much to say on this one. The book’s divided into three sections. First up is comics: eighty pages of little-seen (and sometimes never seen) shorts from various publications, including a lot of stuff from Tower Records‘ Pulse Magazine. Many of the stories are from early in his career, so the tone is closer to Tomine’s minicomics than his later work; for those who enjoyed the humor in “32 Stories”, this will provide a welcome second helping. But even later strips from Entertainment Weekly and Giant Robot provide welcome amusement, a relief from Tomine’s rigorous explorations of emotional paralysis, predominantly the content of his current work in “Optic Nerve”. There are also fragments of stories that later got substantially altered on the way to print, and even two versions of the same story, for us to compare. The second part of the book offers a generous helping of Tomine’s commercial illustration work, including movie review illustrations, posters, album covers, and more. Finally, we get a generous sampling of Tomine’s sketchbooks, filled with detailed portraits and breakdowns. Fans will obviously want this book; the comics alone could have filled a whole separate book, but here we get obscure works, an art showcase, and a peek at the preliminary workings, all under one cover.
Apocalypse Meow Vol. 1 (of 3) by Motofumi Kobayashi
I guess there was some dark corner of my heart that was hoping “Apocalypse Meow” (originally titled “Cat Shit One“ in its Japanese production), should it fail to be an insightful slice of anthropomorphic historical military fiction, would at least turn out to be some jaw-dropping disasterpiece of tasteless camp, with its bunnies and kitties fighting the Vietnam War. The art I saw online (in gorgeous color) emphasized action and explosions, and there is plenty of that in the new digest-sized book from ADV Manga (minus the color). But reading the story in English, in a large dose, reveals only a competently written if extensively researched series of action combat tales, with the occasional character-driven diversion. With bunnies and kitties (and Soviet bears and Japanese monkeys and Chinese pandas and French pigs) .
In his postscript, Kobayashi mentions that he decided to do a war story with animal figures simply because he was bored with the Vietnam story he was working on at the time for Combat Magazine, and he had long fancied the idea of plunking rabbits into a serious war epic. The anthropomorphism is occasionally used to interesting effect, like when an enemy sniper is revealed to be wearing a necklace of severed bunny ears. Some historical figures are rendered in animal form, as is a very well-know execution photograph. But mostly the story proceeds in typical action format, albeit a format pumped up with technical footnotes, a ton of military jargon, and even lengthy text interludes on the history of the conflict. Obviously Kobayashi has done his homework. But there isn’t much lasting effect from the story itself, a series of vignettes featuring Perky, Rats, and Bota, members of a ’Roadrunner’ reconnaissance team taking on missions along the Cambodian border. Perky is the respected leader, Rats the hothead, Bota the nervous one. They get into trouble, stuff blows up, and they live to fight another day. There’s also an R&R trip to Saigon and a peek inside the mind of a conflict-weary Viet Cong, but the battle is never far away. And just as the battle absorbs our cast’s lives, it’s prevalence in the story absorbs the effect the animal figures have; there’s only so many times a fuzzy rabbit can say “Gook” before the effect dulls, and there’s simply not much else done with the stylistic choice.
It’s pretty swell action, all things considered. The art is good, with highly detailed military hardware, authentic-feeling backdrops, and towering, lovingly rendered fireballs. Given the highly technical (though dramatically repetitive) nature of the stories, I couldn’t help but feel that Kobayashi was approaching the work as if building a model kit, pasting every perfectly detailed part together into a sterling, inert creation. Ironically, the bonus feature proves to be the best story in the book. It’s a fragment of the Vietnam story Kobayashi was working on prior to switching to the present animal adventure. His human characters are realistically drafted, although there’s some sameness in their facial features. It’s a meditation on ’expendable lieutenants’, as a young West Point grad tries to establish his authority before a new platoon, despite his total lack of combat experience and the resignation of his men to inevitable chaos. It’s a moody, emotional story, and I wanted to see what would happen, while given the evidence presented elsewhere in the book I’m pretty sure Perky and company will continue to wreak handsome, accurately-presented havoc, cottontails wiggling all the while. I hope they show some more life in the process.
Scrapbook by Adrian Tomine
Really not too much to say on this one. The book’s divided into three sections. First up is comics: eighty pages of little-seen (and sometimes never seen) shorts from various publications, including a lot of stuff from Tower Records‘ Pulse Magazine. Many of the stories are from early in his career, so the tone is closer to Tomine’s minicomics than his later work; for those who enjoyed the humor in “32 Stories”, this will provide a welcome second helping. But even later strips from Entertainment Weekly and Giant Robot provide welcome amusement, a relief from Tomine’s rigorous explorations of emotional paralysis, predominantly the content of his current work in “Optic Nerve”. There are also fragments of stories that later got substantially altered on the way to print, and even two versions of the same story, for us to compare. The second part of the book offers a generous helping of Tomine’s commercial illustration work, including movie review illustrations, posters, album covers, and more. Finally, we get a generous sampling of Tomine’s sketchbooks, filled with detailed portraits and breakdowns. Fans will obviously want this book; the comics alone could have filled a whole separate book, but here we get obscure works, an art showcase, and a peek at the preliminary workings, all under one cover.
posted by Jog at 8:12 PM
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