Screen Shots: Berserk

Miura's amazing manga and Japanese television epic hits the big screen in Japan.

Berserk is an amazing manga and animated series from Japan. The art and story lines shine. But, it is also not for the kiddies. The 17+ series is a ultra-violent, brutally narrated saga. And now it's coming to theaters worldwide as a 3-part movie series beginning in early 2012 in Japan - meaning an official English dub is due in American in a year or more after this date.

Berserk contains violent content and well-developed characters. The entire series of popular books and animated shows have revolved around Griffith's the Band of the Hawk (Taka no Dan in romaji/hiragishi) since the late 1980's when the dense volumes of the manga began wide circulation.

At that time, during the series start, Berserk creator Kentaro "Ken" Miura worked with Okamura/Buronson, the creator of Fist Of The North Star, before developing his own unmistakably dark characters.


Miura's amazing manga has gone through two editions of TPB in Japan and one in the US.

In the Berserk television show that ran in Japan in the early 1990's there was literally something for everyone in Ken Miura's characters. That is provided you have a strong enough stomach for gore. Even for tried and true anime fans Berserk is a challenge.

To add to the not-safe-for-the-kiddies warning: there are implied rape scenes with female lead, Caska, alongside multiple decapitations of demons, foot soldiers, loyal comrades and samurai in feudal European gear. The books and show were completed with an easy grace by the development of "young animal" and hero: Gutts/Gatz.


Miura's amazing manga has gone through two editions of TPB in Japan and one in the US.

The original animated series (OAS) has recently been made available on DVD here in the US in both subtitled and dubbed formats. The first movie itself will be released in January of 2012 in Japan yet as of March 2013 no official US release has been announced.


References:

• Wikipedia, Berserk (manga)
• Berserk Wiki, Ken Miura
• Skull Knight.net, Berserk-opedia

Off The Shelf: Great

Life's savage turns are chronicled in Ryan Armand's American manga Great.

2007 Eisner Award Nominated artist Ryan Armand's American manga series Great features a 28-year-old man's life comically falling completely apart and eventually re-assembling.

Nibbish yuppie Lyle falls through the basement levels of his life, loses his job, his wife and is robbed repeatedly before finally being rescued from homelessness by a Ramen Noodle restauranteur's daughter. Soon after, he becomes determined to take up the self-help concept of being "Great" in all aspects of his life from creating a furniture based martial art to making soup.

The protagonist establishes a better way of life only after completely abandoning his old one. Lyle becomes a chef and new father while dealing with street crime and fatherhood - a far cry from the shallow, corporate and plastic life he once tried everything to save.

The theme of the graphic novel (available directly from the artist) is finding a sense of purpose and optimism in the face of an incredible amount of crushing defeats. By relentlessly pursuing this concept of dedicated determination, with a healthy does of humor and respect for family included, Armand examines the nature of superficiality, relationships between husbands and wives and personal bravery all while illustrating Lyle's many attempts to be great.


References:

• Kiwis By Beat, Store/Illustrations
• Smack Jeeves, Comic Archive
• Comix Talk, Armand Talks 2007 Eisner Nod

Screen Shots: Web Comics

Web comics are a relatively new internet phenomena. Web comics, at varying degrees of complexity, are growing in popularity. What was once the refuge of a handful of cranky cartoonists, with objectionable art skills and even worse social skills, is gradually becoming a recognized story-telling medium.

In 2011, even the powerhouse comic publishing companies of DC and Marvel have introduced new all-digital lines of web based titles to capitalize on their decades of back issues. This is much to the comic fan's advantage because some bygone titles are incredibly hard to find (Warren Ellis's Starjammers #1 for instance) and all of these comics stay in Mint condition.

The officiousness of the web comic began in 2005 with a new Eisner award category going to Brian Fies' painfully autobiographical Mom's Cancer. The following year in 2006, the publication of Gene Yuen's excellent American Born Chinese as a web based comic signaled that web comics were becoming legitimized and fast showing showing signs of becoming a medium-unto-itself.



The sharply drawn and scripted web based series "Sakana" by MAD.

This trend of creator-driven comics hasn't stopped wave after wave of "sprite" comics which do the opposite in kind of an homage to being 10 years old. The problem is most of these sprite comics are created by 40 year-olds addicted to television.

To be definitive, Sprite comics are: made up of badly swiped character art that has literally been ripped out of NES games and then plunked into the worst story-telling possible w/no original plot at all.


"Blake And Moon Light Enter a hotel". An example of a sprite comic by ZoneTh.

This is the low end to Gene Yuen's "high end". The difference being a much better level of artistic integrity, attention to craft and original story-telling. What is most interesting about web comics is found in the "middle level" of web comics. These web comics with their own raw or refined style capitalize on frenetic drawing ability, individual P.O.V. and sometimes really bad taste.

A worthy and hilarious selection of this "middle layer" of current web comics includes:

• Biggie Boobie Chan (PG-13) An outrageous manga "spoof" comic shabbily rendered in pencil with text punched in via computer that makes Family Guy look tame in comparison.
• The formidable KREETOR is a sword and sorcery epic with amazing art told in a Medieval Planet of the Apes setting.
• My Zombie Days is an incredibly well drawn Russian language zombie apocalypse told from the point of view of a man infected with a case of zomboid fever.
• Schizian is a truly, truly bizarre and stylistic story of a young woman's monstrous hallucinations.
• Toilet Genie is at the high end of the toilet-humor-w/dynamic-art-books with well over 3,000+ dutiful subscribers.
• Between Gears is a beautiful autobiographical account of an artist's life.
• GLOOM features the formidable art chops of David Newbold as applied to demons and vicious Dark Age battles.
• Instant Comics is a very original graphic novel with several stories about a young woman, aliens and her dreams. This last web comic easily bests most printed work in bookstores and shops today (that is, work that wasn't printed by Fantagraphics).

References:

• Wikipedia, Web Comic Awards