Volumes: 2/2 (Complete eBooks), 1/1 (Complete Book), In Print
Seinen
Short Story Collection
Summary: 13 creators, both manga and western, contribute very very short stories around the theme of a Tipping Point.
Taiyo Matsumoto: Hanako’s Fart: Hanako farts, she blushes and no one notices. Around the world a number of other things happen at the same time.
Emmanuel Lepage: The Awakening: A loner boy at summer camp unintentionally has his first gay awakening.
Atsushi Kaneko: Screwed: A young guy in trouble with the Yakuza tries to figure out where his life went wrong.
John Cassaday: Huckleberry Friend: Huckleberry Finn tries to decide whether to tell the escaped slave Jim’s masters his location, or to commit what he was taught was a sin and let his friend go free.
Eddie Campbell: Cul-De-Sac: An old man who has lost his cat, walks his blind dog and ponders a street with two dead ends and other wandering thoughts.
Naoki Urasawa: Solo Mission: A man and his wife argue about him going on a dangerous business trip to a third planet in a faraway solar system, but they really need the money for the house and the kid’s college tuition. He goes on the mission, and then a twist.
Bob Fingerman: The Unbeliever: A militant Atheist is sitting in a diner, eating greasy food and arguing about God with his friends when suddenly he finds himself in Hell.
Boulet: I Want to Believe: A man overhears his friends talking about urban legends, chuckles, only to find out they’re all true- all of them.
Paul Pope: Consort to the Destroyer: A half naked woman flees a burning ship, then fights a pirate in a lifeboat, and then jumps into the ocean and fights a shark.
Bastien Vives: The Child: Two astronauts discover a child in a hole and try to rescue him. But it might be a trap.
Keiichi Koike: Fish: A Psychedelic colorful story that follows a fish caught from the ocean.
Frederik Peeters: Laika: Laika, the dog that was sent to space, is back… for revenge.
Katsuya Terada: Tengu: a one page story about a Tengu who challenges a goddess only to land inside a mangaka’s head.
Review: This graphic novel has a lot of famous comic creators in it, both eastern and western. There’s Naoki Urasawa (Monster, 20th Century Boys fame), Taiyo Matsumoto (Tekkon Kinkreet, Ping Pong), Eddie Campbell (From Hell, Bacchus), Boulet (Bouletcorp.com a famous webcomic). And the others are not as famous but respectable.
That being said, basically this collection of short short stories is more about style than story. The mostly full color comics are beautiful and lavishly illustrated, but each story is about ten pages long or less. Some of the stories were interesting, some were funny, others were weird, but for the most part they read more like excerpts or prologues than complete stories.
For the two most famous mangaka, I would say this, Taiyo Matsumoto: the art is beautiful, but it’s not really a story. It just kind of wanders. And Naoki Urasawa’s story was kind of amusing, but also kind of silly. Neither is their best work.
A surprise stand out was Boulet’s I Want to Believe. It’s short, but very funny. I also recommend his free webcomic to anyone who hasn’t read it yet. (http://english.bouletcorp.com/)
Recommended: TLDR; This is the kind of thing I’d borrow from the library, enjoy the lavish color art, and then I’ll probably forget I ever read it in a couple years.
Rating: PG13: some gore and violence, semi-nudity but nothing terrible.
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