My First Manga - Uzumaki

I need to keep certain things at arm's length.  Video games, with their propensity to take over your life, are one.  And then there are comics.  Walking into a comic shop, say Forbidden Planet in Covent Garden, always gives me a sense of the potential of loosing a dangerous beast, something all-consuming that could quickly take over your life.  You pick up a comic or a graphic novel and before you know it you have tumbled headlong into a one-way rabbit hole that delights but utterly devours you.  It is the consuming rather than the delight that worries me.  If I gave myself fully up to that world would I ever do anything else?  Would I make time for books - i.e. real books without pictures … do keep that prejudice in mind for the time being ... music, the real world, a blog to write, my partner and friends?

Of comics and graphic novels I carefully and infrequently indulge.  But I always step back at the critical moment.  I love Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.  But I read them sporadically and I never binge.  As a child I recall a six month period when I'd buy the Beano with my pocket money, and occasionally I'd pluck an Asterix or a Tin Tin from the shelves of the library.  Even then there was the vague sensation that this wasn't proper reading and that it could well get in the way of C.S Lewis or Norton Juster (do get your children to check out Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth).  Not that this mattered much, as I suddenly stopped reading books at the age of twelve and only righted myself at around the age of twenty. I'll save that slightly tedious story for another time.  

Exit light, enter night, take my hand, we're off to never-never land.

Recently I've taken to visiting Forbidden Planet with my six year old boy.  My goal – and thankfully I don't have to work at this at all – is to keep his love of reading fresh and alive.  There's a real sense of glee – on both of our faces – when we enter the comic shop, and I'm always intrigued to see what captures his imagination.   This, along with a recent Ben Walker London Review of Books article on the Manga exhibition at the British Museum, dragged me back into the world of comics, and indeed, has given me my very first foray into manga (literally 'whimsical pictures').  Of one particular comic, and coupling it with one of the images from the exhibition, Walker writes:   

It has always seemed to me that manga lends itself best to horror.  The absence of colour requires more imaginative scare tactics: penmanship provides the gore. Manga blood is jet black and uncommon; wounds are inscribed with dense and detailed cross-hatched lines. In Itō Junji’s Uzumaki, the coastal city of Kurōzu-cho is plagued by a supernatural curse: its citizens are obsessed with spirals – they long to embody them. The British Museum has an original sketch from the first volume of the series. An elderly resident, Mr Saito, has succumbed to the curse: in the image, his family lift the lid of a shallow barrel to expose his skinny frame contorted into an exaggerated swirl, feet snapped back above his head and hands clasped together in a central twist. He looks like a cinnamon Danish. An otherwise cartoony image is made terrible by its finer details: the intricacy of the shading on Mr Saito’s elongated ribcage; a pair of glasses lying amid the carnage. The panel also highlights the inherent difficulty of displaying comic-book art in a museum. In print the image appears on a full-page spread and, while the previous panels are on display to provide some context, you lose the sense of anticipation, of turning the page as the lid is lifted for the big reveal.

'Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel'

I was hooked at spirals.  The Fibonacci Sequence - the mathematical equation that is the essence of beauty - was employed here in the services of horror.  And as if to prove its aesthetic resilience, the image retained its beauty.  It held my gaze, or rather ensnared it, drawing it in towards the centre of the twisted, almost Escher-like composition.  I finished the review and collected Uzumaki from the library – a much larger tome than I anticipated - and had finished the first three chapters on the bus-ride home (although reading - occidentally - back-to front, right to left, did take some getting used to).  There's nothing really clever here, nothing complicated.  Yet in the detail and the execution of these twenty or so stories, each one focusing on a particular spiral atrocity inflicting a secluded Japanese town – snails, coils of out-of-control Medusa like hair, typhoons, and my favourite, the town's lighthouse – coupled with the levels of draughtsmanship in the drawings, all made for a furiously engrossing and astonishingly beautiful reading experience.

I also like the pacing of these stories.  There's a lovely slow-build to each chapter, and then, suddenly, as the stories approach their denouement, dialogue becomes sparse and the frames and images gather momentum.  Your reading pace quickens as you rush towards the final frame, which is often a two-pager (like the man in the barrel above).

Remember, top right to bottom left

Do you suffer from Hotatsosphobia?

It was also surprising to see allusions to Western cultural touchstones.  In 'The Black Lighthouse' chapter I detected a hint of my favourite Doctor Who story - 'The Horror of Fang Rock' (Tom Baker, of course).  More obviously, an earlier chapter, 'The Scar', concerns itself with Azami, a young narcissistic girl who wants only to be worshipped and desired.  Turning the page, the famous image of the 1920s American film-star Louise Brooks leapt straight out at me.  

'There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks'

Ito is clearly a fan of the ultimate femme-fatale, and the American is the perfect visual cipher for the town's scarred siren.  The above image of Brooks might well be my favourite photographic portrait ever and it was a delight to see that image haunting the pages of a manga comic book.   

And so, with at least half of a manga under my belt, I headed to the British Museum.  And although it proved to be a fine and engaging exhibition, one brimming with images, comic pages, history and visuals, I was caught off guard.  Whenever I felt engaged by a particular character or comic strip, the urge to sit down, somewhere quiet, and read became overwhelming.  Indeed, if I'm being unkind, I came away from the British Museum feeling more or less the way that I feel when I come out of a comic shop.  Except the latter would have allowed me to spend my entrance fee on an actual graphic novel and a couple of comics.  Indeed, on seeing the Uzumaki image that had drawn me in I quickened my pace, eager to get back to those spirals.    

This sounds trite, but it needs saying, and saying often.  Comics and graphic novels are real books.  As are thrillers and Sci-Fi, or anything else that appears under the lazy and inadequate catch-all of genre. There are only good books and bad books.  My six year old is quite a few years away from it being appropriate for him to tackle Uzumaki - one particularly horrific image from chapter seven is still etched on my retina - but I'm looking forward to exploring this vast and spectacular world with him in the future.  I feel I can just about resist the downward and mesmerising spiral into comic obsession.  And if I can't, so be it.