English translations of Japanese comics for children have become something of a phenomenon in the North American market, to the point where at least one generation of readers (maybe more) has learned to love cartoon art almost solely through a love of black and white manga digests. Yu-Gi-Oh! and Fruits Basket occupy far higher positions in the hearts and minds of today’s kids than do, say, Superman or Wonder Woman, or even Scooby-Doo. Since each generation of comics readers becomes the next generation of cartoonists, we’ve inevitably begun to see the influence of Japanese storytelling conventions and art styles bleed into the mainstream of American cartooning, on every level, from the comic strip, to the Saturday morning cartoon, to the comic book. Like many major shifts in the tectonic plates of culture, this one started slowly, with subtle tremors and minor effects. In the eighties, for example, we saw Frank Miller channeling Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima (and acknowledging their influence, um, vaguely) while making comics that were, all the same, still quite firmly entrenched in the Western tradition, like Daredeviland Ronin. Later early adopters, like Lea Hernandez, also managed to develop impressive bodies of work which, though clearly informed by a love for manga, continue to try to reach out to the traditional American fanboy and his traditional heroic-fantasy preoccupations, more or less (I suspect that Lea, who is a personal friend of mine, would probably disagree on this last point, not because she hasn’t tried to reach out to the Direct Market reader with every muscle in her body, but because the Direct Market itself has remained so disappointingly closed for so long to her and her kind of comics). More and more often, the new breed of comics, and their creators, choose to ignore the traditions of Western comics, and the limitations of the Direct Market comics culture altogether, spending their time and energy instead emulating the styles, genres, and formats, and chasing the happier marketplace realities, represented by manga translations. One might even say that many young creators have broken with the Western tradition altogether, and are crafting works that should rightly be classed, historically, as extensions of the Japanese branch of the medium, as if there had been no Western tradition at all, and the very idea of commercial comics had been imported whole hog to our shores from Japan. That’s maybe overstating the extent to which young creators are drawing from the manga experience, but not by much.

The latest publishing fad, “Original English language manga” (called “OEL” — and basically meaning, “comics by Western creators which look and act sort of like manga, and which are presented to readers in the black and white digest form made popular by publishers of manga translations, in hopes that kids who like to read translated Japanese comics will also like to read these homegrown productions”) owes more, I think, to the existence of this new kind of cartoonist, the one who cut his or her baby teeth on manga — than it does to any marketing imperative or publisher’s whim (though these factors do certainly have some play). Of course these are the kinds of comics this generation of creators would make, and of course this is the format they’d prefer to see their work published in, and of course these are the publishers they’d be excited to work with. For these cartoonists, comics are black-and-white digests, and being racked beside Tsubasa : RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE in a Waldenbooks store at the mall is a more desirable and natural kind of placement than getting the cover in Previews or a poster in the window of a comic book shop.

And they’re right, of course.

The most ambitious OEL publisher to date is surely TokyoPop, better known for popularizing translated manga in the first place (along with Viz, the Pepsi to TokyoPop’s Coca-Cola, or is it the other way around?). Their recently-launched OEL line consists of more than a dozen titles, ranging from new works in the manga style by American comic book industry veterans like Keith Giffen all the way through to the solo print debuts of relatively unknown webcartoonists like Svetlana Chmakova and Amy Kim Gantner. Becky Cloonan falls squarely in the middle of that range, having broken out as a “name talent” a couple of years back during the course of her Image-published, Eisner-nominated collaboration with Brian Wood, Demo, and currently employed as illustrator on one of DC’s higher-profile Vertigo series, American Virgin. As such, she isn’t exactly the best poster-child for the revolutionary ignore-the-American-mainstream kind of creator I posit in the first paragraph of this essay (she’s sort of a third breed — casually mixing manga influences with Western influences, as if she didn’t know, or care, that there was “supposed” to be a “difference”), but hers is the name that caught my eye the most quickly out of TokyoPop’s OEL catalog (excepting Svetlana, with whom I work professionally, on Girlamatic – and therefore can’t review, in good conscience). To be fair, I am, first and foremost, an American fanboy, albeit a fairly snobbish one, so Eisner noms and Vertigo assignments carry more weight with me than they do the typical member of TokyoPop’s target audience, I would guess. (I’ve heard from a friend in the publishing industry that Svetlana’s book seems to be the actual break-out success story of the line, so far). Anyway, since Demo is one of my favorite graphic novels, ever (see my review of that book from a while back), since I’ve also been enjoying American Virgin, and since the whole OEL thing looks interesting, from the perspective of somebody who enjoys watching the American comics industry get shaken up a bit, I decided to give the first volume of Cloonan and TokyoPop’s new franchise, East Coast Rising, a read.

The premise: the oceans have risen, submerging all but the highest points of the eastern seaboard (we’re not told exactly what happened, or when, or why). In the new post-apocalyptic world order, rival gangs of tattooed, pierced, happy-go-lucky hipsters play semi-seriously at being old-school movie pirates, complete with peg legs, eyepatches, and vicious facial scars, living on large, anachronistically wooden ships, fighting one another, and the random monster or two, in the treacherous waters between the archipelagoes of New Jersey and the former New York City. There’s a young stowaway whose map to a legendary buried treasure (the ill-gotten gains of the corrupt Last Mayor of New York) is stolen from him, by the villain, in the first few pages. There’s lots of ship-to-ship fighting. There’s giant, trained, man-eating sea turtles, and a monster with a human skull (one hundred times too large, of course) for a head, and octopus arms for a body. And so on. More than anything, the story structure reminds me of a videogame — not the two-dimensional fighting games that inform, say, Sharknife, nor the coin-collecting platformers that provide the underlying metaphor for Scott Pilgrim, but rather the lavishly-produced, heavily-scripted, so-called role playing games (”so-called” because the role the player gets to play, unfortunately, is almost always fairly cut and dry) of the Playstation 2 era. Like those games, the widescreen action sequences are separated by a series of quieter, introductory “cut-scenes,” wherein our protagonist (the stowaway I mentioned earlier — name of Archer) explores his new environment, is introduced to the rest of the cast, one or two characters at a time, and figures out what his next objective will be, in incremental stages. You’ll even find a couple of “mini-game” sequences, like when Archer goes fishing off the bow of the ship with his soon-to-be love interest, or when he chases “seachix” across the deck, for their eggs, so he can help the galley cook make omelettes for dinner. Like most of those kinds of games, the story itself isn’t particularly original. In fact, in this case, it’s completely derivative (of Pirates of the Caribbean, of Waterworld, of Robert Louis Stevenson, of a million million other high-seas and/or post-apocalyptic adventures), but not offensively so, in large part because of its sheer, unadulterated charm. Wherever a lesser modern pulp creator might go for the high-pitched insincere squeal of melodrama (in the final monster battle sequence, for example), Cloonan deftly cuts in light, easy sub-scenes, warm and strangely non-urgent personality bits between the characters, while the climax rages around them. “Hey, I found your leg.” “Sweet! I was wondering where it went!” These moments live in a sort of calm bubble of time, almost separate from the main storyline, and are often drawn that way, over in the margins, with deliberately scribbly renderings of the characters. The banter between the heroes and the villains, who are obliged to work together to defeat the final “boss,” comes off as almost affectionate chiding, more like the fans of rival local bar-bands shouting at each other across an East Village avenue at closing time than like the usual seething cliches of high adventure back-and-forth. “You guys so suck!” “I said we gotta work together!” “Pork forever? Joe, you’re not making any sense.” In the context of the book itself, that stuff is a lot of fun, and not (I feel compelled to add) lame, or Stan-Lee-like, in the least, though it probably comes across that way, reading it here in prose form. This kind of charm goes a long way toward fending off the dreadfulness of cliche.

As you might expect, if you’ve seen her other works, the standout element here is Becky Cloonan’s artwork. The same thick, sinuous, oily line and inventive storytelling trickery I noted in Demo can be found in these pages, though the style stays more consistent (in Demo, Cloonan drew every chapter in a different style; East Coast Rising is rendered in a lighter-hearted version of the style she used in one of my favorite stories from Demo, the one called “Stand Strong,” which sported a similar collection of Elvis-sneering fat-lipped, huge-foreheaded hipsters). Though a manga influence is evident, it’s not just about big eyes and speed lines (in fact, the eyes aren’t particularly big, and the speed lines aren’t any more in evidence here than in, say, Carmine Infantino’s 1960’s superhero stories). More than virtually any Western artist I’ve seen yet, Cloonan shows a particularly deft hand with some of the Japanese storytelling tricks that look completely alien to the Western comic book reader — like the tradition of suddenly rendering characters in “superdeformed” mode from time to time, to emphasize an emotional point or silly punchline. Usually that kind of thing throws me right out of a story, because of the unfamiliar artifice. When Cloonan does it, she does it well enough that it actually makes sense, adds to the story, and seems perfectly meaningful and logical without calling attention to itself, all at the same time.

Finally, though, the artwork, the storytelling tricks, and the charming character asides, though well done, are not enough to make me want to read more of this fairly conventional, fairly thin, completely derivative boys-adventure story, so I don’t plan to pick up Volume Two.

Don’t get me wrong. Cloonan’s a major new talent, who approaches all of her efforts, including this one, with the kind of joy and care that radiates off the page — the kind that is all too lacking in most comics coming out of any tradition, Western or Eastern, these days. The kind that should probably be encouraged at all costs.

It’s just not my cuppa.

Overall, if I were to have to decide if this is a “good book” or a “not-good book,” (which, I guess, since I’m writing a review here, and all, I do have to do), I’d fall completely on the “good book” side of the question, without hesitation. If I can’t really recommend it, though — and, ultimately, I cannot — that’s probably just because East Coast Rising isn’t targetted at the grown-up casual reader of graphic novels (like myself, in other words), which is who I try to write for here at GNR. If there’s a younger teen in your circle of acquaintance — particularly a boy, or a tomboy, who isn’t cynical enough to laugh at the very idea of a pirate yarn with a stolen treasure map for a macguffin — then you might want to pick this one up to pass along. But even there, I’m pretty sure your money might be better spent on a “genuine” pirate-adventure manga, like One Piece, given the difficulty I’ve experienced in the past couple of weeks trying to convince my fourteen-year-old niece, a big manga reader of the sprawled-on-the-floor-at-Barnes-and-Noble variety, that this book might be worth her time (I was, um, trying to trick her into writing my review for me, actually). “It isn’t real manga,” she would say, rolling her eyes at me, and then away from me, and then up with the hand. “I can’t read comics left-to-right because that messes with me! Guh! It’s just not right.” Apparantly I’m the biggest idiot, ever, for even suggesting she attempt such a thing. Whether this bodes ill for TokyoPop’s ambitious OEL line generally, and Cloonan’s franchise specifically, or whether my niece is just too contrary for her own good, is not for me to say. Because I don’t know.

Title: East Coast Rising Volume One
Creator: Becky Cloonan
Publisher: TokyoPop
Cover Price: $9.95 (paperback digest)

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