Midaregami

While I’m on the subject of media-inspired unworthiness, let’s discuss Flight. This is an comic anthology put together a year or so ago by a bunch of crazy young artists, loosely centered around the titular theme.

It is so good, I cannot believe it. It reminds me of the first time I read Strangers in Paradise, insofar as it highlights the fact that Americans can still do great comic books. Not all of the artists are American, no—and clearly the influences are all over the map. But it’s an Image Comics release, and it’s wonderful.

Flight Vol. 2 is just out, and it is—no joke—even better than the first one. If you enjoy interesting, innovative sequential art (and I am looking meaningfully at you, Da-chan, and you, Clarissa) these are books worth stealing from a friend. A friend who is not me.

Happy Free Comic Day.

There are moments when I am humbled by my era. I feel like a primitive monkey, a gibbon-boy, brachiating through forests of new media masterpieces, pausing occasionally to poke, hoot, and scratch my simian hide — that’s how wide the gap sometimes feels. I feel almost unworthy to partake, thinking nay, this pleasure must be meant for some higher life-form.

What pleasure, you ask? I have purchased an XBox, and it is blowing my mind. This is a move I have considered for many months now, beginning late last year. So it was not an impulse purchase. Along with the system, I obtained three games. Allow me to expound.

It is time to start writing again. The excuse I have been using (“too tired, nothing happening”) just doesn’t cut it anymore. There’s no reason a genius of my caliber can’t making exhaustion and boredom interesting—look at Douglas Copeland. (Zing! If I were a Simpsons character I’d be Mr. Buuurns!)

But I’m going to start of easy and slow, with Otogi Zoshi, a new anime set in the Heian period of Japan. Let’s discuss the reasons why it is good.

• One-eyed swordsman with memorized, pompous pre-battle speech—check.
• Cross-dressing girl archer secretly fighting in place of dying brother—check.
• Dancing Imperial Entertainer bishounen who is actually an angst-ridden martial artist—check.
• Vicious heian insults such as “The plum blossoms in the capital have little fragrance. I am thinking of searching them out elsewhere.”—check. (and Buuuurn!)
• Bitchin’ gagaku soundtrack—check.
• Creepy Noh mask-wearing villain—check.

And that’s only the first volume. I hear tell that the second half of the series takes place in modern Japan, with the reincarnations of the characters from the first half. As happens so frequently, my hyperbole fails me.

Between lunches in Retail Hell and evenings at home, I’ve had time to finish one trilogy and start another, and in a kind of pleasant symmetry they represent Past and Future.

Over in the pit of despair a while ago, I mentioned Samurai Champloo. It’s possible that I said something about it being excellent. That I would have made such a statement is very likely, because it is. Excellent, I mean. I hate to go bandying about proclamations like “the successor to Cowboy Bebop” and “the best Samurai Anime since Kenshin,” because it’s frankly too early to tell. But it seems very likely to me that by the middle of this year, I will be back up on the soapbox, saying those very things with the sort of irrational bombast that I’m notorious for.

I have been playing a lot of SSX 3, the acclaimed snowboarding game. I’ve been logging the hours on the PlayStation 2 version, but it’s multiplatform, which is good, because I think lots of people need to play this game. It’s that great.

The bottom line is that it’s hard to go wrong with a year when it starts with the new Tokyo Jihen album. Like most of the noble internet citizenry, I have a variety of goals, both electronic and non-, but at the moment I am pleased, thrilled really, to be occupied with my Education.

I may have made some kind of pompous statement, recently, about Pixar’s film “The Incredibles” being related to the idea of marginality in American culture. But that would’ve been a stupid thing to say, because any fool can see that subtext (if it’s even subtle enough to BE a subtext) for themselves. If I indeed made such a statement, what I meant to say was that such an incisive, insightful film comes at a particularly approprite time for me. I will explain.

So there’s a new Grand Theft Auto game out, “San Andreas,” best game for PS2 ever, yadda yadda yadda.

And I want to play it. Or more precisely, I want to want to play it. But I don’t quite find the idiom compelling. I think I’d get bored with the “thug life”-style of the missions, and regress to savagely beating old ladies within about 40 minutes. I’m not proud of this, but I have to admit it’s probably true.

Make me a GTA where you start out as a chinpira yankee with nothing but a sticker-encrusted scooter and a decora-chan girlfriend, and have to work your way up through the yakuza? Oh hell yeah. Make sure you get Blankey Jet City and Dragon Ash to do the soundtrack.

As I may have said (or perhaps didn’t say; my memory is not what it was) the last box from Japan arrived, bringing with it the latest Quruli album, “Antenna.” I bought it after hearing one song in a Kobe Tower Records, and my judgement did not err. This album is lovely.