Weekend Lounge ~ Delinquent!

Welcome t the weekend. Short one today!

The following is a three hour video that covers the delinquent genre of manga. It starts from the beginning and purports to be definitive as it is meant to go through the the past to the present. In a sense it does because the creator covers a lot of material to the point where it's actually a bit overwhelming to watch the full thing.

That said, I don't actually recommend watching the entire thing. The first third of the video about the beginnings of the genre and what is considered a "delinquent" manga is the best material. After that the creator gets far too opinionated and misunderstands the appeal of many genre staples (and misses many crossover hits that expands said definition) because he has a very narrow view and specific set of expectations he wants out of it. So if you are interested in learning about what the delinquent genre is and its appeal, you're not going to get much out of watching the whole. Particularly if you've read some of the series covers and find his opinions on them off or bizarre.

But the first hour or so is very informative and a good sum up on where it came from and what the general appeal is. It also show the difference from other forms of delinquent culture across the world.

You see much of the appeal of delinquent stories isn't from bad kids doing bad things but from teenagers learning what it means to live in a world that doesn't have much use for masculine behavior, leaving the young stranded and alienated on how they are supposed to fit in. This atomized feeling is that heart of the genre which then can lead in any direction: from the split between good and bad kids, to traveling down the wrong path, or even learning to channel that energy in a direction that benefits everyone.

You can go in many directions, and the genre definitely has over the years. It's how you get entries as varied as Ashita no Joe, Akira, Yu Yu Hakusho, Tora Dora, and Slam Dunk, and characters from other related and bordering genres like One Punch Man, School Rumble, Fruits Basket, and Saiki K. Its themes are universal enough to be folded into even series that don't focus on delinquents. They remain an important staple in their stories.

The closest equivalent I can imagine in the West would be the works of S. E. Hinton. Most other stories over here tend to miss the appeal of these sorts of stories or characters, opting instead to make them heartless monsters or generic villains. Probably because we tend to see such characters as "bullies" and bullies are treated as very one dimensional. But while there can be overlap, they are usually not the same archetype. Regardless, that is usually how they are used and they always strike me as being very boring characters with not much to say.

That is a shame, because in my opinion, these kinds of characters always end up being my favorites, and I assume they do for many others as well. Feels like a missed opportunity.

Not to say Japan always does them well either. A large chunk of them simply stop at making said character a loud idiot with no redeeming features, and that's as far as it goes. But dig a little deeper and you usually find, in my eyes, the character who always ends up being the best one. I would be ecstatic if we would write more characters like these over here. In case you are wondering, yes, I actually do have many characters like this. And I probably always will. They highlight a specific failing of modernity that more writers need to touch on.

Plus they are always the coolest and funniest characters. There has to be a reason for that! Why else would they be such an important staple in so many stories?

Anyway, that's all for this week. In case you missed it, check out the new post from earlier in the week! It's a good one.

Have yourself a good weekend and I will see you next time!

Reminder that I will be in the next issue of Silence & Starsong coming out in just under two weeks! You can preorder it here!

A Tale of Two Deaths

Sometimes when I see the current state of things and our reaction to how it's going I ask myself a question. How used to change are we, really?

When you are so used to stagnation, especially decades of it, it is hard to notice real change, especially when it's happening right under your nose. I've highlighted a bit of the change around here in recent times, but I think today's topic should really make it clear how things have shifted recently more than the latest events might lead you to think they have. Old institutions are failing like they are more than overdue to, but the new ones taking their places aren't from where you might expect them to come from. We're heading into uncharted waters and no one really seems to notice.

I think I can safely declare that Cultural Ground Zero is over, even if it hasn't been supplanted yet. There is just no room or momentum left from that old era. Whatever remained from that period of pure stagnation is currently on the way out, if not already gone.

Here is my declaration. By the end of the '20s, I posit everything that finally should have died off with Cultural Ground Zero decades ago will finally do so, and leave us with a more clear path forward into the uncertain future that is the 2030s. It's daunting to think about such a thing, but it's becoming more and more obvious everyday that this is what is awaiting us on the road ahead.

I know I said I wouldn't be able to write much this month due to many ongoing projects, one of which is very close to being revealed, and I'm standing by that. However, recent events have caused me to ruminate on a specific topic that has come up every now and then in recent times--the importance of artists themselves in the grand scheme of things. Much has gotten warped over the years since Cultural Ground Zero closed off the past and future to current modernist insanity, but few things have been as deliberately as the purpose for creation itself.

It's no secret that I am very much not in line with the current zeitgeist's obsession with brand over all else, and yet two recent passings in the wider culture have made me take pause and reconsider a bit about where we currently are. These deaths both mark the opposite ends of the modern spectrum of entertainment appreciation, and yet both are responsible for much influence that stems from the early days of Cultural Ground Zero entertainment that would follow their success. One of these, however, was a much bigger news story than the other. If you've kept up with recent trends then you probably know which one I am referring to.

The first of the two deaths to bring up is the unfortunate early passing of manga legend Akira Toriyama. For those unaware, and I would be very surprised if anyone younger than a Baby Boomer didn't know, Akira Toriyama was the creator of Dragon Ball, one of the most influential IPs of the past forty years. In many ways, it invented battle shonen, one of the keystones of the industry's success in the decades to come, inspiring future megahits like One Piece, Naruto, and My Hero Academia, among many others. DB is also heavily responsible for helping to crack the international market. Without Toriyama, none of this is possible.

It wasn't just Dragon Ball, his other megahit series, Dr. Slump was also hugely influential, including inspiring people such as Shigeru Miyamoto on the art motif and run animation in Super Mario Bros. 3, which is one of the highest selling and most influential video games of all time. The short works he made after finally penning the conclusion to Dragon Ball in the mid-1990s were also very popular, one of which, Sand Land, has both a video game and an animated adaption on the way shortly. Even if that was all he put out it would be enough to cement his fame.

However, on top of all that, Toriyama was involved in the video game world, being instrumental in the success of many projects over the decades, but particularly two incredibly influential franchises in Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, video games whose influence spread even outside of the medium to creators all over the world. If you're of a certain age, you've taken in at least some entertainment that has the influence of these two in it.

And if even all that was not enough, Toriyama's Dragon Ball anime franchise, though he was not involved in the actual production itself, was instrumental in allowing the medium of anime to explode internationally as well as develop many new animation tricks and techniques still used in the industry today. So he was actually highly important in influencing three different mediums throughout his entire career, and his influence definitely goes far beyond even that to the point that we will probably never really know where it ends. The writer of this very post you are currently reading was heavily influenced by Dragon Ball, as well.

If there is a Mount Rushmore specifically for manga creators, Akira Toriyama is definitely on it. One would have a very easy case for his inclusion.

It was only at the moment of his death that so many realized just how big of a mark this one man made on so many lives, and the tributes and celebrations of his life were just about inescapable online. If you're reading this and didn't know about the news I would be very surprised. It was everywhere, and just about everyone had something to say about it.

It was also nice to see the creator, not the production company or the IP, get the credit for his own incredible accomplishments. For once, finally, it felt like the Brand didn't take precedence over the creator. Which is, of course, the way it used to be.

The original manga ran in Shonen Jump from 1984-1995.

Just before this news broke, however, there was a different sort of news being spoken about in its place. A different sort of death, this time it was about a company that had been around for two decades--one of the most influential in the early days of the internet media explosion. For those who haven't yet heard, I'm referring to Rooster Teeth.

Running since about 2003 after being formed by a small group of friends, Rooster Teeth was emblematic of the old internet. It was one of the first "geek culture" groups focused on popular things of the time like video games, machinima, podcasts, and all that went around the "pop culture landscape" during that period. This was the era when we were beginning to make the concept of "Pop Culture" a shrine to ourselves. It was a different era, one that is very quickly wrapping up.

For some perspective on age, Rooster Teeth started in the early days of webcomics with the likes of Penny Arcade, 8-Bit Theater, CTRL+Alt+Delete, Bob & George, VG Cats, Captain SNES, and Megatokyo, and even predated G4's Attack of the Show rebranding era. That is how ancient RT was in the lifespan of the internet and the mutation of Geek Culture that came out of the post 9/11 landscape. You might even remember some of the creations spun out of the company, like Red Vs. Blue, RWBY, or Achievement Hunter, which is what they were most known for. It's been around a long, long time.

In fact, Rooster Teeth represents that bizarre moment of the Angry Video Game Nerd/Retro Junk era of pop cult between when entertainment was appreciated for being as good as it was at the time into being a lifestyle brand of its own to base your identity off of. That transformation would come very shortly, though. Rooster Teeth was there at the beginning of that change, and was instrumental in helping create it.

For younger people, you might not have any idea about this, but things were truly different in the pre-9/11 era. Entertainment was not treated the same way it has been ever since Geek Culture was tortured into existence in order to represent the good guys/consumers against the bad guys/normies who oppressed them via movie clichés invented by the likes of Revenge of the Nerds. The '00s was a whole different beast than what came before, and it is what led to the rampant consumerism as identity problem in the '10s that would make the 1980s blush with envy.

The '00s was the era where quips and references, tropes over art, and snark over sincerity solidified and consumed everything from commentary to the creation of entertainment itself. Essentially, it's the era where Geek Culture began in earnest, as referenced here. The '00s was where we appreciated the paint on the hood more than the engine underneath it, mistaking that sheen for the reason the car even runs at all. Rooster Teeth was one of the forerunners to this cultural shift, and stayed that way for decades, mutating with the times and the zeitgeist, showing both its highs and its lows. There are few companies that represent that entire time period better than they do.

So one might think that because of its longevity and obvious importance to the cultural landscape of how things are that it, much like Toriyama, would at least engender some sadness and reflection upon its passing, right? As stated above, Rooster Teeth was unarguably influential, they were popular, and it even created a few IPs people enjoyed a good deal. So surely the company would be celebrated with the news of its demise. If not on the same level as then maybe at least a fraction of what Toriyama received. Surely it would have something.

Well, no. That isn't what happened at all. In fact, just the opposite happened, a complete contrast to Akira Toriyama's unfortunate passing.

Most people were celebrating Rooster Teeth's overdue end, lamentations over lost jobs aside. The ones that weren't celebrating were more upset at what the company had become and were sad that it died instead of fixing course long ago. The news of Rooster Teeth's death was practically the opposite of Toriyama's with most people shrugging their shoulders or spitting on their grave, hoping they never rise from the ashes like so many dead relics like G4 had attempted to do in recent years. People, oddly enough, have no reverence to these "Geek Culture" institutions that were so influential on them, preferring them to stay dead and never to rise again.

This then leads to the main question of today: what in the world could account for this difference in attitudes between the two deaths? Again, besides the fact that one is a human being and the other is a company. We well know that the wider culture does not seem to distinguish a difference between the two anymore. The confused worship of the Space Battle brand shows that much in how whoever buys something owns its soul for eternity and can pump any product out it wants.

So, then, what is the real difference here?

The original Red Vs. Blue ran 100 shorts from 2003-2007.

There are many factors in why Rooster Teeth's and Toriyama's death are not treated the same (the life of a man and the life of a company being different notwithstanding), but the main reason for that would be the most obvious thing: Toriyama was in control of every single one of his creations until the day he died. He ran them all, made every decision, good or bad, with them, and was the one to decide if a project should even exist at all in the first place. He treated his own creations with care and respect to the people who enjoyed them.

In other words, he was from the generation where the creator mattered more than the creation. This was the time where the IP was just one tool and, once a series ended, that was it unless both the creator and audience both demanded otherwise. It is hard to say how, but Toriyama was very good about knowing when enough of something was enough, ending the original manga at what ended up being the perfect point in the long run. That isn't so common anymore.

In contrast, not a single one of Rooster Teeth's creations were ever continued on by the original creative team from beginning to end. Not a single one. On top of that, every single one decayed and fell apart as they went on, inevitably chasing the audience away. This is because the creator did not matter to them as much as the creation did. This example is one of the most common in the Cultural Ground Zero era of Brand Worship. You would buy product because of the packaging, not for what is contained in said packaging.

Over the years, as the company grew, the group changed from a bunch of frat boy late Gen Xers and early Ys making edgy internet content of the time, into a full-on company staffed by safe peddlers of corporate pap. That mean as they grew and got more corporate, friendships were broken and strained, relationships were thrown under the bus, and people were allegedly ripped off right, left, and center. The Rooster Teeth left over two decades from its beginning was a shell of what it started as, and the people there from the beginning were no longer those same passionate young guys hungry for success. It was just another corporate job. Everything was done to keep the gravy train going, not to create or sustain anything.

Of course, we all grow and change as we get older, but when your very lifeblood is staked on building upon the audience you have cultivated and the creations you all built together, it is paramount that you never forget who you were and build on that person. And, unfortunately, they didn't. It doesn't matter what property of theirs you liked, you were almost certainly chased away by how they conducted themselves as they got older and decided what really mattered to them. Their fall is like a crash course study on how not to grow.

And I haven't even talked about Gen:Lock! (And I won't because you can learn all about that disaster in the link.)

One should also mention that all of this also goes for easily their most popular IP, RWBY, created by the late Monty Oum. For those unaware, Monty Oum was a Gen Y kid, first coming to prominence with early online video game fight videos in the early '00s like Haloid, a mashup of Halo and Metroid, as well as Dead Fantasy, a combination of Dead or Alive and Final Fantasy. Though such a thing is common today, it certainly was not back when he was first doing it. He was hired to work on Red Vs. Blue for Rooster Teeth before getting the chance to make an original series of his own, which ended up being the surprisingly popular RWBY.

Contrary to what some might tell you now, RWBY was never meant to be anything mind-blowing or original. Much like RvB existed for goofy Looney tunes-like comedy shorts, RWBY was supposed to be a showcase for cool fight scenes, much like Oum's earlier work was, and that's what it was for the first couple of seasons. That is until he died via extreme allergic reaction in 2015. A sad early end to a creator that had a style all of his own.

And this is where the series went off the rails.

No, it didn't end. It was too popular to do that. Corporate decided to push on without him. And it was a disaster.

To be clear, Rooster Teeth did help Oum make RWBY, but the series was really his creation. It was a creator-driven project, not a corporate one. Once he died, so did it. There was nothing more to be said. The series was his idea, it was his creation, and it was his passion put behind it to make it stand out from what was being made online at the time. The company in the one who turned it into the punchline it has been for ages now.

So what happened? Well, instead of respecting the creator and wrapping up his creation with his death, Rooster Teeth decided the IP could still make money. What they then did was grab a bunch of random writers and threw things at the wall, none of which stuck, in order to keep the gravy train going, because that is the sort of company they now were. The result? Well, if you know RWBY for anything beyond Oum's early work it is almost certainly for the memes insulting how bad it has gotten. That should tell you everything about how well his property was respected after his death.

Instead of a Toriyama-like appreciation for Oum and what he did for them, his creation was warped beyond recognition by the company looking to pander and milk anything to get a few extra bucks out of the popular property and the consumers attached to the Brand image. And, of course, because this was the era of Cultural Ground Zero, a hyper-specific and quickly dwindling slice of the viewers didn't care. The chipping paint was enough to keep them on the company's side. The creators no longer mattered to fanatics, it was the IP that mattered to the Geek Culture generation weened on corporate creations first and foremost. Nothing can ever end, it must always be pumped for more money to be consumed forever--no one person matters or should get in the way of that.

And, it should be restated here, every other property Rooster Teeth had control of over the years more or less went through this very thing, even if the creator didn't die like Oum unfortunately had. Most of them were chased out regardless, and a large chunk of the consoomers the company courted didn't care. They just wanted the product, not the creation.

This is the sort of comment that can only be made when a faceless corporate entity matters more than people:

No, the above statement is wrong. A company is not bigger than any person's life or their creations that allow it to live in the first place. Every person who works there is more important than the company. The company exists to serve the person's life so that they can create and put said creation out there to as many people as possible. It does not exist to wipe the creator from the process. People are bigger than a company can ever be, because they make it what it is.

This is the legacy of early 2000s Geek Culture and why we are where we are today. So it seems a bit strange to me that despite all this madness and backwards thinking that when both a person and an entity dies that we suddenly remember which one is more important than the other. It is Toriyama that got all the tributes. Rooster Teeth only got memes thrown their way.

Perhaps this all exists as a reminder to appreciate the time you have left and the people you have with you along the way, because you never quite know what'll happen or where you will end up. We have other people in our lives to both be helped and to help us. Just remember to never forget that which made you what you are. Otherwise, not only will you will lose it all--but so too will everyone lose you. At least leave behind the best of you, not the worst.

What else can we hope to leave behind than that?

As I said, this post was just meant to be a shorter one ruminating on recent events. It grew quite a bit from that because it looks like there is more going on here than I originally thought. The 2020s have been a decade of change so far, with many holdover elements from Cultural Ground Zero finally falling to the wayside and ending. I'm not sure you could have predicted any of this happening even a few years ago, and yet here we are.

The 2000s were the nadir of culture, a time of moral vapidity and self-destruction, and the 2010s were a holding pattern of that very time period, with interior change sprinkled about in the few final years. It's only now after a worldwide pandemic has simultaneously shaken so many people's trust, had them face their own mortality, and allowed them to push forward into new arenas that you are starting to see real replacements for those old dinosaur institutions and modern failings we've had to deal with for far too long. As has been said, things do not stay the same forever. By the time we get there, the 2030s will be something to behold.

You're here to pass the baton on to whoever comes after you. Make sure that baton is something you can really be proud to hand off.

Hopefully, this time we won't fumble the toss.

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Big

Welcome to the weekend!

It's finally February and, as the most recent post has shown, the year is already starting to roll along. 2024 is off to a strong start.

However, today I wanted to talk about scale and ambition a little bit. Let us think Big!

There is something about the Epic in storytelling that attracts us all, isn't there? We all want to be wowed and awed, even if we say we couldn't care less about such a thing. Though it's a feeling the mainstream entertainment industry and art world lost through the paint worship of the 20th century, preferring obsessing over aesthetics, disjointed parts, subversion, vague moralizing, and weird nihilism, we still appreciate the large than life more than ever before. There is something to the scale of even the most simple thing that inspires wonder and joy in all but the most cynical of all of us.

We all want to see the greater things in life reflected in even the smallest objects, but along the way we've lost the ability to not only imagine it--we've also lost the ability to even look up in the first place. Instead we've been trained to look at the mud and think ourselves superior to both our neighbor and the rest of the world that we can't even imagine higher things anymore.

When did this hope for greater things start to fall away? I would say it most likely began around the 1960s and rotted away in the 1970s to be replaced with crass commercialism in the 1980s and bottoming out into irony poisoning before the 1990s ended. By the 2000s, all that remained of wonder was perversion, emptiness, and a hatred for life. In half a century, art became the exact flipside of what it was meant to be.

I think this destructive bottoming out can be summed up in the subgenre created by the fallout of this vapid culture, dubbed "Reddit Carnage" by Mystery Grove Publishing, the former book publisher and now full-time newsletter writer.

It's a relatively new term, but I'm sure you have an idea of what it means. "Reddit" of course refers to the social media site, infamous for its trumpeting of group think, reinforcing of anything popular culture pumps out, and general misery of the sort that could only foster in such an echo chamber. "Carnage" is hyper violence. Put the two together and you get Reddit Carnage. Murder porn made for the terminally online, emptied of humanity.

If you've never heard the term before, here are some uses of it:

The long and short of the term is that is empty hyperviolence meant to desensitize you to the purpose of violence, the sanctity of life, and to demoralize you in general. There is no purpose to any of it accept to condition you to accept meaninglessness and think of other people as little more than meat sacks who explode real good. In essence, it's anti-human.

I should explain this further. It's not an easy idea to get across.

This is a sort of "genre" that did not exist before Millennials, because it couldn't have. Reddit Carnage is a story where everyone is a cartoon character who treats the lives of other people as disposable, especially if they are the generic bad guy (whose motivations themselves are usually vague beyond "the government/good guy/girl boss says so"). And you know it's all silly and meaningless because the title is silly and meaningless, the action sequences are silly and meaningless, the characters are 2D flat stereotypes that are silly and meaningless, and the costuming and accents are silly and meaningless. All that matters is the carnage of seeing Bad People ripped to shreds and the World Order run by the Good Guys preserved. There is something intentionally inhuman about this subgenre, and that is because it is an inversion of a style of film that used to be more prevalent before the 21st century. It's a warped misunderstanding and interpretation of what an action story is.

It is the 1980s action movie stripped of any pathos or sense of justice beyond vague shadows of what once used to be there. It is the anti-wonder approach to action storytelling, replacing the eternal with the temporal.

"Reddit Carnage" is a way to reinforce vapid bugmen consumerist morality through carefully prescribed dopamine releases not-so-secretly aimed by the producers of the film on groups of human beings they do not like and portray as "correct" targets to brutalize and dehumanize. This is different from casting villains as terrorist groups based on real life like action movies used to do, because they are frequently not based on real terrorist groups at all. These films are not even subtle about this, but for whatever reason modern movie-goers (however many of these that still exist at this point) cannot seem to see it beyond grinning at Bad People being diced up.

If you want to know why these projects are "still allowed" to be made by Hollywood when other types of action stories aren't, it is because they aren't true action movies. They are murder porn simulators where audiences can see Hollywood approved bad guys get their heads blown up by walking automatons that vaguely resemble what a person they think should be. It is every old parody of action movies on late night TV, but made real.

Reddit Carnage is the parody version of what people who hate action movies used to say they were, made by people who think those critics were right and aim to rub their noses in it. "Yeah, it's blatant murder porn! Who cares! Listen to that one-liner. It's so bad it's good, am I right?"

But that's not what action movie ever were. That's a fantasy concocted by people who hate you telling you what you should think about something you like, and you've let them infect the way you see not only your entertainment, but the world.

Over the years, Cannon has gone from being a joke to being beloved.

Take Cannon Films, the B-movie masters who were considered the makers of pure shlock back in the 1980s. They were considered bottom of the barrel and were hated by Hollywood despite (but actually probably because of) the fact that they only ever wanted to make movies that entertained, not lecture the audience. Finding an anti-human message in a typical Cannon movie is actually very difficult, despite the fact that they were hated so much by the establishment.

Watch a movie like Death Wish II. Yes, it's sleazy. Yes, it's grimy. Yes, it's violent and dark. Yes, there are horrible happening things in it. However, the film still has a point. Life is difficult, justice is not only real but is necessary for a safe society to function, and evil must be pulled out at the root. It's a heavier version of the original Death Wish meant to show the decay that occurs after nothing changed (and nothing did change) after the events of the first film. This goes even further into apocalyptic insanity with Death Wish 3, but I'm not getting into that one here. Regardless, I think the series deserves more credit than it gets.

The last theatrical movie Charles Bronson made with Cannon (he would retire not long after this) was called Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects which is about human trafficking and the dehumanization aspect of it on everyone involved. The movie isn't one of the strongest Bronson ever made (not even with Cannon) but its ending is still surprisingly powerful, asking what justice would have been in this situation. For a final theatrical release, Bronson still tried his best to create something. Meanwhile, Harrison Ford and Baby Boomer stars of the '80s and '90s have been spending their retirement years destroying everything they built up back then.

But that is a whole other subject. The point is that there were more going on in these simple old movies than you think.

Even Chuck Norris movies, the nexus of lazy punchlines for years, all have moral cores. Yes, even the Cannon ones. Missing in Action is about a man who will do anything to undo a near-fatal mistake and put things right again. Invasion USA is about how even in the face of tremendous odds, good remains stronger and will still prevail against encroaching evil. Even The Hitman is about how good repaid with evil eventually leads to self-destruction, ending with good standing on top again. There is nothing empty about any of that because it's all based on truth.

The best example is probably Sidekicks, not made by Cannon. Sidekicks is the story of a physically sick kid who uses his dreams and fantasies and his hopes to improve his life condition to become a stronger human being. Despite being a silly movie meant for younger audiences, there is a very good moral core at the center of it all. Our hero's plight cements both imagination and effort as two of the most important aspects of personal growth.

There is nothing negative about any of this. In fact, this is all healthy messaging. But it was twisted by those in charge into being considered "wrong" and backwards from reality. This is why they were turned into punchlines by those in charge. The last thing they want you to imagine is any greater purpose to anything in life. Just consume, give them your paycheck, and keep your head down. There is nothing else to life.

Reddit Carnage, therefore, is the opposite of what wonder stories are intended to be. It has no relation to how action stories are meant to be.

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So what is a good example of something on the opposite end of the spectrum from Reddit Carnage? What is the sort of story where large ideas and concepts are portrayed as such, where looking up is considered important, and the good is always shown as just that?

The above image should give you a clue. I am talking about Giant Robots. There is a good reason for that--it is action storytelling meant to make you consider Big things through portraying Big things in clear visual language. It is the exact mirror of Reddit Carnage, to the point that the two have never met in the same project. I am not convinced they ever properly can without turning said resulting idea into a mess.

But I digress.

Now, were I to bring up something like Giant Robots in casual conversation, I am liable to get one of two general reactions. The first is of excitement and child-like joy at the very idea of large objects engaged in epic actions, and the other are eyerolls from mature adults who prefer to spend their time golfing on the weekend away from such juvenile things. In other words, your appreciation for the idea of Giant Robots probably aligns with how much you appreciate wonder and the potential for life itself. It's a litmus test: much like how much your appreciation for space opera goes beyond multi-billion dollar brands shows how much you appreciate the general idea of the genre in the first place, or just how much other people are talking about it.

But even in the giant robot space (if one can call it so) there is a bit of misunderstanding as to what they are, what their intent is, or even what makes it a "real" robot story.

The above video highlighted at the very top of this long post delves into the history of the giant robot genre through where it really flourished--Japan. the history goes back far. Particularly important is how it was an invention of post-WWII Japan for a country that wanted to dream big (and did) while finding their footing in a world unlike anything they knew before. In the process they stumbled into something that morphed into a worldwide phenomenon for those lovers of the overblown and the epic. Because it is an idea anyone can understand.

Of course I'm not going to say Japan created them all on their own or are the sole creators of the style, but they ultimately put their own stamp on the idea, just as they did with superheroes with their own tokusatsu. Therefore what influenced them became reflected back out into the world and influenced everyone else. This key aspect of communication and back and forth is what makes art and entertainment so very interesting.

The most fascinating part of the whole thing is that they can't really be subverted. Don't get me wrong--you can try. You can try to inject modern values into the genre, you can try to make the good guys lose, and you can even make it so there are no good guys at all--but it never seems to matter. What remains at the end of it is still the idea of Big, or scale, or romance beyond the mundane. It can never quite be gutted out because by default that is what is.

The Big is embedded in the genre.

And perhaps all of this is why, despite the crumbling of mainstream culture in the West, there still remains plenty of joy and life in those who create and those who want to enjoy the creations of others. Those who still appreciate the Big, the truly weird, and the epic, refuse to be shaken off by the dead trends of those who are supposed to be in charge of them.

You've certainly noticed it yourself, the tide changing. The air is no longer quite what it used to be even a few years ago. We're in the mid-2020s now, and the decade is finally taking shape into what it is meant to be. The shackles of Cultural Ground Zero are breaking apart. As long as we stay the course we can finally break the downwards spiral and aim up once again. All we have to do is keep thinking Big.

There isn't anymore room for Reddit Carnage and its empty promises. It is time for better ways: ways that we are finally rediscovering for ourselves.

Let us keep going back at it and we can then look back on the '20s as the decade where everything finally changed for the better.

Just remember to never stop looking up. There is always something bigger than you can imagine, just waiting to be discovered.

I have my own Giant Robot story in Two Adventures Across Eternity!

Weekend Lounge ~ Believe in Getter!

Welcome to December! Not long left to go in the year. Not only that, it's Advent season and then we go into Christmas, and that's it for 2023! We're in for some good times ahead.

For some updates from my last update post, as I informed Kickstarter backers, the final books have been shipped out and the campaign has now been fulfilled. If you are a backer you can see the details for yourself in the most recent update. For everyone else, the reason I state this is because the paperback omnibus version of the Gemini Man series is now available on Amazon via KDP here! I know some of you were waiting for it, here's your chance.

Today's subject is a bit of a wild one. Recently, mecha series have had a bit of resurgence, especially in the prose arena, with projects like Combat Frame XSeed and Collateral Damage, among many others, have shown there is still much life left here.

What you might not know is one of the most unique, and influential, franchises that have been here since Japan themselves embraced the concept back in the 1970s. I am of course, speaking of the great, yet massively underrated in the West, Getter Robo.

One of the most common ways to describe Getter Robo is Lovecraft with mecha, but that description might be lost on people today because "Lovecraft" has been turned into a synonym for undercooked political thought and rehashed tentacle monsters. That isn't what Getter Robo is. What Getter Robo does is take the cosmic horror aspect and turn it on its head, keeping both the mystery and the horror while also managing to turn the madness into a weapon for the heroic.

Though its origins came from a simple place (legendary creator Go Nagai needed a concept for a new series with three transforming robots and Ken Ishikawa created the franchise under him), it soon transformed into what is one of Japan's best entries in the form, up there with Tetsujin-28/Gigantor, Giant Robo, Mazinger Z, Patlabor, Gundam, and VOTOMs, and it also maintained a surprisingly high level of quality throughout the decades and up to Ken Ishikawa's unfortunate early death.

If you are unaware of Getter Robo, I highly recommend the above video as an introductory crash course, especially if you enjoy giant robots. It is long, but you can put it on 1.5-2 times speed of you want. You will not miss out on much. Regardless, the first three parts alone are invaluable to see above all else. I can definitely say it has influenced a lot of what I do, and many others over the years. Learn exactly why it retains its popularity and influence even to this day. There is nothing quite like Getter Robo.

That's all for this week! Have a happy beginning of December and I will see you next time!

The physical edition of the Gemini Man is available here!

Weekend Signal Boost!

Back it Here!

As I said last time, I'm still in the word mines for the final Gemini Man story, so keeping up with the blog is a bit tough. That said, there are a few things to update you with, such as some recent releases from various NewPub authors!

The first one up is a brand new manga Kickstarter by Yakov Merkin called Amaranth Angels. This is a brand new series from the author who brought you the Light from Another World light novel series and the Galaxy Ascendant space opera books. This time he is trying his hand at something quite a bit different. You can even read a 31 page free chapter here ahead of time.

The description:

Amaranth Angels is an original sci-fi adventure manga, done fully in manga style, including being drawn to be read from right to left. It's a cute-girls-doing military-things story in the vein of anime like Girls Und Panzer, High School Fleet, the Magnificent Kotobuki, and Lycoris Recoil. So you can expect cute, likable characters, and fast paced, exciting starfighter action, brought to you with a gripping story and amazing art.

You can find Amaranth Angels here!

Now as for something completely different let us take a look at a more "disgusting" and less clean project. We have to keep mixing it up for you, the readers, after all. Next is the newest entry in J. Manfred Weichsel's Tales to Make You Vomit book series!

You can find it Here!

For those who remember, Mr. Weichsel is an author that uses the macabre and the degenerate to highlight the good and true of the world. As a consequence his work can be very controversial and not for everyone, which leads to his newest book extending the invitation for others to do the same under his watchful eye. You definitely won't read anything else like it.

The description:

The librarian is back with her first misanthropic anthology!

When three brave astronauts embark on a trip to the moon, little do they know that a hidden purpose awaits them—an alien signal detected from the moon, shrouded in secrecy to prevent panic on Earth. The lunar module is damaged upon landing, stranding the astronauts on the moon's surface, with no hope of returning home. Determined to fulfill their mission, they follow the mysterious signal to a crater, leading them beneath the moon's surface and into an enigmatic library.

Here they meet the Librarian, a seemingly harmless elderly woman with a nefarious agenda. The bilious bibliosoph has decided to put humanity on trial by forcing each astronaut to read a sickening science fiction book from her liverish library. If just one can read a book without throwing up, the earth will be spared. But each time one of the astronauts gets green around the gills, the librarian will launch, by catapult, a giant rock at the earth, which will, upon impact, cause massive loss of life. As the bizarre book bazaar unfolds, the astronauts face an unsettling realization—the final rock will bring about the destruction of Earth.

Along with the frame narrative by J. Manfred Weichsel, Gruesome Futures features stories by three acclaimed authors renowned for their ability to invoke revulsion, dread, and a dark fascination. They are:

Misha Burnett!

With a penchant for crafting unsettling narratives, Misha Burnett’s latest tale, It Only Hurts When I Swallow, promises to take you on an emotional journey of grotesque beauty. In this slice of new wave fiction, Burnett’s twisted imagination births scenes of judicial punishment that will be difficult to digest.

Max Gunssler!

Prepare to be ensnared by the putrid pulp of Max Gunssler, for in The R*** and Annihilation of Babe Babylonia, he weaves a story of future professional wrestling that will disturb the depths of your puny human psyche. Gunssler’s uncanny ability to write gonzo, off-the-wall action scenes will leave you breathless, and empty your stomach.

Todd Love!

In The Secret on Subfloor 82 of Serenity Station, Todd Love offers readers an unforgiving plunge into the darkest recesses of the human condition. In this piece of Grimdark MilFic action, Love’s exploration of the grotesque serves as a reflection of our own flawed existence, challenging you to unearth the true horrors that lie within… within your gut, that is.

Gruesome Futures will invade your nightmares and make you sick. Can you read this digest of disgust without throwing up? Do you take the challenge?

You can find Gruesome Futures here!

Lastly, in case you missed it, Alexander Hellene's final book in his Swordbringer trilogy has left crowdfunding and is now available on Amazon for general purchase. He has been writing this saga for a long while so it is thrilling to see him do what many in OldPub cannot: finish a series. And if you've read anything by him, you know he goes all out.

Find it Here!

He's been neck deep in this series for at least four years, including getting an omnibus version out to backers of his campaign, while also editing the awesome Pulp Rock anthology in the meanwhile, showing just how much he loves storytelling. I am definitely looking forward to where he goes after this series.

The description:

The Reaper has landed! His mission: find the secret of immortality and destroy any who stand in his way.

With the Global Union closign in and Pysh in shambles, a bitter enemy may be humanity's only hope. Garrett and Ghryxa lead an envoy to Kharvalar with a proposal for the High Lord: join forces to fight the Global Union or Yxakh will be doomed. But Kharvalar, besieged by lizardmen, giant serpents, and ancient foes from beyond the western wastes, has troubles of its own.

Old enmities, prophecies fulfilled, and interstellar war collide in the explosive conclusion to The Swordbringer, with the fates of two planets hanging in the balance!

You can find The Final Home here!

In very related news, author TJ Marquis has started a YouTube show of his own in order to highlight NewPub releases that might be flying under the radar. It is called IndieScan. You can find his channel here, as well as the first episode here.

We definitely need more folks out there highlighting the avalanche of new stories we might otherwise miss, so definitely be sure to give his show a look. It is weekly and a rather short update lengthwise so you won't be too put out or exhausted by it.

Here is the most recent episode:

And that's all for this update! Thank you for reading, as always, and I hope you'll keep sticking in this space. There is so much going on at all times it is almost overwhelming. This is a full reversal of how it was back when I started writing. I never imagined a climate like this existing for stories. Here's hoping the momentum only increases.

Enjoy your weekend, and I will see you next time!

A cross country adventure of magic, superpowers, and a strange brotherly bond! How will the Gemini Man find his way out of a mad cult's grasp?

Safe as Bunkers

Is there more to life than just getting by and hiding in the margins? Our classical stories and our art tell us there is, and yet you would be hard pressed to find such a belief in the modern works of today. Especially in the mainstream. Instead we are told the only meaning in life is to hang on tightly to whatever you can grab hold of and squeeze it for all its worth since it can disappear at any moment. There is nothing beyond that worth striving for, little worth building, and only a fool would tell you different.

We only live to be safe, but is that so bad? Who wants to live in constant fear of the unknown, after all? We are more Progressive than that. In Current Year, we know everything.

I can't be too facetious here. Safety is something everyone wants. We want our family to be safe, we want knowledge that our homes will not vandalized when we look away for but a second, and we desire to have a stable income to keep ourselves afloat and out of poverty. There is not one who would disagree with any of that.

However, this is where it gets funny.

The safer a society is, the more its art tends to go wild in response. We still want excitement, unpredictability, and new thrills, even while we desire a life as free of said danger as possible. Humans are strange that way. Our art typically reflects the part of life we see but don't quite experience fully ourselves in the moment. This is why the best creations usually come up in times of peace, when reflection is possible and safety is around us.

Oddly enough there has been a shift in that mentality in recent years. As our society has grown more socially unstable, basic utilities begin to fail in nonsensical and embarrassing ways, and public trust among the populace has dropped in regards to each other and those in charge, art has instead become safer, more nostalgic, and frightened of things in life as common as aging or the basic family unit. The danger and wonder is all but gone in mainstream spaces, replaced with mechanized comfort food instead.

Safetyism, the desire for emotional safety above anything else, is now the rule of the land, even over human ambition and personal connection. It rules everything in the mainstream art and entertainment world. The highest goal is to be safe and accepted in a world you cannot trust or love. You cannot escape this mentality today.

And, to be honest, I don't think a lot of folks have even realized the shift has happened. It is as if this change occurred overnight. For many of us, especially those who don't value safety as much as other things, it basically did. Now everyone is supposed to treat it as the highest ambition to achieve.

There is more at play than just that, but we should just get to the meat of the topic.

For anyone who has been paying attention to mainstream art for awhile, you know those in charge of it have not been firing on all cylinders for ages now. The people in charge of the industries in the West really do dislike tradition, their audience, and anyone who dares criticize them even a little. This antagonistic relationship has ruined the modern landscape to everything from music to short stories.

But we've talked about this before. Many times, in fact. What we haven't much talked about is a place where the opposite has happened: a place where the people in charge are so absolutely scared of contradiction or challenge that they vomit out bottom of the barrel art without any personality or character to pander to the lowest common denominator for a status quo that is rapidly changing from underneath them. What this leads to is a field exactly as stagnant as the one we have in the West, and one just as likely to avoid taking risks.

In case you aren't aware, I am referring to Japan.

Now, I can hear you now, coming at me with counter examples and refutations, all in the name of hoisting them up over our broken system, but I'm not specifically talking about individual pieces here. This is about a growing attitude in Japan's mainstream that is completely ill-equipped to deal with the "Global Standards" currently watering down art and entertainment everywhere else.

Far be it from me to criticize another country I don't live in, and have never visited, for their practices, but this is an attitude that is indicative of an older problem from decades ago that was never really addressed by those in charge. What I'm saying is that the industry itself is in danger of surrendering its identity despite its current massive worldwide success today.

This will be a controversial opinion, but it can't be avoided given the current topic, so I will just go into it. There is no sense beating around the bush on this issue.

Japan has had a serious issue with Safetyism for a while now, and they have been letting it take over more and more of their industry. This has been a problem foreseen for a long time, as said by animator, director, and mangaka, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko as to why he originally left the industry way back in 1990 after his movie Venus Wars released.

This is why he originally left the industry:

I don't care what your opinion on the quality of anime is today, but one would be a liar at this point if they do not see this attitude dominant everywhere in the industry. It has turned adventurous and ambitious storytelling into a Pleasure Dome of unreality where tropes are celebrated as the ideal and hedonism and empty platitudes are about all you'll find inside the shell.

What Mr. Yasuhiko is predicting here is the growth of Safetyism: the desire to escape reality, not through escapism, but by turning reality itself into a bland mush of a playpen. It is about turning imagination itself towards unimaginative things. There is no ambition or hope of greater meaning here. It is just everyday things, stripped of their greater meaning in the web of society, presented in a fetishistic way. The championing of alienation and the atomized self, and pandering toward others to keep such a thought process alive.

He predicted the modern landscape quite well.

For an example of the full flowering of Yasuhiko's predictions, I wish to present to you this twitter thread commenting on an interview with a more recent Safetyism obsessed mangaka and his willingness to bend the knee to censor his work overseas to avoid stirring the pot. There is no great aspirations here: just a desire to be left alone to pump out product.

Be warned, this is quite bleak for anyone who loves the possibilities of art and entertainment. You can find the thread here. Read it in full before we continue here. It is important to understanding where we go from here.

The part of the interview worth pointing out:

There are no beliefs here: just mindless capitulation to whoever complains about whatever. In other words, the artist in question has nothing to say at the base level. This is why they are so easily steamrolled into doing whatever those in charge wants them to do. For those who think Japan is immune to the same issues as the West, you might want to think again.

They are extremely vulnerable to this, especially within certain ranks of more modern creators. They have no desire to learn what their audience wants when localizers will make those decisions for them, and they will not fight back. They will not fight back because they have reason to: they lack any sort of ideals to fight for.

The part of the thread that got me to make this connection is the quote where the poster says:

"guys like this spent most of their lives in the anime dollhouse in their heads so they have no real worldviews and belie[f]s of their own to fall back on when attacked. you can tell just based on how they draw"

He proceeds to give very well drawn, but artistically bland examples of the artist in question to show. The obvious takeaway is that this creator just pumps out fetish content that he doesn't really ever think about because of his appetites, therefore if another country's puritans tell him to censor it he has no problems doing it. The mangaka has no problems doing it because none of this essentially means anything to him. He doesn't care about his own works in the first place, so why would he care if his bosses wanted him to change them however they want to?

Such a creator is ideal for corporations that wish to pump out factory beltline product. And wouldn't you know it, there is a large segment of otaku who want this sort of thing. It all ends up coming together.

Of course I am in no way saying this weak-willed attitude is the way the majority of creators think or operate. It is very clear that, for instance, in Shonen Jump the stories that succeed are the ones that go beyond delivering only expected tropes and have something the creator wants to impart on the reader, even if it is straightforward. There is an attempt at communication being made between artist and audience. This is why their industry is a powerhouse both at home and especially overseas where we have long since forgotten what this is all supposed to be for.

However, that does not change the fact that Safetyism is a growing issue overseas and one that can threaten even what they produce. Japan is not infallible to this modern poison, as no one is, but they also have a tendency to misread just what those of us overseas even like because the localization industry runs interference with them for their own selfish needs over the actual customer.

This is the exact problem Yasuhiko was foreseeing coming down the road, how it would lead to art and entertainment less concerned with wonder and excitement, and more focused and banal trivialities and the mundane. Such a landscape is not sustainable.

This is where an industry led by such base thinking will eventually lead. It is destined to be steamrolled over and ruled by one with a stronger hand. Our own desire for safety is giving ammo for those who dislike us.

There is a reason trash like Sword Art Online is so vapid and nothing but a collection of tropes. Allowing this artless pandering to be the standard of your industry is going to be a problem in the future. You are giving influence to people who are, in the end, corporate drones that will do whatever they are told by those in charge. Even if those in charge are people who hate you. This is the danger of declining standards.

This soulless attitude is what kills art dead.

You need to believe in something to have principles and stances. The problem is that many modern creators don't even really think about what they believe because as long as they pump out content they will get paid and be allowed to live in peace. There isn't anything more to it than that for some of these types. They allow clichés and slogans do the heavy lifting for them in life. They merely function to get by and have no higher aspirations.

At the same time as this, there is a whole other problem developing from those same crowds who are having their soul filled in by those who hate them. You can teach anti-reality very easily this way, and you can make it seem normal. Once again, you can't not have principles. Eventually someone will get to you and change who you are and make you have them.

For those who know how awful and twisted mainstream western art and entertainment has gotten over the years, they know a lot of it is driven by ideologues who believe those who think differently than them as inhuman and worthy of destruction. Would you be pleased to know that such a mentality is actually more prevalent in the glorious land of Japan than you previously thought it was?

Not only that, it was recently paraded in one of its most storied franchises they have: Kamen Rider.

For a summation, Kamen Rider is a tokusatsu franchise created by Shotaro Ishinomori. Ishinomori's true beliefs could probably be best summed up by his influential Cyborg 009 manga (also reflected in many anime adaptations) where divisiveness will always exist but can always by conquered by those willing to look for a way to unite. It is a view very much of its time, and one that tends to carry over in adaptions of his work to this day. But it is undoubtedly his.

So then it might be interesting to note that the recent Black Sun series ultimate message is that killing your political enemies is a good thing, and we should train our children to do so. Who are these political enemies? I'm sure if you've consumed any mainstream western entertainment you can hazard a guess as to who the strawmen worth dehumanizing are. There is even a scene where they gleefully murder an obvious stand-in for a real life politician who was famously murdered.

But there is more than that. It manages to get even stupider, as hard as that might be to imagine.

Here is a random scene from the series in question:

I don't think I need to add any more context than that. It is a scene Marvel Comics would blush at as subtle high art. There is a twitter thread where the topic is broached upon here. The series itself was controversial, and not very well liked, for good reason.

This is "political" as far as that meaningless jargon word goes, but has little to nothing in common with the purpose of the original idea or creator. It is insipid, loud nonsense from people who have no beliefs or thoughts original to themselves.

In contrast, here is what the original Kamen Rider actor has to say about the franchise and his involvement in it:

How do you go from this to what is pictured above? What sort of lesson is being imparted on viewers now? In what universe is this similar to Ishinomori's original vision?

In this newer series you can see the slight of hand faux-centrism that exists to slip in propaganda and dehumanize those one disagrees with politically over views they were taught by others. It is absolutely the sort of garbage that the West produces now, and there is a very good reason its reception was not exactly glowing even in Japan. But once that hatred of the audience sets in, the rot only grows from there. Art reflects the artist and the society they live in. This is not a good sign for their future if this sort of attitude is their highest ambition.

Do you think it possible to live in a society where your neighbor doesn't know anything about you, doesn't want to know anything about you, yet considers you expendable for voting wrong, believing the wrong thing, or wearing the wrong colored hat? The desire for safety and ideological conformity overrides common sense and turns what was once a typical neighborhood into a potential warzone over trivialities. At a certain point this stops being a community and starts being spaces between enemy lines.

Perhaps this is why the term "conformist" is no longer used as a pejorative among these types. They always wanted conformity: they just wanted to be the ones enforcing it. And that is exactly what they are doing.

This insanity will only continue to bubble before it spills over in the worst kind of ways. Demonization, dehumanization, and selfishness, will not build anything. It will not make anyone safer or more creative, but it will make them spiteful, and lead to the sort of hateful trash the exists purely to spite those their masters told them to spite.

This is a societal dead end.

Don't think this is just a problem in the West. The evil of Safetyism has only spread worldwide over the years, despite the public's protestations, but for certain creators their ingroup fashioned around their designated political leaders matters more than having a functional society to grow in or industry worth supporting. Their desire to be safe from interacting with their inferiors outweighs the desire to want to communicate or understand them. The unknown must be avoided, at all costs. Until this problem is finally dealt with, the weeds will never stop growing.

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself these hard questions. Can you live with people you don't see as people? Can you exist around ideas you think are not only incorrect but evil? Can you operate and build in a society that wishes to destroy society? Because, at the moment, we are giving the exact wrong answers to these questions and wondering why it is killing us and making everything more miserable.

Life is more than safety, and it is more than what we see on the surface. We have to have desires and ambitions or else we have nothing to live for in the first place. The wonder of the Unknown is worth striving for.

How much longer can this clown show of modernity and deliberate worshiping of anti-reality go on? Will you be the one to steer the ship to safe waters, or the one to steer it into the rocks? It will not go on this way forever.

Time is running out, and I don't want to find out what will ultimately happen if we continue to steer in the wrong direction.

All we need to do is remember that there is more to life than just getting by. Once we seek out where our destination is, we can set the right coordinates towards it again. We just have to remember there is more to existing than just existing.

Here's hoping we figure it out before it is too late.

Stories of modernity where wonder still lives!

Weekend Lounge ~ The Missing Art of Adventure

We talk a lot about the "good old days" and the way things used to be, but sometimes we miss things from back then that should have been much bigger than it was. While there were good times that doesn't mean everything was perfect.

Case in point, the early days of manga and anime in the West was actually a lot spottier than you might remember. High selling classics from Japan, and even obscure favorites, were given a release over here and were not only much more underground than they were in the East, they also never really hit mainstream popularity even when anime and manga finally broke big.

As mentioned before, anime and manga were very much the alternative underground in the West back in the day. This is perhaps that is why they attracted so many hipsters. And a lot of those folks now run the industry today. This might explain why this era has yet to get a a fresh opportunity.

While some series like Akira, Spriggan, Mermaid Saga, Dragon Half, and Battle Angel Alita, were allowed a second wind, many have never quite got the chance to begin with. To this day works like Caravan Kidd, City Hunter, GetBackers, Outlanders, Pineapple Army, Psychic Girl Mai, Getter Robo, and Ogre Slayer, all of which were favorites in Japan and actually did release in the North America, have never had proper re-releases here despite the more friendlier market in the modern age. And even then, many modern audiences were trained to ignore old things.

This doesn't even go into Japanese mega sellers like Ushio & Tora, Ginga Sengoku Gun'yūden Rai, Tomorrow's Joe (Ashita no Joe), Mazinger Z, and Ghost Sweeper Mikami, which for whatever inexplicable reason never even got put out here in the first place and absolutely would have hit with audiences at the time this stuff was still underground here. The fact of the matter is that we missed out on a real treasure trove of a Golden Age, even back then. I doubt we'll ever really catch up with it.

One such series that was absolutely whiffed at back in the day was a series title you probably know despite probably never having read or seen before. This would be Yuzo Takeda's long running mystic horror adventure romance series 3x3 Eyes.

for those unaware, 3x3 Eyes is the story of Yakamo, a young man who has no family and is barely getting by in the world. One day he meets a strange dirty and exotic girl named Pai who seems to be looking for him. Through a string of events she ends up taking his soul into hers, turning him into a superzombie who cannot die until she does. Not only that but cults, monsters, and assassins, all seem to want her to resurrect a god who wishes to remake the world itself. Is she truly the key to it all?

However, Pai does not quite know who or what she is, bearer of a third eye and strange magic including the ability to summon giant monsters, and is also alone in the world. Yakumo decides to help her claim humanity along with his mortality, and the two go on a long journey fraught with mystery, danger, and secrets of the like you would never quite imagine. Despite its length, the series does not let up on its pacing.

3x3 Eyes (which refers to the eyes on the creatures that want to resurrect an evil god) is a strange bird in that it has all the elements that should guarantee huge success overseas. It originally ran from 1987 to 2002 in the same magazine Akira did, it has everything readers of classic adventure love (brave men, pretty women, cool monsters, strange magic, and a lot of adventure), had two OVAs that released during the golden age of the form, and its legitimately really good.

Despite that, 3x3 Eyes is about as well known as an obscure OVA such as Master of Mosquiton or K.O. Beast is today. Just about no one in the West remembers it ever existed in the first place.

And it wasn't for lack of trying!

Indie publishers and Dark Horse both attempted to put the manga out back in the day, but it never got any traction or much in the way of sales. The OVAs, despite being put out by Streamline, Orion, and Pioneer, the three biggest western anime companies back in the day, are still barely more than curiosities today. It also doesn't help that apparently the masters are in such rough shape that it makes a newer HD release all but impossible. Even now as older manga get Netflix anime remakes and new manga releases bundled with them, the 40 volume classic (though since re-released in omnibus form like many others to give it far fewer volumes) still remains unreleased here. It is as if it came, failed to catch on, and simply disappeared. We missed our chance, and that is simply all she wrote!

The series remains big in Japan, getting sequel manga to this day. In the West, it has been all but forgotten without a trace. It really is bizarre how that works sometimes!

It might not help that manga like this isn't really common anymore, making a new release even more unlikely. 3x3 Eyes is an adventure series, not like a battle, horror, or romance manga. There is a lot of action, plenty of weird horrors, and there is romance, but it is all in service of a journey through strange lands and hidden space, a series very much in the lineage of classics like Babel II, Cyborg 009, Trigun, or Fist of the North Star. It's the sort of thing you don't see much anymore. These series prioritize classic struggles of good and evil, the wonder and beauty of the world even during dark times, and things beyond which the eye can perceive into what is really important. Such series are not so much common anymore, even as the medium is more popular worldwide as it has ever been.

Perhaps there is just no market for such a series anymore. Maybe it was already dying off back in the day. Who really knows?

This isn't meant to decry things as terrible or anything like that, merely to point out that even when one does everything right, and even when one puts out a work that hits, it might not always do so in the way one expects. There is no formula for success.

That said, 3x3 Eyes is a series that does deserve to be remembered worldwide. It is in Japan, after all. Hopefully sometime in the near future it can achieve a second wind of western popularity of the sort so many classics are getting today. It is more than due for the same treatment.

If you haven't read it, I do highly recommend doing so however you can. It is an adventure unlike any you've take before. It will take you places you will never expect and lift you up when you are feeling low.

And that is what it's all about!

Check out Brutal Dreams for a weird adventure unlike any other you've read!