Here’s Ax, a mixed bag of goodness to dispel any notions you might’ve accrued about how manga ~ that’s Japanese comics, friend ~ is all big-eyed kiddie-genre hijinks. Top Shelf Productions (a company that publishes excellent American comics, too) is where this gorgeously produced volume comes from. Why else is it worth your time and money?
Look: They’ve got Sean Michael Wilson as editor for this 400-page collection of black-and-white sequential art; Wilson’s currently writing books for Japanese mega-publisher Kodansha and is seated firmly in the expert section of the knowledgeable-about-manga-and-especially-Ax bullet train.
Wait, did we lose you? The way you used to get lost in the non-Western flow of panels down a page of Naruto or whatever? The editor of this anthology called Ax knows about Ax because, see, Ax is also the name of the monthly alternative-manga magazine that was started in Japan in 1998 by Mitsuhiro Atsakawa and is the source from which the stories in this Top Shelf tome were taken.
Did we mention that this is the contents’ English-language debut? And did we say “mixed bag” already, too?
Indeed: This collection contains “Love’s Bride,” an unsettling and well-drawn tale of desire deferred, by the acclaimed Yoshihiro Tatsumi; Takashi Nemoto’s roughly cartooned “Black Sushi Party Piece,” which could make the gaijin Johnny Ryan’s oeuvre seem urbane and inhibited in comparison; the urban gangster grit of Yuichi Kiriyama’s “Well-Dressed Corpse;” Einosuke’s “Home Drama: The Sugawaras,” which does for pho kind of what David Lynch did for severed ears; and Kazuichi Hanawa’s deliciously creepy “Six Paths of Wealth,” a story that wouldn’t seem much out of place in the EC Comics of the 1950s.
The other stories and their visual presentations range from body-obsessed vignettes rendered in simple figures, to complex entanglements of myth and legend conjured with illustrations so lavish that Edmund Dulac would burn green with envy. You’ll experience a few things in Ax that will make you go “Uh, gross” or “Dude, WTF?” But you’ll also be treated to some graphic narratives that reach the sublime, that effectively illuminate what W. Faulkner, back in the day, called “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Seriously.
Most often for the better, rarely for the worse, what you won’t see in this collection called Ax is: The same-old, same-old manga trips and tropes. We recommend adding it to your library tout de damn suite.
This article appears in December 3 • 2010.