Week 19/2022
I've spent this week working on things you can't talk about, so I'm going to an advertising space, for which I'm not paid, to talk about a manga masterpiece, DanDaDan.
* In a moment of exaltation I asked a friend to get in touch with someone from Norma Editorial** to see if they would let me do an introductory text for the collection, but it looks like it came packaged and there was no way, a pity, but this entry is worth it to get it out of my system.
**Norma Editorial is publishing it in Spain, Viz will publish it next October.
Norma Editorial has just published the first two volumes of this missile for only 8,00€, it's a gift to give yourself because we are people, it's spring and because it's the best drawn manga I've seen in a long time.
It blew my mind.
But what is it about this comic that makes me not stop evangelizing about it?
Besides some double-page spreads to live in? Everything, everything here is ham.
First of all, the drawing, Yukinobu Tatsu dominates all aspects, characterization, expression, composition, clarity, finish, T O D O, E V E R Y T H I N G. His characters are perfectly defined by their appearance and body language, you always know who you are seeing and what they are doing, that's something very important in a comic with such extreme action. Because here comes another of the strengths of this comic, the action works with absolute precision and without any budget limit, everything is bigger, stronger and crazier every time, for that to work convincingly, to be able to support the whole series on that, you need a superlative cartoonist.
But let's not get lost, I'm talking about manga, a way of making comics in which the script and the drawing are done by the same person, here Tatsu doesn't shy away and manages to make HIS FIRST WORK, a precision mechanism whose goal is to propel the reader forward without giving him time to breathe: it starts really fast, the first fight happens on page 2 and by page 6 the characters are already established, by page 13 the premise of the series is already clear and the narrative begins its unstoppable advance. When the action and the main plot slows down (gotta pace yourself, folks), the relationship between the characters, the romance, makes its appearance and intertwines very naturally. It's all good.
So what's it all about? Well, it's about a boy who believes in UFOs but not in ghosts and a girl who believes in ghosts but not in UFOs, how they challenge each other to go to a UFO sighting site and how the inevitable happens, how the aliens give her powers and the ghosts give him powers and one thing leads to another and at the end of the first volume they are already being chased by a giant crab.
(Here it is thankful that Norma has edited the first two volumes at the same time, the first one passes quickly and ends in a huge cliffhanger).
Here Yukinobu Tatsu doesn't try to be original and what he achieves is to be exceptional, he goes all out from the first page with a campy and self-aware work that sometimes manages to skid due to its excesses, but that lack of control makes it feel natural and fresh.
How do I know so much about this? Well, because the work is published in Manga+, Shueisha's App where you have all the chapters for free to read them translated at the same time as when they are published in Japan.
There are only a couple of things, TWO, that do not satisfy me 100%, the logo and the covers, they are not up to the content, they are overloaded to excess.
During this past Salón de Barcelona there was an exhibition with pages (I'm told they were high quality prints) but there are a couple of things that catch my attention that I will talk about with Lafu in our next Streaming de Dibujantes that I already announce that we will dedicate to DanDaDan because we want to do a favor to all our subscribers and we want them to read DanDaDan, it's worth it.
In the meantime, here's last week's video, Lafuente and I talked about impostor syndrome and style... and everything, of course.
As for the role this last week was quite a downer, the character of one of my players died... well, she didn't die but she had to be removed from the game because some slavers kidnapped her and sold her... it's a very unpleasant situation because a lot of energy is invested in the construction of a character and it feels very unfair to lose it, even more in such a random way, but to maintain the "illusion of reality" you can't rewind or activate the Tolkienian deus ex machina of a mysterious ally arriving and saving you at the last moment. The positive thing is that it is an opportunity to make a new character, the beginnings are always exciting.
At this point it's time to share a process, isn't it? Let's see a Star Wars cover, which are always nice. This one corresponds to the "sabac" variants of Crinsom Reign in which the main characters of the mini appeared portrayed on cards of the game played in the most infamous slums of the exterior limits.
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