MYTHCOMICS: "A BAD CUT" (1987)

RANMA 1/2, Rumiko Takahashi's second long-running serial, marked a change in approach from her previous extended project, URUSEI YATSURA. The earlier serial focused on the adventures of two prickly paramours, Japanese boy-teen Ataru and alien girl Lum-- and although Takahashi often devoted considerable time to the series' support-cast, Lum and Ataru were front and center when the artist finally brought the series to a close.

However, a close reading of URUSEI's first stories suggests that Takahashi may not have originally intended Lum to be the co-star. (It's my recollection that the artist said as much at a San Diego Con many years ago, but I didn't write down her remarks.) My close reading suggests that Ataru and his normal girlfriend Shinobu might've have been Takahashi's original romantic team, with Lum registering as little more than an obnoxious intruder.

The first major arc of RANMA 1/2-- which I've chosen to title "A Bad Cut" after one of the story-titles-- seems designed to leave no room for any Lum-like character to oust the "normal girl."In URUSEI, Takahashi doesn't really devote much attention to Shinobu, but Akane Tendou, the female co-star of RANMA, gets her own personal psychology. She also has her own unique place within her family, consisting of her widowed father Soun and her two older sisters Kasumi and Nabiki. To be sure, Takahashi never, in the entire series, devotes much detail to the sisters' late mother. The mother's absence has no perceptible psychological effect on the older sisters, especially not Kasumi, who essentially takes on the role of the family's "mother" by handling all the cooking and cleaning of their home. Indeed, Kasumi never shows any sexual feelings for anyone, nor evinces any intention of leaving her faux-mother position in the family.

Akane, lacking a feminine role-model capable of helping her negotiate her interactions with boys of her own age, apparently emulates her father instead. In "Bad Cut," the reader knows little about Soun Tendou, except that he maintains the girls' home in some Japanese suburb by running a dojo (although no students are ever seen, and he's not even seen instructing Akane). Martial arts offer Akane a way to keep the male of the species at a distance, as is seen early in the arc, when she's seen literally fighting off boys at high school who think she'll date them if they defeat her.

So Akane becomes a Japanese Atlanta, using her athleticism to avoid contact with males. However, unlike the folkloric father of Atlanta, Soun does want Akane-- or at least one of his three daughters-- to marry in order to carry on the heritage of Soun's dojo. To accomplish this, Soun promises to marry one of his daughters to Ranma, the son of Soun's fellow martial artist Genma Saotome.

One day Genma and Ranma come to Japan to visit Soun-- but neither of the Saotomes is anything like what Soun remembers. It's eventually revealed that while the Saotomes traveled in China, brushing up on their martial arts disciplines, they foolishly trained in "the Ground of Accursed Springs." Over the years, many creatures, including human beings, have fallen into this or that spring and drowned-- and any spring that has drowned a living creature also has the magical power to "impress" the physical appearance of the drowned creature onto any living creature who falls into a given spring. The transformation is temporary, in that it can be reversed if the victim is doused in hot water. However, the reversal is also temporary, since cold water will return the victim to his or her cursed status. In the case of Ranma, he's cursed to transform into a girl (hence the title, which means something like "Ranma between two states"), while his father Genma does double-duty as a giant panda.

The shape-shifting antics of the Saotomes naturally provide lots of craziness for the relatively normal Akane to deal with. Neither she nor Ranma agree to their patents' idea of an arranged marriage, but Soun nevertheless invites the Saotomes to be his permanent house-guests. Thus the two teenagers are obliged to interact every day, as well as going to the same high school, and they frequently quarrel as a result, not least because they do have a tentative attraction to one another. Ranma is more often the source of the quarrels, for his upbringing as an itinerant martial artist have made him into a bantam rooster who views every confrontation as an excuse for a fight. Further, while Genma isn't particularly put out by his periodic transformations into a panda, Ranma's masculine ego is perpetually injured by his assumption of female physicality. His male mentality is never altered by his transformation, and one could hypothesize that his many years of training have atrophied his sexual instincts. Whereas URUSEI's male lead Ataru could think of nothing but chasing girls, Ranma is even less practiced than Akane at dealing with the opposite sex. Often he needles Akane about her looks, acting more like a twelve-year old than a boy of about seventeen, and yet he's immediately threatened if another male makes up to Akane. As for Akane, whenever any competition arises-- and Ranma, despite his lack of manners, attracts a lot of other girls-- she responds by violently beating up Ranma, who refuses to fight back out of a sense of chivalry.

I won't explore every incident in "A Bad Cut," which includes introducing two of Ranma's frequent foes and sexual competitors, Tatewaki Kuno and Ryoga Hibiki. It's during one of Ranma's wild fights with Ryoga that Akane's long hair gets sliced off by one of Ryoga's weapons.

Despite her masculine aggressiveness, this attack on one of her feminine attributes strikes Akane hard. Takahashi then uses flashbacks to show how as a child Akane formed a crush on a handsome local twenty-something physician, given the winsome name "Doctor Tofu." However, even as a kid Akane notices how besotted Tofu is with Kasumi, who, for her part, seems oblivious. The child-Akane lets her hair grow out in the vain hope of attracting Tofu when she's old enough, making him something of a father-imago for her.

In the intervening years, apparently Tofu never works up enough courage to disclose his feelings to Kasumi, and his character quickly disappears from the RANMA narrative, given that he served his purpose by providing Akane with an early crush-object. Clearly Takahashi found in Tofu a means to intimate the existence of Akane's normal feminine instincts, which then had to be directed toward a more appropriate boy her own age. The accidental cutting of her hair, brought about by the aggressive behavior of boys, allows Akane to "get over" her childhood crush, and although her relationship with Ranma remains fractious for the rest of the series, it's from this point on that the reader's been assured of the continuance of the "dueling lovebirds" theme for the rest of the series.

Significantly, about a year later Takahashi does get around to bringing a female character who strongly resembles Lum in being a powerful "alien" figure" the Chinese Amazon Shampoo. Though Ranma never makes love to any of the women who pursue him-- being, in his way, faithful to Akane despite her constant suspicions-- Shampoo, with her greater martial skills and her exotic sexiness, seems the greatest threat to the main romantic relationship. But Shampoo never has any of Lum's charming qualities, thus assuring that she's really no danger to the romance at all.