MYTHCOMICS: "THE TALE OF THE CLAWS OF ATHENS" (UNICO, 1978?)

I copied these scans from a 2013 edition of the eight stories Osamu Tezuka completed for his series UNICO, about a hapless little unicorn consigned to travel from era to era, where he solves the problems of innocents like himself. Without further information, I assume that the translated stories are unaltered from the 1976-79 originals, aside from translation choices and the addition of color. 

While I've reviewed some of Tezuka's more ambitious works here, UNICO is a serial devoted to one overarching plotline that loosely unites eight done-in-one stories. Of those stories, only one satisfies my criteria for a mythcomic, so I'll devote most of my critique to the tale with the odd title CLAWS OF ATHENS.

The structure of the series slightly resembles the American show THE TIME TUNNEL, in which the protagonists were thrust into a new environment in every episode. Venus, the Greek goddess of love, resents the way the locals value the younger deity Psyche over her, and Psyche thinks that Psyche's power stems from having a pet unicorn, Unico. Venus calls upon the West Wind, telling the spirit to transport the young unicorn to another era, where Psyche can never find her pet. In whatever era Unico appears, he loses his memory of all past events, recollecting only his name and the fact that his magical powers are enhanced whenever someone shows Unico kindness and/or love. And every time Unico finishes helping some marginalized person-- or trying to, at least-- the West Wind shows up and transports the unicorn to his next adventure. Only in the last one is suggested that Unico may be able to be reunited with Psyche.

CLAWS is interesting in that though it invokes the story of the Sphinx and her riddle, almost nothing about the associated Oedipus narrative proves important. Unico gets deposited in a desert where the Sphinx dwells. (Possibly Tezuka was thinking more about the Thebes in Egypt than the one where the Sophocles play transpires.) The monstrous female tries to subject the amnesia-stricken child to questions, but the exhausted Unico simply collapses. The Sphinx interprets this failure as her victory and takes the unicorn to her lair to feed to her only offspring, Piro. 

Piro doesn't care for meat and lets Unico go. However, Unico gets turned around in the desert and ends up back at the lair. The unicorn learns that in his absence, the sage Oedipus accepted the Sphinx's challenge. He correctly guessed the answer to the riddle and used the wish he won to slay the Sphinx. (In some Greek stories the monster kills itself, but apparently there are variants wherein Oedipus does the dirty deed.) On the verge of death, the Sphinx asks Unico to help Piro become a healthy, powerful Sphinx.

Oedipus is mentioned in passing once more, but CLAWS is all about Piro's pedagogical journey, the "claws" symbolizing the young monster's ability to be aggressive. Unico, despite his own youth, is a pretty severe taskmaster, but Piro is dilatory and self-indulgent. 

Then we finally learn why Tezuka worked in a reference to Athens, because the bulk of the story from then on is a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. We never see Athens itself, only "Athens Forest," where the elf queen Titania reigns with her husband Oberon. Titania wants to make Piro her pet, and when Unico puts his spade in, the queen gets her henchman Puck to trap the busybody unicorn. With Unico out of the way, Piro gives in to his worst instincts, inflated with self-importance.

Even while Unico is out of the picture, though, Oberon meets Piro and gives the Sphinx the same message Unico, telling him to "make yourself stronger." Humiliated, Piro tells Titania that he wants to leave, and she places on him the curse of Bottom in the Bard's play: making an ass of him. Oberon, tired of his wife's high-handed ways, gets into a fight with her. Meanwhile, ass-Piro seeks out Unico. Unico tells him to fetch an axe from a nearby mortal's cabin, but not to touch anything else. Once again Piro's self-indulgence gets the better of him; he filches some of the mortal's food gets captured and sold to a donkey-skinner.

Unico makes a deal with Puck, and the elf frees the unicorn. However, before they can find Piro, the West Wind obeys one of Venus' chimerical orders and comes to transport Unico to another realm. To the unicorn's good fortune, night is about to fall, and the Night Wind's power trumps that of the West Wind.

Puck gets the ides to run an impersonation scam on Oberon, so that he'll cancel out Titania's spell. Much Midsummer's tomfoolery ensues, but Titania finally removes the spell. Restored to Sphinx-hood, Piro finally stands up for himself against a pack of savage dogs. Having at last honored the wishes of his mother, Piro also plans to build a great statue to her-- but then the West Wind returns and spirits Unico away to his next exploit.

The rest of the stories in the collection are all good melodrama, but CLAWS is the only one where Tezuka manages to work a good epistemological pattern into his very eclectic approach to three unrelated narratives.

MYTHCOMICS: "WOMEN HOWLING AT THE MOON" (FUUSUKE, 1969)

Osamu Tezuka became widely associated, in both his own country and in others, with squeaky-clean (usually) kids' entertainment. But he had attempted more adult works even before his ASTRO BOY breakout, such as 1949's METROPOLIS. And toward the end of the 1960s, the God of Manga became increasingly involved in manga with pronounced sexual content.

FUUSUKE is a minor work, consisting of eleven installments in the life of the title character. There's no real continuity between the stories, a few of which take place back in Japan's feudal era. The only point the tales have in common is to show the hapless Fuusuke getting humiliated, like a "salaryman" version of Dagwood Bumstead. But for all Dagwood's ignominies, at least he didn't have his sexual capacities trashed. True, everything that happens in the one mythic FUUSUKE story, "Women Howling at the Moon," happens within the main character's dream. But Tezuka wasn't describing , Jules Feiffer-style, the shortcomings of one protagonist, but of the male sex generally, at least in 1969 Japan.

Fuusuke's dream imagines that Earth's hunger for the commodity of "moon rocks" following the 1969 lunar landing results in the strip-mining of Luna. Though the second panel gives us the image of the moon-rocket as penis, it's Earth's vaginas that are empowered by increased lunar radiation. (Tezuka's explanation of the moon's increased shininess oddly invokes an image associated with male aging.) Tezuka also loosely references the moon's much storied influence upon women's periods, though he doesn't sustain the allusion.

The lunar radiation has a pronounced effect on women (possibly in the rest of the world too, though Japanese life alone is spotlighted).  The females of the species become endlessly horny on full-moon nights, so much so that they not only attack their husbands, but any males they can find. To Fuusuke's immense aggravation, he seems to be the one Japanese male that none of these rapacious women will bother with. Meanwhile, women everywhere celebrate their newfound sexual freedom, just as if moonshine had taken the place of the Pill.

Though it's impossible to gauge passage of time in Fuusuke's jumbled dream-world, things swiftly escalate from isolated attacks to hordes of women attacking the police forces. Moreover, in a move that seems counter-intuitive, some females become "black widow" cannibals. Not surprisingly, Tezuka is careful not to include any references to the fate of Japanese children amid all this hullabaloo, but then, it is a dream, so excluding real-world stuff is logical.

One of Fuusuke's comrades avers that "none of this would have happened if men hadn't become so weak." This sentiment is echoed by the ending, in which, just before the protagonist wakes up, he's being lauded as the only male immune to being ravaged, though only because of his unexplained total lack of sex appeal. Tezuka's final word is, "This is the sad dream that the most unpopular men in the world have to comfort themselves."

But this isn't the final word according to the dynamics of the story. Tezuka certainly puts a lot more effort into elaborating his sex-scenario than he needed to simply explain Fuusuke's sexual alienation-- especially since the dream doesn't really "explain" anything. 

Traditional "the fox and the grapes" rationalizations usually follow some pattern of criticizing the tastes of the opposite sex-- women are superficially attracted to money, social position, good looks or displays of macho physicality. But the Moon-Howlers display no discrimination whatever. None of the victimized men are better looking than Fuusuke, and there's nothing to mitigate the opinion of Fuusuke's friend, that all Japanese men have become weak. And what do money or social position matter, since the women aren't forcing their conquests into marriage, and at least some of those conquests end up in a cook-pot?

In the Howlers' near-total lack of discrimination, they resemble the male of the species, who constantly want sex with any available female. Western culture, in fact, compares horny men to another creature known for howling at the moon: the venerable Canis Lupus. It's just as simplistic to say "rape is only about power" as it is to say "rape is only about sex," but clearly ravishment depends upon some power differential. Does the weakness of Japanese men trigger the Moon-Howlers to assume the role of rapacious males? Tezuka doesn't precisely say this, but claiming that lunar radiation makes women want to kill and devour their mates recalls a remark attributed to Simone Weil: that male rapists physically dominating women prior to sex is comparable to a butcher "tenderizing" meat.

The reason for Fuusuke's exclusion is a joke without a punchline. He's certainly not being excluded because he's bad breeding material, because the Moon-Howlers are utterly unconcerned with breeding, There's no answer to Fuusuke's existential question in the dream as such, but there's the suggestion of a clue in Tezuka's invocation of the menstrual cycle. Accepting the generalization that the cycle can be distinguished into two main phases-- the follicular, which encourages female horniness, and the luteal, which discourages sexual responsiveness-- then the Moon-Howlers seem to enter the follicular stage whenever they stalk Japanese men. Only Fuusuke, for whatever unknown reason, shifts them into the luteal phase, in which his mere presence "switches them off." 

"Moon's" image of rapacious women finds an echo in his next-year work APOLLO'S SONG. In this more developed work, Tezuka focuses on a young male who's just the opposite of Fuusuke-- being a more traditional aggressive male-- but who is still utterly trammeled by female influences that leave him "cut off at the knees," or some similar compromise of his masculinity.

NEAR-MYTHS: METROPOLIS (1949)

As a prelude to reviewing the animated movie made from this 1949 Osamu Tezuka work, I read the online scans of the comic. According to available histories, METROPOLIS was one of a trio of science-fiction works Tezuka produced prior to making his major breakthroughs with more popular fare like JUNGLE EMPEROR LEO and ASTRO BOY.

In his commentary Tezuka avers that in that period he did not see the silent Fritz Lang classic of the same name, but that he was impressed by a still showing a scene in which the robotic Maria leads the discontented citizens against the leaders of Metropolis. I can well believe that the mangaka took no more inspiration from Lang, because there are no plot-similarities between the two works. Tezuka's 160-page "graphic novel" is certainly one of the first times the artist tuned into the dramatic possibilities of robots with human feelings, which concern would later lead to the artist's success with Astro Boy. 

In the aforementioned commentary, Tezuka also says that he, as much as Lang, modeled his super-city on the megalopolises of the United States, particularly New York. The early scenes of METROPOLIS don't dwell on the city's system of government, as did Lang's film, but they do display a great deal of wit in depicting a Babel-like confusion of voices of those who live there-- talking of, among other things, a dangerous revolutionary gang, the Red Party. After a brief look at the citizens, though, Tezuka narrows his focus to a scientific conference, also filled with a Babel of natterings, and then discards this trope in favor of depicting two of the opposed powers that will bring forth the novel's robotic protagonist. One is "good father" Doctor Lawton, who has invented a type of synthetic cell with which to build an android, and the other is "bad father" Duke Red, scheming leader of the Red Party, who wants Lawton's android to be a superhuman pawn. (Tezuka claims that he hadn't read Superman in 1949, but it's hard to believe that he didn't at least know the rudiments of that character's appeal.) 

By authorial coincidence, one of the Duke's plans-- using a rare elements to create black spots on the sun-- enhances the viability of Lawton's artificial cells. When the super-criminal finds this out, he's even more insistent that the scientist create a super-android for the Red Party. Lawton does create an android in the form of a young boy, but then creates a conflagration, making it look as though he Lawton and his creation are destroyed. Duke Red drops the project and goes on about his business, which largely seems to be enjoying the trouble caused by his sunspots: mainly that of mutating normal animals to turn into giants. (These include rats that end up looking like man-sized versions of Mickey Mouse.) But Lawton escapes with his android and raises him as his child, naming him Michi (like Mickey?). The scientist also keeps his faux-son ignorant of the fact that he possesses the powers of flight and super-strength, or that, more oddly, he can shift from male to female if an area of his throat is touched in the right way. 

Inevitably, Michi's powers are exposed, and Duke Red comes calling. Lawton is killed, but his associate Detective Mustachio takes over, acting in loco parentis toward the android boy, though still not telling him of his origins. Eventually Michi finds out his true nature, partly due to his interaction with children his own "age."  At one point the Red Party tracks down Michi, but one of the android's friends activates the sex-change device, and the thugs are fooled. But despite many sorties between Mustachio and the Duke, eventually the revolutionary tries to gain control of Michi. 

Michi then goes berserk, and usurps the Duke's control of an army of robots in order to defeat not just the Duke, but all humanity. The city is rocked by Michi's invasion, but the embittered robot boy is defeated by his own biology. Around the same time as the attack, agents of the government destroy the device with which Duke Red made black spots on the sun. Thus Michi's cells degrade because the black spots no longer exist. After he perishes, humankind mourns for the misunderstood artificial human and regrets the Frankensteinian excesses of science.

Tezuka's fertile imagination is consistently impressive, but the parts of METROPOLIS don't cohere into a pleasing whole. Support-character Mustachio takes up so much space that Michi never becomes a compelling central character. As noted earlier Duke Red's schemes seem quite haphazard, as he never seems to take advantage of the chaos caused by his black-spot scheme, and he apparently makes his army of robots just so that they'll be around for Michi to subvert. Neither the sociological nor cosmological themes are explored with any depth, much less the notion of the robot boy's bisexuality. Later Tezuka would get better mileage out of the latter theme in the PRINCESS KNIGHT stories, while Astro Boy's adventures would offer a much stronger central hero. Thus METROPOLIS the graphic novel, while entertaining, is largely significant as a repository of tropes that the "God of Manga" would later exploit to much better effect.

Minor point: at one point METROPOLIS seems to guest-star the redoubtable detective Sherlock Holmes, but the revelation that "Holmes" is just Duke Red in disguise disallows the narrative from crossover-status.

MYTHCOMICS: CAPTAIN KEN (WEEKLY SHONEN SUNDAY, 1960-61)

I hope to slowly work my way through the early works of Osamu Tezuka in quest of mythcomics, since the only ones I've mentioned thus far have stemmed from the latter part of his career. So far I've found nothing in the corpus of his most famous creation, ASTRO BOY, which his PRINCESS KNIGHT works didn't quite make my cut. But CAPTAIN KEN, a "space western" from 1960, proves a happy exception. This essay makes heavy use of--

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I don't have any knowledge of Tezuka's no-doubt-complex feelings toward American culture, given that it was the source of many of the early comics that influenced him, yet also spawned the atomic bomb with which American forces humbled the martial might of Japan. I doubt that he set down any thoughts about one of the most archetypal genres of America, the western, but in CAPTAIN KEN the artist managed to produce a commentary on the genre that may offer a reconciliation of both good and bad sentiments.

According to a prologue, uttered by a member of the Martian race (the "Indians" of the story), the first Earthlings to colonize Mars in 1983 were Americans, and so these are the people who institute the wholesale slaughter and enslavement of the natives for several generations to come. However, the prologue also mentions a single Earthling who saves the Martian race. American westerns had their share of "savior-figures" who sought to save Native Americans from a dire fate, however temporarily, and in modern politics these are deemed as bad juju for not allowing the Indians to save themselves, or something like that. Long before this political trope evolved, Tezuka dodged this particular bullet by making his savior-hero a member of a marginalized community on Mars: Japanese colonists, who have become part and parcel of American's Westernization of the Martian environment.

Mamoru, who fills the part of a viewpoint character for the work's early chapters, has lived on Mars all his life, though Tezuka is careful to point out that some if not all Japanese emigrants still esteem the culture of their society on Earth. Mamoru is attacked by hostile Martian tribes known as "the Moro," but he's saved by a strange young man known as Captain Ken, accompanied by Arrow, his resourceful robot horse. Mamoru assumes that the so-called captain is a distant relative who's expected to visit Mamoru's family, but the young man disappears. When Mamoru gets home, he finds that the actual traveler, a young woman named Kenn Minakami, has appeared at his family's house. Since she looks to be the spitting image of Captain Ken, but says she has no siblings or similar relatives, Mamoru wonders if Ken and Kenn are one and the same.

Tezuka keeps this suspicion going for several chapters, probably encouraging readers to believe that he Tezuka was mining the same tropes he'd used with PRINCESS KNIGHT, wherein a young woman masqueraded as a male for fight for justice. I'll spoil the big reveal right now: Captain Ken is the time-traveling son of the adult woman that Kenn will later become, which explains the resemblance. Ken's mission will also be revealed late in the series, and once the reader knows it, it may seem somewhat counter-intuitional for the hero to run around fighting assorted menaces that don't have anything to do with his main mission.

Still, on some level Tezuka wanted his readers to invest in a traditional Western protagonist, who does not hesitate to stand up for what's right, even when most of the people in his culture have become corrupt. So Ken, with or without help from the locals, opposes the town's corrupt mayor, his rowdy son Double, the gunfighter Lamp and a mysterious supercriminal named Napoleon. He also champions the insect-like Moro against the ruthless exploiters from Earth, and bonds with a female Moro named Papillon (French for "butterfly"). Despite the fact that they are of different species, Tezuka strongly implies that Papillon cherishes erotic feelings for Ken, though the hero does not notice her lovelorn nature and remains focused on his general mission.

After several peripatetic adventures, some of which find ingenious ways for the hero to interact with the Martian environment, the Moro launch a major offensive against the Earthlings. This pushes the Earthling president-- who is actually the criminal Napoleon-- to launch a solar bomb designed to wipe out the Martians, with all the settlers as collateral damage. Around the same time, Ken reveals to Mamoru his true origins: that he comes from another time-line in which the solar bomb went off and caused his mother, Kenn Minakami, to suffer awful delayed-reaction symptoms. Utilizing a convenient time machine, Ken and his robot horse travel back to the earlier phase of Martian history to undo the injury to Ken's mother. This mission also dovetails with saving the Martian race from extinction, but given Ken's democratic treatment of the natives, the two goals seem coterminous in terms of justice rather than mutually exclusive. Ken, accompanied by Papillon in what might be read as a "love-death," sacrifices his life to avert the solar bomb. His mother Kenn never knows what her son is destined to do, but Mamoru does, and by story's end it's clear that Mamoru is destined to marry Kennn and become the father of the doomed hero.

Like many time-travel paradoxes, one is not meant to poke at the dominos too much. If in the new reality Kenn never suffers the solar bomb's effects, then does Ken have any motive to go back in time and change reality? Does he go back at all, and if he doesn't, does the original reality re-assert itself? The time-travel part of the story is CAPTAIN KEN's least interesting aspect. A note from Tezuka in the manga's second observes that the artist's readers didn't quite know what to make of this space-western, with the result that CAPTAIN wasn't as popular as other contemporaneous works. Perhaps those Japanese readers weren't quite ready to grapple with the trope of the Western hero, an idealized hero who was meant to redeem the misdeeds of his own culture in the name of higher justice.

The 2014 English-language reprints of the manga also include a disclaimer about Tezuka's representations of race. Maybe this was a boilerplate they prepared for other works in which Tezuka made use of caricatures now considered politically incorrect, but there are no such images in CAPTAIN KEN, unless one is triggered by the idea of the insect-Martians being compared to real Native Americans.

NEAR MYTHS: PRINCESS KNIGHT (1953/1963) and THE TWIN KNIGHTS (1958)

Though I'm obliged to judge certain stories to be relatively undeveloped in terms of their mythicity, that doesn't mean that they aren't necessarily of societal consequence.

Take as example Osamu Tezuka's PRINCESS KNIGHT series, which began in 1953, was reworked at least three times (the 1963 version is apparently the one translated by Vertical Inc.), and given one sequel, THE TWIN KNIGHTS, about the two children of the previous series' heroine. Fred Schodt attested that before PRINCESS KNIGHT-- as the manga-series became known in the U.S.-- Japanese shojo ("girls' comics) lacked the narrative drive of the boys' comics. The franchise's entry on Wikipedia is full of many other such accolades as to the series' importance to fans, and I included a short writeup on the character here.That said, the 1963 version is extremely episodic, and I suspect that the earliest version may have rambled about even more.

If PRINCESS KNIGHT is known at all to audiences outside of both Japan and the world of hardcore comics-devotees, it's only from the 1967 animated adaptation. However, despite running for 52 episodes, PRINCESS KNIGHT did not attain the cult fandom experienced by other anime shows of the period, such as SPEED RACER and Tezuka's own ASTRO BOY.

KNIGHT begins with a strong concept. A mixup in heaven-- a heaven right out of early animation shorts-- causes Princess Sapphire of Goldland to be born with two hearts. Normally every child, even before being born, has his or her gender determined by being given a "boy heart" or a "girl heart," which imbue the child with the fixed qualities of the gender. (In Tezuka's world, then, essence does precede existence, though it will be seen that existence can radically modify essence.) As it happens, Sapphire's dual nature comes in handy, for only a prince can inherit his parents' throne. The king and queen of Goldland agree to conceal Sapphire's physical femininity and pass her off to the kingdom as a boy-- which is easier than one might expect, since Sapphire's "boy heart" gives her a macho fortitude rarely seen in average females.

That said, Tezuka is writing to a largely female audience, so he doesn't entirely want to alienate them from their desires-- whether socially created or not-- to like "girly things." Thus Sapphire is constantly alienated by her inability to do girl-things like wearing pretty dresses-- suggesting that the "girl heart," the one in tune with her actual body, is the one in ascendance.

Yet the fantasy of being able to do "boy things" is ever-present. At one point, the bumbling angel Tink succeeds in removing Sapphire's "boy heart" from her body, which will enable her to live as a full-fledged female. However, Sapphire happens to be engaged in a deadly swordfight at the time, and losing her "boy heart" saps her of her fortitude. Tink has to return that heart to her so that she can win her battle. To be sure, this isn't pure gender essentialism at work. Later in the story Sapphire loses her "male nature" and seems to win her battles as easily without it as with it-- which is where the matter of existence modifying essence comes in.

The downside of this promising concept is that Tezuka has too many irons in the fire to allow for a strong symbolic discourse. It would be contrary to my task as a myth-critic to assert that any author ought to bulldoze over his expressivity in order to accommodate some didactic theme. But I suspect Tezuka plotted PRINCESS KNIGHT somewhat on the fly, without much thought as to what was going to happen overall. Throughout most of the early chapters of this version, Sapphire's most persistent foe-- aside from courtiers who want to dethrone her-- is a witch named Madame Hell. I couldn't find an image of what she looked like in the 1953 version. But given Tezuka's stories love for all things Disney, there's not much serious doubt that the 1963 version was modeled on "Maleficent" from the 1959 animated classic SLEEPING BEAUTY. Not only does the Good Madame have the supernatural power to manifest huge thorned plants as did Maleficent, Hell even perishes in almost the same way: transforming herself into a huge beast-- this time a monstrous owl rather than a dragon-- only to be killed by a prince. Madame Hell is even more overtly affiliated with the Christian Devil, while Maleficent merely looks devilish and makes an oblique reference to "the powers of hell."

Unfortunately, Tezuka kills off Madame Hell too soon, so that for the remaining chapters he must introduce a new opponent out of the blue. Madame Hell was an indirect threat to Sapphire's relationship with her true love Prince Franz Charming, in that Hell wanted the prince to marry her daughter so that the latter would become a queen. However, this relatively mundane motivation hurt the Bad Madame's potential to be a superior villain, and once both she and her daughter perished, Tezuka had to introduce a new "Big Bad." For the final chapters of the series, the goddess Venus herself falls in love with Franz and wants to steal him from Sapphire-- thus making her the worst kind of "bad mother:" the kind that poaches on the younger generation.

I could imagine Tezuka having created a truly mythic story had he focused on one or the other of the two major villains, while continuing to use the lesser courtiers as comic foes. However, Sapphire's struggle is vitiated by the serials "and then this happened" approach. In some ways the problematic structure of PRINCESS KNIGHT and certain other Tezuka works, such as APOLLO'S SONG, may stem from the same "problem" one finds in the works of Jack Kirby: both artists were just so damn creative they sometimes overwhelmed their own narratives with "new stuff."

The irony is that a lot of real fairy-tales and romances may tend to ramble as much as PRINCESS KNIGHT does, but one can excuse that, since many of those stories descended from oral cultures.
Still, Tezuka certainly does create in Princess Sapphire a liminal figure with which many Japanese girls obviously did identify. The story is certainly not "ideological correct" enough to please many modern readers, but there are indications that Tezuka was willing to endorse feminist concerns-- at least, as long as they served the purpose of delivering an entertaining story.

TWIN KNIGHTS, on the other hand, is not nearly as wide in its scope. Years after Sapphire marries Franz, she bears twins, a son and daughter, both given flower-names (the boy is "Daisy," the girl "Violetta.") Thanks to the actions of two courtly conspirators-- whose motives are extremely hard to fathom-- the male child is exposed in the forest, only to be raised to adolescence by a magical deer. In Daisy's absence, the king and queen compel Violetta to pose as her brother so that she can take the throne, which means that she has to learn all the demands of being a boy without the advantage of a "boy heart." This is also a very rambling adventure and suffers from the lack of a strong villain. Additionally, Tezuka tosses out loads of flower-metaphors-- there are even two "flower-spirits," brothers who respectively love and hate Violetta-- but none of the symbolism comes together, and even the fated reunion of the siblings is fairly disappointing. KNIGHTS' only saving grace is Emerald, one of Tezuka's gamin-type characters, who exists to help Violetta through her exploits but is actually much more interesting than either sibling.

MYTHIC MANGA

Though contemporary Japanese manga (and its various Asian cousins) can be episodic, they're best known today for their sprawling, multi-chapter story-arcs. I don't have an in-depth knowledge of the development of comics in Japan, though I'm aware that the medium's best-known early exemplar, Osamu Tezuka, varied his approach between generally episodic works (ASTRO BOY) and longer, more involved storylines (PRINCESS KNIGHT). Many manga-serials of the past twenty years have gone even further than Tezuka. Eiichiro Oda's ONE PIECE, initiated in 1997, depicts a fantasy-world replete with enough characters and character-arcs to rival (in quantity at least) the novels of Dickens.

Very few American comic books sought to go beyond purely episodic stories until the mid-1960s, when Marvel began making its storytelling mark. Some of the "long arcs" at Marvel resemble simple film-serial cliffhangers, but others may have been more influenced by the narrative example of American comic strips. This online essay asserts that post-WWII Japan was definitely affected by the importation of newspaper strips, though of course there may a host of other factors that influenced the country's fascination with long, involved story-arcs. It's possible that, while the American comic book remained strongly wedded to the short story, Japan made greater strides in the realization of the "novel in graphic form," simply because they had no preconceptions against the idea.

Now, in earlier essays like this one, I've asserted that narratives have 'had their greatest capacity for mythicity when they possessed the traditional "beginning, middle and end," which worked to maximize a given story's potential for "connotative associations."' However, the majority of "long melodrama" comic strips of the classic period lack the scope of the novel in terms of such associations, because "each of these story-lines is just one narrative arc, without a lot of complementary development," 

I certainly wouldn't say that all of the long multi-chapter arcs in manga are necessarily better developed than those of the best classic American comic strips, but the potential has generally been better realized, perhaps because some Japanese authors have emulated the intricacies of the prose novel. At present ONE PIECE has not yet concluded, so it can't be judged in its entirety, but Oda has often laid down involved plot-threads in one sequence that would not culminate until a much later sequence. Whether or not Oda's execution of those plot-lines proves felicitous or not is a separate matter; he's using novel-like narrative devices that were only very rarely utilized in "long melodrama" comics, with an occasional exception like this DICK TRACY sequence.

This week's mythcomic will be DANCERS IN THE VAMPIRE BUND, which boasts a heady complexity of plot and character. However, the original 14-book sequence of BUND, completed in 2012, was something of a novel-fragment. Two years later, the author came forth with SCARLET ORDER, a four-volume follow-up, which might be loosely regarded as the "end of the novel" (although some plot-threads were not resolved, and were certainly intended as lead-ins to further tales). Despite its heavy fantasy-content, BUND is written largely like a political thriller, and this raised the danger that the author might have created too many characters and story-arcs to allow for a reasonably clear "beginning, middle, and end." However, I'm pleased to see that there is a sense of resolution in SCARLET ORDER, so that I can finally put the series on my list, after having alluded to its potential excellence back in this 2011 quasi-review.

MYTHCOMICS: PHOENIX: A TALE OF THE FUTURE (1967-68)

I have not read all twelve of the translated arcs in Osamu Tezuka's mammoth PHOENIX story-cycle, but they're meant to stand alone, and in fact Tezuka passed away in 1989 without having finished everything he wanted to say on the theme. Possibly, since he viewed the cycle as his life's work, he never would have finished it, even if he'd been given the impossibly long life of certain characters in this 1967-68 arc, which I'll henceforth refer to as FUTURE. Though FUTURE was one of the first arcs that the "God of Manga" completed, it was also chronologically the end of the cycle, in which Tezuka put the earth of 3404 AD through the mill of a great apocalypse, only to deliver on the promise of renewed life afterward.

The author's distant techno-future is a visual feast, though sometimes skimpy on the logical details. Although humankind has mastered space-travel-- two characters are "space patrolmen" and Earth has played host to at least one alien species-- it's not clear whether or not humans have been able to colonize the stars. Regardless, Earth itself has become a desolate place of cold temperatures and windblown terrain. No one can live on Earth's surface, but what remains of the human populace has been crammed into five colossal underground cities. In the city named Yamato-- presumably pioneered by Tezuka's ancestors-- a conflict evolves between three of the narrative's main characters: heroic Masato, his "negative mirror-image" Roc, and the female alien Tamami.

Tamami belongs to the aforementioned alien species, an amoeba-like organism able to (a) transform into any other organic form, and (b) able to beguile humans with hypnotic dreams, so that they can flee their hectic, crowded lives into the idyllic worlds of Earth's past history. But after the shapechangers became popular in Yamato as both pets and lovers, the autocratic computer that rules Yamato commands that all Moopies must be exterminated. Space patrolman Masato is one of those who was obliged to carry out such executions, but somehow he managed to hide Tamami in his own apartment, with the alien using its powers to appear like a normal human relative of the patrolman. However, Masato's superior officer Roc-- who came up with Masato in the ranks, and is therefore about the same age as the hero-- finds out about Tamami, and gives Masato the chance to finish off the last Moopie on Earth. Masato, aware of the penalties in Yamato's rigid society, tries to kill his companion but cannot. The two of them flee to the hostile surface of Earth, with Roc's forces in pursuit.

All that saves Masato and Tamami is that the image of the Phoenix appears to them, leading them to the shelter of eminent scientist Doctor Saruta, one of the few men able to maintain a domed refuge on Earth's surface. In addition, the Phoenix appears to Saruta. The creature represents itself as the living spirit of Earth itself, and urges the doctor to let the fugitives into his home, asserting that they will be necessary to renew the failing life-forces of the Earth.

I won't recount all of the involved plot-developments, except to note that after Roc's expeditionary forces fail, he himself seeks out Saruta's redoubt, because two of the great city-computers have declared war on each other. Soon the three men and the alien woman (the only major female character in FUTURE) are the only intelligent creatures left on Earth. Masato butts heads with both Roc, who covets Tamami's beauty, and Saruta, who wants to use her in his experiments to bring forth new life.

Though Tezuka's cosmological and metaphysical myth-motifs are of great scope in FUTURE, conceptutually they too butt heads. Most of the time Tezuka portrays the rise of new life in strictly materialistic biological terms, reminding one of the "Rite of Spring" sequence in Disney's FANTASIA. The Phoenix, however, claims that both stars and planets are alive in some metaphysical fashion. This would be acceptable if Tezuka were advocating panpsychism. However, the Phoenix can actually pull off a few miracles, like transforming Masato into a nearly immortal man, who oversees the return of life to Earth long after all the other characters have died. Yet, when the ancient Masato beholds a new race of primitive cavemen worshiping their gods, he thinks they're morons for so doing. What?

Tezuka is perhaps at his best with psychological themes, but he's ambivalent here as well. He sides with lovers Masato and Tamami, and their harmless dream-diversion, against the dictates of the city-computer. However, Tezuka seems to be on the side of "the reality factor" when he reveals that Saruta attempted to find emotional comfort with female robots. His arguments here aren't especially consistent, though one can hardly doubt Tezuka's abilities to put over any sentiment with affecting (if often fevered) dramatics.

MYTHCOMICS: APOLLO'S SONG (1970)

APOLLO'S SONG will probably never be on anyone's list of favorite works from Osamu "God of Manga" Tezuka. Indeed, one online resource claims that Tezuka himself didn't like it, partly because it came from his so-called "dark period." Many of the manga from this period reputedly have a nihilistic edge, far from the boundless optimism one finds in his early, often-juvenile works like TETSUWAN ATOM (aka Astro Boy) and RIBON NO KISHI (aka Princess Knight).

SONG is far from a perfect, or even disciplined, work. It's comprised of several disjointed episodes in the life of a 20th-century Japanese delinquent named Shogo Chikashi. Aside from the opening scenes, in which Shogo goes to an asylum and suffers shock therapy to straighten him out, the reader can't be entirely sure that any of the episodes actually occur. In addition, the work is informed by the author's desire to descant on the subject of sex education-- although Tezuka's vision of heterosexual relations seems fraught with a sense of devastating irony, in which all human aspirations are frustrated.

A prequel to Shogo's adventures takes the form of a sex-ed comic. Tezuka projects his imagination into the human female's Fallopian tube, where a few thousand sperm-- drawn as identical male humanoids-- gather to make their race for the personified egg, with whom one lucky sperm will successfully merge. It's one of the few un-ironic moments in the novel.

Shogo, however, isn't exactly the finest exemplar of the human species. He's a confused young man who's been committed on the grounds of his having assaulted small animals, and it soon comes out that he's the result of a slutty mother who gamboled about with many men while barely giving Shogo any maternal attention, beyond beating him from time to time. 

Tezuka's scenario is almost textbook Freud: lack of a positive father-figure and a concupiscent mother mold Shogo into a person almost divorced from feelings. However, instead of a "talking cure," in Tezuka's world the delinquent merits only punishment from a strange goddess-figure with a vaguely Greek appearance; one who appears in his dreams after his first encounter with electro-shock.

Despite the use of the name "Apollo" in the title, and in the story's only direct reference to Greek mythology, Shogo's fate seems modeled after that of a Greek tragic figure like Hippolytus. In the surviving play by Euripides, the titular character is minding his own business, worshiping the chaste goddess Artemis, when the love-goddess Aphrodite decides to make his life miserable by causing his stepmother Phaedra to pursue the young man.

By comparison Hippolytus was lucky: he only suffered one doom, while Shogo undergoes several-- and even by the novel's conclusion, it's stated that his sufferings will go on forever, with no expectation that he can ever break the cycle. To some readers this may seem pretty excessive for a youth whose aberrations are largely the result of adult irresponsibility. However, such a sense of universal injustice would accord perfectly with a masochistic outlook. As I'm not a Tezuka expert, I can't say if such an outlook appears consistently in his work. But in SONG, he certainly seems to be taking pleasure in his protagonist's sufferings.

The first episode, taking place after Shogo is cursed by the goddess, is one of the weakest. Shogo finds himself living in the body of a WWII German soldier, with no real memory beyond the fact that his name is still the very un-German Shogo. He meets a cute young Jewess and tries to set her free from captivity, but both of them are killed by the war's violence.

The next episode takes place after a hospital psychiatrist has hypnotized him. This time Shogo imagines being a Japanese pilot who's stranded on a remote island with a rather uppity Japanese female. The island is also inhabited by an assortment of animals who have formed a community in which none of them devour one another, although they will eat fish from the neighboring sea. Presumably the psychiatrist suggests this scenario because he's trying to force Shogo to relate to the animals that he's come to hate, largely because he can't stand their unconflicted attitude toward sexual fertilization. That said, it's odd that the doctor ends his tale with more death and tragedy.

Then, in a sequence which may or may not be part of the story's base reality, Shogo escapes the hospital. He's spirited away to a secluded mountain resort by a slightly older woman, Hiromi, who isn't interested in seducing him but wants to train him as a long-distance runner. The improbability of this setup is rendered slightly more palatable when it's revealed that Hiromi is also a psychiatrist, who took it upon herself to attempt cuing Shogo with this strange athletic program. At the same time, she's not above tempting Shogo with her feminine charms in order to manage him, and it's strongly suggested that she falls in love with him in the process of trying to heal him. 

This sequence is possibly the most successful in an aesthetic sense: Hiromi incarnates some of the motherly traits that Shogo's actual mother did not have. Yet she's also had a former lover, a fiancee who comes nosing around when he learns about the young man's presence, and this character may represent a deflection of the many fathers that tormented Shogo's life. In addition, she even slaps him a few times, giving her yet another resemblance to Shogo's unnamed female parent.

The interlude with Shogo and Hiromi is interrupted when he's injured, thus precipitating the story's last story. Shogo dreams that he's transported into the far future, at a time when human civilization has been marginalized by artificial, non-reproducing humanoids called "Synthans." Future-Shogo is talked into making an assassination-attempt on Queen Sigma, ruler of the Synthans. To his dismay, this requires him to become a servant in her palace, and this leads her to become intrigued with the human practice of lovemaking. Over the course of time, Sigma and Shogo fall in love for real, amid many SF-tropes involving cloning, artificial body-parts and robotics. Only in this section is there something closer to the passion of drama rather than the futility of irony.

The dream ends, and Shogo is back with Hiromi, though not for long. He soon finds out how he's been played by both Hiromi and the psychiatrist from the asylum.

The psychiatrist's idea of deferring sexual passion through Greek myth bears a moderate resemblance to Hippolytus' rejection of his own amorous potential. Yet it doesn't do either Hiromi or Shogo any good. They both die, and the spirit of Shogo is hauled before the goddess once more. Even though he's experienced genuine love for Hiromi, the goddess tells him that because he has "no faith in love," he will continue to experience "the trials of love" for the rest of existence.

It's possible that the English translation of APOLLO'S SONG misses some of the nuances of the Japanese original. Still, even if the narrative may not be entirely satisfying in any language, I must admit that it's one of the most pervasively pessimistic myths ever committed to a comics-page.