MYTHCOMICS: ZEBRAMAN (2004?)

  In my December review of the 2004 Takashi Miike film ZEBRAMAN, I originally wrote the essay without knowing that a manga version existed, so I attempted a quickie correction when I discovered the manga's existence, saying, "Kankuro Kudo is the scriptwriter of record for the movie, but apparently both he and one Yamada Reiji co-created an earlier ZEBRAMAN manga, which the movie partly adapts, and which I have not read."                                                                                                                                              However, according to the automatic translation of a Japanese-language Wiki, it now appears that the movie came about first-- partly celebrating Miike's career, as it was his 100th feature film-- and that the manga apparently came afterward, ostensibly more the creation of artist Yamada Reiji.                                                                                                                                                                                            'Although the basic setting is borrowed, the story and other aspects are almost original to Yamada. In the movie version, the monsters who appear are "aliens who invaded the Earth", but in the manga version, they are "ordinary people who have been brainwashed because they have darkness in their hearts and have committed evil deeds according to their desires". Even the people who "play" the phantom also have loved ones, and the main character's own feelings and conflicts, which are suffering just like the monsters while playing the hero, and the process of the protagonist reexamining himself through battles and awakening to true family love are depicted more vividly than in the movie version, and the themes of "humanity" and "family ties" are more brought to the forefront.'-- Japanese-language Wiki.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      I'm familiar with the fact that manga serials are sometimes responses to anime serials or to "light novels." On this blog, I've reviewed a couple of manga-serials concocted from such prose novels, such as MAYO CHIKI and ZERO'S FAMILIAR. But now that l have read Yamada's version of ZEBRAMAN, it seems to have been designed to oppose much of the content in the Miike films.                         

 First, as the Wiki-article states, the 2004 Miike movie (like its 2010 sequel) takes the view that Shinichi Ishikawa, forty-something schoolteacher in Yokohama, has idolized the "Zebraman" tv show of his youth without knowing that, all along, he has always lived in a tokusatsu world. By the time Ishikawa reached age forty-two, alien influences abound so much that bizarre entities are spawned, many of whom are strange recapitulations of monsters from the tv show. The same ET phenomenon confers special powers upon Ishikawa, allowing him to become Zebraman and combat the evil aliens. But in the manga, there are no genuine aliens, only human beings who dress up in weird costumes. Some have odd resources, such as hypnotism. but that's the extent of the metaphenomenality here.         

                                                                                            

 Ishikawa's contempt from his family is about the same as what the movie depicts, with a son who finds his father lame, a wife who cheats on Ishikawa with a younger man, and a daughter who signals some weird Oedipal issues by sleeping around with older men. Yamada alters the dynamic between the teacher and his daughter, though, by showing that as a child Midori idolized her father and wanted to marry him. Ishikawa encounters Midori while he's dressed as Zebraman, though when the unwitting hero encounters his first opponent, he ends up saving another teenaged female victim from the TV-monster "Crabjack." Yamada doesn't pursue the psychological trope of "knight rescuing damsel" to any transgressive conclusions, though, because the author wants to build upon the film's suggestion that Ishikawa may get the chance to choose between his bad real family and a potential new one.                             

  Ishikawa's relationship to Shinpei, a "better son" to take the place of the real one, stays roughly the same, and the manga even keeps a version of the scene in which Shinpei overcomes the mental block that keeps him in a wheelchair. But Yamada builds up the character of Kana, Shinpei's mother, to the extent that now she's Ishikawa's childhood girlfriend, the "good wife" to take the place of the unfaithful one-- who's never particularly sympathetic, despite the gospel of forgiveness put forth in the late chapters.                             

                                                

Crabjack is like Zebraman, is really a forty-something man in a costume. This serial killer, Kitahara, has been dating if not definitely screwing Midori, and he finally decides to massacre her like his previous victims. Zebraman saves his daughter and eventually regains her respect, but Kitahara introduces a new wrinkle not in the film: that he goes after sinful young women because he himself possesses a young daughter he believes to be pure-- which comes up again in later chapters. Kitahara also tells Zebraman that he thinks they both come from "the Galactic Church," founded by a mystery man named "Gray." Yamada will build up the contrast between the opposed "black and white" of the Zebraman-ethos and that of Gray.         

                                                                                                       For brevity's sake I'll pass over the next sequence, which more or less duplicates the Midori sequence, but with a killer named "ScorpioDahmer," who preys upon on unfaithful wives, yet targets both the bad wife Sayako and the good potential wife Kana. Toward the sequence's end, though, Kana introduces the ethic of forgiveness that Zebraman will articulate later.                      

ETHOLOGICAL ASIDE

Here's a section of an online argument I had with an atheist poster who, as the final section explains, attempted to claim that early humans evolved "ethics" without any input from the abstractions of religion. Hope it makes sense on its own, which I preserve here for the possibility of further development. ______________________________________                                                        Animals of many species have demonstrated at least the possibility of very elementary reasoning processes. We know that ants use tools, as with transporting liquids. Did they reason, "if I do this thing with this thing X will happen," or did they just stumble across something that worked? We don't know. But in that case, as with the case of male lions murdering other lions' offspring, we're talking about observing possible consequences in the near future. Lions might not be able to articulate: "if I leave the lioness' other cubs alive, the lioness won't have milk for my cubs." But it's a zero sum game that a lion might observe, not any more abstract that making plans to find food. We know that cougars cache their excess of food, which also indicates some sense of future outcomes, though some have argued that the animals don't retain the memory of their caches very long. My earlier example of large rats giving in to smaller rats while in wrestling-play applies here too: it doesn't take abstraction for the big rat to figure out that he has to give a little to get a little. ALL of these examples depend on time-sensitive observations imbued with self-interest. But it takes abstract correlation of many factors to make the conclusion, "Hey, my cubs with a strange lion came out good and the cubs with my sister didn't; ergo, better avoid incest." It's particularly counter-intuitive because offspring with relations don't ALWAYS show immediate physical flaws. Maybe some primates *might* make some such connections, but if so we're getting back into the deep end of the brain-pool. Your concept of animals forming societies through an "ethics" based on acceptable/non-acceptable behavior is also predicated with pre-cognitive reasoning processes. I brought up the lack of strong incest avoidance in lower animals to show one of the places where humans diverged from animals, to give an example of an ethical conclusion founded in abstract conceptualizing. We know that in modern times tribal-level humans correlate their incest injunctions with their religious beliefs, so it's not a giant leap to theorize a parallel development in prehistoric eras. So again, your attempt to segregate "ethics" from "religion" is a dogmatic belief that isn't even justified by available anthropological and ethological evidence.    

TAKING STOCK OF 2024

 I've mentioned in previous year-summaries that I've been sharing some of my essays on the comics-site BLEEDING FOOL. My most ambitious project for 2024 was an essay-series entitled HEROES BY THE HUNDREDFOLD: 100 BEST COSTUMED-CRUSADER FILMS, based on one of the categories I've been regularly exploring on the GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA blog. The final section finished up in December 2024 here, and the series of course has received thunderous acclaim. ***JUST KIDDING.*** But it was an enjoyable undertaking, worth doing for its own sake. It gave me a chance to exercise my ability to suss out superhero movies with respect to other potentialities than the kinetic one for which the public knows them. The essay-series is partly a response to the anti-superhero polemic of Martin Scorsese, last addressed here.                                                                                                                                   Meanwhile, back at the ARCHIVE, my most challenging project was probably to define the nature of literary (as opposed to real) evil in the EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD series, beginning here. This occasioned a small return to the poetics of Bataille, which might spawn some future ruminations down the road. Second on that list would be the formulations on my category of "magical fantasy stories," using the conceptual framework of Mircea Eliade to arrive at a concept of a pure magical fantasy in contrast to those rendered impure by intrusions of modernity, or non-magical nonsense-concepts. Though I've seen a fair number of critical studies that privilege the appearance of magical fantasy in archaic societies, I think MIND OUT OF TIME PT 2 might be unique in stating that the archaic society is part of the equation that allows for conviction in the magical rationale.                                                                                                                                                                                                           The "phase shift" is probably the only significant term introduced in 2024. I furthered some of my investigations on durability, ravishment, and ontology, any of which may breed more involved ruminations later on.                                                                                                                                                                                                   I produced in 2024 a handful of overviews of either serials or concepts. My examination of the Lovecraft "mythos stories" was tabled for other projects, but hopefully I'll finish it up this year. I provided a fairly detailed analysis of Chic Young's BLONDIE here, as a means of providing context for the particular type of "sadism in domesticity" myth I've found in that franchise. In contrast to Young, who found his metier with BLONDIE and stuck with that strip until his passing, the manga-artist Nanashi brought his serial NAGATORO to a conclusion in 2024, and though I wasn't satisfied with the serial's conclusion in every respect, I noted here that the artist's determination to bring closure to his teen-romance brought forth Nanashi's only mythopoeic narrative, which is no small feat since his dominant focus was upon the dramatic potentiality.                                                                                                                            In addition to the Nagatoro and Blondie "1001 myths" entries, I also particularly enjoyed working on those for Tezuka's UNICO, Nagai's KAMASUTRA, a Binder MARY MARVEL tale, Druillet's DELIRIUS, another wacky WONDER WOMAN from Marston, and one of Gardner Fox's classic sensawunda tales for ADAM STRANGE. No new non-fiction reads in 2024 that really set my brain afire, but there were some worthy new fiction reads, like the original Pinocchio, and the Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden, which I started reviewing here. It's not that I didn't keep busy reading various new works in my three book-groups, but there just wasn't all that much I could build upon, aside from my observations on Dotoyevsky's NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND. I suppose I'm glad I read Wyndham's TRIFIDS, Rohmer's GREEN EYES OF BAST, and Barker's SCARLET GOSPELS even though I found all of them not-as-mythic as I could have wished. In addition to my long-form attempts to suss out the Lovecraft mythos, I probably put in the most effort to explicate both Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST and LeFanu's CARMILLA.                                                                                                                                                                                       Over on the NUM blog, I like to think I elucidated some interesting myth-tropes (even if sub-concrescent ones). Some reviews of possible interest: WATCHMEN (2009), HIS NAME WAS HOLY GHOST (1972), TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS (1968), LITTLE MISS INNOCENCE (1973), THE THRONE OF FIRE (1983), THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1940), WANDA THE SADISTIC HYPNOTIST (1969), CUTIE HONEY (2004), SUPERMAN VS. THE ELITE (2012), THE BLACK SWAN (1942), LUPIN III: FUJIKO'S LIE (2020), THE FISH WITH EYES OF GOLD (1974), HEY, GOOD LOOKIN' (1982), INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), GHASTLY PRINCE ENMA, BURNING UP! (2011), and, just to round out the year with something I'd been seeking for some time (but didn't want to pay for on streaming), THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU (1980). Though I also completed a good number of series-reviews, there wasn't much to explicate in GOTHAM, THE TICK, INVINCIBLE, or even STARGIRL, though I very much liked the latter show providing a final decent three-season run in marked contrast to the horrible idiocies of so many other CW shows. There was more to analyze in the six seasons of XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS, though also a lot of formula junk to sort through there. TEEN TITANS probably was more rewarding in terms of providing more fair and good stuff to offset the weak sauce. I also finished Season 2 of SMALLVILLE, but who knows when I'll find time to do individual show-critiques of the later seasons.                                                                                                                                                        So Year 2024 offered quite a bit of variety, and maybe 2025 will at least keep pace. I would be remiss not to mention one dominating political event: the re-election of Donald Trump. Though I believe none of the fervid fantasies of the Far Left as to his assumption of power, I also don't believe that the next four years will be smooth sailing, as Trump's adherents imagine. He's going to mess up on one thing or the other, maybe several things. But the change was necessary, because the Democrat Party had just become such a polluted mess, and I think that no matter badly Trump does in some particulars, the alternative would have been far worse-- though of course, no one will ever truly know what might have been. We will be living in interesting times, to be sure.