Kids Comics Roundtable: Get Away, Fuzzy

A year and a half ago, I wrote a review of a Get Fuzzy anthology for the Comics Journal. Somehow, though, it got lost in the ether that is email, and so it never got published. Thus rejected, it has come here to the blog to find a home.

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I’m Ready For My Movie Contract
Darby Conley
Andrews McMeel Publishing
128 pages/B&W
$10.95/softcover
978-0-7407-6922-1

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy is, as the strip itself mentions several times, an almost indecently faithful Garfield clone. As in Garfield, there’s a mean, domineering cat (Bucky); a dumb, sweet dog (Satchel); and a nerdy, vaguely artsy owner (Rob.) And also as in Garfield, the animals are sentient, but not quite adult — sort of a cross between pets and small children. Rob even carries Bucky around in a Baby Bjorn.

There are a couple of differences from Jim Henson’s franchise. First, Bucky’s a Siamese, which (for a Siamese owner such as myself) is automatic bonus points. And, perhaps more importantly, Conley has dispensed with most of the ossified Garfield gags. Bucky isn’t fat, he doesn’t care about Mondays, and he doesn’t eat lasagna. Instead, he yearns to consume monkeys, engages in credit card fraud, and is terrified of beavers. Or, as he puts it, “They curse all that is good! They curse all that is wholesome! I tell you, beavers are evil!”

The double entendre makes that a good bit funnier than it’s meant to be, of course. Similarly, the high point of the book is a misprinted sequence in which Satchel mouths an empty speech bubble, Rob says, “On the same monkey,” and then we get a close up of some sort of bizarre test pattern with an Indian chief’s head in the middle. The nicest thing about these bloopers is that they’re really not all that far removed from the spirit of the strip as a whole. Conley must have done a lot of weed at some point; Satchel and Bucky’s confused almost-clever-but-then-totally-boneheaded patter is quintessential stoner humor. “Rob: T. rexes don’t even exist anymore!” “Bucky: Exactly. Therefore, a beaver is a million-billion times more dangerous than a T-rex.” Satchel: “You just blew my mind.” I mean, that could almost be lifted from A Scanner Darkly.

Conley’s art is pretty decent for the comics page — he has serious troubles with perspective, and I find his grayscale effects irritating, but his character designs are cute and winning rather than Dilbert or Pearls Before Swine-ugly. He’s helped somewhat by the fact that he rarely attempts physical or slapstick humor — instead, the jokes are mostly bad puns and zoned-out verbal goofiness. In his heart, I think Conley really is more fourth-rate Peanuts than second-rate Garfield. And yes, that’s a compliment.
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So as I said, this was written at the end of 2007 or thereabouts. Since then, my son went through a very intense Get Fuzzy phase. This involved reading our three Get Fuzzy collections over and over (and over) again. At the same time, he was obsessed with Garfield, which we read over and over. We also got to hear the strips repeated back to us without any context or description (so you get a strip which sounds something like: "I'm going to steal Jon's chicken. Hey where did that vine come from! Isn't that funny!")

So a couple of points here. First, after this intense exposure, I think that I was right that Get Fuzzy is not really a knock-off of Garfield -- and maybe wrong that it is a knock-off of Peanuts. In its running gags and its rhythms, its really maybe closer to Bloom County in a lot of ways. (Which is fine with me; I like Bloom County. But it's important to make these distinctions.)

Second, reading these strips aloud (and other comics) has really, really made me appreciate story books. Not that I have anything against comic strips qua comic strips...or, okay, maybe I do, but that's not the point I'm making here. The point I am making here is that reading comics aloud kind of sucks. When I read a regular story book, I'm often able to pretty much zone out; I can just read along without paying much attention to what I'm doing because...well, it's a narrative, it only goes one direction, you don't really have to think about it that hard. Getting downtime like this is really crucial when you're a parent, and I greatly appreciate it.

With comics, it's a lot harder to do that. You have to pay more attention to where the text goes in the first place, and in the second you have to make sure the small child is following along, since he's got to be able to figure out who says what. Admittedly, after the millionth repetition, he pretty much knows who's saying what...but after the millionth repetition you're ready to go insane anyway, so the benefit is not as great as it might seem.

On the plus side, though, comics seem to be really good for teaching reading. The constant interplay between text and pictures, and the aforementioned need to follow which text goes where, has really helped my kid parse a lot of words. The first word that he read out of context without any prompting from me, in fact, was "Garfield" (we were in the car and he said, "That sign says Garfield!" I said, what? and started looking around for an advertising poster — but he was actually reading the street sign for Gafield Boulevard, which we were driving on.) He also taught himself to read sound effects like "Crash!" and "Zip!" because he sees them so often on the page.

So...less restful, but better reading comprehension. A few minutes of peace vs. a lifetime of learning. Yep, I'd make the same decision; a few minutes of peace, every time. But if I have to be irritated, I guess it's good that he's learning to read. Because then he can go off with a book by himself eventually and leave me alone.

This just in: Nicole Wallace is a jerk

The "pals around with terrorists" line came straight from the McCain high command, according to reporters Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Marc Ambinder summarizes:

an e-mail from campaign adviser Nicolle Wallace [was] sent to Palin on the morning of October 4rd, with an attached New York Times article about Obama's relationship with Ayers.

Turns out that the McCain campaign was a week away from running an ad linking Obama to Ayers. The e-mail from Wallace, according to Balz and Johnson, reads as follows: "Governor and Team: rick [Davis], Steve [Schmidt] and I suggest the following attack from the new york times. If you are comfortable, please deliver the attack as written. Please do not make any changes to the below without approval from steve or myself because precision is crucial in our ability to introduce this." 

McCain HQ had suggested the following line: "This is not a man who sees American as you and I do -- as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country."

When complaining about what a diva Palin was, McCain's people would cite the very line the campaign had given her. They claimed she had "gone rogue" and delivered the line all on her own. Well no, looks like that wasn't the case. (Assuming the email is genuine. Ambinder's post doesn't say where the fellows got ahold of it.)

Does this mean that Palin isn't a diva and whack job? I doubt it. She has a trail of bitter ex-allies from Wasilla to Juneau to wherever Republican high command is now bunkered. My guess is that the McCain people 1) wanted to keep their distance from an especially nasty attack, and 2) wanted another stone to throw at the Gal.

The "pals" revelation brings up the same lesson taught by the great post-"pitbull" letdown: never trust a story sourced to Republican political operatives.

Yeah, lipstick, and also pit bulls are kind of tough

The first time I heard the lipstick-pitbull line? Well, I remember reading this a couple of days before Sarah Palin's big convention speech. William Kristol wrote it, of course:

McCain aides whose judgment I trust are impressed by Sarah Palin. One was particularly amused by this exchange: A nervous young McCain staffer took it upon himself to explain to Palin the facts of life in a national campaign, the intense scrutiny she'd be under from the media, the viciousness of the assault that she'd be facing, etc.:

Palin: "Thanks for the warning. By the way, do you know what they say the difference is between a hockey mom and a Pit Bull?"

McCain aide: "No, Governor."

Palin: "A hockey mom wears lipstick."

Oh, that nervous young staffer. I like Palin's amused, unruffled air in deflecting him. I also like the idea that anyone would trust William Kristol's assessment of who is trustworthy. And the idea that we would think Palin came up with the lipstick line. And the idea that this conversation ever took place.

We all know how the line went over. Now, from the big Times article on why the governor decided to quit:

Late last week, as her sport utility vehicle made its way through the town of McGrath, Ms. Palin said in an interview that the seeds of her resignation had been planted the morning Mr. McCain named her as his vice-presidential choice.

“It began when we started really looking at the conditions that had so drastically changed on Aug. 29,” she said. “The hordes of opposition researchers came up here digging for dirt for political reasons, making crap up.”

Well gee, Princess! You should have listened to that nervous young aide! Though, admittedly, his probable nonexistence could have gotten in the way. But, all right then, listen to Janet Kincaid of Palmer, Alaska. I don't know if she's involved in politics, but she seems to have glommed onto a fact of political life that everyone in the country knows except Sarah Palin:

“In politics, you’ve got to just let it roll or it will eat you alive.”

Good point. By the way, I don't concede that anyone has made up anything derogatory about Gov. Palin. All the inventing seems to have been intended to build her up. For an example, see the start of this post.

The press loves cliches and taglines and obvious irony, so I'm kind of surprised that we don't hear about the pit bull line now that Palin has turned tail. Even the liberal bloggers haven't harped on it much, from what I've seen. So I'll say this: some fucking pit bull.

She wasn't much of a governor either. I don't mean just that her policies were bad or that she proved inept. I mean that she progressively forgot that she was supposed to be governing:

Amid all the turmoil, Ms. Palin’s enthusiasm for the job itself seemed to be waning, her office appointment books from January 2007 through this May indicate. Since her return from the national campaign her days have typically started later and ended earlier, and the number of meetings with local legislators and mayors has declined.

That 70% percent of Republicans say they'd be likely to vote for Palin in a presidential race shows that the GOP has become a system for generating and then swallowing bullshit. It's bad enough that the schmucks think that being tough beats or encompasses all other virtues, like intelligence and competence. But they insist on thinking Palin is tough when she has demonstrated that she isn't. She has broken before the very test that, way back at the beginning of her national career,  was supposed to prove what superior iron she was made of. 

Come to think of it, her downfall wasn't even pressure at the national level. The ethics complaints that she says drove her from office were all filed by locals. Forget the big time -- Palin can't hack politics in Alaska, a state with fewer people than Barack Obama's old state Senate district.

What a fucking loser. Sarah Palin is a pair of breasts, a pair of cheekbones, a pair of glasses, and a winsome mouth that delivered a speech somebody had handed her. Republicans have given up on political life and switched to a fantasy life, and for those purposes she works just fine. She never was a pit bull, just a party doll.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Mini-Marvels

Everyone knows that what kids these days crave is a heaping helping of continuity in-jokes. Obscure, off-hand references to Bendis-birthed secret societies, Gwen Stacy's death, or multi-hued Hulks — lord knows, five year olds love that kind of stuff, right?

The answer, oddly enough is — yeah, they do, at least in this case. Chris Giarrusso's Mini-Marvels volumes prove that an inventive artist can make even the worst ideas work. Where most other Marvel all ages titles (the Marvel Adventures books or Franklin Richards) studiously avoid the continuity quagmire, Giarrusso and his collaborators happily frolic in the quaggiest bits. Uatu pops up for a gratuitous single-panel gag ("Wha? Me change a diaper? Dude I don't even want to watch!" See, that's funny because Uatu is called the watcher, and he spends all his time watching so...oh, never mind.) A whole short story is devoted to the fact that Thor was replaced with a clone (which is funny I think because there was a Thor-clone in the Civil Wars mini-series?) And so forth. Mini-Marvels is, in a lot of ways, the great grandnephew of Fred Hembeck. It's affectionate, insider parody, delighting in meta-geek mockery of geekishness. It's a kid-friendly version of Marvel Zombies — just another example of the self-cannibalizing decadence that has consumed the super-hero genre.

Except, as it turns out, when you make your decadence kid-friendly, it kind of stops looking like decadence. Super-hero zombies are a mannered affectation for the jaded palate. Super-heroes as big-headed, manga-looking kids though — that makes the characters more accessible, not less. I mean, awww, look, little Venom has a single square tooth sticking out of his mouth! That's just adorable.

I think mini-Venom is probably my son's favorite character in the book, as it happens, and he really highlights Giarrusso's talent for finding the Marvel heroes and villains core appeal, cutting out the icky bits, and serving up an all ages version that is superior to the original in almost every way. Giarrusso's Venom isn't a slavering, violent, scary monster for teens and up. Rather, he's a slavering, largely harmless monster who keeps repeating "I want to eat your brains!" Over and over. And let me tell you, my son loved it. Half a day and all he said was "I want to eat your brains!"

But despite its bad influence, I still like Mini-Marvels. I like the way Giarrusso and his collaborators are able to take a single goofy fan-scruff notion ("Why doesn't Iron Man make suits of armor for all the Avengers?) and spin them out into absurdly escalating nonsense (Spider-Man's armor doesn't have jet boots, because, Iron Man explains, spiders can't fly. But, Spider-Man points out, in some irritation, people can't fly either. "They do when they're wearing one of my suits of armor!" Iron Man replies.) I like how the books mix in simple, intuitive plots (Wolverine goes to buy a box of cereal) with the multi-part Civil War parody/tributes. I like that Reed Richards' hair is still greying even though he's, like 10, and I like the fact that there's an extra-bonus Avenger named Elephant Steve and that Peter Parker wears his costume all the time, even at breakfast in his house, but that Aunt May still doesn't realize that he's Spider-Man. And most of all I like that though all of this stuff is based on what is presumably a life-long obsession with Marvel continuity, you don't actually have to know anything about the continuity itself to find it funny. Hawkeye climbing a magic beanstalk and finding Galactus at the top of it is amusing whether or not you know who Galactus is; Elephant Steve is funny even if you don't know he's not really supposed to be an Avenger. Giarrusso has done the seemingly impossible; he's created an alternate world where initiates and newcomers alike can appreciate the Byzantine monstrosity that is the Marvel Universe. In fact, if you didn't know better, reading these books might even convince you that super-heroes were created for kids in the first place.

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This is the first post in a roundtable on kids comics, which will be running throughout this week.

Don't Let the Pigeon Shrink the Panels

We're going to have a roundtable next week on kids comics (featuring a special guest post by the multi-talented Brigid Alverson if all goes well.) To get you in the mood I thought I'd reprint this effort from Culture 11. So here goes.
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For lots of small children, “funny” equals slapstick — and by that standard, the funnies just aren’t all that funny anymore. Kinetic pratfalls, fisticuffs, explosions, characters bouncing about like demented sugared-up toddlers — to draw those things you space which just doesn’t exist anymore on the funnies page. The full-page nuttiness of strips like the Katzenjammer Kids or Popeye are, of course, long, long, gone. But even the four-panel efforts of my youth have shrunk and dwindled. If you get three tiny panels on a daily, you’re pretty darn lucky — and that means that physicality has been mostly replaced by verbal humor and the occasional static silly drawing. Strips like Dilbert (or even the online Achewood) are almost completely paralyzed; clip-art friezes whose inert perfection is unsullied by motion line or sound effect.

Not to despair, though. Non-sedentary funnies still exist. They’ve just hopped, scurried, and rolled off newsprint, and into the children’s section of your local bookstore. Little, little ones can find cartoon hippos and penguins and moose cavorting with the requisite flurry through any number of Sandra Boynton books — most especially the appropriately named Hippos Go Berserk! And for slightly older kids, there’s Mo Willems, whose Elephant &Piggie series is one of our households all-time favorites…possibly edged out by Willems’ series of Pigeon books.

Part of what makes Willems’ books so enjoyable is that his background is not in the funnies, but in television — he wrote for Sesame Street, and was involved in a number of Nickelodeon animated series. Obviously, animation and comic strips have a long history together, but over the years they’ve largely gone their separate ways. Animation has retained its commitment to wacky physical hijinks and the funnies pages — well, as we said, not so much.

This isn’t to say that Willems’ stories are violent. On the contrary, even by children’s publishing standards, these are extraordinarily gentle books. The plots involve straightforward, resolutely unfrightening conflicts; in “There Is a Bird on Your Head!” Elephant Gerald must deal with a bird building a nest on his head; in “I Am Invited to a Party!” Piggie gets a party invitation, and she must figure out (with Gerald’s help) what she should wear. Even something like Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, the title of which at least suggests the possibility of car chases and crashes, in the event involves nothing more hair-raising than a small bird throwing a tantrum.

It is quite a tantrum, though. The pigeon really, really wants to drive the bus. After begging and pleading with the reader to give him a chance (“My cousin Herb drives a bus almost every day!” “How ‘bout I give you five bucks?”) the insistent bird has a full-page fit, hopping up and down, shouting to the sky, and flipping over onto its back in an explosion of motion lines that culminates with it’s head turned around three-hundred sixty degrees, it’s eye inflamed and bulging red, and it’s wings flapping in a multiplied blur, shedding feathers like drops of sweat.

Though Willems simple character outlines and neutral backgrounds are obviously derived from animation, the grainy quality of his chalky lines, their feeling of dashed-off imperfection, gives the drawings a tactile oomph. That sense of contained movement on a static surface, of personality within the line, is one of the great joys of comic-strip cartooning, and Willems’ mastery of it is, I think, part of the reason his books have been so popular with both kids and parents. For instance, in the Elephant & Piggie book, Today I Will Fly!, Piggie is determined to get herself airborne. Willems illustrates her hapless hopping with energetic thick dotted lines, which trace her tergiversations from right to left across the layout, then back from left to right on the next page — and ultimately, through a short hop and uuuuuuup in a flying leap onto poor Gerald’s much-colonized head. Those dashes are, literally, a physical delight: my son likes nothing more than to trace every single one of them with his finger. If I forget and turn the page before he gets a chance to do so, I’ve got something very like a pigeon tantrum on my hands.

Willems makes use of his luxurious space not only in terms of elbow-room on the page, but also in terms of story length. These narratives may not be especially extended, but compared to a daily comic strip, they might as well be novels. With that extra room, Willems reinjects visual cartooning with some of the rhythms of animation. His narratives have the spiraling escalating silliness of good vaudeville. In I Am Invited to a Party! Gerard and Piggie decide first that the party must be fancy dress…then that it must be a pool party…then that it must be a costume party…until at the end Piggie is wearing an evening dress with flippers and a snorkel and a giant cowboy hat. Each costume change is preceded by the same schtick, as Gerald proclaims, “We must be ready! I know parties!” (To which Piggie responds, “He knows parties!” ) The repetition and variation is like a sublime schematic of how humor works. It also makes it easy to anticipate and then memorize the dialogue, which is exactly what four and five-year-olds want from their reading experience.

Ultimately, though, perhaps the greatest advantage Willems has over his newsprint peers is not space, but time. Between Elephant &Piggie, the Pigeon series, and other projects, Willems seems to be churning out somewhere between four and five books a year. That’s quite a pace — but it’s nothing compared to the brutal grind of a daily strip. The truth is, given all the constrictions placed on them, it’s no wonder that the funnies have had to abandon many of the medium’s traditional resources. Perhaps, as newspapers complete their death spiral and content is forced online, the funnies will rediscover some of the possibilities they’ve lost — though goodness knows strips like PvP certainly don’t give one much hope. In the meantime, if I start hankering for more cartoony goodness, I won’t have to look too far. Writing this article has alerted me to the fact that Willems has yet another Elephant & Piggie book out: Are You Ready to Play Outside? As Gerald might say, “We must have it!”
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As a kind of update, we did get "Are You Ready to Play Outside?", which is maybe the best of the series. It certainly has one of the stand out lines: "I am not a happy pig!" It's amazing the number of situations for which that quote is the ideal. -- indeed, perhaps the only -- appropriate response.

That Other Yazawa Title

My column over at Comixology is about romance and Ai Yazawa's pre-Nana series, Paradise Kiss. Here's a quote:

The romance genre, is not, in other words, a fantasy of female disempowerment, but of female empowerment. Which isn't to say that it's necessarily empowering. In fact, the insistence that women can save men from themselves is, overall, fairly depressing. Why on earth would you want to save Richard Gere in the first place? I mean, fuck him…and no, adamantly not literally.

And yet, the romance genre can't get enough of him and his ilk. From Jane Eyre and the moody, violent Rochester to Maggie Gyllenhaal and the utterly emotionally inaccessible James Spader in the film Secretary, the excitement of romance is all wrapped up in the magical power of masochism. Yes, this guy is an abusive shithead…but that very abuse makes the relationship all the more rewarding when I tame him through the power of my redeeming love! No pain, no gain…or, to paraphrase another fairytale, no magic kiss without the frog.

Gluey Tart: Lovers and Souls

Lovers and Souls
Kano Miyamoto, Deux Press, 2008

This is one of those mangas. I read it just last week – late last week, even – and I felt all happy and a little swoony about it, especially the main story (out of five; the other four are pretty short). Pretty art, complex emotional whatsit, ambiguous sexuality, casual prostitution, and a good amount of"explicit content," as promised on the cover. Yes! Houston, we have a winner! And a week later, I still love the main story. I might still love the secondary stories as well, but I can't remember them.

This is an interesting phenomenon (interesting to me, anyway). I read a lot of yaoi. A lot, a lot. And my memory is not – well, it's really not very good, that's true, but I do manage to stumble along and get to work and back and pay the bills on time. Usually. What I'm trying to establish here is that I'm not significantly impaired. The only reason this matters, as far as this column goes, is that I don't have the slightest idea what's in the stories between pages 113 and 238. And if I do not suffer from significant mental impairment, this might mean that there's not much there there. Lord knows it happens.

We'll table that logical leap for a moment and discuss the main story, the part between pages 1 and 112 that I do in fact recall. It's a melancholy little thing with a surprising and, I thought, absurdly melodramatic ending, even for melodrama. Now, I know melodrama is supposed to be a dirty word, but I'm a fan. I'm not dismissing anything because it contains a hefty dose of melodrama, or even an excess, necessarily. I'm just saying. It's really a stubbornly emo ending. I thought it was maybe a bit much, but it worked in context, and there was a point to the out of nowhere-ness, so I can live with it.

"What the hell happens?" I hear you asking. I'm not going to say, because the element of surprise is really important. I don't mind spilling about the rest of the plot, though. Shinomiya is hot and aimless and earning money for college by posing nude for Matsuoka, a photographer. Matsuoka wants Shinomiya, who says he's straight, but – maybe not so much, since all it takes is some extra cash. After he tries it once, Shinomiya gets pretty comfortable with both gay sex and Matsuoka, eventually working in a gay sex club. (As one does.) The story is about their relationship and how it develops.



This isn't the kind of story where flowers explode all over the page. It's quiet and subdued and sort of grim. The character development is believable, if kind of strange. The photographer, Matsuoka, seems like a complete dick at first, apologizing to the obviously offended Shinomiya about "that incident" and asking what it'll take to get him in bed. He stuffs $100 down Matsuoka's pants and forces a kiss on him, offering him money for more and telling Matsuoka to think about it before he has to force him. Nice. The next time we see them together, Shinomiya is taking pictures of Matsuoka and seems much nicer. He does offer Matsuoka money for sex, but he seems a lot less predatory about it, and Shinomiya accepts, saying he's kind of interested in Matsuoka. Earlier, Shinomiya had been musing to himself that he isn't especially interested in other people, and he doesn't much care what happens with his body. Over the course of the story, the disinterested part changes. It doesn't happen smoothly, and neither party exactly understands it, but Shinomiya starts to fall for Matsuoka. And Matsuoka shows a surprising amount of gentleness and insight, given his opening scenes.



Well, it ends badly. I feel OK saying that much, since the back cover announces that this is "a tragic tale of love found and lost." The story is a little sordid, a little vague, and, dare I say, bittersweet. I wouldn't say it feels realistic, but it has a ring of truth about it that I responded to. It had enough presence to keep me thinking about it, days later.

So, let's go back to the other stories, the ones I apparently stopped thinking about instantaneously. If I ever thought about them in the first place. Let us look over them, you and I, and retrace what happened.

Story two, "Vanity," is about Shinomiya's response to the unfortunate events wot I do not explain. It's good – in some ways, maybe better than the main story. Shinomiya is depressed and confused and desperate, and his reactions are believable and even sexy, which is a deft trick. This story really illustrates how complicated and fragile and coincidental and harrowing relationships with other people can be. OK; I hadn't forgotten his one. I just thought it was part of the first story.

Next: "Sleeping Beauty." This one is the backstory for a something fleetingly mentioned in "Lovers and Souls," that Matsuoka had taken a picture of Shinomiya and entered it in a contest, all without Shinomiya's knowledge, much less permission. That detail, tossed out at the very beginning of the manga, had made me wonder about Matsuoka. That and the non-con and the $100 kiss. These points, taken together, made him look, well, kind of sleazy. You know, just a little. But he turns out to be very different. This little story gives us just a bit of insight into this blessedly complicated character, and, oh yeah, the ending is super-sweet. I forgot it because it almost isn't there – only eleven pages. But, in retrospect, they're a nice eleven pages.

Story four: "Eternal Moon." It's a nice little story, too, sparse and real. Long enough to develop the characters of two friends who fall in love. It doesn't play as trite as it sounds. I would have enjoyed this more the first time I read it (and thus possibly remembered having read it) if I hadn't spent a certain amount of my limited mental abilities wondering if Kai was the character from the first two stories, who I remembered only as bi-guy (and this is where I admit, to my shame, that certain Japanese names just slide off my brain as if it were coated with Teflon). What the hell was that guy's name? Oh, Hikaru. Well, he isn't. May you all learn from my stupidity. (Also, a bonus: Toward the end, Kai – not Hikaru at all – wears his hair in that half-updo thing I'm so excited about. Woo hoo!)

Story the last: "Tomorrow's Sky." This one is about the characters in "Eternal Moon." (Hey, there's a theme there! Eternal moon, tomorrow's sky – yup, definitely a theme. You can't fool me.) It's told from the point of view of Nozaki, the other half of the couple. Public affection is offered and fidgeted about, a fight is fought, insecurities are aired, and understanding is fumbled toward. It's short and not necessarily substantial, this story, but it is quietly gentle, the kind of story that leaves you with a smile. Which you should savor, since in about thirty minutes, you'll have no memory of this moment. If you're like me, anyway.



I love Kano Miyamoto's art, the pacing of her stories, and her over-arching lack of desire to create plot. She is able to convey wonderful subtleties of expression and nuances of emotion without a lot of movement. And that may have something to do with my lapse of memory, too. The more plot you have, the easier it is to remember the details. But those aren't the kind of details this manga is concerned with. I was left with an understanding of the characters, a feeling for them, and the ways they experienced love. (Which did include explicit sex scenes, by the way, involving invisible penises – well, you can't have everything.) So, good enough. I'll put this one on the keeper stack and probably read it again, one day. The whole thing will no doubt be brand new to me, by then. And I'll enjoy it just as much the second time. (Cue "Feels Like the First Time as background/fadeout music.)