Happy Boxing Day!
However, as those two were NOT written for The Land of Obscusion, they are not eligible for this very list I'll be going over. With that in mind, what were the "12 posts" (i.e. it's actually more like "12 subjects" than "12 individual writings") that I was most proud of over the course of 2021 & 2022? Let's get started with the first six...
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| That last cover has some real "Everything is Fine!!" energy. |
Pretty much any year can be a notable anniversary for an anime and/or manga, & by that I mean "five & zeroes". 2021 wound up being just that for Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Mars, which celebrated its 45th Anniversary that year, as it originally debuted in the pages of Weekly Shonen Champion magazine back in 1976. Yokoyama was a legend in manga that arguably rivaled the likes of Osamu Tezuka & Shotaro Ishinomori in setting standards when it came to certain genres & the like, but unlike either of those names there has never been an official English release of any Yokoyama manga; his legacy in English-speaking fandom has exclusively been experienced (officially) only via adaptations. However, to showcase just how influential & inspirational Yokoyama was, even some his shorter works have gone on to achieve notoriety, and one of them was Mars, the tale of an amnesiac who discovers that he's actually an alien meant to decide the fate of Earth itself by being able to command a giant robot named Gaia. Despite being able to command Gaia to instantly destroy the planet, because of humanity's history of violence making it a potential threat to the rest of the universe, Mars decides to believe that humanity can learn from its mistakes, despite this decision making him a marked man by his own kind, who have their own giant robots to kill Mars with, as Mars' death will still cause Gaia to destroy the planet.
The original five-volume manga remains a very good read, with themes & concepts that still hold true today (sadly, in some regards), a main character who you want to root for, & even a regular human character (Iwakura) that you want to see survive & succeed in his own quest in finding out more about Mars & the "Six Gods" that are after him. The ending, in particular, is something that remains iconic to this very day, as while the end result itself had been done both before & after this manga, the way it comes about, especially in how succinct & sudden it is, remains something that I feel could have only been done by Yokoyama back in the mid-70s, giving it a one-of-a-kind feeling. While there was the TV anime Rokushin Gattai God Mars during the 80s by TMS, which was iconic in its own right, it wasn't really an actual adaptation of the manga (it was more "adaptation-in-concept-only"), so I moved on to KSS' attempted OVA adaptation of Mars from 1994. Despite some grand ambitions from the staff, who wanted to rival Yasuhiro Imagawa's legendary Giant Robo OVA series, KSS' penchant for cutting its OVAs short after just two episodes if there weren't instant sales stifled this adaptation's ability to really make any impact; what we did get is definitely interesting & went in its own direction in some ways, though. Finally, the 45th Anniversary retrospective ended with a re-review of Shin Seiki Den Mars, a TV anime from 2002 that intended to finally adapt all of Yokoyama's manga accurately... for the most part, at least. While it does technically adapt the manga's plot from start to finish, it also added in some extra elements to the characters, some of it admittedly good & some of it at least well-intentioned, & the anime stopped before the literal final two pages of the manga so as to deliver an alternate ending (though one that still more or less decried humanity's flaws), a decision that I'm sure was ordered on from high. This entire trilogy was a blast to do last year, and I heartily recommend reading the original Mars manga, while Shin Seiki Den Mars is also worth a watch, in my opinion; due to its unfinished nature, the Mars OVA is just a really interesting curiosity.
Covers, Color, & "The Dreaded ToC": Shonen Jump's 40-Year History of Celebrating Final Chapters (March 30, 2021)
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, things like "anime conventions" changed by being almost exclusively online until the middle of 2021, when Otakon became the first major con to return to in-person attendance. Because of that, people who wanted to do panels for these online events had two options: Either "do it live" via livestream (using a service like Zoom, or something) or produce a pre-recorded video & let the con air it at the right time. While I did the former for Anime Lockdown in 2021, I did the latter for Crunchyroll Expo in 2020, and in 2021 I did the same for Fanime & AnimeNEXT. In doing so, I wound up getting a minor itch to maybe make a video for my now rarely used YouTube channel, though with a traditional piece here on the blog. 2021 was an interesting year for Shonen Jump, because it marked the 40th Anniversary of not one but two notable manga finales, particularly in the treatment they each received from the magazine. So, while we'll get to the latter finale's 40th Anniversary in Part 2 of this list, I first started work on getting something ready for the former finale's 40th.
On "March 30, 1981" (yes, the actual date isn't that, but let's not be pedantic about actual release dates for issues of manga magazines), Issue 16 of Weekly Shonen Jump for that year had the final chapter of Yamazaki Ginjiro by Hiroshi Motomiya, the sequel to Monthly Jump's Kouha Ginjiro, and for the first time ever a manga that was ending received the cover for that respective issue. Followed by Ring ni Kakero's final chapter later in 1981 being given special treatment involving both color & being the first thing featured in its own issue, this marked the start of an interesting history of various final chapters in Jump, & how they each received some sort of special treatment. So for this piece/video I went over things chronologically, detailing each manga whose final chapter received something special, whether it was "kantou/lead color" (starting the issue with color opening pages), "all color" (the entire chapter being given red-tinted coloring), being given the cover (which has only happened three times in Jump, so far), the modern tradition of "center color" (receiving color opening pages, but not appearing at the start of the issue), Naruto's unique digitally-produced full-color final chapter, or some combination of these. I did my absolute best to be as accurate as possible for this history (the website Jajanken - Weekly Shonen Jump Lab was absolutely essential to this even being possible), and while one or two minor details were off (Bastard!!'s "final" center color was apparently actually later used as the cover for Volume 22, not the image I showed) I think I did pretty damn well, all things considered. While many people will stick very strictly to looking at Jump's Table of Contents to be able to judge the relative success of whatever manga are currently running in that magazine, I wanted to take a more empirical & historical look at that, and I am still extremely proud of the end result.
In fact, I honestly do feel that the video version of this is the definitive product, so please check that version out at this link.
Demo Disc Vol. 20: Korean Kwan (March 9, 2022)
While anime & manga is the main focus of this blog, there is another variant out there that also applies & I argue would not be categorized as Obscusion B-Side material: Korean manhwa & anime (Chinese manhua & anime can count, too). While webtoons are currently the hot thing when it comes to Korean comics, there is a vast amount of old-school printed & serialized manhwa that saw release in English, and I first covered the various supr-long-runners that never got finished in English back in December of 2021 with the two-part There's a Whole "Sesang" Out There piece. In doing that, though, I wound up getting the itch to purchase & (re-)read a couple of manhwa that were never finished in English back during the 00s, both of which came from the same creator, manhwaga Park Sung-woo.
While today he's mostly been forgotten in English-speaking fandom, there was a time during the 00s when his stuff was a little prevalent in North America, and I don't just mean via his Japanese manga Black God, or the 2009 anime adaptation by Sunrise that actually wound up becoming one of the earliest simuldubs in modern anime history! No, prior to that, publishers ComicsOne & Infinity Studios had already been releasing a bunch of Park's Korean manhwa, like Péigenz, Zero: Beginning of the Coffin, & the two subjects of Volume 20 of Demo Disc from this year: Chun Rhang Yhur Jhun & its next-gen sequel NOW. In South Korea, these two martial arts-focused action series look to be Park Sung-woo's most iconic titles, detailing the journeys & fights practitioners of the ancient assassination art Sa Shin Mu take on during their own respective stories; while NOW does feature characters from CRYJ, it also works just fine as a standalone story. I had read both of these manhwa back in the day to varying extents, so it was really fun & cool to go back & read what we had received of them in English again, and while the first half of CRYJ is something that I eventually warmed up to over time, reading the first 1/5 or so of NOW again just reminded me of how good that latter series is, even to this day.
It's honestly a bit of a shame that webtoons are all anyone really pays attention to nowadays (printed manhwa magazines still exist in Korea, but have long lost the luster they once had during the 90s & 00s), because there are plenty of great "old-school" printed manhwa out there that simply were released in a English-speaking market that was not yet ready to fully embrace them, as they were often looked at as "cheap knock-offs" of manga simply due to their country of origin. While I wouldn't go asking for Chun Rhang Yhur Jhun to be given a second chance, I definitely feel that NOW deserves a second (well, technically it'd be third) chance in English, because it really is just that damn good.
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| I don't want to showcase all those covers, so here's an awesome image instead. |
The Surprisingly (If Fitting) Perpetual Life of Chakan: The Forever Man in Print (September 6, 2021)
Today, the concept of the "indie comic" that's creator-owned is more viable than it arguably ever has been, with there being various publishers that are more than willing to publish someone else's work without also getting full rights to said work, and that's if the creator doesn't decide to just put it out online. Back in the early 80s, though, things were immensely different. While there were independent & creator-owned comics during that time, for every success (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Usagi Yojimbo, Antarctic Press, etc.) there were tons of failures & simply forgotten works. For all intents & purposes, the latter could have very well been the result for RAK Graphics, a studio founded by artist Robert A. Kraus. One of RAK's earliest works was a series of shorts starring a character named "Chakan: The Forever Man" that managed to find itself something resembling a fanbase at the time, but it was a chance encounter with video game producer Ed Annunziata (then working for Sega of America) at Gen Con that would give Kraus something that was unheard of for an indie comic at the time: A video game adaptation of Chakan for a major console in 1992, in this case the Sega Genesis (& a version for the Game Gear, too); Usagi Yojimbo did receive a game back in 1988 for 8-bit home computers, but Chakan may be the first for consoles.
To go with that incoming push into the mainstream for a little bit, Kraus would finally give Chakan its own comic book series in 1990, though after only a second proper "issue" in 1994 Kraus went in a different direction: Graphic Novellas. Starting in 1998, Kraus would start detailing Chakan's adventure through the "Journey of 1,000 Candles" spell, and over time has published 22 of these novellas, with some of them featuring artwork by guest artists & even one of them was actually written by a guest author. While the main focus here is on episodic stories detailing Chakan killing various monsters & the like, a fair number of these novellas actually detail an overarching storyline detailing how Chakan managed to find his way into the spell, complete with a small supporting cast & a pair of rivals who have their own stories that get themselves all caught up in Chakan's very existence & the journey he finds himself on. Because of the fact that Kraus publishes all of these comics & novellas himself, they aren't really known by many online, and even getting a hold of all of these books is admittedly a pricey endeavor, so I took advantage of the retro game market a little bit & managed to justify getting all of these books myself so that I could give a good overview of the real story of Chakan: The Forever Man, because most only know of it via the Genesis game. And Chakan still continues to see the rare appearance to this day, most recently being included in the successfully Kickstarted card game Card Slicers that came out this past September!
I have no idea if Robert A. Kraus himself ever came across this overview, but I did have a good time reading all of these stories, and I do wish they were more readily available for others to check out. While there were, understandably, a couple of stories that were just OK (at best), the majority of them were well told, and the "graphic novella" format (essentially an ultra-light novel) makes Chakan a little unique, in that regard.
Resident Evil's (& Dino Crisis') Original First-Person Exploits: A Gun Survivor Retrospective (May 12, 2021)
Every once in a while I try to do something timely to match with a more mainstream happening in entertainment, and in May of 2021 Capcom released Resident Evil: Village, the eighth mainline entry in its iconic survival horror franchise. With it following RE7's first-person viewpoint (though the game has since been updated to offer a third-person camera, ala the recent remakes), I decided that it was a perfect time to take a look back at Capcom's initial efforts to give the franchise a first-person perspective: The Gun Survivor sub-series. From 2000 to 2003, Capcom & a variety of third-party studios (Tose, Namco, Nextech, SIMS, Flagship, Neuron-Age, & finally Cavia) created a quartet of games that offered short (no more than 2-3 hours, per game) experiences in which you controlled a character from a first-person perspective & were tasked with survival against the horde. However, instead of being a straight FPS or even an on-rails arcade-style light gun game, Gun Survivor aimed to act as a middle ground between the two, one where Namco's GunCon accessory was the intended way to play them, but while also offering a more directly controllable experience than, say, Sega's House of the Dead franchise.
The end result, then, really depends on the game you play. The original Resident Evil: Survivor for the PS1 has a reputation for being crap, but it's honestly better than its reputation precedes it. It's certainly flawed, no doubt about that, but it's really more a case of the hardware just not being capable of fulfilling the concept, and that's enforced by the original GunCon itself. While support for the peripheral was removed for North American release (likely due to Columbine), the way you actually would play this first game with it just sounds like a nightmare, due to the GunCon's lack of certain buttons. Gun Survivor 2 - Code:Veronica, which was originally released for arcades & later ported to the PS2, fares slightly better in terms of controls with the GunCon 2, but falters in terms of gameplay by being rather shallow & still awkward to control. The third game, Dino Stalker, is actually a spin-off of Dino Crisis (& even acts as a proper-ish follow up to Dino Crisis 2!) that refines the more arcade-like experience of the second game & overall is fun, but its ideal control scheme (GunCon 2+Controller) is actually hidden away as an unlockable co-op mode; my mind broke a little after realizing that. Finally, the last game, Resident Evil - Gun Survivor 4: Dead Aim - Heroes Never Die (got to respect both titles), is by far the best game in the sub-series, delivering a interesting fusion of third-person maneuvering & first-person combat that ages far better than the previous three games (especially when you use the excellent GunCon 2+Controller scheme), an amusingly bizarre plot that actually winds up indicating why Umbrella Corporation died off (alongside co-writer Noboru Sugimura, RIP), and some fun English voice work in the traditional RE cheese. Personally, I would love to see Capcom remake both the original RE: Survivor & Dead Aim in the style of their recent RE games, because they both deserve second chances to truly shine.
Also, Dead Aim's very existence is what allowed Yoko Taro to showcase his talent as a project lead, as director Takuya Iwasaki was also originally planned to direct Drakengard, but when he realized that he couldn't handle both projects simultaneously he asked Taro to take lead on the latter. The rest is history, as they say, & it's essentially all because of the final Gun Survivor game.
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| No home video release yet(...), but this image is great. |
Retrospect in Retrograde: Hareluya II BØY (May 19, 2022)
While I did say that my ANN article about Hareluya II BØY wasn't eligible for this list... it wasn't the only piece of writing I did for that anime this year!
All prior Retrospect in Retrograde re-reviews prior to this year had a shared element to them in that they were all anime that I had originally reviewed on this blog going off of nothing more than mere memory of when I had previously watched them, which is something I stopped doing after only a little over a year of doing this blog, in general; I think the last one I did off of mere memory (mostly) was Joe vs. Joe in early 2012. However, there was one show that I had considered re-reviewing, despite having essentially watched it just prior to writing the original review for it: Hareluya II BØY. Originally airing in 1997 as the first anime based on a Shonen Jump manga to debut in a late-night time slot, the BØY anime was, without a doubt, the review I had done using the worst materials I ever encountered. They were terrible rips from a Chinese TV airing, with hard-encoded Chinese subtitles, horrendous video quality, even worse audio quality (which literally would de-sync at some point in every episode, necessitating me fixing them myself with a video editor before I could even watch them!), and two episodes were even only available with Chinese-dubbed voice work! However, despite all of that, I still found myself absolutely loving the show, its good qualities managing to pierce through the crap that was the "raws" I had no choice but to watch, and over time I actually managed to buy all seven LDs for the show, which years later I managed to capture digitally, & even uploaded to the Internet Archive, for posterity, in early 2021. I also discarded those old crappy raws as soon as I got my LD captures segmented into individual episodes, because I wouldn't want to expose those to anyone else.
At that point, I was thinking of eventually re-watching & re-reviewing the show, this time using the best possible version that was out there, since it was obviously never going to get licensed for official English release... and then it got licensed for official English release by Sentai Filmworks in late 2021.
Needless to say, I was shocked. In fact, I still can't comprehend how Sentai even managed to come across this anime in general, let alone decide to license it, as this is second only to Ring ni Kakero 1 in terms of "Th-This is my hole! It was made for me!", and I'm too humble to feel anything else other than "Do you seriously want to lose money? Why did you license this?!". Anyway, with a weekly release from December 2021 to May 2022 planned over at Hidive (&, seriously, why didn't they promote it as a "retro simulcast"?), I decided that BØY would be the next RiR re-review for the blog, to coincide with the final episode getting added at the end of May (just in time for me to try to promote it at Anime Boston, too!). I also decided to pitch an article about the anime to ANN, which they amazingly agreed was a timely subject at that point & approved. Anyway, watching Hareluya II BØY in full again for the first time in a decade, and with a complete English subtitle translation, was just a great experience all around, and something I truly thought would never happen. While the show definitely has its problems when it comes to the visuals (not helped any by the fact that Hidive apparently had to rely on what looked to be LD-sourced masters from Japan!), literally everything else remains great, whether it's the instantly memorable & likable cast, the large & extremely varied music (including the cavalcade of great vocal songs by SPYKE), the generally fun & enjoyable stories told throughout the show (but in particular the four multi-parters), the absolutely bonkers finale that pays homage to the original Hareluya manga that predated everything, & the outstanding voice cast (including a constantly scene-stealing Shinichiro Miki as Hareluya).
It's been a little over a year since Hidive started its "retro simulcast" of Hareluya II BØY, yet there still has been no word of a home video release from Sentai, outside of the initial announcement stating that one will happen. Aside from it naturally not being a priority due to its obscurity (it likely would be easy to surmise that it barely got a trickle of viewers, compared to its modern simulcasts), I can only imagine that the video materials themselves are the cause of there being no home video release yet, despite shows that simulcasted alongside it, like Teasing Master Takagi-san Season 3, having already been scheduled for physical release. Sentai did at one point give SD-BDs a go, but the end results of them tended to be of mixed quality, and since then the company has generally gone with simply upscaling titles that don't have native HD versions, which itself can have mixed results, depending on the title. Needless to say, but it's tough to release LD-quality video on a Blu-Ray disc & have it look "decent", let alone "good". My personal hope is that, maybe (just maybe), Sentai has hired the team at Astro Res to help out, as the company has already proven its worth with what's been shown off for Discotek's upcoming releases of both Digimon & the original Shaman King anime, and it would certainly be a big help for Hareluya II BØY.
That being said, however, it would just mean even more money being spent on a title that, if we're being totally honest, will obviously never be profitable for Sentai Filmworks. Unless the Japanese licensors would be the ones footing the bill for something like an Astro Res upscale for Hareluya II BØY so that it could also be used for a Japanese home video re-release (which still hasn't happened yet, either, only streaming), I don't see it happening, which would also mean that it's very possible that BØY will never receive a home video release; it's a situation that I have already come to accept, honestly. But, hey, at least the show was given a chance in English, and that's way more than I ever expected to see happen.
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Enjoy the rest of this final week of 2022, and come back on December 30 (New Year's Eve's Eve!) as we take a look at the other "six" of my favorite posts of the past two years!
Definitely consider your Mars retrospective as some of the most interesting posts of the year. While I haven't seen much Yokoyama outside of the Giant Robo Ovas and Babel II, the things you wrote about Mars where quite the interesting read.
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