Author: JET
Imprint: Halloween Shoujo Comic-kan
Publisher: Asahi Sonorama
Reviewed by Jeanne
It was probably Henry Jenkins who first pointed out that fans who write series fic are just harking back to an older way of story-telling in which the characters belong, not to their (usually anonymous) creator, but to everyone.
Historically, our culture evolved through a collective process of collaboration and elaboration. Folktales, legends, myths and ballads were built up over time as people added elements that make them more meaningful to their own contexts. The Industrial Revolution resulted in the privatization of culture and the emergence of a concept of intellectual property which assumes that cultural value originates from the original contributions of individual authors... Fans respond to this situation by preserving the traditional practices of a folk culture in responding to mass culture, treating film or television as if it offered them raw materials for telling their own stories and resources for forging their own communities.
Of course the heroes of popular tales- Robin Hood, King Arthur, Nezumi Kozou or Oda Nobunaga- were real people, so they were always 'public domain' as it were. No-one *could* hold the intellectual rights to presentations of them (except possibly God.) I'm trying to think of a literary creation, the work of an identifiable author, who has inspired secondary works about him/herself-- prior to Star Trek and Captain Tsubasa, that is-- and only one name comes to mind: Sherlock Holmes.
It's a pity Conan Doyle cared so little for his creation, because Holmes and Watson are indeed figures of folklore. They have an existence independent of their creator; very few literary creations, however stunning, manage that trick. Hamlet may be the only one and Hamlet himself was borrowed from someone else. Don Quixote is certainly a recognizable archetype, but AFAIK there have been no follow-ups to Cervantes' long novel. I believe some court lady went on to write the further adventures of Genji's family (suspicion is that several of the chapters now included in Genji Monogatari were this person's, not Murasaki Shikibu's.) But The Further Adventures of Prince Genji- that one I've never heard of.
Holmes and Watson, however- 'take those two to different times and countries, to people who have no native detective literature at all, and--- watch them draw manga about them.' I don't say you'll like the results, but the process itself is very familiar.
So we have JET's London Mamougai (London City of Demons and Spirits, literally; Ominous Town as JET herself renders it. The series is continued in Hyouhaku Angel, from Asuka.) It's famous as 'the series with a werewolf Holmes and vampire Watson,' which you'd think would have possibilities . But of course what literal-minded westerners want is characters who are recognizably Conan Doyle's, somehow (convincingly) morphed into werewolves and vampires; and what we get is a genki exuberant Holmes with a bushy tale, whether in wolf or human form, bouncing genkily about the landscape, and a melancholy long-haired Dr Watson vampire who's the one who solves all the mysteries. Mrs. Hudson is the ghost of their landlady's mother. Moriarty is Holmes' biseinen half-brother Fred (or maybe he isn't. Unresolved plot twist there.) Jack the Ripper is a zombie, in an advanced state of lovingly rendered decomposition, from the graveyard next door, only he says he's not really the Ripper. Um, yeah. As renditions of Holmes and Watson go, this is Hedz pastede on yay!
JET is... oh well, JET is something of an institution- or do I just think she is because she's so prolific? Best summed up as energy without direction. Lots of series and AFAIK none of them ever finished. Confused plots with confusing endings. Information assumed or withheld- you already know who this person is, why do I have to tell you? Confusing b&w artwork, in which the dark-haired characters sometimes appear as blonds. (Her cover art is gorgeous though.) Unidentified/ unidentifiable bogeys which I find the visual equivalent of Lovecraft's irritatingly vague prose: unspeakable horror! unnamable abominations! unimaginable evil! ie it's big and black and shapeless and it drips. Oooohh scary stuff boys and girls! ("Ohh c'mon, name that abomination, I bet it's not as abominable as you think.") Notes in absolutely unreadable penji, ever the gaijin's bane. Much energy and great good humour, so that reading her isn't as annoying as it might be, but then again, kleenex reading, use once and discard.
However I should add a few qualifiers to this high-handed dismissal. The first is that I'm not a good picture reader and IME native kanji/ hanzi readers are. That is, they pick up on small visual clues that I don't even see; trained to automatically note the differences between characters that are 70%-80% the same, they often seem able to extract meaning from only part of a picture while I'm still wondering what it's a picture of. I was bemused to read a book written by a traveller to Japan in the 1930's. He watched a group of schoolchildren out drawing a temple. Western children would have been looking up every other minute to check details. The Japanese schoolchildren looked at the temple and then kept their heads down, drawing, for a good five minutes before any of them looked up again; and they only looked up once or twice after that, but all produced exact pictures of the temple. They simply saw more when they looked than a westerner would.
Further, to repeat a common but true generalization, Japanese culture has less use for linear logic than we do. 'What' is more important than 'why,' or even 'who'-- a grammatical fact that can lead to reading whole paragraphs without being quite certain who it is you're reading about. Feeling is more prized than reason; what does it matter if it doesn't make sense, so long as you've had your exquisite thrill of terror or whatever? (Does anyone here remember ET, where for no reason I could see ET disappears one morning and is found half-drowned in the river? Why did he go? How did he fall into the river? Who cares? What matters is ET IS DYING ANGST MOMENT OMG!!!BOOHOOWAAAHHH CLAP YOUR HANDS IF YOU BELIEVE IN FAIRIES EXTRATERRESTRIALS!!! We do it too, y'know.) It has been pointed out by one who knows that most Japanese zip through their manga so that plot, character and everything else turns into a lovely vague flow, there and gone. So maybe that's what you're supposed to take away from this stuff- an image here and there, a bit of terror, and the sight of Holmes in furious tears refusing to believe that Watson could have died. Um, yes. Whether it's The Revenge of Conan Doyle, or just a Japanese mangaka's hyper-sensibility to m/m, what survives through JET's travesty is the canonical devotion of Holmes and Watson.
Which theme gets a treatment more sympathetic to western prejudices in YOTSUYA Simone's Seikimatsu Tantei Club.
ISBNs
Vol1: zasshi code 57810-22
Vol2: zc57810-71
Vol3: zc57811-03
Vol4: zc57811-38
Vol5: ISBN4-257-98163-6
Vol6: ISBN4-257-98188-1
Vol7: ISBN4-257-98238-1
Vol8: ISBN4-257-98256-X
Hyouhaku no Angel:4-04-852797-5