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Why so serious?

I’ll Give It My All…Tomorrow, Vol. 2

I loved the first volume of I’ll Give It My All…Tomorrow. Shizuo Oguro, a fat, untalented, forty-year old  slacker who ditched his dead-end job in order to become a manga artist, had a  relaxed charm about him, and I loved his nonjudgmental nature that was accepting  of everyone’s foibles. His interactions with his grumpy father, prostitute  daughter, and gangster co-worker were handled in a unique way free of angst and  social commentary. They were all just getting along in this thing called life.

Which is why I was disappointed to see Volume Two take a more serious  tone. The story looks backwards on the history of some of the characters. We see  Shizuo as a young boy, crying over the corpse of his mother who died too young.  We see Shizuo’s father laid off from work, and opening a small restaurant which  is on the perpetual verge of failure. We see Shizuo’s gangster co-worker Shuichi  discovering the body of his suicidal father. All of this takes away from the  “Lovable Losers” aspect of “I’ll Give it my All…Tomorrow” and just makes things sad. It’s all a little too much reality into my fantasy.

Not that  there aren’t still some good bits here. Shizuo keeps going with his manga, and  he actually seems to be improving bit by bit. When the rejection slips stack up  a little too high, Shizuo and his father have a blow-out so Shizuo decides to  move in with Shuichi. That leads to some comedy, like Shuichi worrying the  neighbors will think they are a gay couple, with a great panel of Shizuo in an  apron wishing Shuichi a good day at work. But the laughs are too few, and the  tears too many.

I had some issues with the translation of this volume as  well. Akemi Wegmuller is still doing the translations, but it doesn’t seem as  smooth as volume one. I think we get by now that “manager’ is just Shizuo’s  nickname at work, and there is no need to see “Hey manager  nickname)!”  everytime it is used. A single footnote would be sufficient. There is also a  crucial scene where Shizuo asks a girl out saying “How about we start out as  just friends?” That might work in Japanese, where the context of the situation  shows what Shizuo is really asking, but for an English audience the translation  makes no sense and a less direct translation would have been better.

I still want to pick up the next volume in the series, but I hope that author  Shunju Aono gets the focus back on making Shizuo a character we can root for rather than one we feel sorry for.

The Sureal Life of Johnny Hiro and Mayumi

I first read “Johnny Hiro” as a sample in The Best American Comics 2010, and it was the only selection in that anthology that impressed me enough to seek out the graphic novel. There was something infectiously happy about Johnny Hiro, his Japanese girlfriend Mayumi, and the hijinks as the sushi joint that made me want to read more.

While I thought this was going to be a twist on the slice-of-life-young-couple-in-New York genre, by page three of the collection I knew it was going to be completely different. While Johnny and Mayumi are asleep in their small apartment, the wall suddenly burst in and Mayumi is grabbed by Gozadilla, a giant monster out for revenge. It seems that Mayumi’s mother was once the arm in a Voltron-like giant robot called Super A-OK Robot who beat up on poor Gozadilla. I kept waiting for the familiar reveal that it was all a dream-sequence, but eventually you realize that this is real, and that this is the story, which makes it oh so good. Eventually Mayor Blomberg walks into save the day, but Johnny and Mayumi’s problems are just beginning.

This collection contains the four issues of the “Johnny Hiro” comic series, and each issue has some goofy delima mixed in with the very real worries of a young-couple-in-New York. Paying the rent. Keeping the jobs. Fighting off an attack by 47ronin employees of a company put out of business by a friend’s company’s IPO. Hanging with Coolio and David Byrne (Mayumi’s comment was classic “You look very handsome. Sit fit you nice.”) Catching with a giant tuna with chef Masago off the shores of Shikoku. Mayumi having troubles at work because of her perceived English skills. The restuarant being short of Aji. Johnny Hiro has some sort of strange karma that attracts weird troubles, and he is learning to roll with it.

So yeah, the series is a little bit sureal, a little bit sweet, a little bit goofy, a little bit cool, a little bit serious, and a little bit out-of-nowhere. But the whole packages comes together just right.