Jonathan Clements's Blog, page 12

Cloaking Device

Arctic Air

The Map of My Dead Pilots reads in two ways – as an account of a systematic, scholarly study of the history of plane crashes in Alaska, and as an oral history of the kind of people who are likely to be flying those very planes. As the title implies, some of these figures are mere names in the newspaper archives, and pins stuck in charts. Others are people that Colleen Mondor knew personally, from her days as a dispatcher at a weird little airline in the middle of nowhere.

The two accounts advance on each other – a dispassionate enquiry into aviation history, and a melancholy memoir of life among the ice pilots. Mondor artfully constructs snapshots of a snowbound world where men treat dogs like machines and machines like spouses; where weather is more than just scenery; where everyone has come north with a story they don't want to tell. She wrestles with what it is to have an authorial mind in a world of harsh truths, as she tries to reconcile academic rigour with narrative romance. There are tantalising snapshots here, from the scarred girl who must relive the moments of her long-ago accident in the eyes of everyone who sees her face, to the nuns who refuse to give up their seats for a hospital-bound teenager. The result is gripping, as a fledgling author finds her style and suddenly takes wing. With a start, Mondor realises what she is really writing about, and lets the reader find out along with her.

Mondor's pilots gripe that they might as well be bus drivers on the Moon, as if that is not an incredible idea in itself. The US Mail has to get through, not because some Inuit trapper is waiting for a postcard from Puerto Rico, but because the plane that is being vastly overpaid to carry the postcard will now also have hold space for medicine, food and supplies. But this is the land of Mondor, where the shadows lie, as the author sits forlorn amid pieces of broken lives, and carefully builds something beautiful with the fragments. Like an antique, graceful plane thunking onto the landing strip with bingo fuel and a hold full of howling dogs, The Map of My Dead Pilots touches down just in time. Any longer, and this lovely little book would have broken its spell.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy.

The Japanese John Carter

I've got an article up on the Manga UK blog today about the Japanese prequels, sequels and pastiches to John Carter of Mars. This draws, of course, on the work I've been doing for the Science Fiction Encyclopedia to chronicle Japanese authors like Hitoshi Yoshioka. There's also a little bit about Japanese steampunk that doesn't get any attention abroad.

Spartacus Reviewed

Steve Donoghue at Open Letters reviews my novel Swords and Ashes from a classical perspective, suggesting that the book is loaded with hidden allusions to ancient authors. Indeed it is, and includes nods not only to Cicero's Verrine Orations and Letters to Atticus, but also Ovid's Art of Love, Ulpian's Commentaries on Roman law, and the writings of Seneca, Plutarch, Florus and Frontinus, to name but a few. As a bonus extra, his whole review seems intended as a gentle slap to an acquaintance who think Spartacus was invented by Howard Fast, and that nobody is allowed to write about the American Civil War any more, because Margaret Mitchell has already done it.

Sean Canfield at the Daily Rotation approaches Swords and Ashes from a formalist perspective, as someone who has never seen the TV series, and doesn't care whose picture is on the cover, or who wrote the book. He demands that the book stands up on its own merits, not attached to any other text or event. A tall order, but one which he finds the book to have met. Now he wants to watch the TV show, which if truth be told is the entire reason why licensors get onboard with tie-ins: as adverts for the next season.

Jesse the Pen of Doom (What were Mr and Mrs Pen of Doom thinking when they gave their son the middle name of "the"?) over at 8 Days a Geek thinks that if you like sex and violence, you will like this. But he also notes what few other reviewers have — the precise moment in series continuity where the book is set, which he praises as a "great bridge between two key points."

John Neal at Celebrity Cafe: "Clements is able to take readers deeper into the gladiator's mind and reveal his thoughts and actions… an entertaining read and an excellent companion to the series"

Pilbeam at Defective Geeks: "It's bloody, violent, vulgar and full of sex. And that's just in the first chapter"!

Kate Lane at Shadowlocked calls it a "toga ripper", noting that the nature of reading a book rather than watching a TV show makes sex and violence more garish and disturbing. She says it's: "a fabulous, well written tale that grabs the reader by the throat and slams them around a tits-, tans- and testosterone- filled version of ancient Rome that leaves them breathless."

George Sakalis at Extra Hype says: "By Jupiter's cock, I recommend this book and if the following Spartacus books are like this one, then Titan Books will have a great tie-in series!" With a name like his, I was expecting some flak for the way the book treats Greeks, but it seems he took it all in context, as an example of historically accurate racism. Phew.

"Fitz" at Blogcritics likes the imagery, and quotes one of the scenes I liked the most.

John Redfearn at Bookgeeks finds himself "more interested in trying to work out the rules for deciding when people say 'the' or 'a' and when they leave them out than in what would happen next."

Meanwhile, over on Amazon, there's a growing number of reviews, from a very interesting bunch of readers, seemingly equally divided between those who have seen the TV series, and those who now want to.

House of Cards

And we're back in court, as a Nevada judge awards $3.95 million to the Japanese studio Aniplex, after a three-year battle against the American CCG company Upper Deck. The reason? A shedload of money owed for the anime series Kiba, made as part of the promotion for the card game of the same name. The beef? That Upper Deck hadn't paid what was owed to Aniplex, because Upper Deck didn't like what Aniplex had done.

Kiba went into production in 2006, at the historical height not only of anime output, but also of Japanese producers' love affair with foreign money. Flushed with the 'taking-the-world-by-storm' hype that ballooned after Miyazaki's Oscar, the world and his dog decided that anime was the future. Why, with just a few ticks in the right boxes, any idiot could invent the next Pokémon by just getting a bunch of Japanese blokes with pencils to knock out a cartoon. Right?

In 2006, Japanese companies were surrounded by so much foreign money that some were refusing to go into production unless a foreign company would stump up half the costs. And there were plenty of foreign companies willing to do so, because rights competition in the West was so fierce that the likes of ADV Films had begun to invest in new shows so that they didn't need to fight over the foreign rights.

And then, BAM! It all fell apart. A couple of months ahead of the sub-prime crisis that affected everyone, banks started calling in their loans. ADV stumbled and went under, Geneon pulled out of the US market, a couple of distributors shut their doors and suddenly anime was in free-fall.

Which left Upper Deck and Aniplex fighting over who owed who what. Kiba ran for 51 episodes, usually a sign of great success… well, that or great investment. When Upper Deck wouldn't pay for it, the fight started, with vague accusations that Aniplex hadn't delivered what Upper Deck wanted. Reading between the lines, one suspects that Upper Deck were just looking for someone to blame who was still solvent. But you can't guarantee megabucks success, and it's facetious to imply that the whole thing rested on a frankly generic fighting anime.

The trouble's hopefully over, at the cost of yet another reason for the Japanese to avoid foreign co-productions.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #94, 2012.

Eurotrash Ultraman

In 1996, I was young, thin, and apparently a "journalist" — actually, I was already a full-time translator of anime and manga. And I appeared on Eurotrash for about three seconds, wittering about Japanese superheroes. I said something very funny about lycra factories, although it seems to have been cut from this clip, which ex-Tsuburaya employee Brad Warner stumbled across on the interwebs.

Sharp Focus

My review of Jasper Sharp's Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema is up now on the Manga UK blog. Nice to see something that takes anime seriously enough not to cut it any slack.

Pretty Boys

For the whole archives see Know Your Anime.

Public Lending Right

My results are in for the last year's library loans, and as predicted last year, the Brief History of the Samurai has raced up the chart. The top ten JC British library loans are:

A Brief History of the Samurai
Confucius: A Biography (hardback and paperback combined)
A Brief History of the Vikings
Wu: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced and Murdered Her Way to Become a Living God
Beijing: Biography of a City
The First Emperor of China (hardback and paperback combined)
Chinese Life
Marco Polo
A Brief History of Khubilai Khan
Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East

This year, for the first time in living memory, I made no money at all from my 1996 translation of Streetfighter II: the Manga, although Ironfist Chinmi is still bringing in enough revenue after 17 years to buy me a Chinese takeaway.

Curse of the Blue Duck

Last month I met an animation director from a well-known company, who let me in on a little trick of the trade. He had grown tired of endless meetings with licensors and advertisers, wherein stuffed shirts would look up from their Blackberries for just long enough to say something, anything, that made it look like they were paying attention.

There are politics at such companies. People want the boss to remember that they were in a meeting and that they made a contribution, and that invariably means pointing at something in the rushes or the storyboards, and saying that they don't like it. Job done!

Except if someone is picking holes in your cartoon just to impress the boss, you don't want to get it absolutely right first try. Instead, you want to come up with something that really, obviously, needs fixing, so the drones can point it out, and you can get on with your job without having to change the scenery, replace your lead, or anything similarly pointless.

And so, in new work for corporate clients, the animation company now includes an incongruous blue duck in every piece of work. Doesn't matter if it's an advert for funeral homes or a party political broadcast by the Independence Party, they'll shove a blue duck in it. It'll be there, waving nerdily at the camera, or tripping on a banana skin in the background. And it'll look calculatedly stupid.

"I love the storyboards," the suits will say. "But can we lose the blue duck?"

That, at least is the plan.

But looking at certain anime works, one wonders if the joke hasn't backfired awfully. How many anime mascot characters started out as a blue duck gambit, only to unexpectedly meet with management approval. Did anyone seriously ask for Ulysses 31 to have an irritating robot in it? Does Tekken: Blood Vengeance really need a comic-relief panda?

But maybe a few films could be improved by a blue duck. A little quack levity in Legend of the Overfiend, perhaps. Or a bit of comedy business in Grave of the Fireflies? It might work…

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO 93, 2011.