Fist Of The North Star vol 1 & 2- Buronson and Tetsuo Hara (1983)
Fist Of The North Star is for many readers the very epitome of hard boiled, hyperviolent 80's manga. It may not match the excess of some of its contemporaries (Go Nagi's Violence Jack and basically everything written by Kazuo Koike spring to mind), but in terms of capturing a very particular zeitgeist, Fist Of The North Star is untouchable. Which is why its fantastic to see it back in English, and in such a handsome edition too.
Fist Of The North Star comes with some precedent, and is very clearly and very openly influenced by Mad Max 2, in terms of setting, iconography, costume and characters. Some frames are literal copies from the film. This is fine. Mad Max 2's setting is exceptional and evocative, and by taking it as a starting point, Buronson and Hara are able to construct an often bizarre, unwieldy and always compelling vision. It's 199X, and the world has ended. The weak whimper in crumbling shanties, while the strong have grown 4m tall, raided the local sport shops and sex shops for clothes and are motorbiking around and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Food, water and petrol may be hot commodities following the apocalypse, but there's clearly enough going around for some people. Rather than clubbing together, everything's degraded in to a hyperviolent state of feudalism, not unlike Lone Wolf And Cub, only everyone looks like they've stumbled out of a very specific fetish club. So Fist Of The North Star is utterly horrible. The world is awful and ghastly, in that way that 80's post apocalyptic media so often was. Everyone's trying to murder each other in the most horrible and degrading way possible. Enter Kenshiro, warrior of the wasteland, whose pure heart and sad eyes are matched only by his combat potential, which we will discuss shortly.
Fist Of The North Star's real notability lies not so much in the realisation of the setting as much as how it expertly uses the comic book medium to tell its story in a way pretty much impossible in any other media. Firstly, there is an alarming disparity in size between the depictions of the wasteland thugs and every other character, Kenshiro included. While Ken is clearly around a meaty 2m, his adversaries can be anything up to 10m. It's ludicrous. And it's not diegetically explicated how this is possible. It is clearly a stylistic embellishment, made explicit through the nature of the medium. The vast size of Kenshiro's adversaries is symbolic not only of their sheer evil, but also bizarrely constructs Kenshiro as the underdog, time and time again. In the second omnibus, this discrepancy in size is made even more ridiculous with a character called Devil, who is perhaps 30m tall. His vast size is even surprising to the other characters, though there is no explanation offered (or required) for this. It is simply wonderful visual storytelling.
Kenshiro is a particularly powerful comic book protagonist. And the depiction of his powers neatly solve another narrative problem: how to adequately and stylistically depict the sheer violence of the world he lives in? The answer is clearly inspired by the violent excess of Chinese action films and old Japanese chanbara flicks, most notably the Zatoichi series. Kenshiro's ability to inflict violence is transcendental. It is metaphysical. By utilising an ancient Chinese art known as Hokuto Shinken, he is able to skillfully manipulate the pressure points of his foes. After he does so, they typically scoff that they felt nothing. At which point, Ken utters his famous catchphrase ("you're already dead", wonderful), and the snivelling thug will literally be torn to pieces in revolting, phantasmagoric, dehumanising detail. This is Fist Of The North Star at its most basic level: a means of depicting the most disgustingly wonderful violence imaginable. Watching goons being ripped apart from within, bones snapping, internal Organs rupturing and sinews tearing as geysers of blood soak the post-apocalyptic hellscape never gets boring, and while the violence and degradation and nihility is always harrowing, the fantastical techniques employed also mean it's brilliant fun.
Berserk vol 17 - Kentaro Miura (1999)
Berserk ran for over 40 volumes, and may be officially concluded following the untimely death of Miura. The first story arc, The Black Swordsman introduces Guts, a typical Shonen anti hero. One arm, one eye, and a whole load of snarling attitude. Guts fights revolting hell spawn in a kind of post apocalyptic fantasy medieval Britain. The setting is as bleak and as grimdark as anything, and with Miura's exquisite blacker than black linework, it was clearly destined to become a minor classic.
Then, after three or four volumes of this, Miura implemented his master plan. He commenced a flashback arc, which took a full seven years for him to complete. For many volumes, all sight of monsters vanished. The story focused instead on the impetuous young Guts, and his intense friendship and perhaps romance with the androgynous Griffith, a slender, elegant man ripped straight from a shojo romance comic. This relationship, built on competition, rivalry and, increasingly, jealousy, is set against the establishment and end of the world itself. In terms of both scope and realisation, it is undoubtedly one of the most well realised accomplishments in all of comic book story telling.
After the grand guignol conclusion of The Golden Age ark, we find ourselves back at the beginning. Beloved characters have either died, been driven insane, or have transmogrified in to vile and powerful devils. The 90s anime adaptation condenses the arc in to 25 episodes (cutting many corners and excesses), but has a compelling, if abrupt ending. Having been only acquainted with Berserk through the anime, it was fascinating to read the Further Adventures Of Guts, as the story essentially descends in to a jet black fairytale.
Volume 17 starts with the battered and bruised Guts escaping captivity, and taking hostage the Holy Iron Chain Knight Farnese, who, incidentally is half naked. Guts riding a horse through hordes of demons (the cataclysmic events of the Golden Age arc have left him permanently beset by devils every time night falls) with a naked woman in tow is very much the kind of pulpy excess that Berserk just about gets away with. It's silly and gratuitous, especially when it's revealed that Farnese is sexually aroused by both inflicting and receiving pain. Later a priest beats someone's head in with a Bible. As a criticism of the self flagellation of Judeo Christian religions it's a little on the nose, but this is a Japanese comic in the 90s, after all.
Then, everything switches, and we're back in the meaty political drama and wonderfully rendered castle towns. Guts isn't even in it for two whole chapters. Things drift. Old characters are checked in on, and new characters are introduced. Berserk's pace is hardly glacial, but it's ability to switch from insane to considered in heartbeat is admirable. It's the ultra violent grindhouse homoerotic political thriller we've always wanted. Way more disgusting than Game Of Thrones, and way more stylish as well, Berserk is still essential.
Wrong - Dennis Cooper (1992)
This collection of short stories was published after Frisk, but were mainly written significantly earlier. So this is Cooper even more raw and unpolished as usual. And, although it definitely couldn't be categorised as juvenilia, Wrong really does emphasise how much better Cooper's writing would become.
The first story, A Herd, was the first written, and has moments of near excellence but is somewhat formative; a little too long, a little too brusque. Yet it hides many of the themes to be later explored with more success. Elsewhere it is fascinating to see Cooper's deliberately artless writing style take form. The very short, 3 or 4 page long stories are particularly effective. Themes such as alienation, duplication of media, anxiety, psychosadism and the destruction of the psyche emerge in Cooper's characteristic disaffected, bleary manner.
The longer stories fare less well. One, Safe was so dull and aimless I couldn't finish it. On the blurb, there's a review from the New York Review Of Books which states something like "parts of Wrong are very, very good", which seems about the right level of faint praise.