C21st Gods Issue #1 Is Out

I'm a little behind on this, I must admit, having been distracted by that whole thing of The Black River Chronicles: Level One coming out and also having had a birthday around the same time (not a major one, thankfully, I'm not certain I could have coped with that this year!)  At any rate, when I say that the first issue of C21st Gods is out, I mean to say that it's been out for a few days now.  And that, in fact, you can buy it right this minute if the urge should take you.

The response so far has definitely been positive, if not absolutely great: lots of love, understandably, for Anthony's artwork, a general air that we're punching  above our weight in terms of a book from an indy press, but also a few comments along the lines of "So, is this it?"  Which is to say, is the first issue of Gods and its tale of a police detective stumbling across a gruesome string of murders that hint at darker horrors indicative of everything the book has going on?

And no, it isn't.  I mean, of course it isn't.  Anthony and I have some big damn things to come, of that I promise you, and many of those will come more clearly into focus in issue two, wherein the central conflicts become more readily apparent.  A small confession: one of the aspects of writing commercially that I find hardest is that you can't simply ask a reader to trust you.  If you let it, that fact ends up restricting the choices you make; faced with an audience who aren't familiar with your work and who'll tend to assume the worst, the temptation is to play safe, to front load the big ideas, to be attention-grabbing in favour of a slow burn.

But all of those things would have killed this idea stone dead, and that left me in the risky - but, fingers crossed, in the long term more rewarding - place of starting small and quiet and letting the artwork do the heavy lifting.  And at this point I must say, not for the first and surely not for the last time, that thank goodness I stumbled across Anthony Summey, whose detailed penciling and striking design work and eye-catching approach to colour are more than capable of all the heavy lifting I could have asked for.  I'm wholly ready to admit that his art carries this first issue -but that's as it was intended to be.

Because, as I say - big things to come.  And I for one am downright giddy at the thought of what Anthony's going to do with the next issue, when balls (and heads) really start rolling and shadowy figures make themselves known and C21st Gods gets to play some of the cards that make it, I hope, not just another book riding on the lengthy coattails of Mr. H. P. Lovecraft.  But all of that starts here in issue one, with a creepy house and a ghastly murder - soon to be followed by a string of even ghastlier murders - and a cop who realises he's willing to put everything on the line for the answers that no one much wants to give him.

You can pick up the first issue of C21st Gods here on Comixology and here on Amazon US.

Level One: The Threats

Being a student adventurer is a dangerous business, and nowhere more so than at the Black River Academy, an educational establishment not exactly famed for its safety record.  (Though as dwarf wizard Arein optimistically notes, "I've heard it's much safer than it used to be.  They say nearly eight out of ten students only ever suffer minor injuries.")  At any rate, adventuring means quests, and quests mean threats, and more often than not those threats come on two - or four, or possibly more - legs.  So here's a brief introduction to a few of those that our plucky but ill-prepared band come up against in Level One...

[And if you're the sort of reader who prefers to come into a book knowing absolutely nothing then bear in mind that there are some mild spoilers ahead!]

Rat-kind

Durren had never met any rat-kind, and he knew of them only by their reputation, which wasn't good.  They were considered to be at best scavengers, at worst thieves and bandits.  He certainly wasn't surprised to hear that they'd have robbed a merchant caravan, though he guessed it had been a small and poorly protected merchant caravan - because rat-kind were also known for their cowardice in the face of any real threat.

Our would-be heroes' first challenge is to try and recover stolen goods from a race known as rat-kind: basically, humanoid rats.  Though looked down on by other species, who tend to focus on their verminous half, rat-kind are intelligent and sociable, with their own language, crafts and culture.  (Though it's true that they do have a bad habit of stealing things.)  At any rate, the party are surprised by how much the village they find resembles any human - or dwarf, or elvish - community.  It's their first lesson that not everything is what it seems when it comes to the Black River Academy and the world of Level One.

Unicorns

"What, in the end, is a unicorn but a horse with a spike upon its brow?  An intelligent beast with its weapon always drawn?  Therefore, the unicorn that has tasted blood is a dangerous creature indeed." - Cullglass 

Like rat-kind, unicorns were once normal animals that, centuries past, were infected and changed by the cosmic phenomenon and source of all magic known as the Unbalance.  And, as with the rat-kind, this has granted them a level of reasoning that goes far beyond what the average horse could hope to possess.  Just what that adds up to, and whether the party's mentor is right in suggesting that such unusual intelligence grants unicorns a capacity not just for violence but deliberate cruelty, is something they'll have to decide for themselves.

Priesthood of the Petrified Egg

"A priesthood in the hills east of Fort Jargen, formerly famous for their good deeds and responsible use of magic, have grown somehow corrupted.  Where in the past they strived to heal the unbalance, now they seem actively to be exacerbating it, abusing their power without the least concern or accountability." - Cullglass 

All magic in the world of Level One comes from the Unbalance, and all magic has a cost.  Put simply, using magic makes everything more magical, and that means more creatures like rat-kind, unicorns - and far worse.  As such, every spell cast has the potential to make the world a stranger and a more dangerous place.  So it is that the vast majority of those who use magic take upon themselves a grave responsibility: most try at least to heal the Unbalance in proportion to the damage they inflict, and some even go further, working to compensate for others as well.

So it was with the Priesthood of the Petrified Egg, at least once upon a time.  But rumour has it that recently they've had a change of tune, that they may even by striving to actively worsen the Unbalance - and that they have an immensely powerful magical relic at their disposal to help them to do so.

The Booby-trapped Dungeon

"At the risk of pointing out the obvious, you do realise it's dark down here?" -

Durren

Because there has to be a booby-trapped dungeon.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 17

You know, I try and keep these posts short, I do.  I try, and I fail miserably.  I guess I just like writing at absurd length about nineties anime - which probably explains how we've got to part seventeen and I'm already halfway through the next one!

Anyway, this time through we have: A Wind Named Amnesia, Dirty Pair Flash: Random Angels, Slayers: The Motion Picture and Street Fighter Alpha: The Movie.

Boy, that's a lot of colons.

A Wind Named Amnesia, 1993, Kazuo Yamazaki

So much of what I've reviewed here has been so similar to so much else that it's hard to know what to do with a title that feels unique.  It's easy to judge a demons-invade-Tokyo story against the bar of all the other demons-invade-Tokyo stories, just as half the fun of watching a new mecha anime is figuring out how it squares up to all those other mecha animes that clutter the medium, but how to approach something that eschews such easy categorisation?

Though thinking about it, A Wind Named Amnesia does actually open with a mech.  That, though, is less a point of similarity than a clear declaration that what we have here is going to be carving its own niche - for said mech is piloted, in one of the film's early striking images, by a rotting human corpse.  We'll learn soon that the reason for this horror is that an apocalyptic event, the titular wind*, has left humanity devoid of all but the most primitive and instinctual memories; with its pilot effectively defunct and everyone else acting like neanderthals, the building-sized anti-riot machine has concluded that there's one hell of a riot going on.

That mech is taken down, at least temporarily, by our hero Wataru, who not only still has his memories but can even speak.  When, soon after, he meets a mysterious silver-haired woman named Sophia who decides to travel with him, we discover his backstory, in what amounts to the film's first segment.  And here, already, in a film I urgently want to praise, we have a problem that's tough to overlook: A Wind Named Amnesia is the very definition of episodic.  What we get, basically, is three short stories strung together with Wataru and Sophia's narrative and their ongoing battle with the mech, (named Guardian in the sub), and held together more loosely by themes of the link between civilization and memory.  And there's just no ignoring how the film keeps stopping and starting in the most abrupt manner.

Even putting that aside, I'm not convinced it altogether works.  There are plenty of ideas, and some of them land, but others feel half-formed.  The same goes for other aspects: the backgrounds are lovely, the animation is frequently very good, yet Yamazaki has an unfortunate habit of letting the frame rate plummet in certain scenes, and every time it's painfully noticeable, as objects suddenly start jerking around the screen.   There's also a startling bit of racism -  startling at least partly because it's so damn random - and the film has only the most limited ideas of what to do with its female characters, with exposing their breasts for tenuous reasons high among the notions it does have.

A Wind Named Amnesia is certainly flawed, then.  But when it lands, it really does land.  It's big on atmosphere, big on asking difficult questions and proposing troubling answers, and above all else it's a genuine original.  I feel as though I've ended up focusing on the negatives, but the positives were what largely struck me while I was watching: so little in nineties anime, or nineties anything, even tried to be this original or philosophical within the bounds of genre filmmaking.  Plus, it's been recently released - a note on that in the conclusion! - so it's no longer even hard to find.

Dirty Pair Flash: Random Angels, 1995, dir: Tomomi Mochizuki

I thoroughly enjoyed the first volume of Dirty Pair Flash and found the second to be largely rubbish, so perhaps saying that this third and final part falls somewhere in the middle isn't altogether useful.  Still, it's the truth: there are moments that scale the modest heights of volume one and others that sink to the depths of volume two, and that comes down largely to the fact that for the first time we have a collection of unrelated stories, with not even as tenuous an arc plot as part two delivered to hold things together.

Things get off to a strong start, at least, with an episode that places Kei in the role of unwilling babysitter and all but sidelines Yuri; there's a return to the over the top action of the first volume, the dynamic between Kei and her uncooperative infant charge is good fun, and really the only thing to let down the proceedings is one of the most downright weird bits of fan service to ever (dis)grace the world of anime - that and the fact that, with Yuri given almost nothing to do, it's hardly fair to consider the story a Dirty Pair adventure at all.

Those two problems don't really go away.  Episode two is probably the next worst offender on the uncomfortable fan service count, with Yuri and Kei at the mercy of a cute, demented fifteen-year-old girl assassin with an arsenal of murderous toys and a costume that leaves little to the imagination.  Then, as if the creators were in actual competition with themselves, part three involves the Pair being forced into a beach volleyball contest, and plays out something like a mix of Dodgeball, the training scenes in Starship Troopers and an animated pinup calendar.  Things get yet weirder with the Yuri-centric part four, in which Yuri has to stand in as substitute for the robotic duplicate of herself that an obsessive, millionaire child stalker has built.  And after that decided low point, a final episode in which the two have to defend the 3WA headquarters against a murderous antagonist in a state-of-the-art robotic suit feels like positively high drama.

It's all very strange indeed, and the English language subtitle of "Random Angels" feels absolutely on the money.  But that oddness and to a lesser extent the randomness largely works to its benefit.  Only the Yuri episode is flat-out bad; the volleyball one and the school-aged assassin one certainly feel like they should be, yet there's an energetic silliness and a knowing irony that keeps them on the right side of fun.  Mochizuki has probably the surest grasp on his material of any of the three directors, he certainly knows how to put an action sequence together, and its that which makes the best parts stand out: there the mix of ingredients that worked so well in the first volume comes together once again.  None of this, of course, adds up to a recommendation, but at least I feel safe in saying that if you liked volume one then this conclusion won't altogether be a waste of your time.

Slayers: The Motion Picture, 1995, Hiroshi Watanabe, Kazuo Yamazaki

I'd heard a lot of good stuff about Slayers: The Motion Picture, and it had been high on my list of things to track down for a while, which made it doubly frustrating when I finally found a copy at a reasonable price and the seller e-mailed to say that the disk was damaged beyond repair.  Screw you, Music Magpie.  Fortunately I have a multi-region DVD player and Australians are lucky enough to get a box set of all five Slayers movies that I managed to track down not too expensively.  Still, it felt like a gamble buying an entire box set of movies when I hadn't seen even one of them.

Slayers, as I understand it based on not much research and watching this first film, follows the adventures of roving sorceress Lina Inverse and probably some other characters too, but here that boils down to a temporary partnership with the notably buxom, morally dubious and slightly insane Naga the Serpent, as the two are dragged into a tale of demons, hot springs, time travel and octopuses.

Lina and Naga make for great protagonists, perhaps cast from a familiar mold - what nineties anime heroines aren't, at least a little? - but brought to life in altogether satisfying ways.  A good deal of care goes into making their faces distinctive and expressive, to the point where there are gags that land solely based on the attention lavished over the twitch of an eyebrow or the slightest of smirks.  And the performances are terrific, as you'd expected from a couple of highly experienced voice actors performing characters they've long since grown familiar with: in particular, the demented, self-amused laugh that Maria Kawamura gives Naga is inherently just funny.

The degree of care put into the animation pays dividends elsewhere as well, and it's certainly above par for what you'd expect from a weekly show, or even a film based on a weekly show.  From top to bottom Slayers: The Motion Picture is consistently good-looking, which is a sure-fire way to gain points around these parts.  In general, the production values are top notch, at least in the sense of that phrase that accepts that this is still nineties animation bound by a certain level of budgetary constraint.  But those constraints never draw attention to themselves: not a frame or a line delivery or a piece of music feels less than spot on.

Really, all that undermines the Slayers movie is that the plot is kind of a mess.  You'd think that would be a bigger deal than it is, but at its worst all it adds up to is a vague aimlessness, as events occur with some sense of sequence but not necessarily of logical continuity.  It's fun at the level of incident and individual scenes work like gangbusters, but there's the definite sense that the aim here was more to thread ideas together than to massage those ideas into a unified whole.  Regardless, I'm certainly not regretting my purchase.  Rumour has it that the next film is actually better, and even if it isn't, I doubt Lina Inverse is a protagonist I'll grow bored of anytime soon.

Street Fighter Alpha: The Movie, 1999, Shigeyasu Yamauchi

Among Street Fighter fans, it would appear to be the view that 1994's aimless but pretty Street Fighter II is a stone-cold masterpiece, while its 1999 sequel / prequel is not much good for anything.  I'm tempted to say that this shows how much attention you should pay to fans, and, you know, it kind of does.  There's a clear argument for Alpha being the better movie, if only for having a damn story with actual characters and clear narrative development.  And even putting that aside, there's such a great deal that it gets right that its bad reputation is obviously undeserved.  But you know, I can sort of see where those fans are coming from: as a Street Fighter movie, Alpha is a weird old mess, and it's hard to judge how differently I'd have rated these things if I could care less for the franchise.

But that's ultimately an academic question because the fact is I don't, but I am a colossal anime geek, and if you give me a movie that by turns manages to remind me of Mamoru Oshii and Yoshiaki Kawajiri then there's no sense in expecting me not to love it a little bit.  Now, I can't in good conscience suggest that Street Fighter Alpha is anywhere near as good as you'd expect some mythic collaboration by the directors of Ghost in the Shell and Ninja Scroll to be; really all I'm saying is that when it borrows it borrow from the best, even when doing so is objectively not the sensible choice.  There are haunting passages where not a great deal happens and there are aggressively grotesque sequences presented in eye-searing colour schemes, and while they probably don't actually make the film better, they sure as hell make it more interesting.

The thing is, Street Fighter II looked pretty great, but only in so much as any film that had a good deal of money spent on it would: the backgrounds were lavish and the animation was detailed.  I'd be astonished if Street Fighter Alpha cost even half as much, but the level of genuine artistry on display is higher at every turn.  The character designs are vastly improved, with real solidity and weight this time around, the backgrounds are less meticulous but equally as gorgeous and the direction is operating at a wholly different level.  Frankly, I could write a post just on the use of colour here, and how many video game adaptations can you say that about?

But hey, let's not oversell the thing.  The plot is functional and told better than it deserves to be, but we're not looking at Great Expectations here.  Even with that caveat, a lot of the good work starts to dissipate in the final third, when the film remembers that it was supposed to be being a Street Fighter movie; even the animation takes a hit, with characters going off model and a gravely misjudged decision to show the wear and tear of all the fighting by scribbling lines all over their faces, an anime mainstay that doesn't work with these designs at all.  And my pleasure at seeing Chun Li given an actual role in the plot got diluted pretty quickly when I realised that every second shot of her would feature either her butt or her crotch - a bit of idiocy made all the more bizarre by the fact that this film's terrific Chun Li design, all muscle and hard angles, seems to be deliberately emphasizing her skill as a fighter over her femininity.

Ultimately, Street Fighter Alpha feels like a movie made by a director with not an awful lot of commitment to his material but a sure grasp of how to contort a nondescript story into something more interesting, not to mention terrific instincts for an eye-catching image.  That was enough for me to enjoy every minute I spent with it, and it's enough for me to say that it's worth a look, even if - especially if? - you don't have a great deal of nostalgia for age-old video games about punching.

-oOo-

So, I promised in the A Wind Named Amnesia review that I'd elaborate on that movie's recent rerelease, and that was really because I wanted to get a proper plug in for Discotek Media, who - despite having a terrible pun for a name - are absolutely my favourite company at the minute.  They're apparently on a crusade to bring as much nineties and pre-nineties anime back into print as possible, much of it on blu-ray, and for that I love them with a deep and abiding love.  What's more, though they're only releasing in the US, all their disks appear to actually be region 0, which just pushes my affection into the stratosphere.  They already have a phenomenal catalogue and it's growing at a rate of knots.  Discotek, in the eyes of this lowly anime nut, you're the best damn thing.

Unfortunately, I'm poor, and importing DVDs is something I have to do sparingly, especially now that the pound is worth about the same as that currency I made myself with macaroni and poster paints.  So next time around we'll probably be back to dreadful Manga Collection releases and whatever oddities I could scrape up from e-bay.  So it goes!



[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]



* The Australian and UK title translation, The Wind of Amnesia, makes more sense at the sacrifice of a little poetry.

Level One: The Cast

In this first of what I hope will become a series of regular posts introducing aspects of mine and Michael Wills's new novel The Black River Chronicles: Level One, I'd like to start off by talking a little about some of the more important members of the book's rather sprawling cast:

Durren Flintrand

"It means you're not trying.  It means you're going to be the last of us to level up.  It means that I don't know what you're up to and I don't care, but you're not going to stop me doing what I came here to do." - Tia 

 For as long as he can remember, Durren has wanted to leave home and become a trainee ranger - and that's precisely what he's done.  The only problem is that Durren has a very large secret, and because of that secret he's doing everything he can not to draw attention to himself.  Until now that's been only a minor problem, but as he finds himself made part of a party of adventurers, with any hope of success relying on all four of them pulling their weight, he quickly realizes that feigning mediocrity is a recipe for exactly the kind of disaster he's been trying to avoid.  And even that's ignoring the fact that the secret he's so  desperate to hide is bound to catch up with him sooner or later...

Areinelimus Ironheart Thundertree

"And look what I did!  Those poor people.  For all we know, I burned their whole village down." - Arein

On the face of it, Arein is hardly the ideal party member.  For one thing, she's a Dwarf and Dwarves are notoriously unmagical, producing wizards at roughly a rate of one a generation.  And for another she's so crippled by her fear of using magic, knowing that doing so undermines the reality-altering cosmic phenomenon called the Unbalance, that she needs a great deal of persuasion to consider casting a spell at all.  But her companions steadily learns that Arein's virtues have more to do with who she is than what she can do.  Kind-hearted, brave and colossally stubborn, Arein soon becomes the party's heart and conscience - even when they'd much rather she just shut up and stop asking difficult questions.

Hule Tremick

"Hule says we storm in and take the treasure." - Hule 

Born among folk who consider punching a quicker and more efficient mode of communication than talking, everything you could ever need to know about fighter Hule is summed up in the fact that he insists on referring to himself by his own first name.  Or is it?  Could anyone really be as stupid as Hule seems to be?  Given his proclivity for rushing headlong into danger and picking fights at the worst possible moments, the answer just might be yes.

Tia Locke

"This is what you always do!  You decide on a plan, you go off on your own, and you couldn't care less what the rest of us are doing in the meantime." - Durren 

Arrogant, peremptory and totally intolerant of the failings of others, its nevertheless hard to criticise Elfen rogue Tia, because she genuinely is more capable than the rest of her companions put together.  Her approach of attempting quests single-handedly drives Durren to distraction - just as his habit of refusing to try his best does her - but the worst of it is that she generally succeeds.  And it soon becomes apparent that the only thing between Tia and a stellar career at Black River is the fact that the rest of her party are holding her back.  That leaves her with a choice: keep on the way she has been and risk never reaching level two or try her hand at the one task that her skills are hopelessly unsuited for: fixing her broken party.

Lyruke Cullglass

"Here you are, my young adventurers!  It seems an age since last we were together.  Have you missed each others' company?  Have you craved a chance to prove your worth?" - Cullglass 

After their first mentor quits on them in disgust at the disaster that is their debut quest, storesmaster Lyruke Cullglass steps in to fill the breach: a fresh addition to the academy's mentoring staff, he's specifically said that he's seeking a challenge.  In that sense, at least, Cullglass is a perfect fit for Durren, Tia, Arein and Hule.  And since the storesmaster is notoriously eccentric and proves surprisingly sympathetic to their problems, he may really be just the person to help the party put aside their differences.  On the other hand, just about everyone at Black River has their secrets, and Lyruke Cullglass is no exception.

Adocine Borgnin

"Often in life you will be called upon to work with others whose abilities differ from but complement your own.  Fail to do so and you'll be of no use to anyone, not even yourselves." - Borgnin 

The second-youngest head tutor the Black River academy has ever had, Adocine Borgnin takes his role and the responsibilities that go with it immensely seriously, and has no tolerance for students who defy the rules or fail to pull their weight - a fact that inevitably puts him on a collision course with Durren.  But when events raise difficult questions about the nature of the quests they're being sent on, the party begin to wonder if even the academy's prestigious head tutor is everything he seems.

 Pootle

"Pootle was the name of a rock-slug I had when I was little." - Arein 

All adventuring parties are accompanied by the magical creatures known as observers - basically sentient, floating, disembodied eyeballs - to make sure that they don't get into too much trouble.  However, not all parties have someone like Arein to give their observers names and adopt them as pets.

And if that's whetted your interest to get to know these characters better then you can grab a copy of The Black River Chronicles: Level One at Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.