When I first saw a piece of cover art for Madame Mirage, I thought is was some kind of Carmen Sandiego bit. Brunette with a wide-brimmed hat, champagne flute in hand, surrounded by tuxedo-clad assailants. How will Carmen get out of this predicament? I was wrong, of course. The two have little in common save for some thrilling headgear.

Produced by Top Cow Productions, generally known for bringing us Witchblade and comic-book adaptations of Gatchaman and Tomb Raider, Madame Mirage is a tale of treachery and revenge. Set in a near-future where technology led to the rise of heroes and villains with superhuman powers, this series uses a now-familiar premise borrowed from The Watchmen, Powers, The Incredibles, and the Nightmare of Futures Past in that there is a population of former super-heroes and super-villains whose operations have been banned. Some supers turned themselves in and have presumably been put into protective custody, many resisted and were forced into captivity, some went to ground. Madame Mirage uses her powers of illusion in a crusade to bring down a criminal organization that traded in their tights and capes for suits and ties.

The artwork, by Kenneth Rocafort, is an interesting blend of highly-stylized character designs and ink work that creates the impression of details through the use of coloring that gives more texture than precision. In several places, a key character on the page is little more than a doodle of ink lines, but the color work gives a richness to the frame as a whole. It reminds me of some of the older Eclipse trading cards and a Paranoia comic that came out ages ago, when airbrushed art was briefly in vogue. Madame Mirage recalls that brief fad without clinging so tightly to some high-falutin artistic conceit.

The plot itself suffers from a heavy-handed Mary Sue syndrome, with the protagonist outsmarting and outmaneuvering and outclassing her opponents at each turn, with even the cliffhangers working into a pre-arranged plan. Once the main character has so thoroughly demonstrated her superiority over all opposition, it gets harder and harder for me to maintain interest; harrowing predicaments fade away. The edge-of-the-seat anticipation is replaced by a disinterested curiosity as to the precise manner in which the bad guys will trip all over themselves and be duped (again) by some ingenious web of deceit. This is a problem I’ve run into with Superman, the Silver Surfer, and most Robert Heinlein books.

The first plot arc is about to wind down with issue 6, after which we’ll see if the series has any real staying power. If the cliffhanger ending to issue 5 is handled properly, Madame Mirage will likely end up on my subscription list for a while to come. If it continues on its current track, it will have amounted to little more than a trashy little pile of eye-candy at the back of a longbox under my stairs.

Poking around on some of the anime blogs that I view from time to time, I see that we’re heading into a new season of shows soon. It occurred to me that I hadn’t picked up any of the Fall 2007 series. Why was that? In the interest of concision: they sucked.

Maybe they didn’t suck, but they certainly weren’t right for me. Over the past couple of years, the slice-of-life school comedy and endless-string-of-misunderstandings-romance clichés have really worn thin for me. It really doesn’t matter to me if they’ve got some tsundere, yandere, deredere, moeblob, whatever in the show. It’s about as appealing to me as all those prime-time broadcast sitcoms that I never watch either. This meant that shows like Bamboo Blade, Sketchbook, Myself; Yourself, Goshuushou-sama, Clannad, Kimikiss, and whever the heck else people were watching for the past couple of months never had a shot. Didn’t even merit a single viewing and nothing anybody posted in their blogs tempted me to think otherwise.

I gave Ghost Hound a fighting chance, by which I mean I labored through the first couple episodes. There were no characters that appealed to me, nothing about the premise that intrigued me. Having recently seen Ghost Hunt and Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, I’ve got high standards for spooky/creepy content these days. Sorry.

I probably would have watched the second season of Genshiken if it weren’t for the pyschic damage that a couple of episodes of Lucky Star inflicted on me a few months back. Anime geeks making shows about anime geeks brings disturbingly-pathetic images to mind. It was like the main character from NHK Ni Youkoso had made a cartoon while drinking himself to a stupor, crying himself to sleep, and masturbating. It’s a genre niche I’ll have to stay away from for a while.

Gundam 00 I skipped because it’s Gundam. Bandai, you’ve tricked me into watching your crap years ago, but never again! I’ve learned my lesson.

Shakugan no Shana is one of those shows that I watched at first, but just couldn’t get behind. The premise was interesting, but the execution put me off about six episodes into the first season. Watching the second season just wouldn’t have made any sense.

I may go back and check out Rental Magica at some point, and Dragonaut didn’t put me off as much as I figured it would have; I just never made the time for it. The Winter 2008 season isn’t looking too hot at this point, either, but at least there should be some more Sayounara Zetsubou Sensei coming in.

Sayounara Zetsubou Sensei is the tale of a teacher who lives a life of despair. Each episode is generally split into one or two short stories about an interaction between Itoshiki Nozomu and one of his homeroom class students, each of whom has some terribly-exaggerated characteristic, ranging from the perpetually-optimistic Fuura Kafuka to the vocally-withdrawn Otonashi Meru (who is horribly abusive via text message).

Each of the characters’ names are what amount to Japanese-language puns reflecting their personalities. For example, Itoshiki Nozomu is spelled 糸色 望. If you compress the first two characters into one, you get 絶望, which means “despair.” The cast, while individually quite shallow, make for a variety of great comedic gags when mixed together. When Chiri, the obsessive perfectionist, forces herself into a love triangle with the stalker-girl Matoi, the jealousy and moral indignation that follow are simply hilarious.

Production values are excellent, with a rather bold tendency towards switching up the visual presentation at key moments, replacing scenery with solid colors, dramatically altering lighting, and inserting photography to disrupt or enhance the mood of the scene. The production studio, Shaft, goes so far as to oscillate between soft sepia tones with fake scratches and dust to bold colors and high contrast mid-scene. The character designs lend themselves well to character close-ups, which is put to great effect when a character’s forthright attitude in a conversation is reflected by the camera shot: straight on.

On an unusual note: the opening theme song is actually a pretty passable tune. This flies in the face of my general impression that the Japanese should not be allowed near guitars.