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.

Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann drew to a close this weekend, bringing to a climax Simon and the Dai Gurren Brigade’s quest for self-determination in the defiance of fate. Gainax did a laudable job of building up to a predictable but appropriate finish, avoiding what many feared would be a fall-on-their-face failure of a series conclusion.

There will be detractors, to be sure. Some people just cannot be satisfied. Bearing in mind that the story was at its heart a straightforward coming-of-age tale, all the pertinent loose ends were neatly tied up, the conclusion of the conflict was consistent with the over-the-top action that came before, and Simon’s eventual fate was appropriate to his character. Good job, Gainax. This was one of the better anime I’ve had the pleasure of watching.

Oh, and I was right about the brush-stroke titles in the end arc. Chalk one up for Burrowowl.

Why does Simon’s drill, the metaphor for his determination, strength, and courage, exist? Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is a kid’s show, aired on Sunday mornings in Japan. Clearly Simon’s purpose is to be brave, honest, and strong without being mean, foolish, or petty, all qualities that we hope to cultivate in ourselves and in our children. Kamina’s reappearance, the Obi-Wan to Simon’s Luke, reminding us of what Simon (and hence, by proxy, the audience) admires and finds value in.

I can easily call this my favorite show on television these days, what with Battlestar Galactica and Heroes both between seasons, and not counting C-SPAN (which is hilarious). Gainax, however, has a well-deserved reputation for winding up a otherwise-excellent shows with severely disappointing endings. FLCL, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Mahoromatic are felt by many to suffer from this bad-ending affliction, and over the past couple of weeks I’ve been dreading every symptom of backslide in Simon and the Dai Gurren Dan’s story.

This week saw the airing of episode 26: Let’s Go, My Friends. With but a single episode remaining, I’m cautiously optimistic that the fine folks at Gainax are actually going to pull this one off. This week we saw that the writers and producers can refocus their attention to the core theme of the show. There’s a suitably overwhelmingly powerful antagonist, a damsel in distress, burning manly spirit, and the fate of the universe at stake, all of which will potentially add up to a suitable climax and fitting denouement. Are they done killing off protagonists? Will Simon prevail? Have the heavens been satisfactorily pierced (as promised back in episode 1)? We’ll find out next Sunday.

I’ve been following Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann since it originally aired, going so far as to watch the raws before any proper translations are out, I just haven’t been posting about it all that often. 21 episodes in, this series maintains an excellent quality that goes beyond the actual animation production values, its genre clichés, the dialogue, or the silly mecha. Something that I’d been meaning to comment on for a while are the changes to the opening credits and title screens for each episode; as the story develops, the intros change along with it, reflecting the tone and theme of each story arc. Right now it feels like we’re winding towards the end of the third arc, so I figured I’d comment on the previous ones and speculate a little about the next one.

The first few episodes featured a title screen that reflected Simon’s primary influence, Kamina. It, like him, was rough-edged, sloppy, and bold. It looks very much like something he would have scrawled on a brick wall were he literate enough to.

The second set is purely Nia: soft, cute, round-edged, with a bright splash of cheerful colors. Given how gloomy Simon’s outlook is at the beginning of this plot arc, the title screens were a sharp contrast.

The most recent style reflects the world Rossiu has built up since the fall of Tepperin. It is stark, neat, and orderly. Unlike the previous layouts, this title screen is left-justified.

With five or six episodes left, I rather doubt this Rossiu-style title page is going to hold up. Simon is finally catching up with the “Captain GARlock” persona presented at the very start of the story, so I speculate that when Rossiu concedes leadership, we’ll get a new Simon-style. There are two ways I could see this going: one would be a spiral/drill motif, which I would find rather disappointing, the other would be more like the series logo itself, a fiery brush-stroke that conveys a certain spontaneity and boldness of spirit.

Back in late September of last year, I thought that Higurashi no Naku Koro ni was all wrapped up. The main characters had all died. Some repeatedly and graphically. Some repeatedly by inference. Imagine my joy when I found out a second season was coming in July! Well, actually I waited until this week to actually pick it up, my interest having waned in the intervening months.

I shouldn’t have strayed, Oyashiro-sama! Please forgive me! “Reunion” is a single-episode segue between the two seasons rather than a new plot arc, and features our buddy Ooishi meeting up with Akasaka and a third man in 2005, twenty-three years after the Great Hinamizawa Disaster. They discuss the popular theories of the day regarding the nature of the incident, including some of the ramblings of Takano Miyo, the nurse that keeps disappearing on the night of the festival. From the TIPS, it’s fairly clear that Miyo has a variety of nutty theories about the Curse of Oyashiro-sama, so seeing these men fixated on an alien-landing-strip theory was quite amusing for me. Best twist for this episode: they put Rena as the sole survivor of the disaster. Previously that role, when mentioned at all, was exclusively the domain of Keiichi. She reports that Rika had tried to inject her with something. Very interesting, in light of how Mion and Rena tried to take a syringe to Keiichi in the “Demoned Away” chapter (the very first plot arc). Were they really trying to help him after all?

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For some reason I’d been skimping on my manga lately. I haven’t read Air Gear in a while, Noritaka keeps falling off my radar, Gantz was never really able to hold my attention, and I haven’t even been keeping up with Otogi no Machi no Rena’s slow release schedule. The other day while trolling through 4chan’s /a/ board, though, I stumbled upon Mirai Nikki, a suspense / action title with an interesting concept and what looks like rather sporadic fan translations.

Mirai Nikki means “future diary” and is about a socially-inept high school student named Yukiteru Amano, who obsessively records everything he sees into a diary-like log on his cellphone. When one of his imaginary friends (for he has no real friends) decides to play a new game with him, things get interesting. His diary starts writing itself, and shows him the future. This is all well and good until this phone tells him that a serial killer is going to murder him.

Happily, Mirai Nikki doesn’t fall into the age-old Sci-fi trap of time paradoxes and such, allowing our protagonist to influence his own future. After escaping near-certain doom, Yuki discovers that eleven other people were given the ability to see into the future as well, and over the next ninety days or so they are to hunt each other down. The last person standing will inherit the title of Yuki’s imaginary friend, who just happens to be the god of space and time.

The main character falls squarely in the downtrodden-everyman category that has become so hackneyed in Japanese fiction, but five chapters into this story I’m really quite excited to see where all of this is heading. Due to the clearly limited scope of the premise (twelve competitors, three months), I’m optimistic that the plot won’t spin itself completely out of control like so many other manga I’ve had to give up over the years.

With the casting changes of Episode 8 and 9 behind us, Tengen Toppa Gurren-Laggan is back out of its transitional phase with episode 11. Time for us to settle in and watch the young man face up to his destiny.

With the discarded princess Nia now the focus of attention amongst the Dai Gurren Dan, and apparently amongst slathering fanboys across the blogosphere and *chans, the original core trio of Simon, Kamina, and Yoko (with Simon looking in with envy at the other two’s budding romance) is now Simon, Nia, and Yoko.

Poor Yoko. Hard on the heels of a great personal loss, she kept a stiff upper lip in front of her peers and provided no help to Simon in his hour of need. Now a pretty young princess fallen from the ranks of the enemy has taken her place. Episode 12, “Miss Yoko, I Have Something to Ask of You,” finally has given Yoko a chance to work out her issues a bit, something I figured Gainax wouldn’t bother doing. The first half of the episode focuses on a one-sided rivalry with Nia, with Yoko losing at every turn. After the obligatory fight between giant robots starts up, Yoko gets a chance to take the reins and show the bad guys, her comrades, and the viewing audience what she’s really made of.

Aside from the obvious fanservice draw, episode 12 brings one of my favorite characters back into the foreground where she belongs, and not just as a couple of boobs and thighhigh stockings.

Transitional episodes have an odd effect on me. Most shows don’t have the courtesy to provide them, as it’s necessary to keep the story and character development moving forward, but I think Gainax was able to pull it off with the introduction of a new character, a dramatic (if temporary) shift in presentation style, and a little reshuffling of the deck.
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