AX: Alternative Manga 1

compiled by Mitsuhiro Asakawa, edited by Sean Michael Wilson;

This 400-page collection is a selection of the best from alternative Japanese anthology AX, which has published around 18,000 pages of material. I guess the closest comparison might be Raw: this is outsider material, a lot of it with an approach or attitude that would be unacceptable in the big mainstream publications. But it’s worth remembering that the Japanese mainstream is much bigger and broader than in the anglophone world, so that is therefore a bigger statement to make: you need to be more alternative to be outside the mainstream there.

The art in layout terms is mostly less experimental than is common in for instance girls’ comics in Japan, but the drawing is immensely diverse, from crude Outsider art to rich and complex drawing to highly stylised work to work rather like the autobiographical indies we are used to, and much more. The subject matter is completely unpredictable too, ranging across horror and sex and confessional and comedy and just about everything else, much of it not easily definable.

The one star name is the always superb Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who delivers a strange tale of love and sex, featuring a monkey, but I was also struck by Imiri Sakabashira’s extraordinary and horrific fever dream, and Takato Yamamoto’s lushly, beautifully drawn and poetically expressed reverie of eroticism and decay. Mitsuhiko Yoshida’s cute & charming tortoise/hare race seems completely out of place, as does Shinya Komatsu’s only slightly druggy mushroom strip, which kind of reminds me of Winsor McCay, but I guess it’s nice to see that this isn’t all adult material. I think my favourite strip was probably the moving ‘Kosuke Okada and his Fifty Sons’ by Hideyasu Moto, but the wit and Zen minimalism of Kotobuki Shiriagari’s ‘Twin Adults’ ran it close.

Overall, there was very little I didn’t like, and given that the successful manga that make it into English translation comprise a mere subset of the whole (I don’t suppose we will ever get much in the way of pachinko stories, for instance, or salaryman comedy), it’s valuable to get an illustration of the breadth that is out of sight, that shows the range of comics that people want to make, even if not so many want to see it. Frankly I am not convinced that the quality of this is any match for Raw, perhaps because a lot of Raw creators would have found a home in the wider stream of Japanese comic publishing, but almost all of it is good and interesting, and quite a lot is excellent.