Bamboo Blade: The Complete Series - A No Flying No Tights Review

SOURCE: Bamboo Blade: The Complete Series



Toraji is a second-rate sensei – a starving teacher who manages the Kendo team at the public high-school where he is employed. Toraji’s enthusiasm for his job is rekindled after a fellow Kendo coach makes Toraji a wager he can’t refuse. Both coaches will test their girls teams against one another, with Toraji winning a year’s worth of free gourmet sushi if his team is victorious.

There are just a few small problems standing in the way of Toraji’s getting a full belly. Thanks to his lax discipline, most of last year’s team members were scared off by bullying upperclassmen, who only showed up to practice to beat people up. And as the school year opens Toraji only has one serious team member left – energetic sophomore Kirino. What is worse, the only new recruits he can field are boys!

Things are looking grim until Toraji chances across Tamaki – a pint-size freshman with lightning-fast reflexes and years of fighting experience. But Tamakai sees Kendo as more of a chore than a hobby and has little interest in anything besides her favorite animeprograms! But Kirino won’t take no for an answer and after a chance encounter with the same bullies that drove off most of last year’s team, the injustice-hating Tamakai decides to stay and serve as team’s champion.

As the year progresses, they will recruit the rest of their team. There is Miya-Miya, whose cheerful façade hides a dark, sadistic personality. Next is Saya, who seeks stability to balance her unfocused creative spirit. Finally, there’s Azuma, a would-be scholar who doesn’t study well and is clumsy and awkward everywhere except the dueling floor. Together they will forge a team. And in time, a slacker sensei may learn to be a better teacher, a group of outcasts will become friends, and a would-be captain will learn her first hard lessons in leadership.

I’m not usually a fan of sports anime, but Bamboo Blade is not your typical sports anime. The focus of the series is firmly upon the characters and their relationships – not the sport. Indeed, the viewer doesn’t need to know anything at all about Kendo and even during the tournament scenes the action is easily followed by a novice.

This focus on the characters – and the fact that those characters truly develop and grow as the series goes on – also separates Bamboo Blade from most comedic anime and sport series. While Sensei Toraji is a comic (and occasionally pathetic) figure, his heart is in the right place and he honestly does try to be a good example. Being obsessed with victory at any cost early on, he later removes Tamaki from the action in one tournament after it becomes clear her temper is getting the better of her. And in one dramatic moment, he leaves the ethical decision of how to handle one situation in the hands of Kirinio, despite her protests that as advisor he should tell her what to do.

Most of the other characters undergo similar growth arcs. Indeed, one of the only weaknesses of this series is that so many members of the ensemble – particularly the two male team members Donny and Yuji – aren’t as well developed as they could be. Indeed, Donny and Yuji comment to one another about how neglected they feel compared to their female teammates – a complaint that could be aimed at their sensei or the series writer.

The series is well-animated, though the animation is strictly standard. The one noteworthy thing about it is also one of most maddening points regarding this series. As written, this would be a wonderful empowering series for young women about sports and friendship. Yet the camera of the series has a bad case of “male gaze”, focusing at times upon the back of the girl’s skirts or their chests as they workout and talk to one another, for no apparent reason! While there are no panty shots or any bouncing cleavage, it is just distracting enough to make me think twice about showing this to any audience with any children younger than 13, despite the series’ PG rating. With that caveat in mind, I highly recommend this series for all anime fans.

Bamboo Blade
FUNimation, , 2007
directed by Hisashi Saitou
650 minutes, Number of Discs: 4, Season set
Company Age Rating: PG
Related to: Bamboo Blade by Masahiro Totsuka, Neko Sutajio

"Black Canary" Cast for "Arrow" Pilot

SOURCE: Oh Hai TV Green Arrow's Black Canary

"Katie Cassidy has just been cast as Dinah Lance/Black Canary in The CW's increasingly-looking-like-it's-actually-going-to-happen Green Arrow TV series. She's been in the Melrose Place reboot TV series, some Gossip Girl episodes and was also in Supernatural for a while as Ruby, which means she's got quite the The CW pedigree. "

Well, she DOES look the part, I'll give her that. To quote a line from Justice League Unlimited, I wouldn't mind going a few rounds with her and I'm not talking about sparring. Of course we've seen nothing to indicated she'd become Black Canary, even if the pilot does get picked-up to become a series... but I don't see anything here to make me wail and lament anymore than I possibly could have over who is writing and supervising this disaster in the making.

52 Catch-Up: Green Arrow #1-6

I don't think any book in the New 52 line-up has disappointed me more than Green Arrow. Not because of anything in the book itself but more because of the promise that wasn't fulfilled.

As regular readers know, Green Arrow is one of my favorite characters and I was of the opinion that most of the people writing him in the last decade had no idea what they were doing. So when it was announced that Oliver Queen would be getting a fresh start under the pen of J.T. Krul - whose work with the character during Brightest Day I liked - well, I was cautiously optimistic.

As I noted in my review of the first issue, J.T. Krul gave us a good set-up. The basic concept of Oliver Queen being this universe's version of Steve Jobs was a solid start and a nice modernization of the character's classic origins as a billionaire playboy. We were given a brief look at Ollie's support team at both his day and night jobs. Krul also managed to establish what sets Green Arrow apart from similar heroes, apart from his archery gimmick - his skills as a tracker, his hatred of people who abuse their power and his motivations for being a hero - with surprising subtlety.





Sadly, the potential of the first issue went largely untapped and Krul never expanded upon the one hint he gave as to how Oliver Queen's past may have differed from the old Green Arrow before leaving the book with Issue #3. Krul's three issues are, for the most part, standard superhero action fare. Do not misunderstand me - it's good superhero action fare. But this isn't what the opening issues of a new series should be like.




To my mind, an opening arc should firmly establish the main character's past and character for new readers. But these opening issues don't really do that. Apart from the aforementioned hint we aren't given any information at all about Oliver Queen's past or motivations for having become a crime-fighter. Was he washed up on an island and forced to fight a drug cartel for the freedom of an enslaved tribe? Did he discover a secret marijuana farm and force the hippies running it to take him back to civilization at arrow point? Was he abducted by Chinese slavers and forced to think up lucky numbers in a fortune cookie factory? We don't know!

Oddly, this lack of a back-story is more of a hindrance to long-time fans rather than new readers. I know I was anxious to see how the relationships between Green Arrow and his extended family would be different in the New DCU. Heck, I was anxious to see if there would even be an extended family. It turns out there isn't. This book is firmly set in the new Year One, before Roy Harper was adopted and apparently before Green Arrow met Black Canary, despite a promise at the end of Issue #2 that she would appear in Issue #3. She did not.

Another problem is that none of the supporting characters are developed past a one-sentence summary. Naomi is a sassy hacker grrrl. Jax is a pacifist weapon designer. Nobody seems to have any life outside of helping Ollie do what he does or - in the case of Queen Enterprises CEO Emerson - being an annoyance. Yet Emerson gets a scene suggesting that his motivation for riding Ollie so hard is because of his friendship with Ollie's father and his worries that Ollie is wasting his potential. It's a nice touch, making Emerson a much more complex character with a few simple panels and these opening issues could have used more brief scenes like this.





I mentioned before that Krul did a good job of establishing Ollie's basic character in the first issue. One way he did this was by giving Green Arrow the perfect villainous foil in a gang of publicity-hungry supervillains. No matter what the incarnation, there's nothing Green Arrow should hate more than people who abuse their power and hurt others like it is nothing.





Though I disagree strongly with the equation Naomi makes between supervillains posting their crimes on-line and being cheered for it and people who play violent video games. Wouldn't a comparison to the people who watch Jersey Shore, cheering the antics of a group of morally reprehensible publicity whores be more apt? Just saying.





While I can quibble with the characterization and the metaphors, I cannot quibble with the action nor with how well it is illustrated. Dan Jurgens or George Perez would be a fine artist to put on any book. Put the two of them together though, with Jurgens doing layouts and Perez doing finishes and you have something unique that captures the best of both artists. The characters all have a classic Perez feel to them but the form and flow of the panels is more structured, with just as much detail to the setting as there is to the characters. Most importantly, all of the characters have unique designs that make them easily identifiable even in the long shots.





Issues 4-6, co-plotted by artist Dan Jurgens and writer Keith Giffen, suffer from similar problems to those I described in the first three issues. There's a lot of well-designed and well-drawn action sequences but the characterization is still shallow, at best. What is worse, someone is stealing jokes from the a movie about another billionaire playboy superhero, which leaves me questioning just how coincidental it is that Oliver's executive assistant is a hyper-competent redhead.



Does this seem familiar to anyone else, somehow? Anyone?

All issues of parody or plagiarism aside, the plot of this trio of books doesn't have as much punch as the first three. The focus here is upon two new villains - Blood Rose and Midas. Blood Rose is a standard issue gun-totting femme fatale with super-strength. Midas, a slightly more original creation, was a scientist whose injuries at the hands of a group of eco-terrorists turned him into an avatar of pollution. Think Swamp Thing mixed with The Toxic Avenger... but evil! Heck, Alec Holland even gets name dropped!





Blood Rose wants to see Oliver Queen suffer slowly before she eventually kills him. Why? Good question - one Oliver actually asks her point blank and one she refuses to answer. There is a hint in the artwork that she may have known Oliver at one point in the past but nothing is ever explained.





Midas, for his part, has a much simpler motivation - he's a nerd who never had any luck with women before his accident and his relationship with Blood Rose is the closest thing he's ever had to real intimacy. He does what she wants to make her happy and appreciate him more. Which only serves to make the ending of this arc and the lack of explanation as to how these two ever hooked up even more nonsensical.

However, the confusing plot and lack of back-story for the characters is not the least of this arc's problems. The art is full of continuity errors and one great big whopping WTF moment, when Oliver Queen is apparently shot in the head and survives! I suppose the bullet is meant to have just grazed the front of his forehead but given that the gun was aimed at the back of his head before he tried to move, Ollie shouldn't have had a chance to dodge. ESPECIALLY considering the twist ending which... well... pretty much confirms there's no way Ollie could be faster than Blood Rose and certainly not fast enough to dodge bullets.





Ollie doesn't even have a bandage or signs of a wound when he goes after Midas and Blood Rose afterward! The blame for this can probably be laid on artist Ignacio Calero, who took over pencil finishes on the final issue. George Perez, he ain't.





In the end, all my grousing is completely meaningless given that Issue #7 will bring a new creative team to this book - Writer Ann Nocenti (most famous for her work on Daredevil and creation of Typhoid Mary) and artist Harvey Talibao (Most recently seen working on a Silver Surfer mini-series for Marvel). With any luck, they'll be sticking around for a while and we can finally get a look at Oliver Queen's past. Either way, you can be sure I'll be covering it!

52 Catch-Up

For a variety of reasons, I haven't been quite so diligent in my comic book reviewing of late. I had originally planned to review the first story arc of each of the New 52 titles I had been picking up and then... well, life got in the way, as it often does.

Now, six months into the new direction for DC Comics, I think we're at a good place to look back at what we've seen so far and consider what is coming up. And so begins my new feature: 52 Catch-Up.

Enough Is Never Enough: A Response

I was catching up on my Twitter feed, when I read a most worrying post over at the DC Women Kicking Ass Tumblr. In brief, they discussed a recent survey conducted by DC Comics regarding public response to the New 52 line. The survey concluded that - despite much talk about the revitalization of the line bringing in new readers - most of the people reading the New 52 books are males between 18-34 and that they were avid or lapsed fans. No word on how many of them think all these new #1s will be worth something someday.

Now, I find most surveys to be suspect. Especially one that was conducted, in-part, through the Internet. But even if we could assume that this survey was wholly accurate and accept the conclusions that less than 10% of the current comics market is made up of women and children, does that mean we should give up trying to make the comics industry a wide-spread cultural institution?

Here then is The Question: Is it a waste of our time to fight for better portrayals of female characters? Is it foolish for us to demand quality comics aimed at children? Is it utterly futile for all of us to try and save an industry that, by most appearances, doesn't want to be saved?

In the words of The Mighty Thor, "I say thee nay!"

The comic book publishers in general have a lot to answer for. But they aren't the only ones to blame for the current state of things. There are some comic shop owners who have a lot to answer for too - owners like my former bosses from my days as a comic shop employee, who gave orders that any woman entering into our store was to be escorted toward the fairy statues or the Hello Kitty merchandise. Because there's no way any woman would ever come into a comic shop wanting to buy comics! Stores like this are just as much to blame for driving women out of the hobby as the publishers creating products that ignore half of their potential market.

I know it is frustrating having to deal with this sort of thing and that some days you are bashing your head against a wall. But fighting sexism is never a mistake. Fighting for your children is never a mistake. Fighting for a better world for everyone is never a mistake.

That being said, I do believe we have made two mistakes.

The first mistake is thinking this change will come quickly when it does come. That all it will take is one magical reboot and the world will change overnight. Change doesn't work that way outside the storybook pages. At the very least, constructive change rarely comes about that easily.

The other mistake is thinking that the comic book industry must be the one to initiate the change. It's us. It has always been us and it must begin with us. If there are going to be any lasting changes, it is going to have to come from all of the fandom united together. But those changes can be small ones. And like pebbles falling down a cliff, eventually an avalanche will come.

I don't claim to have all the answers. And I've thought about hanging up my pen and giving up comics more times than many would guess. But I've also come to relish the small positive changes that I've helped bring about and all the signs that as bad as things may be, there is still something worth fighting for.

The girl I wrote about a week ago, who decided she wanted a Supergirl birthday party instead of a Princess one? That's a small change.

The ex-girlfriend I got into comics by introducing her to Fables? That's a small change.

The Manga fan who I introduced to American Comics through Birds of Prey? That's a small change.

The little girl who came into my store with a brother who just wanted Yu-Gi-Oh cards and wound up walking out with a copy of Amelia Rules? That's a small change.

The girl at the movie theater, where I was handing out comics on Free Comic Book Day, who - when told by her friend that they were out of girl's comics - said "No, they still have Iron Man". That's a small change.

As saccharine as it may sound, those little changes do give me hope. And they keep me going. They say we can't fight the system. But people fight the system every day in little ways, spawning little changes and little victories.

Will their be a big victory someday? I hope so. But until then, I am content to do what good I can and change what little I can. Because we win every time someone says "No. This isn't acceptable. And we can be better."