Katsumoto Kasane - Hands Off!, vol. 01-02 (Eng. trans.)

For some reason, I thought this was about psychic basketball players. There is one psychic basketball player, but the manga is not actually about basketball, thankfully.

It is, however, about psychic kids. Oohira Kotarou is aforementioned psychic basketball player, though the basketball really is not very important so far. He's recently transferred to Tokyo from an all-boys school, as his smaller physique and feminine face used to get him into situations. In case you were wondering, the first page of the series has him in a schoolgirl uniform (oh manga!).

But now he's living with his grandfather and his surly cousin Tatsuki, who used to be a good childhood friend of his and now brushes off any attempt at niceness. He's made friends with Urushiyama Yuuto, your standard womanizing guy with a heart of gold. Little does he know that his touch enhances other people's psychic powers; Tatsuki sees the past while Yuuto sees people's auras. Together, they fight crime!

No really, they actually do fight crime, albeit in a non-structured, very random way.

I wasn't too drawn in by the art, which is somewhat too sketchy and skinny for me, but I am already deeply in love with Tatsuki, who is your standard manga variation of the alpha male. Namely, he is brusque and gruff and says about three words every five pages and he will just as silently and gruffly put himself into mortal danger to protect Kotarou and then pretend nothing just happened. I am not sure why this version of alpha male gets to me, as opposed to the romance novel version, which just annoys the hell out of me, but it invariably does.

Kotarou, Yuuto and Tatsuki are all fairly standard manga and BL types (Kotarou fills the role of the clueless girly one), but I'm enjoying what Katsumoto is doing with them and how their respective powers embody their types. Kotarou doesn't know his touch enhances psychic powers, Yuuto is good with people because he reads auras, and Tatsuki violently reacts to being touched because he has been tragically non-literally scarred. And I absolutely adore the dynamics among the three, particularly the Kotarou-Tatsuki relationship (where is the fic??).

Just like with the main characters, some of the side plots are fairly standard manga tropes, but Katsumoto does small things with them that I enjoy. For an edging-toward-BL manga, the main female love interest has been very sympathetic. Also, as Kotarou is the girly one, he endlessly gets into trouble and needs to be rescued by Tatsuki. I might get tired of this some day, but so far, I love it to pieces.

And for anyone wondering, we already have completely random sibling incest complete with cross-dressing!

Also, have I mentioned completely falling for Tatsuki in a very dramatic and embarrassing way?

Iizuka Hiroyuki, et al. - Shojo Beat Manga Artist Academy (Eng. trans.)

This is a general introduction to creating shoujo manga, done in manga format. It's slightly gimmicky; we follow little panda Satomi in her quest to become a shoujo mangaka, but I forgive it for the gimmick because I am so amused by Satomi and Mr. Manga Star, her hard-ass editor.

The book is divided into several sections, each of which covers a topic on manga production, each written by a different shoujo mangaka. They can vary widely in quality; thankfully, the ones that seemed pretty bad were the sections I wasn't very interested in anyway. These include the two chapters on writing (character and plot), which seem to believe that the more cliched something is, the better. I also suspect that the book isn't very good for those looking to improve basic drawing skills like perception or human physique.

On the other hand, while the book never manages to go into great depth, it actually covers things like panelling and toning and inking, all of which are topics that are very foreign to me. I think if you know anything about those topics, this book might be boring, but since I don't, it was pretty neat. I liked it best when the mangaka got into the nitty gritty of what they do, of the pens and the ink they use, of things like sand erasers for erasing clouds into skies of screentone. And there's some fairly basic stuff that I don't think about, like having the main character generally facing or running or walking from right to left, to follow the reader's reading patterns.

Also, while I disregarded most of the story-telling advice ("Exaggerate your characters so you can describe them with just one word!"), I liked notes on how to compress monologues and skip over unimportant action, both of which are things that I (hopefully) already know how to do in writing, but not necessarily in manga.

Now I want more detailed books on things like panelling!

On the notion of the ghetto pass

After the great SGA race debates of DOOM, witchqueen had a post on earning a ghetto pass, or "How not to be scared of the FoC-ing cabal." ("FoC-ing cabal" being "fans-of-color cabal," as coined by witchqueen)

I nodded a lot and thought, "Yes! Thank you!"

If anyone's interested, I can tell you what I look at with regard to ghetto passes in discussions of racism, but really, that's just me and I change my mind every other second.

But I think there's something witchqueen didn't explicity state, and something that will often get buried in the list of things that various people look at re: a ghetto passes, which is:

Not only is there no short cut to a ghetto pass, there is also no guarantee of keeping a ghetto pass. There is no checklist, and even if there were, you could do everything on it and still fall flat on your face. In other words, you may be the best ally ever in terms of black-white dynamics, but you can still say stupid things about Asians. Or vice versa. Or multiply for multi-racial people, for people of color outside of the US, for people who can "pass," for women of color, for third culture kids, for so many non-privileged people.

And no matter what your track record is, there is always a chance that the FoC-ing cabal will be mean to you (OMG! Woe and terror!) because the FoC-ing cabal, like all other groups out there, is made of individual people, and people have this funny habit of disagreeing and not being monolithic.

Because of this, the ghetto pass isn't a pass from fear or a pass that you can wave around to do what you want after you get it. And that sucks, I know. To give you my perspective (and I am by no means the expert or the magical minority fairy), every single time I post about race and racism, I am scared that I will be yelled at by people, particularly by people whose anti-racist stance and views and work I respect a lot. I hope that I am a part of the FoC-ing cabal and that I do have a ghetto pass, but I think these are things that are very easy to claim and very difficult to keep.

The point isn't having a ghetto pass; the point is in doing the work that goes into a ghetto pass. And to keep doing it, and to do it even and especially when you're scared out of your mind and certain that you are going to start the next flame war of DOOM by pointing out, "Um. I love this show, but why are all the POC dead?"

And even then, even when you put things on the line, there are no gold stars, no passes, no official designations of "okay-ness." It's just work, work, and more work.

And then you get tired, and you bitch, and you kick this broken world and wish it were fixed already. And you let something slide because you just want to spend time with people and for once, just once, not be the one to call people out on their whiteness or their unthinking assumptions, and you feel guilty because you know what silence means. And you read things and think and Google and think more and then watch your comfort show with problematic racial representation because your head hurts and you want to relax. Some days you throw the remote at it, some days you don't. And you find allies in the least expected of places, and you get kicked in the head when someone you (formerly) deeply respected tells you there is no racism where she lives. You post and people respect you; you post again and get called out on unthinking racism.

And then you go to bed, and you get up the next day, and you do it all over again.