1900HOTDOG

Nerding Day: i tell c

Added 2022-07-12 12:00:05 +0000 UTC

A friend of mine (you’re famous now, James Bizzarro) says it’s a miracle any movie gets made. Each stage of production is a lurking point of failure: a master performance of a beautiful script can’t survive cinematography by an Eisner-in-law. With those odds, every movie should look like the lost reel of Birdemic.

I think there’s something to that, but for all mediums.

Take comics. Or manga, if you’re tired of Peter Parker fighting animal-themed single dads (I’m not, but I’m fanboy Switzerland). It’s easy to think of a series as the result of one creative voice. But any vision gets filtered through editors, art assistants, senior editors, assistant editors, meta-editors, and Baal: Eater of Inferior Pages.

i tell c doesn’t suck in a vacuum. It sucks in a way only possible in prestige manga sweatshops. While stand-up egos breed two-hour specials defending one helicopter joke, manga editorial breeds breakdowns. Sending Shonen Jump editors to Netflix could fix both, but that’s another article.

Weekly Shonen Jump reigns as the world’s biggest manga magazine. It specializes in shonen, which means young male punching. Seinen is adult male punching, shoujo is young female punching, and publishers fear adult women.

[Correction: Adult female punching is called josei. Forgive me; I’m from EagleLand, which hasn’t sold comics for employed women since courts banned premarital reading.]

Jump owns Dragon Ball (Z, Super, and The Good One), One Piece, Naruto, the concept of overcoming superior opponents through grit, and a mass graveyard of canceled series. Don’t come to Jump with a sleeper hit, or anything else that makes less money than Singapore. Take your mortal profit margins over to the second largest money printer and reflect on your mistakes.

High expectations make things tense between editorial and servants. Twenty pages a week is suicidal enough without a tribunal to please. Bleach creator Tite Kubo started out wearing sunglasses indoors, and left with a therapist. He’s a top-tier success story. Kubo survived 618 chapters of feedback before his work devolved from this:

To this:

The laziest page in sequential art history. And Bleach started off fun. Imagine something that always sucked.

Enter i tell c: half A Study in Scarlet, half waifus.

The title looks like a target, but I’ll spare it. It’s an elaborate bilingual pun. Aiterushi plays off aishiteru, which means “Please don’t steal Dennard’s lunch money. He’s saving for a Gundam model so that he can finally build a friend.”

It’s actually “I love you.” As smiles go extinct, I support letting hard-working puns go.

Thank you, master. i tell c begins with a celebrity murder, a tragedy worth at least three normals.

Sad times. If teens enslaved by conglomerates to scintillate horny obsessives aren’t safe, who is? Haruka deserves merchandisable justice. Someone smart enough to catch the killer spoiled on page three.

Our ace detective is Risa Aioi, a human adult who looks like this:

The avatar of glitter. The heart-eyes aren’t a one-off gag, she looks like that half the time. My notes say “permanently banned from Build-A-Bear Workshop,” and I stand by them.

In the shared tradition of hacks and virtuosos, Risa’s design echoes her personality. It’s the natural middle point between Sherlock Holmes, Pepe Le Pew, and porn addiction. Fitting, since her gimmick’s falling in love with perps.

Not just in this case. Every case.

“Now hold on,” I thought. “Don’t Japanese cops pretend you have rights? At least until you join the 99 percent conviction rate?”

Wrong. Risa is the law’s ultimate weapon. Columbo merged with your Canadian girlfriend from summer camp. The Japan Civil Liberties Union can eat shit before her adorable stalking prowess. There’s finally a boot stamping on human loneliness, forever.

Risa’s a yandere detective, a concept I can’t explain if you dated before undergrad. Imagine the kidnapper from Misery hunting down Roman Polanski, and you almost have it. But now you’re also in jail. Sorry about that.

Remember to read from right to left, or all this might make sense.

Risa gets her man, and solves the crime too, I guess. I almost wrote “Imagine this with a male officer.” But a gender flip doesn’t change the horror. In pursuit of a fetish object, they’ve created Detective Nyarlathotep. All three terabytes of my detective erotica are ruined.

Normally, I end my culture war reports with this kind of reveal. i tell c kicks off like this. Everything above comes from the first chapter. Sit down, breathe in, and light a candle. We’re going to the astral plane of garbage. The wildest manga industry disaster since BitTorrent.

Two forgettable cops hang around for exposition. Only 0.02% of Japan’s population is black, so they don’t get much done. Risa, who’s somewhere between a consultant and huggable death squad, handles the heavy lifting. They’re also brothers, proving that enabling is genetic.

These twin hammers of justice are Sakon and Ukon. What they lack in “solving cases” or “respecting civil liberties,” they make up for with heroism. To honor their valor, I’ve designed “The Thin Kawaii Line.” Salute it, wash the nearest Ford Explorer by hand, and then salute it again:

Ukon endears himself to readers with his love of sweets. Sakon endears himself by inhaling and exhaling. Heroically. Together, they stand nearby while Risa solves another celebrity murder. This makes America stronger, even though they’re all in Tokyo.

Now, you might imagine you have the basic series formula down. New crime, new love-shrine, new lawsuit. Rinse, wash your eyes, repeat. Law and Order on drugs, or SVU in rehab. And you’d be right! For three chapters.

Then chapter four gives us a new tone, backstory, and premise.

During a country vacation inevitably leading to another corpse pile, the gang runs into a new character design: a hapless crime writer. He has the clumsy injuries of an unattended president, and knows the location of today’s unsolved murder.

Risa almost falls for him, but segfaults because his kills are fictional. Specifically, he’s a novelist. Modern manga’s as fixated on metafiction as our comics are on showing how Batman’s parents really died. While American writing about writers hides in novel drafts you’ll have to torture me to access, in manga it’s a thriving subgenre. Still, a curious turn for a series portraying realistic crimes through a single idiotic filter. Unless...

What was I thinking? He’s our secretly-hot main villain. Also, our episodic police procedural has a main villain. I’ve eaten garbage for decades, I should be able to identify flavors by now.

The guy he just offed was a red herring—who also committed a few murders, but Aioi redeemed him through love or whatever. He’s dead now. What matters is the GQ assassin:

Risa’s original kidnapper. A man so foul, so unforgivable, that Risa swipes left. She’d marry anyone with an open warrant, but his workshop meta-murders are just that twisted. To set the stakes, he kills Sakon. Or Ukon. One of the exposition brothers.

Goodbye, Ukon. Unless you were Sakon. Either way, blame your idiot brother for losing his gun to a tied-up flight risk:

A correction: despite his heroism, Sakon sucks. He’s the worst thing to happen to policing since the Fugitive Slave Act, and nearly justifies local tolerance for Risa’s quirky sex crimes. While they both swear to avenge Ukon, I can only take the state-sponsored stalker seriously.

There’s just a little tonal whiplash. i tell c is now a revenge thriller about fighting hostage trauma with stalker trauma. Strange, but still more than enough pig nostril and food coloring to make a nice hotdog.

What?

How? Her kidnapper just double-killed Ukon and someone useful. You can’t stick a laugh track over “What’s in the box?” Actually, that would rule. But you can’t show it halfway through Se7en.

Stop. It’s not too late. You’ve introduced a sex pest police chief, but you can still complete your thin revenge arc. The story can have a beginning, a chapter we never discuss, and an end.

I’m wrong again! Writing is humbling. Welcome to i tell c’s comedy phase.

My goal today was convincing Anime Week survivors to try the medium. I’m an expert at botching my goals. Rehabilitating anime can join side flips and immigration fraud on my list of misses. If you ever forgive me, give Sword of the Stranger a shot.

At least I can finish my point about editorial. There’s a material reason i tell c compulsively changes hats: a rival comic dies every week. Often one with better sales. At Shonen Jump, weekly popularity polls convert sleep and regular exercise into unemployment. When you’re working at max capacity and losing, why not cycle gimmicks and pray to Baal?

This manga is in a valiant struggle. Lesser creators complete sane stories because they’ve lost the human drive to survive. Kazusa Inoaka is kicking, biting, and drawing thigh gaps. We’re watching The One Thousand and One Nights told by an alcoholic with a plaid fetish.

Alright, so now this is a crime sitcom, leaning on all the sex appeal allowed in the magazine running Karate Pirates Fight God. We get a new antagonist to match: Mar, a master thief by way of Madonna.

Aioi’s schtick applies across all felonies and genders, so she pines for Mar instead of stopping her. Think Congress and Remington. As for the author that murdered our leads’ brother-in-arms/literal brother? He displeased Baal. Poll numbers are down, only Larceny Barbie matters now.

Nobody won a GLAAD award for this one. I’d suggest starting a Razzie equivalent, but that opens a portal to a dimension of evangelical film and Jamaican anything no judging panel is ready for. Either way, if you killed Vampyr’s best friend on Dick Fight Island, he’d spend at least a week hunting the killer before going back to inhaling sex dust.

In defense of the author/editors/creative spirit, there’s a benefit to dropping everything we were doing tonally and narratively. i tell c gets to make a joke for humans. It even features Aioi’s wacky sexual predation backfiring!

Sure, it’s driven by hornball Looney Tunes logic. But it delivers a clean setup and payoff, unlike the execution of a core cast member. If you expect Hikaru to come back, you’re under Godot’s tree with Fry’s dog.

After Mar, the cancellation axe falls. i tell c has two chapters to eke meaning out of nothing. The philosophers of olde knew how, but Square Enix copyrighted manga alchemy. So i tell c dime-stop turns into drama again.

I assume he met everyone between Abe and Aiko first, but they eventually let Aioi into a room with a minor. This, mercifully, does not lead to our fifth genre change.

That’s right, the junior varsity Riddler. Aioi’s adventures have elevated her to HR Hazard Batman. Criminals are a superstitious and unconsenting lot, and Risa’s trampling their rights to a J-Pop remix of Can’t Stop City Halloween.

If you fear Risa’s affection less than Bruce Wayne’s fatherly chokehold, you haven’t been paying attention. If you have, you don’t need me to tell you she makes it. Or that she unearths his backstory as a bullying victim, redeeming his domestic terrorism phase. Because unlike Batman, she has a superpower. Something stronger than telepathy, super speed, or sane deadlines.

I will never hear that word again without fleeing.

I get a taste of the Mandela effect reading i tell c. I suspect it’s the equivalent of Judge Dredd on a world run by matriarchal sex addicts. A scathing satire of policing by the Sirens, later twisted into Stella Stallone slurring to popular fanfare.

Shonen Jump heroes say “don’t give up” once every three pages. And it’s thrived long enough to attract artists that spent their childhoods and man-childhoods reading Shonen Jump. Thus, after 2000 words shitting on his dreams, I have to admit: Kazusa Inaoka didn’t give up. Even if he really should have! That’s just enough guts to replace wisdom or talent.

You might fall into a similar bind. Don’t let crude hecklers (me), ivory-tower sophists (also me), or failure spectators (that’s you) set the tone. There’s another act coming. Kazusa’s got a new series now, tapping a different axis of sex appeal:

It’s in Shonen Jump too, so Kazusa’s learned to enjoy the cool sensation of waterboarding. I hope it does well enough to cover a week of Tokyo rent. In my own backwards, aggressive-aggressive way, I’m rooting for Kazusa’s work.