I've been doing a lot of comics-related posts lately, and since I've got a lot to say on the subject I decided it might be neat if I made a weekly thing of it. So from now on look forward to the SUNDAY MORNING COMICS CLUB every weekend until I lose interest:

This week's issue features




and

Alright, first on today's agenda is the discovery of a new style of gag cartoons I had no idea about until last week (thanks
mexicanpony ). Most cartoonists either use one panel to tell a gag or three to tell a slightly more structured joke, but C.W.Kee of The Star newspaper in Malaysia has quietly perfected the two-panel gag cartoon:






Genius! The ramifications of this discovery should be enormous. I can't wait to see what western cartoonists will do with this new technique. I think in the future people might look back on this guy as some kind of pioneer. In his other cartoons, he shows such a flagrant disregard for conventional ideas of 'what a joke is' that he evokes the spirit of punk rock:



It reminds me of Nedroid's 200 Bad Comics except it's in a national newspaper and not meant to be bad. I hope this goes on to inspire everyone who reads it.


Right. Onto the main topic for today: DRAGON BALL

I posted some issues of Dr. Slump recently, which is the early work of a guy called Akira Toriyama. Toriyama's not held in particularly high regard in the west because he's mostly known for a horrible cartoon for 12-year-olds called Dragon Ball Z, which looks like this:




Toriyama's basically a victim of his own success. For 10 years his comic 'Dragon Ball' appeared in a magazine called Weekly Shonen Jump, a comic anthology where the creators have a very close relationship to the editor, and the editor in turn listens very closely to his readership. The readers are polled constantly as to what they'd like to see happen in their favorite strips, and because they are twelve they invariably say that want 'more fights, more superpowers, more complex battle systems, everyone should get stronger and angrier'. So we end up with monstrosities like you see above where people are either fighting or talking about fighting, and conversing in jargon that's usually only explainable with more jargon.


This is a big shame, because Dragonball started out as a sweetly funny and wonderful little strip that was more obviously from the creator of Dr. Slump. It was originally a modern-day retelling of the chinese fable of the Journey To The West, which also inspired the popular 70's TV series 'Monkey' amongst countless other adaptations.

It tells the story of Son Goku, a little boy with a monkey's tail who has grown up in the wild without ever meeting another human being. Like Dr. Slump, a lot of the humour comes from his naiveity about the world around him, coupled with his cheekiness, his determination and incredible strength. In the first issue, he meets Bulma, a determined but mercenary young woman who is looking for the nine mystic Dragonballs, mystic stones which when brought together are said to summon Sheng Long, a dragon with the power to grant any wish the summoner desires (this is also pretty much the set-up of every Japanese video game and cartoon series ever). Goku has the first ball, left to him by his grandfather when he was just a baby, but since he won't part with it he agrees to accompany Bulma on her quest.

Dragonball has almost the perfect format for an adventure strip, I think, since each issue represents a self-contained story introducing new characters that can be read without having to have read the last, and yet all have the same single narrative thread running throughout. The book has been collected into 42 volumes written over a span of 10 years. However, once they've collected the nine Dragonballs and Sheng Long scatters them throughout the world again at the end of volume 2, it becomes apparent that the story is set up to be able to run forever in a perpetual cycle of 'collect Dragonballs, summon dragon, make wish, dragon scatters Dragonballs, repeat', neverending like a soap opera. I'm not sure how many times I could make myself read the same story, trying to capture the thrill of the first hit with diminishing returns each time, so I called it a day after the first cycle.

It's easy to see why Dragon Ball became a success in the first place since the series, or what I read of it, has charm coming out of its ears. In the first issue it's quickly apparent that the world the characters live in is being completely different to ours, but the specifics of this world are vague enough that we're never sure if we're in fuedal japan, a post apocalyptic future, Star Trek or the stone age. People talk to animals as if it ain't no thing in a manner reminiscent of Jeff Smith's 'Bone'. People have monkey-tails and ride on clouds. Flesh-eating dinosaurs roam the earth, but they're never seen to be anything more than a minor inconvenience.



People also carry around 'HOI-POI CAPSULES' as a matter of course, small pellets which when thrown on the ground produce bikes, cars, buses and even houses, and which hint of a hugely advanced civilisation existing somewhere outside of the scope of the story.

N.B. japanese comics read from right to left.



Speaking of which, all the items produced from the capsules look wicked, testament to Toriyama's incredible talent as a designer. They've all got clean, rounded forms and austere, medicinal labelling that make them look as if they believably came from a tiny capsule, and yet are somehow plausible as real vehicles. They're really charming and tactile, like you want to reach into the comic and pick them up. They must have sold tons of toys off the back of this.



It also needs to be mentioned that Toriyama is an excellent cartoonist! He's got that knack for 'drawing funny' that John Kricfalusi places so much importance on, and that a lot of people don't really have. Look at the feet on this mangy, mangled wolf Goku has killed:



The series has a great sense of humour throughout, in fact. Running jokes are established and then dispensed with from issue to issue. Because Goku is super-strong and invulnerable to most attacks, Bulma chastises him with a sub-machine gun:




I can't do an appraisal of Dragon Ball without talking about the character design. Every supporting character is complete and unique and a joy to look at, which is quite an achievement considering they're often introduced for just one week and then forgotten about.




Goku himself is a masterclass in iconic character design, since his distinctive haircut and tail give him a unique silhouette from all angles. The japanese have a leg-up on this stuff on everybody else, since they get most of their ideas on how to do comics from Osamu 'Astro Boy' Tezuka, who in turn got everything he knows from 1940's Hollywood animation. Mainstream American comics artists, however, abide by principles developed by a long tradition of, uh, 1940's American comics artists, who were all the people not good enough be 1940's Hollywood animators. So they're kind of fucked from the start.

Dragon Ball has an excellent cast of supporting characters, like Oolong. Oolong is the third member of Bulma and Goku's party, and is a shapeshifter figuratively and literally. Both in the sense of the archetypical character whose loyalties are always in question, self-interested and driven by greed, money and sex, and because he can turn into shit:


I also love that one panel is devoted to pure exposition, like the director just shoving his head in front of the camera to explain the story to you. All you really need to know is that Oolong is a pig dressed as Chairman Mao, which is cool no matter how you cut it. I think Toriyama reminds me of Jamie Hewlett in a lot of ways, in his mixing and matching of cultural tropes and the irreverant games of dress-up he plays with his characters, but also because he knows (for example) exactly what type of classic car this rocket-launcher wielding bandit and his cat friend should drive and that they should both wear goggles to do so:




Speaking of whom, Yamcha is another of my favorite characters from the two volumes of Dragonball I read. I wish I had a flying cat buddy.




The cat is a shapeshifter, too, and recognises Oolong from 'the first year of shapeshifter school'. One of the funniest scenes in the book occurs when Puarr disguises himself as Goku to distract Bulma, and Oolong disguises himself as Bulma because he doesn't want Goku to know he's been perving on her, and so neither of them are talking to the person they think they are :



Also, did I mention Toriyama is a master of drawing action sequences?



It's the perfect blueprint on how to do an adventure serial, really, since all the basic food groups are covered and there's a lot of variation in the exciting situations the characters get themselves into. It makes a change from some comics where you just feel like characters are just talking heads that exist only to talk or fight and it's impossible to imagine a scene in which they eat or go to the toilet. Dragon Ball even has one of those scenes where all the characters are trapped in a room that will slowly kill them:



The pace is pretty constant and always moving, so there's no room for small moments. You'll never get three panels devoted to a leaf falling or a bird landing on Goku's tail, but it does do other clever things, like that excellent standard technique of making one panel unexpectedly huge to emphasize something incredible happening.



So there's a lot any aspiring comics creator can learn from Dragonball. It's just a shame it has to follow this soap opera format where larger narrative arcs exist only to perpetuate the series for its own sake, and no story ever has real closure or purpose. I've never really been able to get involved with series like that, which is why the highest praise I could give Dragon Ball is that it's like the best saturday morning cartoon series you saw when you were a kid, with the difference being it doesn't suck to watch it again now you're an adult.

Alright, to close this week's Sunday Morning Comics Club let's have another look at the satirical genius of The Star's C.W. Kee:



YEAH, TRUE DAT