A Manga to Make Carl Sagan Weep

I read somewhere a while back that Tite Kubo, author of the obscenely popular manga series Bleach, made a statement to the effect that he's only halfway through penning that title. It's almost difficult to fathom another TEN YEARS of Bleach. Mind you, that series is basically about teen ghosts that fight each other with spirit swords, so I'm intensely curious--though not enough to actually buy any--about how much plot juice one can wring out of such a banal premise. Madness.

Well, from a critic/sensible reader's perspective it's loony. From that of the accountant it makes perfect sense. In fact, from that angle it's tough to begrudge it since a cash cow like this enables publishers to take risks with other, perhaps more artsy, niche titles.

Back in my Viz days that company occasionally took a gutsy risk thanks to such lucrative series. Carl Horn's great work on Eagle, about a Japanese-American who makes a bid for the White House (this is waaaaay before anybody'd even heard of Obama) was one of them. They promoted the fuck out of it--I know because I helped write and distribute lots of its marketing materials--and it sold like dog poop in a box even though it received critical acclaim.

Before that, though, my favorite risky title had to be Hoshino Yukinobu's 2001 Nights, a hard sci-fi collection of time-skipping vignettes that philosophically approaches the subject of mankind's future endeavors in space. Every year or two I come back to it, read it over, and remember the way it was. You know, back in those good ol' days that don't actually exist except through the rosy glasses in our heads.

It truly is a masterpiece of sci-fi manga, despite my obvious leanings. Like a skilled surgeon Hoshino takes so many of the familiar conventions of the genre, dissects them and presents them back to the audience with that thing the Japanese so love to cite--heart. Take the KARK 9000 storyline, in which a remote probe with a sentient AI at its core is sent shooting off on a nuclear rocket at twelve percent light speed towards Barnard's Star looking for alien life. Hoshino takes the story of a fancy computer and its human programmer and, in two parts, transmutes it into a genuinely piercing tragedy that pulls readers in with tremendous emotional gravity.

The grand question Hoshino presents to readers throughout hundreds of pages of meticulously illustrated panels is this: Will humanity every truly be ready to not just gaze into infinity, but step into it willfully? Serious food for thought as we retire space shuttles, slash NASA funding and move further and further away from the glory days of triumphant moon landings.

--Matt