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Musings: Shigeru Mizuki’s Yokai and Shoji Ohtomo’s Kaiju: Love Is In The Details

I attended G-Fest this past weekend with my son, who is a huge Godzilla and kaiju fan (for those of you who don’t know what kaiju are, they are giant Japanese movie monsters, most of which have been created since the original Godzilla movie premiered in 1954.  If you are a Gen Xer, you probably saw them on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon television).

While I’m not a huge Godzilla fan myself,  I have lived with two of them, and it’s an education. But their enthusiasm in collecting action figures and watching the movies is nothing compared to the contagious love of the genre and almost everything about it that I experienced at G-Fest. You have to dig deep to find the kind of information some of the people running the sessions shared.

 

Yokai daizaiku (electric yokai) anatomical drawing by Shigeru Mizuki

Yokai daizaiku (electric yokai) anatomical drawing by Shigeru Mizuki, courtesy of Monster Brains

The last session I attended was about art depicting Japanese monsters. One of the artists responsible for documenting Japanese monsters put incredible effort and artistry into depicting Japanese folk monsters, called yokai, particularly in the manga series Ge Ge No Kitaro. Eisner Award winner Shigeru Mizuki started out drawing pictures for Japanese story theaters called kamishibai, before the popularity of manga, studied and drew yokai from both the outside and inside (unfortunately, he died in 2015).

 

Drawing near the same time was another artist, Shoji Ohtomo. What Mizuki did for yokai, Ohtomo did for kaiju. His drawings show how interested he was in the details of what made kaiju work, and many people called him “Dr. Kaiju”. Unfortunately, while you can find a reasonable amount of information on Shigeru Mizuki, it’s not as easy to find the same

Cross-section of King Ghidorah (left), photo of Shoji Ohtomo,

Cross-section of King Ghidorah (left), photo of Shoji Ohtomo (right).

about Shoji Ohtomo. Here’s a short piece I found over at Monster Brains that includes several of his anatomical drawings. And a few of my very blurry photos from the session, run by Stan Hyde.

 

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Anatomical drawings of Gappa (left) and Gamera (right) by Shoji Ohtomo.

 

You have to really care about monsters to want to imagine what they would be like inside if they weren’t fictional characters represented by an actor in a rubber suit.

Shoji Ohtomo is also credited by some with the original design of Ultraman, an alien kaiju fighter. Ohtomo’s original drawing appears on the right, with more finished designs on the left. Before I became a children’s librarian, I wanted to be an archivist and manuscripts librarian, and getting to see the details that go into the process of creation, whether it is drafts of a poem by Sylvia Plath or the development of a character like Ultraman is why I wanted to do that.

Original drawing and cross-sections for Ultraman, by Shoji Ohtomo

Original drawing and cross-sections for Ultraman, by Shoji Ohtomo

It’s easy to write off some of these films as cheesy B-movies. As a genre, they do indeed have their cheesy, goofy moments. But there are many talented artists in a variety of mediums who have contributed to the development of kaiju eiga films  and there is a lot more going on than there seems to be on the surface.  Because so much of what makes these movies work occurred (and occurs) in Japan, and (at least given my experience at this convention) many of the makers and actors aren’t known outside Japan(three of the special guests needed a translator), most people don’t get to appreciate that.

What does any of this have to do with the horror genre?  Well, if it had nothing to do with it, this would still be really cool to see. But besides stories about giant monsters being part of the stock in trade, many creators in the horror genre expend the same kind of attention to detail in crafting their art, and in the past have found their work similarly dismissed. I encourage you to explore the different ways monsters and horror are experienced around the world, so you can see that love of the genre expressed in the many different ways people perceive it. Look further, and find even more to love.

Posted on July 19, 2018 by , Reply

Musings: The Same Old Arguments About H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft was a racist.

It’s not an argument we are going to have here. He was a racist, and it’s clear as it can be from his writing that he was racist, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic.

I often hear apologists say “He wasn’t any worse than anyone else at the time.”  That’s a terrible argument. Other people being racists at the same time doesn’t excuse Lovecraft– it just shows that an appalling number of people were racist.

I’ve actually seen someone compare him to Abraham Lincoln (I’m totally willing to say that Lincoln was not an angel, and he certainly held racist beliefs. But that’s one of the most bizarre comparisons I’ve ever come across). Lincoln’s racism isn’t an excuse for anyone else’s racist beliefs, either.

Also, can we please get past the idea that people who object to Lovecraft’s racism are destroying literature? Or that any literature belongs to any one person?  Lovecraftian fiction is more popular than it’s ever been, and his racism isn’t stopping a lot of people from reading and enjoying it, or even writing it.  And authors and publishers who address the problematic nature of Lovecraft’s work are producing some amazing work. Victor Lavalle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, a response to The Horror at Red Hook, received rave reviews.  Silvia Moreno-Garcia at Innsmouth Free Press, published and co-edited She Walks in Shadows, an award-winning anthology of Lovecraftian fiction.

I’m not a fan of Lovecraft at all, but I don’t think Lovecraft’s work should be banned, or shoved under the table. Just because he wrote about shadowy creatures doesn’t mean he and his work should be hidden. He existed, and regardless of what you, or I, or anyone else, think of him,  he made tremendous contributions to horror literature, and his mythos, at least, has solidly embedded itself in mainstream culture.  As individuals, we can each decide whether his problematic attitudes toward race, women, and Jews are enough to keep us from reading his work or even loving it. But they shouldn’t be forced on anyone.

But this back-and-forth on “is Lovecraft a racist” is taking the focus away from some really brilliant writers who have already recognized that he is problematic, and are facing that head-on. Let’s see how far-reaching the diversity and creativity of today’s writers of Lovecraftian fiction can take us as we acknowledge his racist past.

 

 

Posted on September 3, 2017 by , Reply

Diversity is Good… So Are School Libraries.

I was saddened to read this article today in the New York Times, about a neighborhood school with forty percent of the children receiving free lunch that was struggling to save its school library. By digging deep and rallying their community the students of PS 363 in New York City raised the money to save their library and keep their school library program going for another year.

I am lucky enough to live in a district with reasonably well-funded schools, due to a referendum that passed a few years ago. This allows the schools to offer a school library program staffed with professional school librarians not just during the year but also for several days during the summer. The article in the Times notes that while diversity is considered to be a benefit of a public school education, cuts in education are creating casualties in schools like PS 363 (aka The Neighborhood School), where the socioeconomic diversity is enough to make fundraising efforts difficult, but not quite extreme enough to qualify for extra federal funding.

We’ll never escape the inequities of school funding. Some schools will have extraordinary resources available to them, and others will struggle. One way to even the playing field is to make sure that schools like PS 363 have great school library programs staffed by professional librarians- there are strong correlations to significant improvements in student achievement and literacy, for kids at all socioeconomic levels (you can check out Scholastic’s excellent report summarizing the research here– the school also has a link to the report on their fundraising webpage).  Where is the money going to come from? PS 363 showed that supporting  vital, if unfunded, educational programs requires a community effort. It is amazing to me how the school community and surrounding neighborhood pulled together and saved the library program for another year.  The only way it’s going to happen is if each of us gets personally involved in saving an imperiled school library, regardless of the situation the students, and school, find themselves in.

 

Posted on June 7, 2012 by , Reply
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