Visualizing Hypocrisy in Umezu Kazuoâ•Žs Manga Cat-Eyed
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Portland State University PDXScholar World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations World Languages and Literatures 2019 What You See Is What You Get: Visualizing Hypocrisy in Umezu Kazuo’s Manga Cat-Eyed Boy Jon P. Holt Portland State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/wll_fac Part of the Japanese Studies Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Citation Details Holt, Jon P., "What You See Is What You Get: Visualizing Hypocrisy in Umezu Kazuo’s Manga Cat-Eyed Boy" (2019). World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations. 131. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/wll_fac/131 This Article is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. 5/28/2020 What You See Is What You Get: Visualizing Hypocrisy in Umezu Kazuo’s Manga Cat-Eyed Boy ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies ISSN: 1549-6732 Home » Vol. 10 , No. 2 » Articles » What You See Is What You Get: Visualizing Hypocrisy in Umezu Kazuo’s Manga Cat-Eyed Boy By Jon Holt 1 In his manga Cat-Eyed Boy (Nekome Kozō, 1967-9 and 1976), Umezu Kazuo (1936- ) often uses his titular punky half-feline, half-human character less as a protagonist and more as an observer who helps narrate horrific tales. As a discoverer of horror, the character’s greatest superpower is seeing something unknown, something to be feared. What makes Umezu comics like Cat-Eyed Boy so hypnotically compelling for some readers, I suspect, is how he insinuates that under the veneer of contemporary Japanese society, there lurks paradoxical core of ugliness waiting to burst forth from an otherwise beautiful-looking surface. Umezu transcends two subgenres he knew so well—shōjo (girls’) and horā (horror) manga—by combining them in a very idiosyncratic way: he often draws panels freeze-framed on the eyes of his characters, showing both a deep interiority (expected in girls’ comics) and a look of disgust or fear (expected in horror comics). What is even more striking is how Umezu collapses the looks of deep thought and deep fear in his young characters, suggesting how boys and girls can darkly reflect the ugly side of an otherwise seemingly beautiful and perfect society. 2 imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v10_2/holt/ 1/28 5/28/2020 What You See Is What You Get: Visualizing Hypocrisy in Umezu Kazuo’s Manga Cat-Eyed Boy I argue that Umezu’s close-up eye panels are excessive in a number of ways. As I have already suggested, Umezu blends together two seemingly mutually exclusive manga genres (horror and girls). There is no better place to see Umezu’s delight in forcing together ugliness and the innocence than in his eye panels. Moreover, these close-up panels are excessive in that the author often stacks or repeats them within the sequential flow of the page, so they are emblematic of the artist’s overall style: the eye panels are extremely tight, often excluding the rest of the face of the character; likewise, these intensely emotive panels are usually drawn after an already established frame on the character’s face, so Umezu uses a special, additional special eye panel to hammer home the feeling of anxiety felt by the character—these panels desperately cry out to the reader to slow down and relish the mental pain. Like his American contemporary, Steve Ditko (Amazing Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Mr. A), who also focalized his contempt for a morally flabby society through his close-up panels on eyes, Umezu consistently relies on gestures, more than words, to reveal the emotions and psychological insights of his characters. Since both artists share a similar approach, I investigate where they overlap and differ in order to better understand why the device of close-up panel(s) on the eyes might be a significant feature in each artist’s style. Finally, given that Umezu creates a new kind of reading rhythm, or closure, with these panels, I examine how another scholar, Takahashi Akihiko, parses Umezu’s art and I question his argument that Umezu’s uniquely excessive style requires comic scholars to even create a new, “seventh” “iterative” type of panel-to-panel transition, adding to the traditional six that Scott McCloud outlined in his seminal Understanding Comics (1993). Instead of arguing that we need to completely re-understand manga or at least Umezu’s, as Takahashi suggests, I dissect this characteristic aspect of Umezu’s style using McCloudian tools of analysis, and in doing so, analyze Umezu’s sequential art narratives with both Japanese and Western approaches in order to better understand one of Japan’s most bizarre and creative artists. 3 I see a change in Umezu’s style with his later quirky 1967-1969 horror series Cat-Eyed Boy rather than by his 1965 major commercial “break” into the big publishing houses starting with Shōjo Friend (Shōjo furendo), as Takahashi posits. [1] Looking at Umezu’s punky character from his original late sixties adventures to his later 1976 reappearances, one can observe changes in artist’s style in how he treated expressions of fright, fear, or horror in very different ways, particularly in how he draws and re-draws—focusing on—the eyes of his characters. 4 Umezu often uses tight close-ups on the eyes, especially when his characters speak to the audience (or a character who serves as a proxy for the audience), such as in the opening panels of the first Cat-Eyed Boy story, when the protagonist directly explains the story or situation. On the other hand, Umezu often uses special angled shots of his characters’ eyes to further reveal their lack of either honesty or integrity; in these obliquely angled panels, Umezu instead emphasizes a complex and often tortured “interiority,” which is perhaps a by-product of his working in what would seem to be two mutually exclusive genres—girls’ and horror manga—and that he synthesized the two in a very idiosyncratic way, which nonetheless contributed to his lasting popularly in Japan. 5 Takahashi Akihiko, the most thorough Umezu scholar to date, writes that Umezu was the “master of the [Japanese] fear comic” (kyōfu manga no kyoshō). He qualifies the term “fear,”[2]or horror, with three sub- categories: the physiological (seiriteki), the psychological (shinriteki), and the societal (shakaiteki).[3] The view that Umezu progressed in this linear fashion has been upheld by the artist himself, but Takahashi rigorously questions these categories so that he may collapse them into a broader definition of Umezu “fear comic,” which ultimately becomes unhelpful. How does Cat-Eyed Boy function as a “fear comic” and why does his finicky half-feline character serve as a bridge between the audience and an ugly world of horrific monsters and imperfect people? Umezu has always been critical of Japanese society in his works and has used his manga to point out that even beautiful young boys and pretty young girls are capable of great ugliness; that they can be liars; worst of all, hypocrites. Cat-Eyed Boy is just one example of how the artist expresses his loathing for the seemingly perfect best of Japanese society of his time by showing model children and adults at their worst—and imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v10_2/holt/ 2/28 5/28/2020 What You See Is What You Get: Visualizing Hypocrisy in Umezu Kazuo’s Manga Cat-Eyed Boy as the title of the manga suggests, eyes, both seeing and seen, play an important role in revealing how awful contemporary Japanese society was for Umezu. Horror of the Other, Horror of Oneself: Eyes in Cat-Eyed Boy 6 Umezu Kazuo first serialized Cat-Eyed Boy in the monthly manga magazine Boys’ Illustrated (Shōnen gahō) from December 1967 to January 1968 with the story “Resurrection Man” (“Resurrection Man of Fear” [“Kyōfu no saisei ningen,” later retitled “Fujimi no otoko”]); the character immediately reappeared there for four more issues with the story “Ugly Demon” (“Minikui yōkai”) before the magazine’s parent company moved the series to its more prestigious weekly magazine Boys’ King (Shōnen kingu), where the feline hero continued to appear in every issue from that point in 1968 until early spring in 1969, when Umezu quit drawing the series.[4] However by the end of 1968, the character had become so popular that toy maker Nittō Kagaku Kyōzai (Nittō Kagaku) produced plastic model sets of him.[5] King Comics collected the stories’ full run immediately thereafter for three paperback volumes in 1969. Nonetheless, the character went dormant[6] for nearly a decade until 1976 when top manga publisher Shōgakkan re-released the collected adventures of the character in a new five-volume series, including four new stories that Umezu drew for their magazine Weekly Boys’ Sunday (Shōnen sand?), which coincided with a televised series based on Umezu’s stories. Since then, Cat-Eyed Boy has been reprinted in at least four editions as the character still attracts fans to Umezu’s creepy and funny blend of horror and cute character designs. In 2006, Iguchi Noboru (Kataude mashin gaaru; Robogeisha) directed a live- action feature film based on the character (Nekome Kozō, Artport/Shōchiku) with limited success. The film critic Mori Naoto noted certain faithful attempts to capture aspects of Umezu’s style, but he noticed how much more the director reveled in graphic metamorphosis scenes or girl-competition scenes, showing instead the tastes of its director (“Iguchi-kantoku-rashii shikō”).[7] Umezu himself felt the film strayed from the original source materials, saying the studio “played it for laughs,”[8] and thus its poor box office returns might remind us that Umezu’s stories appeal to readers primarily because of his imaginative and imagination-provoking manga style.