Condensation And Displacement In Manga Essay, Research Paper

Condensation and Displacement in Manga In the Comics Underground Japan novel that we read for class, the metaphors and symbols are so rich, it’s easy to loose the superficial meaning of the comic. On just the manga cover alone, Satirical pictures depict one thing but explain a viewpoint of another. These rich texts mixed with hand drawn imaging prove to be a very potent tool in relaying Satire in comic form. At first glance, the cover of the book shows a boy who’s wiping his rectum with some money, while he’s reading a book to take up the bathroom time. But if you look closely and analyze the situation, you find that the book cover of the novel is a picture of a boy masturbating to a comic book. The funny thing is that he’s masturbating himself anally with Japanese money, by flushing it down the toilet. The question is: is he getting off because he’s making a mockery out of the value of the Japanese money, or is he just wiping his rectum while talking to the dog/shampoo. Face value, or deeper image? In every comic in this book, images present one situation but condense many different controversial and broad topics into a single image. Also, the comics in this book displace many ideologized views on supreme power figures with animals and machinery. This displacement and condensation of images create a very rich text that is hard to decipher upon first glance.On the cover-page of the first comic, “Hell’s Angel” a man is walking on his hands in a graveyard. He’s wearing no pants and a woman with a skeleton face is smiling at his genitalia. Tattooed on the man’s buttocks is an upside down picture of a city at night. Dripping with some kind of fluid. Maybe it’s snow, or maybe it’s water. The point is that the only way that people can make out the image is if the man is flipped upside down. This could have several meanings or translations as to what this symbol could mean. Either that a city or working civilization only operates on a very upside down system, where the rich get lazier and lazier. Where workers die at an exponential rate, putting the distribution of wealth and health pyramid upside down where the top of the pyramid is thicker than the bottom. This is one interpretation. The other could be that the city is like a castle in a cloud, that instead of floating right side up, In real life situation (where the man would be wearing pants and standing right side up) the castle in the sky would actually be sinking, in a dysfunctional array. Its amazing how rich this one picture is. So much is said about city life and principal. The whole “show” that government and corporations try to charade on the disillusioned people of modern day society. Now as for the rest of the comic, the kind woman offers help to the tired man and piggy backs him forever. She dies and turns into a dinosaur, still carrying him on her shoulders. The photo angle of the scene opens to the chunk of land that’s floating in outer space. As if we’ve lost contact with the real world, and that corporations have defined what is reality and what is possibility- having us run a gerbil wheel of confused corporate jargon.

In the next comic, “It’s All Right If You Don’t Understand”, the cover page the man holds a beautiful iris in his hand but is obviously distracted by the airplane crash off in the distance. He’s probably wondering if someone died. That shows that we, as a human race, crave excitement and drama, and that no matter how easy life may be presented to us, we still crave the complicated and masochistic disturbance that trauma brings us. As far as the rest of the comic is concerned, the surface picture backs up my hypothesis as to the meaning of the comic. A man who, in order to be with better terms of a new boss, subjects himself to bondage and spanking in order to rise as a corporate leader.Steel Pipe Melancholia is about a man who feels that duty is more important than personal gratification, In saving the city from noxious fumes, He is cheated from his wife, and loses in life. The cover page of this story suggests that in a desperate rage of freedom, he cuts off his hand to do both duty and free will. Too bad that he only has one hand left to do anything with. In the last story that I’ll use as an example, the “Future Sperm Brazil”, this story has nothing to do with Brazil. Even though it’s only a part of a whole story, this is rather confusing. So this guy responds to a dream that he has of saving Japan in its time of crisis. Some interesting things about this story are. Sadakichi Suzuki gets a hard on every time he mentions awards or honor. This happens when the Japanese people of Brazil are praising him, and when he mentions medals of honor after fighting for Japan. Another interesting thing about this comic is it’s displacement of pride and patriotism to sperm lost in a sea (of struggle) “With our spirit, the Pacific Ocean is a mere pool!!” “Fool! This isn’t just a swim; it’s a battle! We can’t let our casualties hold us back!” While all of his colleagues die of “withered spirits”, Suzuki still persists in his vision of a great comeback for his motherland Japan, in hopes of becoming a revered soldier in Brazil. His obsession with this vision that he had during sleep haunts him to the point where he begins to justify his natural urges with the blinding disillusion of the Great Emperor feeding him the delicious tuna that he’d been carnally dreaming of. When in reality, he is eating his comrade. On the last page of this comic, I notice that the red sun of the Japanese flag is setting behind the sleeping cannibal. Hmm, I wonder if he will ever get his precious medals. Overall, these stories are rich with thought and pregnant with symbols of society and situations that are buried underneath common knowledge and ideologized repetition. It is only when seen through a Satirical medium that we are aware of the corruption of our state of disillusion