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OFFERED #1
Recommended (7/10)
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Comicsone.com
Writer: Kazuo Koike
Artist: Ryoichi Ikegami
Price: $14.95 US/$22.50 CAN |
Eagle sort of broke through my habit of not reading manga, and I've been searching out something that will interest me that much in other manga titles since then. Offered really isn't at that level, as it reminds me
more of what I expected from manga in the first place. Don't get me wrong, it's
decent stuff, full of wild violence and sex and ideas, but I get that "this is
weeirrd" vibe I have usually gotten when watching anime, and the obsession with
sex is so heavy as to be distracting. That said, the artwork is gorgeous and
powerful, the ideas behind it very original and unusual and the characters, if a
bit one-note, certainly entertaining. If this were more than a two-volume
series, I don't know that I'd be finishing it, but since there's only one more
volume to the rest of the story, I'm interested enough to see how it turns out.
One of the things that drew me to the book in the first place was the packaging, and I have to give a nod to Comicsone.com for their work in that area. The book features four hundred pages of story for fifteen bucks, has a nice wraparound book cover and is a nice compromise of size between the miniscule Lone Wolf and Cub and the traditional Eagle-sized volumes.
The other thing that drew me
was the concept. The star is an MIT student and Olympic athlete who is drawn
into a web of espionage, crime, sex and murder. There's an element of the hero's
journey as he learns some secrets about his past, and the story ties into such
strange notions as an illegitimate daughter of Hitler, a lost city with amazing
powers and the descendants of the heroic mythological figure Gilgamesh. Along
with all of these fantasy elements, Koike combines military fiction in the form
of a tie-in to World War II and a pair of deadly assassins.
A strength and weakness of
the book is that it really moves along. By the time the book has concluded and
the stage is set for the next chapter, Yu has gone from being an exceptional but
relatively normal athlete to an almost messianic leader. Koike introduces a
variety of factions, including the Colonel, Payetta, Likinius and Yu's group,
and seems to have no problem dispensing with one or all of them. Yu is the
focus, but his travels give the reader a view into such diverse characters as a
secretive military force, an outlaw gang with unusual ideas, a monstrous
professional warrior and killer, a dwarfish genius and a sexy young professor.
Ikegami's artwork is
gorgeous, there's just no way around it. His depiction of the human form is
incredible, realistic but yet powerful and dramatic, and his attention to
background detail and props is equally impressive. His storytelling,
particularly with regards to action, is also stunning. Whether the action is
sexual or violent, he conveys it in a bombastic and exciting style.
However, for all the
enjoyment I did get out of the book, I found that some of the style really put
me off. Koike and Ikegami seem quite obsessed with sex, to the point where every
woman and man is well-endowed and fond of being naked, and where explicit sex
scenes are as common as the ultraviolence. While I suppose I can admire the
even-handed application of extremes in sex and violence, I thought that both
were a bit too over-the-top, and they took away from the possibilities of
exploring the characters beyond who they want to have sex with or who they want
to kill. It didn't make matters any worse that the artwork was censored, such
that the explicit sex scenes were still clear enough to be explicit but weirdly
whited-out so that the whole thing seemed unreal. I'm in no big hurry to see
comic book characters having sex in detail, but if you're going to show me
anyway, at least let me see the artist's original vision of it rather than an
insulting, obviously censored version.
In the end, my enjoyment of the unusual concepts and the skill of the artists just barely overshadows my discomfort with the overabundance of unnecessary sex and violence. However, I think it's fair to say that if Offered had been my first big exposure to manga, rather than Eagle, I
wouldn't be seeking more out as eagerly as I am.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review. |
