Bleach and Caine
Mar. 19th, 2004 01:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
incandescensReading Bleach volume 3 and Count Caine : Kafka today, it was interesting to try to compare and contrast, and to fail. Utterly.
They're both manga, but they're such different manga. The problem is now how to put this into words, especially since they're both in French and I can't be entirely sure how good the translation is.
Still. Bleach is a rattling good story, and it even makes you feel sympathetic for the guy-doing-exorcisms-on-tv who would have been the object of mockery in a lot of other stories. It's crisp, it's brisk, it has long lean lines (though not overly beautiful ones) and splendid poses.
Count Caine has artwork sprawling all over the shop in luxurious drunken lines and curling masses of hair. It has a hero who keeps poisons in the basement, a faithful butler, an innocent half-sister, a pair of doomed aristocratic children, and a doctor who belongs to the evil society known only as "Delilah". Fun. Lush. Gothic. I wish I'd read it before working on the Victorian Age Vampire Companion; I'd have stolen from the series, right, left, and centre.
However, when I'm halfway through reading them, of the two of them, it's Bleach that I'd fish out while standing in a queue or while on a relatively unobstructed stretch of pavement, because I need to find out what happens next and how it happens.
---
Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord
O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.
-- Ezra Pound
(Note: Based on a 1st century BC Chinese poem)
They're both manga, but they're such different manga. The problem is now how to put this into words, especially since they're both in French and I can't be entirely sure how good the translation is.
Still. Bleach is a rattling good story, and it even makes you feel sympathetic for the guy-doing-exorcisms-on-tv who would have been the object of mockery in a lot of other stories. It's crisp, it's brisk, it has long lean lines (though not overly beautiful ones) and splendid poses.
Count Caine has artwork sprawling all over the shop in luxurious drunken lines and curling masses of hair. It has a hero who keeps poisons in the basement, a faithful butler, an innocent half-sister, a pair of doomed aristocratic children, and a doctor who belongs to the evil society known only as "Delilah". Fun. Lush. Gothic. I wish I'd read it before working on the Victorian Age Vampire Companion; I'd have stolen from the series, right, left, and centre.
However, when I'm halfway through reading them, of the two of them, it's Bleach that I'd fish out while standing in a queue or while on a relatively unobstructed stretch of pavement, because I need to find out what happens next and how it happens.
---
Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord
O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.
-- Ezra Pound
(Note: Based on a 1st century BC Chinese poem)
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-19 03:19 am (UTC)On the poem you chose: We recently went over it (and some other imagism poetry) during english class. How strange!
no subject
Date: 2004-03-19 09:38 am (UTC)