Flipped!: David Welsh On Inio Asano's What A Wonderful World!




By David P. Welsh

There's this food stand at the North Market in Columbus that sells Thai food, and they make pretty good Pad Thai. It's not transcendent or anything, but it hits all the flavor notes -- hot, sour, salty, sweet, and savory. I don't go out of my way for it when I'm visiting Ohio's capitol, but I do go to the North Market whenever I'm there, and if I can't decide what I want for lunch, it's a good choice. So I eat it, and I enjoy it, and then I'm hungry again in a half an hour.

I had kind of the same experience with Inio Asano's two-volume What a Wonderful World! (Viz). I read it, I enjoyed it, and in a half an hour, I wanted to read something else. Asano's short stories are polished and effective, but they don't linger in the mind. They don't really last.

The title is ironic, but only mildly so. These collections don't offer the kind of fetuses-in-the-sewer bleakness that's the domain of Yoshihiro Tatsumi. If they did, the title would be actively horrible and sophomoric. Exclamation point aside, it might be read with a flat intonation and a hint of a smirk. The world that Inio portrays isn't wonderful, but it isn't a pit of despair either. It's just kind of hard, though it has its compensations.

Asano's solanin, which came out last year at this time, covered roughly the same territory -- disaffected youth facing the grind of daily life. The difference is that solanin was a full-length piece, allowing him to fully explore a particular kind of transitional angst. Readers had time to breathe with Asano's protagonists and invest in their fates. I think that kind of connection is harder to create in shorter pieces, unless the creator is unusually gifted (like Tatsumi). And while Asano is gifted in many ways, the ultimate feel of the stories in What a Wonderful World! is ephemeral, like catchy, slightly moody pop songs.

The title's stories also feel very familiar, and not merely because you can see the seeds of solanin in the stories here -- characters whose qualities would be grafted together to create the later book's heroine and scenarios and dynamics that recur in a more fully realized way. The familiarity also springs from the covered-ground quality of the scenarios themselves -- the gangster who's nearly saved by a cynical schoolgirl, the college drop-out who wonders if she should have stuck with her band, the high-school girls who fence over their long-ago friendship and the ways they've changed. These are all familiar narrative territory.



Asano is a restrained storyteller, so few of these familiar scenarios lapse fully into triteness, and there are some breath-catching moments of surprise. My favorite story, "A Town of Many Hills" from the first volume, takes a remarkable look at bullying. A schoolgirl has been targeted by the class queen bee not for any interpersonal conflict but because it reinforces her tormentor's authority to have someone under her heel. What's most striking about the story is its heroine's fatalism; she knows the score, and she knows that she has nothing to lose. The no-lose solution she concocts is wonderfully cynical, and it gives Asano the opportunity to draw some startling pages.

For me, the quantity of cynicism Asano expresses is directly proportional to the level of enjoyment I experienced while reading a given story. The second volume's "After the Rain" covers familiar territory -- a trio of siblings trying to function as a family after the death of their mother -- but does so with a welcome lack of sentiment. Rainy season brings out the worst in the youngest of the three; she acts out just to try and feel something. The pleasure here is that her acting out and her siblings' response isn't nearly as melodramatic or predictable as you'd expect. Asano also does a fine job of pacing the revelation of information known to the characters but not the reader. That alone would elevate the material, and his frank and barbed portrayal of the siblings' relationships also works in that direction.

Sentimentality is not yet one of Asano's best events, though. He shows more of a facility for it in solanin, but there are some cringingly mawkish moments scattered through these collections. The worst offender is the title story from the second volume which touches all of the aimless-youth bases in an utterly routine fashion. It's got the underemployed hero, the girl who had the good sense to dump him, and even a wounded stray dog that the hero feels too adrift to help (though he can still muster the focus to lecture the poor mutt about life's cruelty). That his specific woes have been rendered a thousand times in many media isn't the problem so much as that Asano finds nothing fresh or compelling in them. It's just a stroll through the stations of the slacker cross.

But even at his weakest moments as a storyteller or developer of character, Asano's gifts as an illustrator keep the chapters readable. I think his greatest strength is in character design. Asano's creations aren't pretty or robust or sexy, but they aren't wasted or grotesque either. They're generally in between those two extremes, as are most of us. They look like people you might see on the street, which supports at least a baseline level of sympathy. Watching beautiful people whine about their hardships can be off-putting, but Asano's characters at least look like they have some right to grumble. Their respective life experiences are reflected in their expressions and body language.



I also very much like the way Asano composes pages. The slice-of-life nature of the material doesn't automatically lend itself to imaginative staging, but Asano manages to keep his compositions fresh and compelling. And he does so without bending his material into anything strenuous or experimental. He finds interesting and unexpected camera angles, cuts away from the action to provide context or distraction, and finds visual freshness while maintaining narrative fidelity.

Basically, What a Wonderful World! offers breezy, poised entertainment. The stories it contains aren't as urgent or insightful as Asano perhaps intended them to be (or I might just be too old to find them so), but they're diverting and they hold together. And looking back, that's not an insignificant accomplishment. It's not a title that's likely to change your life, but it doesn't waste your time either. Really, there's nothing wrong with a plate of pretty good Pad Thai, even if you'll be hungry again for something more substantial sooner than you might have expected.

*****

* What a Wonderful World! Vol. 1, written and illustrated by Inio Asano, Viz Media, 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1421532219, Oct. 20, 2009.
* What a Wonderful World! Vol. 2, written and illustrated by Inio Asano, Viz Media, 210 pages, ISBN: 978-1421532219, Oct. 20, 2009.

*****

* images from the two volumes selected by Mr. Welsh

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David P. Welsh has loved comics since his parents first used Archie and Casper to sedate him during long trips in the family station wagon.

He's worked as a reporter and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, and later sold out for the glamorous world of public relations. Prior to relocating to The Comics Reporter, he wrote his Flipped column for Comic World News for just over three years. He's written articles on comics for print outlets and a variety of other web sites.

He lives in West Virginia, which he says has gotten a lot easier since the Starbucks and Barnes & Noble opened up.

You may e-mail David with questions or commentary You can write to this site about David's columns

Please bookmark his site, Precocious Curmudgeon.

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