Weekly Thoughts 7/8/23

I’ve been rethinking some things about the single issue comic the past couple days. Like, I haven’t changed my mind about its place in the industry or its current value proposition. The big thing that has changed in my thinking is the narrative role it should play. With a monthly schedule, there’s simply not enough momentum to do drawn-out stories where one adventure takes more than two or three chapters to complete. It’s part of why I stopped buying monthly superhero comics; the ending just wasn’t as exciting or cool as it could be, in most cases, because it was half a year since the battle started. One-and-done adventures are much more the speed for an industry set up like this. It’s why Giant Days was so successful, and it’s a model you see in use in Japan all the time with non-weekly stories. It’s how comics did things back in the olden times, and shifting to a standard model of decompression might have been a mistake, for as alluring as it is to creatives. That’s the kind of thinking I want to have with whatever I make moving forward; I want to do longer series, and an episodic model would probably save me from trying to set up just an opening story for six issues only to find out I’m not being picked up for ongoing, like I’ve seen happen to so many books.

This week, I think I had a different topic I was going to write about, but it was late at night, and I had a headache. Then I watched Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop finally. I know I’m late; it came out at the same time as a Pokémon thing, and I often slow walk new shows if I don’t jump on them immediately, and then it’s awkward to start after the fact. And it’s tragic I didn’t see it earlier, because it’s great. With the stupid backlash it had before it even released, it never had a chance with cancel-happy Netflix. It’s a real shame we don’t get a chance to see a second season of it. So I want to share a brief opinion on this show and talk about adaptations in general.

Like I said, I think the Cowboy Bebop adaptation is a great show. It captures the spirit and vibe of the anime, has a distinct and inventive look, and used the available material to create a really great story arc; clearly, it was supposed to be a halfway point for the characters, but it works just as well as an end point, now that it is one. I thought that Kimmy was a great addition to Jet’s world. The shift for Whitney Haggis Matsumoto to playing as her mother was far more effective for Faye’s story than “generic romance” was. Julia gained so much agency and depth here, since she actually appeared on screen and made choices. Vicious felt less cool because he was less “mysterious,” but his previous mystery was another name for not being fleshed out as a character; I enjoyed the character they created for this show in other ways. That soundtrack, though? Getting Yoko Kanno to work on this was an absolute necessity, and it paid off. And for as much as there were dumb people complaining that it wasn’t exactly like the anime, they put in a ton of work to look exactly like the anime, and it ruled. They had so many unusual camera angles and shots that you don’t see in live action, but do see in animation, including a lot that came straight from the anime. Like the cuts to Spike’s feet as he was walking around looking for leads? Perfection. It did everything you want and need an adaptation to do.

That’s the big thing to get at with adaptations. They’re supposed to take the idea and spirit of a story and make alterations to better fit the new medium; along the way, like with any storytelling venture, you make considerations for the audience that will be watching the new work. There’s no way to directly translate anything from one medium to another exactly as it existed, nor should you close your mind to the possibilities presented to you when producing, especially when the original work is a few decades old. If you’ll recall, the original anime came out in the mid-90s. As the obnoxious, disrespectful youth would say, the late nineteen-hundreds. Times have changed, and Cowboy Bebop has influenced many other works; additionally, the material that inspired the anime is seen differently today than it was back then. It could never look exactly like the original, and it shouldn’t.

And Cowboy Bebop in particular is a silly show to complain about not adapting faithfully, in my eyes. The anime set out to be a vibe. If you ever looked at the stills used to cap the commercial breaks, you’d have seen a document describing the creators’ intent with the show, most notably the line (paraphrasing), “…and it will be a new genre, called Cowboy Bebop.” The visuals were striking, the characters were archetypal, the music was impactful, and the story was pretty bare bones. It was the idea of what a show set in a world like it could be. That’s why there were so many just-for-fun episodes that were basically Seatbelts music videos. I’m not saying that as a knock; it’s a great show, and it succeeded in defining a fusion genre of noir, Western, and sci-fi. It’s not some great holy book that should never be altered or deviated from. The whole point is to take it and make it your own. All of this is said beside the point where the Netflix adaptation was strikingly faithful to the anime in a lot of ways it didn’t have to be.

What really counts as faithful, anyway? The crucial thing in an adaptation is looking for the most important elements and putting those front and center. It’s why our weird paramilitary superhero movie killers make enjoyable action stars and poor superheroes. For a specific example, look at the 1998 Tristar Godzilla movie. On its own merits, it’s actually a pretty good monster movie. The big issue with it is that it’s not a Godzilla movie in the ways that matter. It’s an origin film, so there were certain points it needed to hit to set the proper tone for what Godzilla is supposed to be. Namely, that Godzilla is a living metaphor for nuclear devastation; he’s both a victim with his melted rubber skin and mutant bone plates, and an atom bomb incarnate with his atomic ray. There are all kinds of ways to update that, and the 1998 movie did none of them. Americans don’t think the atom bomb is a great sin or specter of doom due to decades of propaganda to justify dropping them, so in this movie, atomic bombs only act as an excuse for a big lizard to show up and wreck the city because of natural instincts. That’s all they thought Godzilla was, “big lizard attacks.” A similar thing happens with the Legendary movies, because the shift in focus to environmentalism doesn’t really work with nuclear weapons, and they made the living nuclear weapon the hero. It’s not the first time Godzilla has been a hero, of course, but he’s usually a hero only to the audience, and the people in world are, you know, scared of him and sad that cities are leveled; in 2014, Americans were cheering that only most of the city was destroyed. Full disconnect. Kong: Skull Island got the assignment with their Vietnam War thing, and it’s sad the rest of the Legendary movies didn’t follow those footsteps.

For another successful example, I’d point to the Soul Eater anime. It’s a great show that made full use of its advantages, namely that it started production after the manga began but far before it ended and, like all anime adaptations, had license to add storylines as needed. This meant two key things. First, that the show maintained a consistent tone and presentation, instead of starting out hypersexual and gross like the manga does before turning 180 to a somewhat progressive, serious-minded action story. Second, they decided to go their own route and used a completely new storyline after the first major arc, instead of relying on filler stories to eat time so they can copy the manga as it came out. This resulted in a really compelling and faithful adaptation that stayed true to what the story became while also breaking new ground in a way that makes the anime a separate and enjoyable story. I watched the anime before I read the manga – a rare thing for me to do – and quite frankly, I might not have kept going after the first volume of the manga, had I read it first. Because the anime was faithful to the what the manga becomes, I had faith that it would get better, and was rewarded with the thing I loved on screen. That essence is what a good adaptation is supposed to bring.

All this has me thinking about what the One Piece show is going to be like. From the trailer, it looks like they have a good sense of the humor and balance of the characters, and the visuals are consistent with the cartoony yet (in some ways) grounded nature of the manga. It’s a good sign that the cast seems to really enjoy the series, get on well, and like what they made. Now that I’ve seen the Cowboy Bebop adaptation, I have even more faith in it. Like with Cowboy Bebop, One Piece looks like it made a lot of bold choices to bring the manga to life as closely as possible so that they can do it justice, and that kind of dedication indicates they appreciate and understand what makes the series good. One Piece has a lot of story going on, so it’s really a mystery at this point how much of it they’ll adapt, in terms of how long they think they can or want to keep making this adaptation; will they keep the Hawkeye fight at Baratie, or will they skip it because they have no idea right now how far they could get into the Grand Line? The possibilities there also indicate opportunities to add to the story so that what they do adapt hangs together effectively, and new opportunities in currently hypothetical future seasons to reinvent characters and stories for a new introduction. No matter how much of it they do, the visuals we have now and the assuring presence and approval of Oda in production makes me think it’ll turn out really well.