Five years and a day since the last time I did one of these. From Black cat #13, September 1948, as drawn by Lee Elias. Elias is one of those giants of the Golden Age of comics who is now more obscure than he should be. He’s also English, it appears, as the profile in the same issue makes clear:
Alison Bechdel already knew the score in 1995:
The titular Dykes to Watch Out Fo are walking out of a bad movie, when Jillian has to pee. Mo, who has to do the same, doesn’t want to enter the loo because Jillian, though cool, is a trans woman. Lois tells her off, saying she’s not going to wait around all night just because Mo has a transphobia attack. So Mo enters the toilets, only to be challenged by a woman on whether she is in the right bathroom. (Mo looks rather butch after all.) Jillian defends her, telling the stranger to take a closer look. After this, Mo thanks Jillian and says she would do the same for her. This is however no longer necessary now her “nobody knows I’m a transsexual” t-shirt has worn out.
So there you have it, the absurdity of the bathroom panic laid bare in a twentyfive year old comic. Trans women are no danger, the idea that you can tell who is and is not a woman at a glance is deeply homophobic and barring people from pissing in the toilets they feel most comfortable in is ludicrous.
The final panel of Nate Powell’s excellent About Face, “death and surrender to power in the clothing of men” has a warning:
But I just cannot take them seriously. Those overgrown man children, with their penis substitutes and nerd sense of what is cool are made to be mocked and bullied. Just look at them. Gargling bleach to own the libs, deliberately running their cars badly to “roll coal” and own the libs, shooting themselves in the cock (literally) because they have the gun discipline of a drunk elephant. Any asshole can look tough in black sunglasses and holding an M-16, but take away these toys and they fold like a cheap suit. Yes, be aware that they’re dangerous, but for heaven’s sake don’t take them seriously. Fascist bully boys always need mocking.
Akagi Squared is what you get when you create an Azur Lane fan comic, lay it out like an American newspaper strip and apply a Bill Wattersoneqsue, Calvin & Hobbes inspired sensibility to it:
Originally published on Reddit, the strip is now also available on Mangadex. The inspiration for this was an event in the game last year, in which for …reasons kid versions of some of the most popular ship girls were created. Ethan Forsythe took that idea and ran with it. Akagi-chan herself is a happy little floof who just wants the love of her big sister, but her original doesn’t want anything to do with her. One thing leads to another and she defects to the American faction.
Both the art style and the stories remind me of Bill Watterson’s work on Calvin & Hobbes. It has the same sort of anarchistic humour, just cuter. As it is a fan comic, it requires some knowledge of the game and its characters, but on the whole I feel you could enjoy it without this knowledge too.
Sometimes you can tell from a throwaway panel like this what really gets the mangaka out of bed each day:
It is clear from the shot (and the many similar shots throughout this series) that Ojiro Makoto likes her butts. Some extra time and care has been taken to render those buttocks. Of course the same is true for roughly 100 percent of cartoonists and their particular fetishes, but what I like about this is how mundane Ojiro makes it. This is the third panel of the first page of the twelfth chapter of Neko no Otera no Chion-san, a manga about a teenage boy who moves to live with his distant, slightly older cousin and grandma. While he’s the protagonist, he’s not in the scene. Instead the page opens with a shot of cardboard boxes filled with crap, left over cleaning material and the like before the second panel shows a crowded garden shed, more a storage unit than anything else, with two girls dressed in typical work clothing talking about cleaning it. The final panel then, the one above, is a logical progression, rather than a staged cheesecake shot. There’s no posing, the clothing conceals as much as it highlights and Chion and Hiruma are pretty rather than beautiful. An everyday sort of horniness.
Compare and contrast with a typical chapter from Hori no Su’s Azur Lane 4-koma: Slow ahead, a gag strip where every page has a bit of cheesecake on it like this. Unlike in Chion-san, the fan service is strong in this one, your eyes immediately drawn to that intrusive panel of Cygnet posing. It’s not bad, but it interrupts the flow of the comic. Cygnet both poses and is dressed for fan service, thighs and breasts on prominent display. For what it is, basically an advert for the Azur Lane game, very much a waifu collector game, it’s not bad, but it lacks the subtlety of Chion-san. And for me, that makes the latter all the more stronger. Because ultimately Neko no Otera no Chion-san is about a teenage boy moving in with his attractive, not that much older cousin, that sort of everyday horniness fits the mood of the series far more than an intrusive shot like the above would, even if it’s nominally “sexier”.