MADARA (Moryu Senki MADARA), written by Eiji Otsuka & art by Sho-u Tajima. First published in 1987 and first published in North America in 2004.
PLOT:
For fifteen years, Madara was content to spend his days in his peaceful village, helping the local blacksmith out with the aid of his nearly all-mechanical body. Then one day the forces of the evil Emperor Miroku invade, and Madara learns that not only are his mechanical parts capable of great power, but that unsealing that power and defeating powerful enemies gives him the chance to spontaneously regrow parts of his body. Now with his childhood friend Kirin at his side, Madara sets out on what just may be a journey of destiny.
STORY:
Eiji Otsuka is many things: a talented novelist, a notable scholar, the man who help coin the word "otaku," and (as we've seen before) very good at writing horror manga. What he's not is a good fantasy writer.
It's not necessarily a bad idea to take Osamu Tezuka's classic series Dororo and shift it from a vaguely medieval Japanese setting to a more broadly fantastical one. After all, Naoki Urasawa built upon Astro Boy to create Pluto, and that turned out brilliantly. It's also not a bad idea for him to take bits and pieces of Buddhist mythology and scatter it across this manga like so much salt to add his own particular flavor to the story.
The problem is this is where Otsuka's inspiration ends. Once you get past the Dororo parallels and Buddhist trappings, it's nothing but yet another hero's journey. Unlike Dororo, it doesn't seem to be making any sort of commentary about what makes someone human or if the needs of many versus the needs of the few. It's just following that well-worn path Campbell forged, beat by beat.
Madara himself is not a very inspired hero. Beyond avenging his father figure, he seems to be going along on this quest simply because that's what expected of him by the audience. He also doesn't seem to care much about his increasingly organic body beyond some initial curiosity. To be fair, I don't think he put much inspiration into any of the characters. We've got your standard Nagging Childhood Best Friend/Handy Damsel/Obvious Future Love Interest in Kirin, and they pick up the requisite weird, pervy old man character along the way. Even the villains are stock-standard, cackling bosses and mini-bosses who are evil for evil's sake. I realize that this was Otsuka's first manga series, but we know for a fact that he will be capable of more. That being said, f he wasn't going to put any effort into his debut, why even bother to write it in the first place?
ART:
Sho-u Tajima's art also takes cues from a better known managka, although in this case it's not Tezuka, but Katsuhiro Otomo. The way he draws faces here takes a lot from Otomo, and Madara might as well be Akira's Kaneda dropped into a fantasy world. Unlike Otomo, the proportions on the characters are weird. Regardless of sex, they tend to have very short torsos with no waists and long, stocky legs. It gives them a strangely stiff and blocky look, something that becomes all the more obvious during the fights and the few awkward instances of fanservice.
While Tajima is capable of drawing some suitably grand vistas at times, fights mostly play out within voids full of speed lines. He experiments with page layouts from time to time, but most of the time the panels are put together in a very plain sort of way. Just about the only thing that's consistent with his work on MPD Psycho is the gore. Wounds explode in dark bursts of blood and sometimes it gets a little gruesome. Even then, it lacks the imagination of his later works.
PRESENTATION:
This series is published in a flipped format, an outlier for the times in general and CMX in particular. In this case, it's how the book was published in Japanese, an experiment in Western-style publication.
RATING:
Madara suffers from the weaknesses of an inexperienced creative team that hadn't yet found their true genre calling. Unless you're some sort of Otsuka super-fan, this is not really worth hunting down.
This series was published by CMX. This series is complete in Japan with 4 volumes. All four were published and are currently out of print.
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