Frank Miller, Tokyo Tribes & Censorship, and Reinventing Comics

I just purchased three books that are and are about comics. Tokyo Tribes, Eisner/Miller, and Reinventing Comics. I will likely return all three, but at least two seem to be good reads.

I was quite disappointed with Tokyo Tribes. I didn't know how fast manga could be. I whipped through 200 pages in a couple of hours. It sucked. So much for blacks in manga. They didn't even use the slang right at a lot of parts, but at least they tried. The whole setup with blacks running Tokyo dividing it by territories and tribes was far fetched and the story didn't back it up. I can't say anything about it other than it's faults. Nothing else to cling to. Okay, I guess I was disappointed because I thought it would be well, good.

It was the censored American version, which was okay, but I was really expecting the censoration to be different. As I read through I noticed that some instances of violence were pretty heavy, so I was wondering how much heavier could you get than two guys have tears in their eyes after being decapitated? What they did censor later was the crime boss Big Bubb raping a pretty boy. Yeah, it was pretty gruesome. By the time Bubb was done, the pretty boy's asshole was bloody and he had a tear going all the way up his back from his ass. They couldn't show the rape or bloody asshole, but they could show the rip up his back.

So one has to ask themselves, is even a rape of that magnitude worse than decapitation or getting a limb chopped off?

Eisner/Miller is good so far, I'm already halfway through it. Only problem I have is that Eisner really seems to be a storyteller contrasted to Miller. Miller really only seems concerned with freedom, cinematics, and violence. He's definitely not the almighty comic deity some make him out to be. His stories are often entertaining, but they are also often very thing. He definately works best with licensed characters. Sin City is boring what I've read of it. DK2 sucked bloody asshole as well. It was sort of like a slap in the face seeing that Miller couldn't even describe a story to Eisner, then he couldn't tell Eisner exactly how the story was supposed to be exciting and what kind of devices he used to tell the story. Obviously Miller just wanted to be really violent and different in Sin City not tell good stories. Guess he just get inspiration from other's creations, envisioning how he could do different twists on them.

Lastly, I like what ol' McCloud has to say about comics. Alot of the same things that Eisner talks about overlap in this book. It's pretty excellent so far. At the point I'm at, he's only been complaining about certain aspects of comics and exploring what has been done differently, but it seems as if this title will definitely be inspiring.