{"id":3539,"date":"2010-07-16T20:58:23","date_gmt":"2010-07-17T03:58:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/?p=3539"},"modified":"2014-02-03T21:09:52","modified_gmt":"2014-02-04T05:09:52","slug":"peepo-choo-volume-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/2010\/07\/16\/peepo-choo-volume-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Peepo Choo Volume 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Publisher’s Info: They say you cannot choose where and when are born; we are gifted into the worlds are parents are living at the time. Whether a blessing or a curse, as individuals we must make the most of our environments to advance as best possible given the circumstances present. For the cast of <\/em>Peepo Choo, their places of birth, whether they be the suburbs of Tokyo or the South Side of Chicago, appear to be a curse they cannot escape…until they realize the world is a much smaller place than they thought. <\/em><\/p>\n

On the surface Milton appears to be your average a high school student living in the thugged out streets of Chicago’s South Side. As is the case with many teens looks can be deceiving. When he’s not at school or riding the metro, he is at the local comic shop cosplaying as his favorite Japanese animation character Peepo Choo! A hardcore fan, Milton knows every line from the Peepo Choo animation by heart. He can happily replicate the Peepo Dance with ease, and genuinely believes the world depicted in this cartoon is “the real” Japan.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Peepo<\/a>By Felipe Smith
\nPublisher:<\/strong> Vertical, Inc.
\nAge Rating:<\/strong> 16+
\nGenre: <\/strong>Parody
\nPrice: <\/strong>$14.95<\/p>\n

I get the sense that, if he couldn\u2019t draw, Felipe Smith would like to make a living repeatedly punching people in the face, pausing only long enough to make sure they got the joke. Fortunately for us, he can draw\u2014he draws like a damn demon, that one. His art is an assault, seemingly stripped of all subtlety. It is full-bore satire, and he wields it like a machete.<\/p>\n

Ostensibly Peepo Choo <\/em>has a plot: Assassin owns a comic book store in Chicago as a cover, and takes his sex-obsessed, comics-hating employee and an otaku-to-the-extreme\u00a0customer with him to Japan as cover for a job killing a young yakuza. But, really, that plot doesn\u2019t do justice to this over-the-top satire of East-meets-West, West-meets-East, Japan as seen (and fantasized about) in the US, and the US as seen (and fantasized about) in Japan.<\/p>\n

Like the best satires, everyone is skewered: American comics culture, American anime and manga fandom, male porn obsession, Japanese obsession with cute, with American pop culture, with gangsters as symbols of power\u2014I could go on and on. The book\u2019s chock full of so much funny, brutal, venomous lampooning of the absurdity of our collective obsessions it\u2019s hard to describe any one piece.<\/p>\n

A lot has been made of the fact that Felipe Smith is an American cartoonist who has successfully bridged the gap between \u201cmanga-influenced\u201d and \u201cmanga-ka,\u201d which, if my parsing of that makes it sound like an enormous leap, then I\u2019m not going far enough. That is a Herculean feat, to be sure. I remember being astounded at Paul Pope\u2019s crushing stories of pages and volumes of work never published while he was under contract with a Japanese publisher in the ’90s. I think Smith succeeds where Pope failed for two reasons\u2014first, his art is powerfully influenced by manga, and manga now is in no small part influenced by the west. I mean, open a page of Peepo Choo <\/em>and hold it next to a page from Natsume Ono\u2019s not simple <\/em>from Viz. Which one is the manga-inspired cartoonist and which one the western-inspired manga-ka? Not to pick on Paul Pope, but THB<\/em>, and everything before his journey down the manga rabbit hole, is much more influenced by South American and European cartoonists, mostly Hugo Pratt, than any Japanese work. Felipe Smith has already absorbed the rhythms, the lines, and the sensibilities of manga\u2014it\u2019s part of his art\u2019s DNA.<\/p>\n

But more so than this, I think Smith succeeds for a second, more visceral and relevant reason. He doesn\u2019t give a damn what anybody thinks about his work. He\u2019s been doing his own thing from the get-go, and he doesn\u2019t need your approval, or the Kodansha editor\u2019s, or the readers of Morning Two<\/em>, where this was first published. Sure, he needs your money, and the\u00a0approval of Kodansha if they’re going to publish it, but, let\u2019s face it, he\u2019s not about to change a line, or a character, or a word or phrase to suit anyone but his own artistic and satirical sensibilities. Why does this lead to success? Well there’s not a hesitant line, beat, character, or anything in the whole volume. It’s all strong stuff, and the better for its over-the-top tone.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, this isn\u2019t \u201cmerely\u201d satire. Smith does care about one thing\u2014his story and his characters. Especially his characters. He loves them even as he lampoons them. Maybe more than other cartoonists and writers because they live in a world that mocks them, and yet you can see Smith\u2019s hand as he guides his characters, like fate, through the story, protecting the innocent even as their (mis)perceptions of their world are assaulted and torn down. There\u2019s refuge for the forlorn and lost in this tale\u2014but delicious will be the moment that everyone gets what coming to them! Especially that damn \u201cPeepo Choo\u201d character\u2014iconic representation of everything vile about Pikachu and everything it represents. Or doesn\u2019t, really. After all, Japan doesn\u2019t come wrapped in a Pokemon ball, and Hollywood hasn\u2019t been able to fit all of America in a glock. At least, so far.<\/p>\n

Finally, it’s important to note: Felipe Smith walks the line between satire of the culture of sex (read: porn) and extreme violence as closely as possible. That\u2019s right, he\u2019s also mocking you, the discerning comics\/manga reader who insists that these things are for\u00a0“mature adults” now. There\u2019s no pulling that off with this book: that cover should tell you everything you need to know about whether or not it\u2019s a good idea to read this on the subway, at a restaurant, in front of your mother, wife, children, grandpa, etc. Or, to put it another way, when my bookstore co-worker saw this and found out I had ordered it, she said in a whisper to another employee: \u201cit comes wrapped in plastic. Like porn!\u201d Like I said at the beginning, Felipe Smith wants to punch us all in the face. Repeatedly, until we start laughing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Publisher’s Info: They say you cannot choose where and when are born; we are gifted into the worlds are parents are living at the time. Whether a blessing or a curse, as individuals we must make the most of our environments to advance as best possible given the circumstances present. For the cast of Peepo Choo, their places of birth, whether they be the suburbs of Tokyo or the South Side of Chicago, appear to be a curse they cannot escape…until they realize the world is a much smaller place than they thought. On the surface Milton appears to be your average a high school student living in the thugged out streets of Chicago’s South Side. As is the case with many teens looks can be deceiving. When he’s not at school or riding the metro, he is at the local comic shop cosplaying as his favorite Japanese animation character Peepo Choo! A hardcore fan, Milton knows every line from the Peepo Choo animation by heart. He can happily replicate the Peepo Dance with ease, and genuinely believes the world depicted in this cartoon is “the real” Japan. By Felipe Smith Publisher: Vertical, Inc. Age Rating: 16+ Genre: Parody Price:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Peepo Choo Volume 1 http:\/\/wp.me\/p2umma-V5","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15,17],"tags":[83,99,110,117],"class_list":["post-3539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-reviews","category-vertical-2","tag-manga","tag-older-teen","tag-review","tag-seinen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2umma-V5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3539"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4325,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3539\/revisions\/4325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/manga.jadedragononline.com\/village\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}