Naoki Urasawa and Funny Animals
Inaugural Post
Last night i read Naoki Urasawa's short story manga collection, Sneeze, and it was great. Urasawa is one of my all time favorite mangaka, but I'm mostly familiar with his long form work like Yawara!, Monster, Pluto, etc so this format was pretty novel. Despite that a lot of his favorite trademark bits are in this book; like the very expressive old people faces, the ordinary shlubby guys stepping up to do acts of heroism, the earnest but not totally uncritical nostalgia (although this might be the most saccharine I've seen from Urasawa.) The thing I was surprised to see, though, was the anthropomorphic mice doing Tom and Jerry shit.
Henry and Charles is the 4th chapter of the collection and 3rd narrative comic that isn't one of the little autobio things about Urasawa experiencing some boomer folk rock shit. This story features two little mice characters; Henry, the boastful coward, and Charles, the oblivious simpleton, trying to navigate a domestic kitchen in order to steal a piece of cake they want to present to a lady mouse, Diana, without waking the house cat napping on the kitchen floor.
It's Tom and Jerry Shit. There are some key differences since the cat isn't really a character or anthropomorphized at all, so it's not really the same dynamic, the comic is more focused on the two little guys more similar to a Chip and Dale or Pinky and the Brain type situation. But like the kitchen looks like the kitchen from the classic Tom and Jerry cartoons, they are constantly almost being maimed by falling kitchen utensils, it's all in here. And while I guess the titular Billy Bat is anthropomorphic animal character (I'd argue that there are some more pressing metaphysical concerns there,) but I generally think about Urasawa as a highly socially grounded storyteller. A Naoki Urasawa manga is about people that live in society and have families and jobs and hobbies and responsibilities and favorite bands.
A comic about two cartoon mice trying to steal a piece seems out of his wheel house, but thinking about it it is kinda in line with Urasawa's deeply nostalgic tendencies. That man loves a thing from the 60s or 70s, that what Pluto, Billy Bat, and even 20th Century Boys is about. It makes perfect sense that he'd have an affection for funny animal cartoons broadly, and it's really interesting to see him bring his seinen realism art style to such silly subject matter. Neat comic from a neat book.