A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Look, it’s Major Kovar’s grand daddy.

From Eroica With Love is my favorite manga of all time. I was deliriously happy to see it snag an honorable mention on Publishers Weekly’s 2008 best graphic novels of the year. It is published in the USA by CMX manga, which is a division of DC Comics.

From Eroica With Love was the first manga I ever saw, and it is one of the best. Many manga don’t have stories strong enough to sustain the pretty pictures. From Eroica with Love is a manga in which the story is as strong as the art.

Take a flamboyant gay thief, team him up with a cranky, repressed NATO officer, and you get one of the funniest, and most entertaining manga of all time. From Eroica With Love is a classic of the shuojo genre, but the writing is sharper and wittier than the usual fare.

The translations in the American edition are quite good, though the NATO Major’s epithets appear to be toned down somewhat. I think he’s really screaming “You faggot!” at Eroica, but this edition has him running around screaming “You degenerate!” Doesn’t quite have the same bite, and the verbal barbs are half the fun of the series (don’t worry, this book is not a gay bashing fest. It’s just that the Major has issues.)

Usually I am disappointed with manga imports because I imagined the writing would be a lot better when I finally got to read my favorite picture stories in English. Sadly, my imagination has done a lot of favors for bland manga, and I’ve lost interest in books I loved in Japanese. Eroica is actually better in English.

For first timers, you may want to skip volume I. It has no resemblance to the rest of the series and is so insanely goofy it may turn you off to the work entirely. Any book with characters named Sugarplum and Leopard is suspect. Those characters never appear in the series again, and good riddance. The series is quickly taken over by the infamous thief Eroica, and it’s a roller coaster from there. I have the first 10 or so. The art style is very 1970′s, so for kicks, play the soundtrack of The Velvet Underground while reading.

This series was a huge influence on A Distant Soil (see pic above…that’s not Kovar, it’s Klaus), but there is no resemblance between the two books beyond that character’s haircut. A Distant Soil was already in publication before I saw From Eroica with Love, but I was getting a lot of flak from my publishers about my aesthetic taste, my inking style, and my deconstructed storytelling. After seeing From Eroica with Love, and realizing that everything I was trying to do had not only been done, but was common in a comic book land far across the Pacific, I stuck to my guns and stopped letting myself be bullied by my publishers.

The oddest thing about that was that one of my US clients claimed to be quite fond of manga, but whenever my own work showed a hint of manga-esque style, they tried to get me to stop. Weird. I think they may not have liked the competition. Manga was a pretty esoteric field of interest back then (1980′s), and I’ve noticed that some people get proprietary about their interests.

Anyway, there was no manga influence on the development of my book, so I am always surprised when people call A Distant Soil Amerimanga.

The above image comes from a limited edition Eroica art book. It came with an interactive cd that no longer works with my computer. Only works on OS 9, drat! However, this screen saver of Kovar is the desktop theme on my laptop.

Major Kovar was such a popular character when I first introduced him into A Distant Soil that I got no less than six claims of ownership from six different fanfic authors, all claiming they had created a character just like him and I had stolen him from them. That’s some feat, stealing the same guy from six different people. Especially since every A Distant Soil fan knows I was inspired primarily by a character from Yasuko Aioke’s From Eroica With Love. Heh. I deliberately changed Kovar’s hair from blonde to brunette just because I liked Klaus’s haircut. But, you know, you can’t copyright a haircut.

If you are interested in the series, here’s a few links to get you going.

Here is the CMX official webpage for From Eroica With Love.

This site by fans and for fans is pretty comprehensive.

This livejournal is a terrific resource for Eroica fans. It has links to interviews with the creator of Eroica, and lots of other cool stuff. She also uses a picture of Major Kovar in there! Funny!

Yes, that is a woman dressed as Klaus in a few of those pics. I seem to recall some plans to create an Eroica musical with the all female Japanese review Takarazuka, but I may be mistaken. That could just be from a Takarazuka photo shoot.

Because Major Klaus is German, this inspired the vacation plans of many Eroica fans. An interesting tidbit from the website:

Incidentally, the popularity of Eroica in Japan caused a marked increase in Japanese tourism to the towns of Bonn and Eberbach. The tourist board investigated why, and when they found out, they made Aoike an honorary citizen of Bonn.

Yasuko Aoike’s official website can be found here. It is in Japanese, but there’s still some fun stuff to be had.

I hope you will check out this series. It is one of those books I enjoyed so much I bought extras for friends. You may actually want to start out with Volumes 2 or 3. The first volume kind of runs off and goes in directions that are quickly abandoned by the creator.

Moselle Green wrote to let me know that she has faboo pics of the all-female theater group Takarazuka cosplaying Eroica. This is the sort of thing that delights me, and makes me giggle like a madwoman. Go see it here.

Portions of this post were cribbed from the old website. Thanks to Leslie Sternbergh for introducing me to From Eroica with Love and all things manga!

From Eroica with Love © ® Yasuko Aoike