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
Because your work is detailed black and white, because it’s beautiful, and because the stories are complex and the protagonists are a teenage girl and an androgynous young man, it’s so similar to manga that even I suggest it to folks who read that.
You’ve even got the look, but I think that’s partly because you were influenced by Art Nouveau (it seems), and Art Nouveau was influenced by Ukiyo-e paintings, and manga’s actually derived fairly strongly from that (and Disney’s stuff).
If this were a manga, it’d be really big with that crowd.
If I were really doing an Amerimanga, I would be happy to call it that, but since I’m not, I am a little hinky with the term when it is directed at my book. I’m glad manga fans like my work! I wish they liked it about 25,000 copies sold per year more, though.
I think my work is much more European than manga, but I’m not going to complain too much! I like manga just fine.
BTW, it might be more accurate to describe From Eroica with Love as josei and not shuojo. I think it started out shuojo.
I wish they liked it more, too. Is it too expensive to advertise in magazines and whatnot that cater to to that demographic?
Moebius was influenced by Nausicaa, which I thought was interesting. And his art style sometimes reminds me of yours, especially in the backgrounds; I don’t remember if he dug Art Nouveau, too.
But really, I think there’d be less comparisons if there were more variety over here. Euro comics would probably get compared here to manga, too, even though the basis for comparison may, like here, just be some art influences or the fact that storylines and genres are more diverse.
I hope that the comic scene here will someday diversify enough that one can say, ‘A Distant Soil’ is typical of American comics, instead of having to look to Europe or Japan for comparisons. It probably will eventually, but it frustrates me, too, that you don’t sell more now.
The first volume was likely more shoujo, with the rest being josei, but genres do overlap.
A major problem with marketing A Distant Soil to the manga crowd is simply that A Distant Soil is very copy heavy. Most manga aren’t. You can skim them and get the gist of the story in about 15 minutes for an entire GN. It takes as long to read an A Distant Soil GN as it does to read a prose novel. Average reading time for a manga page is about 3-4 seconds. Some manga fans really hate having to read a lot of copy an I have actually had some of them say my work is too hard to read because it has too many words.
Also, to the eyes of manga readers who are fond of that sort of thing, comics where everyone doesn’t have enormous eyes are unattractive. I’ve actually had some manga fans say they didn’t think my characters were pretty enough. I was surprised, to say the least.
To American eyes, my characters are gorgeous, if not too pretty. To some manga fans, they are too realistic, and therefore, not pretty enough.
On the other hand, I haven’t tried to break the manga market in years. I may be expressing outdated viewpoints. Would manga fans like my work more now? I tend to think so, especially considering the fact that there is more variety in manga now than when I was frequenting manga/anime shows (which was years ago. Haven’t been to one in about eight years, I think.)
I’m just musing here. I have heard lots of manga fans who will not buy anything from anyone who is not Japanese, which I think is a ridiculous attitude. But then, there have been a lot of bad manga imitations. Are the fans just responding to the bad imitations? I dunno.
I wonder if manga fans aren’t more accepting of other work now. I don’t really make a study of this sort of thing anymore since I am not doing any consulting work now, but my gut is manga fans aren’t quite as insular as they used to be.
I think they, at least some of them, might be– I know a decent amount of anime fans who like copy and pretty men without huge eyes. But it’s not my advertising dollars on the line. (Though if I could donate right now, I certainly would.)
I know manga style’s been evolving; Kazuya Minekura’s art has been influencing things somewhat over the last decade, and her stuff is popular despite having originally been considered ugly over there and in the US.
I am sure there are many manga fans out there who would like my work. Here’s hoping this webcomic will help out. It’s easy enough to point people here and tell them that looking’s free! I must say the pages show up here better than I thought they would.
If you look at the bottom of http://belladonna.org/takeroica.html you’ll see links to the Takarazuka production that’s being done of Aoike-san’s “Seven Seas, Seven Skies”, about Klaus and Dorian’s lookalike ancestors. If they did Eroica… hell, I would rob a bank and go to Japan for that.
I saw that! It is awesome! I have “Seven Seas, Seven Skies” here as well. I have most of Aoike-san’s work.
I would be right on the plane with you if they ever do Eroica!
Your website is a great resource. Thanks for posting all the cool stuff!