Nothing Important to See Here

Meet our next main character for Worlds Beyond Number: The Official Graphic Novel!

Erika Ishii tells us all about the young witch Ame who loves collecting, playing in nature, and is filled with wonder.

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Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.

Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.

It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.

Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.

So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.

https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons

It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen

It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage

It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own

Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”

I’m having some emotions about it!

“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”

Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!

We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!

I mean, will you LOOK at this:

This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:

oOoOOhhh man...short and poignant in a most disturbing way. I'd already read some works by the same author where he proved being extremely good at 1) writing realistic children, with deep attention paid to how they see the world and act with each other, and 2) drawing illusions, surrealism and dreamscapes...and that little story is just those two things combined isn't it

I had rather high expectations because several people who's tastes I trust told me it was really good, including that it was better than tekkonkinkreet (my favorite manga! how can you!) and was shocked to see it was so short? Taiyo Matsumoto never writes really long manga and I had read shorter things by him but it was still unexpected. Despite the shortness of it all the pacing is nice and slow and gives off that busy monotony of what school was like...the length is perfect for what it's doing, I couldn't see it done otherwise.

The art itself looks great, technically speaking and according to my subjective tastes. That being said it's extremely similar to the other stuff he was doing at the time style-wise which for an artist who willingly experiments with that was a tiny bit underwhelming? I haven't managed to spot anything unique in it - in the context of the artist's mangas. In the wider context of manga in general, it's still a fresh, original and wonderfully drawn comic.

It's all I love in a plot: show don't tell, a humble scale and a healthy dose of vagueness you may interpret. Added to this comes a sort of...respectful distance? I've felt in a lot of the author's work. Despite a small cast and a lot of solo, almost first person moments, you don't quite feel immersed. You're not part of what's going on, only witnessing it. It adds to the atmosphere.

Yet another outcast child protag, this time (if you compare to tekkon, to sunny, even to the prelude to no.5) a softer little guy. Yet another instance of dealing with undisclosed mental health stuff affecting his everyday life. Still love to see that, the gentle kindness in relation to that subject matter is what made me love this author in the first place. I'm easily attached to characters like that and in this case, his relationship to loneliness and strange lack of care for the treatment given by fellow classmates tugged at my heart strings a whole lot.

Now, for the fucked up stuff. This manga actually scared me! The uh, supernatural? Elements creep slowly. I did not see them coming and their execution was terrific. There's something uniquely scary in showing stuff happening and the rest of the world denying it your face, added to this the point of view of a young child, an age where your opinion on the world isn't one many regard as important, where your perspective gets brushed off ... if I had to give a meaning to the story it'd be that. A sort of personification of the discomfort of childhood, of not being taken seriously but of fearing what's coming next, not yet being old enough to be aware of your own life's past tense but feeling the changes in you as you grow up.