Moto Hagio

I read volume 1 of Otherworld Barbara back in December 2017... I got to the second and final volume exactly six years later!

This is definitely to the book's detriment. Otherworld Barbara is one long, complicated story, about a girl dreaming of an imaginary island in the future, scientists studying life on Mars, adoptees and surrogates swapped with one another, cannibalism, people who dive into dreams, research into immortality, the coming of a genocide, and much more, and all I had to go on was a couple recap pages in the front and my vague memories of the first book. If I was smart, I would have read this right after volume 1!

Still, I enjoyed this a lot, even when I wasn't totally sure what was happening. There's a lot of cool science fiction concepts here, and Hagio actually manages to pull them all together in a coherent way. On top of that, this book shows her mastery of the grammar and rhythm of the comics form, with some really emotional beats forming around the reveals here. I particularly liked the stuff about fatherhood, and the twists at the end are surprisingly good. Maybe someday I should reread the whole story in one go and then actually understand it.… (mer)

If you'd asked me to imagine the book that invented the shounen-ai genre, I never could have imagined The Heart of Thomas. This beautifully drawn story of love and loss in a German boarding school is hauntingly dark and compulsively readable.

The story is melodramatic, but the characters have a gritty reality, and their suffering never feels romanticized or fan service-y. Instead, The Heart of Thomas convincingly portrays adolescent experiences of isolation, attraction, and identity and tells a poignant story of surviving trauma. Yes, there are cute boys kissing, but that is decidedly not the point.

Writers of contemporary LGBT fiction for young adults should definitely look back to this classic.… (mer)

Moto Hagio is one of the godmothers of shojo manga, and this collection of short comics shattered many of my preconceptions about the genre.

The stories in this collection are exquisitely drawn and psychologically complex. They share a tendency toward powerful, almost melodramatic emotion that reminds me of modern YA fiction, but heck, I like that aesthetic. I would have loved Moto Hagio unreservedly when I was a teenager myself. A few of the stories just knock it out of the park in terms of craft and psychological acuteness - "Hanshin Half-God" and "Iguana Girl" are two of the best short comics I've read.

Dear Fantagraphics, please publish more shojo manga from the 70s and 80s!… (mer)

Surreal, wistful short-stories, often with fantasy/sci-fi & romance elements.

This is a really fascinating selection of work by pioneering cartoonist Moto Hagio, from the mid-70s (only a few years after her career began) to the present day. Her work was always aimed at girls, and when she started it was unusual for women to be creating comics.

The stories are refreshingly creative, and often really funny. There are some recurring themes (isolation, lost love, conflicted siblings, absent (for some reason) family members...), although the plots and setting are incredibly diverse. I believe that Hagio is more famous in Japan for her longer serials; based on the shorter stories here, I'm going to look our for them.

There's a long interview with Hagio from The Comics Journal included in this volume. In TCJ I often find these interviews a little too long, but really enjoyed this one in this context. It really added a lot to the enjoyment of the book, and had some fascinating insights into Hagio's work. Read it before, or (as I did) after - but skip it at your peril!
… (mer)