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Andy's Bookshelf: 3x3 Eyes
Jun. 30th, 2011 07:50 pm3x3 Eyes, by Yuzo Takada
Manga, in Japanese, 40 volumes
It's a pretty basic story, really. A high school student working illegally at a transvestite bar meets a lost Chinese girl who is actually a 300-year old monster. He inadvertently gets killed, she makes him immortal. We learn some back story (increasingly cribbed from the Hinduism section of the encyclopedia), then there's 30-odd volumes of globe trotting, fighting, and pre-pokemon monster summoning.
This is more than just a manga I like. It's one thing that's been woven throughout my burgeoning through my anime fandom.
It's no great work of art, but I like the story well enough. The immortal main character lead to lots of interesting bits where he wins against demons and monsters by doing something clever (and usually painful) related to being immortal, rather than properly beating them or having some heretofore unrealized potential. He gradually obtains skill with fighting and magic, but is almost always outclassed, which was a nice change of pace from the badass samurai stuff I had been reading prior. And I find it interesting to watch the art evolve from the late 80s to the early 2000s, becoming a little more cartoony (especially after Takada gets Studio Palm to help with the backgrounds).
It has it's problems, from some early LOL cross-dressing, a fair amount of cultural appropriating of India, and a preponderance of panty shots in the early volumes (Pai's pants are strangely fragile), but there's a certain 80s manga quaintness about it that keeps it from bothering me as much as I suspect a more modern manga would.
I'm can't quite recall know how I started reading this; either I stumbled onto it in a comic shop when Dark Horse released the second volume in '95 or I heard it talked about on the Anti-Gravity Room (a Canadian comics show that played on Sci-Fi for a while and I had a fondness for) and then tracked it down. I believe volume 2 was released nearly 5 years after Dark Horse released the first volume, and it quickly became apparent that it wasn't going to get a regular release. I contented myself with rereading what I had, tracking down the first Dark Horse release at SDCC, and finding random images on the still shiny new home internet connection (I think this was also after I developed connections at school for hacked and stolen AOL accounts).
Things really picked up when I went to college. I bough up my first Japanese volume (#17) when I found it randomly for sale at a table at the first Baka!-con (later Sakura con). [Remind me to tell stories about those first years when I worked at the con.] Then I picked up a couple more during every trip to Kinokuniya in Seattle (Japanese class trips, dad's visits, one epic trip around Seattle with Jo-chan and Francesco).
My Japanese was never quite good enough to read more than a couple pages at a time and scanlations hadn't really taken off yet (I think the average bandwidth was too low), so I was downloading txt files of translations. It was delightfully old school. But still a pain and I wouldn't go back to it.
The series wrapped up in 2002 and apparently wasn't popular enough to keep back issues in the store, so the last missing copy (I believe it was volume 3 of all things) I picked up on e-Bay in 2003. After 40 volumes, the series encyclopedia, and a nice artbook/poster book I was finally done.
Dark Horse eventually translated some more, but then quickly canceled it again. My goal for my Japanese studies (something I don't drive terribly hard for, cause I'm lazy) has always been to be able to read this. Comfortably intermediate reading skills and access to my manga collection seems a decent target. Though it's all scanlated, if you're interested.
Though I do really like the manga, I'll admit part of the appeal has been tracking down and following something that has never really been a major fandom in the US.
Manga, in Japanese, 40 volumes
It's a pretty basic story, really. A high school student working illegally at a transvestite bar meets a lost Chinese girl who is actually a 300-year old monster. He inadvertently gets killed, she makes him immortal. We learn some back story (increasingly cribbed from the Hinduism section of the encyclopedia), then there's 30-odd volumes of globe trotting, fighting, and pre-pokemon monster summoning.
This is more than just a manga I like. It's one thing that's been woven throughout my burgeoning through my anime fandom.
It's no great work of art, but I like the story well enough. The immortal main character lead to lots of interesting bits where he wins against demons and monsters by doing something clever (and usually painful) related to being immortal, rather than properly beating them or having some heretofore unrealized potential. He gradually obtains skill with fighting and magic, but is almost always outclassed, which was a nice change of pace from the badass samurai stuff I had been reading prior. And I find it interesting to watch the art evolve from the late 80s to the early 2000s, becoming a little more cartoony (especially after Takada gets Studio Palm to help with the backgrounds).
It has it's problems, from some early LOL cross-dressing, a fair amount of cultural appropriating of India, and a preponderance of panty shots in the early volumes (Pai's pants are strangely fragile), but there's a certain 80s manga quaintness about it that keeps it from bothering me as much as I suspect a more modern manga would.
I'm can't quite recall know how I started reading this; either I stumbled onto it in a comic shop when Dark Horse released the second volume in '95 or I heard it talked about on the Anti-Gravity Room (a Canadian comics show that played on Sci-Fi for a while and I had a fondness for) and then tracked it down. I believe volume 2 was released nearly 5 years after Dark Horse released the first volume, and it quickly became apparent that it wasn't going to get a regular release. I contented myself with rereading what I had, tracking down the first Dark Horse release at SDCC, and finding random images on the still shiny new home internet connection (I think this was also after I developed connections at school for hacked and stolen AOL accounts).
Things really picked up when I went to college. I bough up my first Japanese volume (#17) when I found it randomly for sale at a table at the first Baka!-con (later Sakura con). [Remind me to tell stories about those first years when I worked at the con.] Then I picked up a couple more during every trip to Kinokuniya in Seattle (Japanese class trips, dad's visits, one epic trip around Seattle with Jo-chan and Francesco).
My Japanese was never quite good enough to read more than a couple pages at a time and scanlations hadn't really taken off yet (I think the average bandwidth was too low), so I was downloading txt files of translations. It was delightfully old school. But still a pain and I wouldn't go back to it.
The series wrapped up in 2002 and apparently wasn't popular enough to keep back issues in the store, so the last missing copy (I believe it was volume 3 of all things) I picked up on e-Bay in 2003. After 40 volumes, the series encyclopedia, and a nice artbook/poster book I was finally done.
Dark Horse eventually translated some more, but then quickly canceled it again. My goal for my Japanese studies (something I don't drive terribly hard for, cause I'm lazy) has always been to be able to read this. Comfortably intermediate reading skills and access to my manga collection seems a decent target. Though it's all scanlated, if you're interested.
Though I do really like the manga, I'll admit part of the appeal has been tracking down and following something that has never really been a major fandom in the US.
