If you're familiar with
Leiji Matsumoto's Captain Harlock or Galaxy Express 999, you're
likely familiar with Emeraldas, the lady cosmo-pirate with the giant
space blimp who's prone to surprise appearances whenever plots need
advancing or machine planets need blowing up. Here in Kodansha's Queen Emeraldas Vol. 1, space-fantasy manga fans here in the West are
finally able to enjoy her solo adventures; and rest easy, Leijiverse
fans, Matsumoto's signature style of sci-fi romanticism is in full
mid 1970s effect here, a handwavey future-fantasy idiom where SF
motifs mix freely with Wild West tropes and the high-tech trappings
of gravity waves and space drives serve only to highlight the greater
struggles of the human spirit as Emeraldas haunts the spacelanes, a
mystery woman with little patience for fools or cowards.
Queen Emeraldas appeared in
Weekly Shonen during what must have been one of Matsumoto's busiest
periods, 1978-'79. Smack dab in the middle of helping promote the
Yamato boom, Leiji was also producing Danguard Ace for Adventure
King, the Galaxy Express 999 manga in Shonen King, and Captain
Harlock for Akita Shoten's Play Comic. Queen Emeraldas is 100%
Matsumoto; the flowing scarves and cloaks and hair, the vast
sky/starscapes, and the stately panels filled with elaborate space
machinery covered in meaningless dials all let the reader know
exactly whose comics he's reading. Manga is thought of as filmic,
kinetic and fast-paced, but Matsumoto's work is a different kind of
cinematic, slow and contemplative, and Queen Emeraldas is no
exception, filled with long shots of windswept asteroids, double-page
spreads of deep space, and tableaus heavy with impending doom.
Matsumoto's atmospheric,
engaging, all-natural brush line picks out every board on dilapidated
Martian towns and every swirl of dust in the thin atmosphere, and his
cartoonish, exaggerated characters contrast nicely with the slick
mechanical renderings (perhaps courtesy Matsumoto assistant Kaoru "Area 88" Shintani) of vehicles, weapons, space stations, futuristic
cities, and the other super-constructions they utilize or inhabit.
Emeraldas and other characters loom in and out of rich, inky
darkness, visible in the light of endless rows of analog dials and
meters and screens set against highly polished fittings. There's been
a lot of animation based on Matsumoto's work, but what we see on the
TV never quite seems to capture the cold metallic elegance of his
manga-style brand of outer space.
Queen Emeraldas opens as
young Hiroshi Umino's patchwork spaceship augers into the rock of
Martian satellite Deimos, a signature Matsumoto western-frontier
space boomtown. Stranded with nothing but his pride, young Umino's
True Grit touches the heart of Emeraldas, who is introduced to the
reader in awestruck tones cut short as grizzled barflies shut their
pieholes rather than offend the mysterious bounty hunter. Stubborn
Hiroshi would die before accepting help, but help he gets anyway, and
soon he's odd-jobbing his way across an unfriendly solar system where
the harsh code of the West – I mean, Space – is superseded by the
harsher laws of gravitational physics. Want a meditative
spaghetti-western gunfight set in a spaceship's control room? Well,
why not. No point in mixing genres halfheartedly.
Hiroshi's poverty,
potato-head physique, and casual betrayal by beautiful women bear
strong parallels to the adventures of another Matsumoto manga star,
Ooyama of "Otoko Oidon", the poor but proud wandering-ronin
college student trying to make good on his vow to make it on his own
in the big city. Or outer space, as is the case here. Eschewing help
from others, Hiroshi swears to build his dream spaceship by himself;
a libertarian fantasy if ever there was one, considering the vast
teams of engineers and scientists required to put even the smallest
satellite into the most temporary Earth orbit. At least here the text
throws us a reference or two to 'construction droids,' a step up from
Tochiro Oyama's bespoke hand-built space battleship seen in 1982's
"My Youth In Arcadia."
Matsumoto's iconic
characters might perhaps be best used sparingly, as a dash of
inspiring color at the edges of more direct narratives involving
people who actually have things to do, and here in her own book Emeraldas is no exception. At times she almost assumes the maternal
Maetel role as she watches Hiroshi's struggle from afar, only
occasionally dropping in to shoot someone or make financial
arrangements, or sometimes both. Emeraldas comes close to being a
secondary character in her own comic, but she takes center stage when
necessary to give us glimpses of her own backstory. She too fled to
outer space but made it further than Hiroshi did, all the way to the
planet Jura in the Ammonite solar system (that's where Harlock's Miimay is from, kinda), and we see how she receives her amazing spaceship
Queen Emeraldas and how she is taught the inflexible law of survival
in outer space, which involves the unbreakable rule to never ever
show mercy to your enemies or allow the guilty to escape punishment
no matter the cost.
 |
| Emeraldas as star of her own Galaxy Express 999 special |
We'll travel to the Sargasso
Of Space – every pulp SF series has a Sargasso Of Space – and see
her kickstart a revolt on a planet where the non-beautiful are
imprisoned, and we'll see Hiroshi labor in the mines of Ganymede and
the run down frontier towns littering the badlands of the solar
system. All the while we'll be lectured about what it means to be a
man, about how much mercy to show our enemies (spoiler: none), and of
the greatness of making our own way in the universe. Characters major
and minor emote at length on flying freely without let or hindrance
in their own space ships, but we're never told what it is about outer
space that makes them want to go there so badly. Hiroshi Umino, and
to a certain extent Emeraldas herself, aren't interested in
marveling at the awesome spectacle of the universe. They aren't on a
quest to save the Earth or find a space treasure or solve a space
mystery. The reader looks hopefully for a plot development that at
least pretends to matter to society as a whole, but our heroes are
steadfast in their earnest desire to simply tool around the universe
riding their machines without being hassled by "the man."
Filled with characters taking extreme positions on focus-tested shonen manga ideals, sometimes these stories resemble a more lyrical version of Steve Ditko's "Mister A." However, the aggressive self-reliance of the characters is subverted by the text; for every proud declamatory speech about doing it yourself by your own bootstraps, there's a helping hand behind the scenes keeping Hiroshi (and occasionally Emeraldas) afloat. Maybe it really does take a village to launch a spaceship. Ending as it does with Emeraldas encountering a huge armada of perhaps village-launched spaceships that may be able to help her on her enigmatic quest, we can only wait for Volume 2 to witness the culmination of all this interstellar self-actualization.
Kodansha's Queen Emeraldas vol. 1 is a classy, heavy hardback printed on nice paper, a
professional package representative of comics today, which is to say,
$30 books rather than $3 pamphlets. It's an impressive format with
the downside of limiting exactly how many comics the average reader
can bring home in a month – both the arm muscles and the pocketbook
give out after a few of these things. I do feel with the $25 price
point ($32 in Canada) they could throw in a few interior color pages,
but that's me. Emeraldas has a beautifully printed hard cover and
well-bound interior stock that justifies the sticker price and holds
up nicely to the enormous swaths of inky space blackness haunting
every other page. Zack Davisson's translation manages to throw in an
Oscar Wilde quote and never gets lost in Queen Emeraldas' storm of SF
adjectives, giving the reader both the cold formality of Emeraldas dialogue and the seedy slang of hard-bitten spacemen and derelict
space-drunks.
Classic Showa-era Matsumoto
manga is thin on the ground this side of the Pacific; the arrival of
Kodansha's Queen Emeraldas is like welcoming a long-lost cousin who
should have been here a lot earlier, warranting both "at last"
and "it's about time." A manga creator as prolific and as
influential as Leiji Matsumoto deserves more representation in the
bookstores of America; if they can handle endless volumes of One
Piece, Dragonball, and Naruto, they can surely deal with an Emeraldas or two. I look forward to continuing the journey of Hiroshi Umino
and Queen Emeraldas, wherever in space they take us.
-Dave Merrill
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