#i favour the villainess icons

[brainbuffering]

12 Days of Manga 2022

Day 11: Series Dropped/Disliked

Okay, I try to be positive about stuff as a whole but I read 3 series this year that gave me beef so it’s time to make some burgers! Or something.

1) Deadpool Samurai by Sanshiro Kasama and Hikaru Uesugi from Viz Media/Marvel (T: Amanda Haley L: Walden Wong E: David Brothers)

[ID: English Cover for Deadpool Samurai. A montage of pictures makes up the iconic deadpool mask in black and red. The red is images of deadpool, the black is weaponry.]

“Deadpool moves to Tokyo and makes a mess of everything!

Everyone's favorite Merc with a Mouth has finally come to manga! As soon as Deadpool moves to Tokyo, he runs afoul of some familiar faces. Before he knows it, he's teaming up with new heroes, battling gods, attending concerts, and being repeatedly dismembered. That's good, right?

Anyway, Deadpool lands in Tokyo with a bang! What could possibly go wrong when Iron Man invites Deadpool join the Avengers' new Samurai Squad? After all, Deadpool is just in it for the money... and the trip to Japan. This is fine, right?”

Honestly this should have been an open and shut case. I like manga! I like deadpool! A deadpool manga? Major win! And whilst I can assure you that this is, indeed, a Deadpool Manga, it doesn’t really go beyond that and a lot of the jokes somehow seem lost in translation.

Deadpool is a character built upon the destruction of the fourth wall. That’s where the humour lays, and I was really hoping for some amped up moments! This is a american series, localised for a japanese audience, then localised back for americans once more! I was hoping for meta jokes, knowing looks, comments about how the translator had given up or was really going to struggle with a concept. Yet even when there was an “untranslateable” joke in the form of the kanji in Uncle Tsutomu’s name can be pronounced “Ben”, they never took the opportunity to make fun of themselves or the reader? Instead we’re just given a very formal note explaining it. We loose the joke. No “That’s what you get for not learning japanese” or “It’s super funny, we promise”.  It felt very “un-deadpool”.

I don’t mind that the book borrows from the movie version of Deadpool rather than the comics, the purpose of this book is to get Japanese Fans from just cinema goers into comics readers and putting Deadpool into the pages of Shonen Jump makes sense! But the book never really goes beyond a collection of cameos and character introductions.

There are some good ideas in there. The Venom Symbiont taking over the body of a Hatsune Miku Inspired Idol. Thor asking Loki to watch Demon Slayer with him because he relates to Tanjiro. The All Might Team Up. But over all it feel like a missed opportunity for fun in favour of fealty to shueisha.

I will say, that I am glad that Sakura Spider (AKA Hida Haruka) is now in the maintream marvel universe though as part of the Third Totem War. Next time I boot up my Marvel Subscription I’ll be sure to check it out! I will not, however, be picking up any of the other Marvel Manga coming out in 2023. Not after this disapointment.

Now when are we going to be getting “Superman VS Food”?

2) My Next Life as a Villainess Side Story: Girls Patch anthology from SevenSeas (T: Elina Ishikawa A: Lora Gray L: Uncredited E: Peter Adrian Behravesh)

[ID: English Cover for My Next Life as a Villainess Side Story: Girls Patch. Maria, Catarina, Sophia and Mary gather around a bouquet of pink and blue flowers. They look up at the audience with different yet happy expressions. Maria is smiling widely, Catarina is winking and raising her hand in the sky. Sophia i smiling quietly. Mary has a coy expression with one finger on her cheek.]

“A yuri manga anthology based on the hit My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! light novels, manga, and anime! A brand-new anthology brought to you by the highly popular doom-avoidance-strategy romantic comedy! This book features nine stories focusing on the heroines and their dazzling emotions!”

*Sigh* Oh HameFura franchise, your queer content is just like the moon. So near, yet still so far out of reach.

I don’t know what I was expecting when I saw this in Waterstones. I suppose the description of it being a “Yuri manga anthology” had me hoping that maybe the girls would be allowed to be gay. Alas, it still feels like they’re dancing around everything and claiming them all to be just good friends!

Come on Japan! Let them say “I love you”! Let them imagine marriage and kids and kissing! Why is it that Geordo and Keith are allowed to violate Catarina’s consent but Mary can’t even imagine their wedding day?

I love that we’ve got a bisexual harem going on here, and My Next Life as a Villainess is certainly one of my favourite harem animes of all time, but I still feel like I’m being perpetually queerbaited... and it’s getting exhausting.

3) Game: Between The Suits by Mai Nishikata from SevenSeas Steamship imprint (T: Jess Leif L: Kai Kyou E: Claudie Summers)

[ID: English Volume 1 of Game Between The Suits. A man and a woman posed sexily on a black background. They are both wearing similar work outfits, a white shirt and black trousers/skirt. The woman is wearing bright red heels. The man spreads her legs apart and leans in, the woman pushes her hand up against his mouth with an unimprssd air. His hand is ontop of hers on the floor.]

“At twenty-seven, Sayo is married to her career--she's the kind of woman who will even answer work calls while having sex! When her firm hires charming playboy Ryoichi, Sayo tries to resist his advances, but not for long. Soon they're plunging into a purely physical relationship, agreeing that they'll only play this love game until they find true romance. Sayo will let Ryoichi into her bed, but will she let him into her heart...?”

Due to very obvious hashtag feminist reasons I have bought all of SevenSeas new Steamship offerings. It’s rare enough to get Josei licenced for English release, let alone smut! I saw a lot of people very excited for this title in paticular. I personally was drawn in by the promise of a protagonist my own age, and I do like me some ‘fuck buddies to lovers’.

However after volume one I will not be going any further for the simple fact thaat Ryoichi is just...  a dick. He’s highly unlikeable! He doesn’t respect bondries, he acts superior to everyone, he’s arrogant and so far doesn’t seem to have any redeaming qualities beyond being good in bed? Which is not something I can attest to beyond Sayo’s testimonies.

I don’t even think he’s not even that hot. The art style makes everyone incredibly thin and boney, and whilst that might appeal to some people, I am not one of them. I’ve nothing against the basic plot outline, I am even quite fond of the “Dark Prince” archetype (I have read both volumes of Crown Princess, after all) but I still need at least some sort of tragic backstory to find a reason to love them! Or for them to go so far into the extreme of villainery that my friends start questioning my life choices. Meanwhile Ryoichi is just... unlikeable.

I’ll give Nishikata this, he does feel incredibly believeable and realistic as a character. I went to univeristy with men like him! And that is precisely the reason I will not be picking up volume 2.

[smallgalaxylemon]

Matching Rae And Claire Icons

Feel free to use

[graceandfamily]

Rita Gam: “My friend Grace Kelly”

A style icon who favoured old sweaters, the Hollywood star-turned-princess was full of paradoxes, friend and fellow actress Rita Gam tells Nick Miller.

By Nick Miller (March 11, 2012)

'THEY used to have stories. Today we don't have stories as good as that,'' says Rita Gam, 84-year-old star from Hollywood's golden age, sitting upright and respectable in her New York apartment as she remembers past roles. ''Even though some of them were B pictures they were terrific - nice stories, interesting.''

There would be a girl, well-bred but independent, glamorous, beautiful, stylish, make-up and clothes just so, admired, feisty. There would be complications, arguments, wit and danger and romance, and then the frame misty as she falls into the arms of a moustached older man, or a prince, then a wedding, a happy-ever-after or a tragic twist.

(Above: Rita Gam and Grace Kelly in 1956)

But I'm not there to hear that story. I'm there to talk to Gam about her close friend, Grace Kelly. We're inside a 100-year-old block in midtown, with an ornate facade, a concierge and that old New York attitude, in an apartment decorated with movie posters from Hollywood's prime.

It must be frustrating for such a successful film, TV and stage actress to be constantly interviewed about her best friend. But Gam only once looks at the absence of a watch on her wrist, saying: ''I've got another five minutes of talking about Grace in me and that's it.''

(Above: Rita Gam at 84)

I show her a book, Grace Kelly: Style Icon, published to accompany an exhibition curated by London's V&A museum and soon to open in Bendigo.

''Oh, this is very Grace,'' she says of the cover, from a 1955 Cosmopolitan shoot at the height of Kelly's movie career.

But when she flicks through the pages, her eyes are drawn to a casual Kelly on the streets of Manhattan, the Empire State Building over her shoulder, her clothes smart but demure.

''That's what she wore a lot,'' Gam says. ''Skirts and shirts. She was not much of a 'lunch girl', who would go to lunch and dress up.''

(Above: Gam [back row, third from left] at the wedding of Kelly and Prince Rainer of Monaco in 1956)

This is Grace Kelly: Style Icon (it says so on the cover). Adored by the public, sought-after by designers. Still the touchstone reference for the Oscars red carpet; the woman who bridged the golden age of movies and the modern era - the first modern celebrity, a Princess Diana-come-January Jones.

But talking to Gam, a more complex version of Kelly emerges. ''She was not a fashionista in any way,'' Gam insists. ''You've got to separate what was created by the studio system, which was a make-believe image of a goddess.''

(Above: Rainer and Kelly with children Caroline and Albert at Princess Stephanie's christening in 1965)

The Kelly that Gam knew exploited, then transcended - but never embodied - the public role that the Hollywood machine decreed for the leading ladies it owned.

Her life was a dance between image and reality, PR confections and real-life fairytales. Yes, she did marry a prince; but their first meeting was a contrived magazine publicity stunt. Yes, she was a fashion icon, but her private dress sense was conservative and her palace closets were packed with old sweaters.

KELLY and Gam met in New York in the early '50s as hard-working young TV actors and models. Pittsburgh-born Gam was married to a young director, Sidney Lumet, and Grace was the daughter of a well-to-do Philadelphia family (her father an Olympic medal-winning rower and construction millionaire), determined to make her own life in the performing arts, and succeeding at it.

They met on the sound stage of a show called Danger. ''She was playing some villainess or other - she was very cute,'' Gam recalls. ''We were introduced by Sidney. He said, 'Oh Rita, this is Grace. Grace Kelly, this is Rita.' 'How do you do?' ''

It was not a movie-star moment. ''She was a very nice girl - she could have been a kindergarten teacher. She had scrubbed clean, sympathetic looks. It's just when the camera hit her she became absolute magic.''

Others noticed, too. John Ford cast her in her first movie role after seeing a screen test and exclaiming: ''This dame has breeding, quality and class … I want to make a colour test of her - I'll bet she'll knock us on our ass!''

Gam and Kelly signed with MGM and became close friends when Gam moved to Los Angeles a year or so later. She had been put up at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

''I was very uncomfortable [there],'' she says. ''I was a woman alone, and if I sat in the lobby I would get hit on, and I was lonely. I would be calling New York and Sidney all of the time.''

At the suggestion of her agent, she called Kelly, who was on the cusp of fame as Rear Window, her second movie with Alfred Hitchcock, was finishing filming. Kelly was lonely too, having left behind in New York her on-and-off paramour, European designer Oleg Cassini.

''I called Grace and she said, 'Oh come for tea today', which I did. She was living with Prudy Wise, her secretary, a girl from the south. It was just a one-bedroom Hollywood apartment in the Hollywood flats. I don't know, we were just having tea and she said, 'Well, why don't you move in with us? Three is as good as two is as good as one.'

''So we did, I moved into her flat and it was rather fun, it was like we were sorority girls.''

In those days, Hollywood was ''a party town'' and ''pretty wide open'', Gam says, in suggestive but decorous tones. ''We would get hit on by industry wolves.

''I remember once, [Kelly] had a little gold Chevrolet, a couple of years older than was current, and [an acquaintance] said, 'Oh we'll send a car for you'. His name was Charlie Feldman, he was a big agent, and I said, 'Grace they're going to send a car for us'. I was on the telephone, and she said: 'No, tell them we'll drive ourselves.' I said: 'Oh, OK.'

''Well of course she was smart, we were in control of our destiny. We left that 'party' of four - two gentlemen, Charlie and his South American friend - and drove safely home down the Hollywood hills. [Kelly] was really much more wise than I was.''

It's a recurring theme as Gam remembers Kelly - a smart girl becoming a smart businesswoman who saw through the Hollywood machine and was fearless about imposing her own demands on it - in fashion as much as anything else.

''Basically, she was suburban in her tastes,'' Gam remembers. ''[Even as a princess] she had closets full of old tweed skirts that she hadn't worn in years, and many many blouses that had long since seen their day, and tonnes of sweaters that were well-washed and well-worn.

''She didn't have any particular style sense, I don't think. I think she addressed that as an actress. She didn't read a lot about fashion. [She relied on] not friends but professionals.''

Kelly befriended and relied on the studios' top designers. But she kept one eye on the result. In her first leading role (Dial M for Murder), even as she was learning how to act on film, she overruled Hitchcock on a costume decision, telling him that if her character got up in the middle of the night to answer the phone, she wouldn't bother putting a big velvet robe over her nightgown. She also had a fight with the make-up man who she thought was putting too much rouge on her. ''After that, I had his confidence as far as wardrobe was concerned, and he gave me a very great deal of liberty in what I wore in his next two pictures,'' Kelly said.

If style means anything, it's not what you wear, it's how you wear it. ''The subtlety of Grace's sexuality - her elegant sexiness - appealed to me,'' Hitchcock told his biographer. ''Grace conveyed much more sex than the average movie sexpot. With Grace you had to find it out, you had to discover it. Everybody wants a new leading lady but there aren't many of them around. There are a lot of leading women, but not enough leading ladies.''

Of their first meeting, Cassini later wrote: ''I saw her only in profile. I saw the utter perfection of her nose, the long elegant neck, the silky diaphanous blonde hair. She wore a black velvet two-piece, very demure, with a full skirt and a little white Peter Pan collar.

''Later, when she stood, I saw that she had a pleasing figure, tall, about five-foot-eight, good broad shoulders, subtle curves and long legs - a very aristocratic girl, not the sort you simply called for a date.''

The Hollywood system marketed her as the antithesis of Marilyn Monroe, whom Fox had recently discovered, feeding magazines lines that drew Grace as the all-American dream, a fine but approachable noblewoman who men wanted but women would also want to be: respectable, white-gloved, fine-bred and pretty. When Marilyn Monroe was asked what she wore to bed she replied ''Chanel No 5''. When Grace was asked, she replied: ''I think it's nobody's business what I wear to bed.'' Article after article punned on her first name.

Grace found it all amusing. But she told her biographer that this ''respectable'' image of Hollywood felt unreal, when the reality too often was ''full of men and women whose lives were confused and full of pain. To outsiders it looked like a glamorous life, but really it was not.'' After her Academy Award for best actress (tellingly, for her role in The Country Girl, in which she played ''a woman who had been married 10 years and lost interest in clothes, herself, everything'') she turned down most of the roles she was offered. The pressure and grind of Hollywood left her exhausted and disillusioned.

But she was also setting the mould for the modern movie star, taking control of her own PR from the studio. For Photoplay magazine she invited a photographer to take unprecedented candid shots of her and her sister on holiday in the Caribbean, in casual clothes and away from the studio's platoon of retouchers. The photographer Howell Conant wrote: ''You trusted Grace's beauty, you knew it wasn't built from clothes and make-up … [it was] natural, unpretentious.''

And then came her prince. Paris Match magazine set up a photo shoot of her with Prince Rainier of Monaco, as a promotion for its Cannes coverage. Gam recalls that the dress Kelly wore for the occasion she considers her biggest fashion faux pas. ''She would make jokes about it.''

Months later, Rainier arrived in New York. ''She called me, and she said, 'Come up for drinks on Thursday, I want you meet my prince.' I thought she meant her newest boyfriend and indeed it was her prince,'' Gam remembers. ''When I first met him … I wasn't blown over - you know, it wasn't Clark Gable, he was just a nice guy. He wasn't handsome, he was short and dumpy - [but] he was fun, he was well-educated, he had a good, funny British sense of humour, and he was intelligent, so I mean, what's not to like? And rich.''

''She was romantic, she would go with somebody for a long time and she was looking for the perfect person. And she fell in love with Rainier and that was that. She just allowed the romance of the times to sweep her away.''

This was the ultimate fairytale - the lavish royal wedding, the palace life in Monaco, dressed by designers.

And then there was the reality. More than 1600 reporters and photographers (more than covered World War II) turned the wedding into a mob scene. ''After the honeymoon she [and] Rainier slept for two days. It was exhausting and it took [them] a long time to recover from it,'' Gam, who was a bridesmaid, remembers.

''She didn't have a clue [what she was in for],'' says Gam of what followed for Kelly. The royal family forbade her from making any more films, which devastated Kelly. But Kelly was resourceful, playing the new role of princess in the same way as she had approached her movie career.

She switched from Hollywood's designers to the cream of the European fashion houses, and took to the kind of roles that princesses perform - benefits and balls, and patron of the arts.

''I don't think Grace changed from the minute I met her to the day she died,'' Gam says. ''She had an extraordinary PR sense and she had a strong sense of who she was and what she wanted to say. She allowed herself to be used by the talented fashion people of the time. And she enjoyed it. [But] I certainly don't think of clothes [when I think of her]. I think of friendship, I think of a loyal good friend, and somebody with a lovely voice and lovely face.

''You know, I see her very clearly, even though it's 35-odd years since she's gone.'' (Kelly died in a car crash in 1982.) ''She had a very strong presence … Everyone should have a friend like that.''

Grace Kelly encapsulated the latter part of Hollywood's golden age. At least, that's the legend, that's what people say. ''And well they should,'' says Gam. After all, it's a good story.

Grace Kelly: Style Icon is curated and organised by the V&A Museum, London, and the Grimaldi Forum Monaco. The exhibition will run from today to June 17 at the Bendigo Art Gallery.