The Mike Toole Show

War Stories

It's kind of morbid of me to frame it like this, but a few weeks ago, I made my last visit to what I'd started referring to as the Corpse of Borders. The bookstore chain had thrown in the towel, the liquidators had taken over, more than ten thousand jobs were quietly vanishing, and a business that had once been a major fulcrum of the North American manga supply chain wasn't quite dead yet... but it was starting to smell funny. When the chain was still healthy, I'd occasionally visit, and behold the gargantuan aisle of manga and related books. It was astonishing, for a time - as a kid newly discovering manga, I dreamed of all of the undoubtedly amazing stuff that hung tantalizingly out of reach, and here it all was. Usually, I'd gaze on it and think, "My god, I don't want any of this crap!" But I took the time to root through the embers of Borders and select a few books (a House of Five Leaves there...) from the hundreds and hundreds that still remained.

I speak of hundreds, because of course there's hundreds of English-language manga books available. But back in 1987, there were three. This column's about one of them. This column's about Area 88.

I didn't see Area 88 myself until 1988, when my brother and I made a trip to our local New England Comics and discovered the title amongst the week's new offerings. He brought it home and I bogarted it soon afterwards; we were still a bit fuzzy on the whole idea of special Japanese comics, but to us, Viz/Eclipse's original run. Huh, you know what? Neither did I. One eBay trip later, I was the proud owner of about two thirds of the unfinished, 42-issue run. The cost: eight dollars. But hey, check out this beaut:

Here's one of the first fruits of a trip that Viz chairman mecha designs. Matsumoto paid the guy back for his hard work by inserting him into Harlock thusly:


Yep, that's Kaoru Shintani, alright! Anyway, back to Area 88. The series takes place in a fictional Middle Eastern country (probably based largely on Iran, given the country's contemporaneous revolution) where a royal exile uses his immense wealth to fund a band of mercenary pilots who fight against revolutionary forces plotting to sell the country's oil reserves to foreign interests. Shin Kazama starts off half a world away in Tokyo; he's beaten the odds, rising above his past as a poor orphan to be a gifted graduate of Japan's top aviation school, and engaged to the daughter of the president of Yamato Airlines. His future father in law ires his skills as a pilot and plans on grooming him as an executive. All of this really pisses off Kanzaki, Shin's best friend from the orphanage, who's followed a similar career path and can only see his old friend stealing all of the accomplishments he wants for himself. So he answers one of those ads in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine, and one night, he gets Shin good and drunk, and hands him a piece of paper to sign. One dodgy contract and late-night flight later, Kanzaki's in pole position to take over Yamato Airlines, and Shin is in the country of Asran, sequestered at the remote Area 88 airfield, where he has to suit up and dogfight his way towards a $1.5 million purse, which he can then use to buy out his contract.

Shin's got the Right Stuff, but he's a civilian pilot, so he's horrified at the prospect of having to kill and face death every day. But his commanding officer, Saki Vashtal, is oddly persuasive, even when he isn't simply threatening to shoot Shin if he tries to desert. Shin tries desperately to remain emotionally distant from the carnage of the skies above Area 88, but against his intentions, he starts to make friends with the other pilots at the base - there's Vietnam war vet Micky Simon, who, just like John Rambo, couldn't make himself hop out of the cockpit of a million-dollar combat jet and get a day job. Simon eventually earns enough money to escape, but instead ends up spending it all on a state of the art F-14 Tomcat so he can keep fighting. There's RAF veteran Boris, who suffers terribly from nightmares of his dead war buddies. There's Greg Gates, a burly Dane who's made so many improbable escapes from desperate situations that he's oddly (and sometimes hilariously) indifferent to danger. A war photographer, Rocky Mutsugi, provides Shin with a faint conduit to his old life; his fiancee Ryoko spies him in the background of one of Mutsugi's photos in TIME magazine and refuses to give up on him, ratcheting the drama sky-high and keeping Kanzaki good and mad.

You can see where it all leads, right? After months and months at Area 88 (and not without setbacks - Shin soon replaces his Crusader with an F5E Tiger II, an unintended and expensive move), Shin starts to enjoy the icy thrill of kill-or-be-killed aerial combat, not to mention the heady cameraderie he enjoys with his squates. This depiction of Shin's internal and external struggles is where Area 88 really shines - Shintani is a much more refined character artist than his mentor Matsumoto; as you can see in the picture, he can actually draw characters who don't look like walking potatoes or Marianne Hold. Shintani also takes special and obvious delight in painstakingly drawing military hardware - dozens of awesome warplanes from around the world appear in Area 88's pages, from the elderly Texan I prop plane to 60s and 70s stalwarts like the MiG-23 and Mirage F1, to exciting new planes like the AV-8 Harrier II. Area 88 would become a 23-volume hit, so of course, it got turned into anime twice.

Happily, both of these animated versions - 1985's 3-part Manga UK cast was replaced by an American cast for the final volume. Neither versions are particularly memorable. American fans who'd been waiting for years from closure after the manga's abrupt disappearance would get their due, as the series wraps up with a remarkably grim, fatalistic turn. I first watched this OVA adaptation at UMJAMS, my old anime club; after that point, for more than a year, the club's seal was a caricature of Shin Kazama despondently holding a gun to his head. Draw your own conclusions, kids!

Someone at Mai the Psychic Girl got the paperback reprint treatment.

But what else has Kaoru Shintani been up to? It can't all be war comics, right? Of course not. Shintani really excels at drawing two things - fighter planes and attractive girls. He's best ed for Area 88, but he'd score a modest hit in the 80s with Seven Seas are publishing this one in English in a few months - I'll certainly be checking it out.

In the meantime, I'll paw through my newly acquired pile of Area 88 back issues, reliving the adventures of Shin and his pals at Area 88. Area 88 was the first manga series I ever read. What was the first manga you ever read? What's your favorite part of Area 88? Sound off in the comments!