Writer: Stefan Petucha
Artiists: Sho Murase; Rachel Ito (computer graphics)
Publisher: Papercutz
I hate manga. I dislike the general style of manga. I find the homogenous faces to be without character and the action shots to be repetitively staged. I believe the manga aimed toward men assumes an audience that wishes to see distressed waif-like women with saucer-shaped eyes and knockers raised to the fifth power. I feel the manga aimed toward women assumes an audience that's confused with their sexual-identities; the men look androgynous.
It would take a lot for me to buy manga. Lupin III could not even entice me to buy manga. I love the wacky anime television series, but I can't stand the manga on which Lupin III is based. So what would it take for me to buy manga? A better question is who. Who has the ability to lure me to manga?
Edward Stratemeyer created Nancy Drew in the nineteen-thirties, but a better designation for him would be midwife. The true genius behind Nancy Drew's adventures, in the same way that Walter B. Gibson was the true genius behind the Shadow's casefiles, was proto-feminist Mildred Wirt Benson. In about the first thirty books, this is the lady ghostwriter who under the housename of Carolyn Keene gave Nancy fire.
Nancy devolved into a sweet, mousy little girl who sort of stumbled onto mysteries and got into trouble by accident rather than design. That Nancy bored me to tears. Before this unfortunate plummet in characterization, Benson made Nancy into a bombastic blonde who was more like a juvenile pulp hero. On more than one occasion, she even packed and used a pistol. It is this Nancy Drew who inflamed imaginations and molded the likes of quintessential Nancy Pamela Sue Martin, Robin Lively--who memorably portrayed Nancy in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Tracy Ryan who on Saturday afternoons instilled relish to Nancy as she frequently engaged in breaking and entering and most recently Maggie Lawson who brought Nancy's blazing gusto to an ABC pilot.
Now, Nancy sets her sights on comic books--specifically manga, a wise decision given the feminine interest in the media. Stefan Petrucha, X-Files comics alum, creates an alluring mystery for Nancy and the reader to solve. The detection is as smart as the characters, and he very carefully updates the trappings rather than these classic figures of children's lit. The characters--as the cliché states--write themselves. Benson's Nancy, George and Bess embrace the twentieth century, and Petrucha embraces them.
While Nancy isn't packing heat, she does in a stand out scene fight off a bear. Most important, Petrucha emphasizes Nancy's core characterization. Almost everything else in the world is a distraction. The whole point to Nancy's life is to solve mysteries. Petrucha shows how this personality trait makes Nancy an effective hero, but he also and very cleverly notes how her obsession with mysteries can in a novel way make her vulnerable.
The only thing Nancy cares more about than mysteries are her father and her friends. Of this aspect, I am not absolutely certain how much of the characterization belongs to Petrucha and how much belongs to Benson. What I can say is it works, or it still works. George regains her tomboyish attitude, which feeds an appreciation for high tech. Petrucha also reinforces George's straight-shooting personality, which is definitely a Benson germ. I cannot remember if Bess was always a mechanical genius. I could have sworn that George was more--well, butch and often repairing Nancy's Roadster. If I'm not mistaken, George was also a two-fisted gal. Bess was more like the voice of reason, though I seem to recall she was no slouch when it came to a fight. I really cannot say for certain. The original mysteries that I read in the library as a kid are likely long gone, and as an added insult, they were rewritten in the fifties to fit with the mind-set of Stratemeyer's daughter--who should at least be credited with keeping Nancy alive: although one can state she was captive in a demure strait jacket.
The element of the book that I thought for sure I would hate surprises me. Sho Murase puts a lot of thought in her distinguishing her characters. Not once did I mistake Nancy for George or Bess as I'm sure I would have in typical manga, and while the colors certainly help, they are not the factors that most importantly identify the trio. Murase gives the cast different facial contours, different eyes--not those awful owl eyes--and different body language. She with Ito creates atmosphere as well as simply solid backgrounds. I found myself...strangely impressed. This does not make me more inclined to try more manga, but it does make my buying more volumes of Nancy Drew a certainty.
References
Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)
www.nancydrewsleuth.com
The Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)
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