Adventure Boys

Posted: Sat Dec 23, 2006 4:58 pm

DISCUSS!

MS Sex Bot Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 21 Location: Paris

This is one amazing work.

Kudo to the master for doing such a great job.

Everything is perfect, seriously, from the drawing with amazing amounts of details, the stories are even better, man how can he manage to hook us so much too protagonist he just introduced one page ago ?

Unlike some others mangaka he really manage to make us embrace the flow of his story, we don't feel like drawing into too much stuff or not moving cause of stuff lacking, right the perfect dosage.

I love all the stories but i do have a preference for the coffee one ^^ (that's if anyone care about which one is my favorite).

Anyway i highly recomand you to read it, you're so gonna love it XD

Fan Boy Joined: 21 Nov 2006 Posts: 18

I loved it. I was already an Adachi fan; his stuff is the best to enjoy sitting back on a relaxing summer eve. Nevertheless, I can easily say this was probably the best work I've seen him do.

I read both Short Program installments, and while I liked some stories, I can safely say this one was simply put together so much better. A real flow of nostalgia and heartwarming comedy in every single story.

I like heartwarming stories. Adachi pulled it off without getting too melodramatic or sappy (though I'm sure some would disagree).

So basically, it was a fantastic read.

Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2007 6:08 pm

I'm starting to doubt that it's possible to dislike an Adachi manga. Are there any really bad ones?

I have to say my favorite story in this one was the Stairs of Time one, if only because I had to read it a couple times to figure out the story.

Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2007 7:37 pm

Dislike is a strong word. I think the worst you can do is marathon too much of his material and reach the level of "apathetic." But taken individually they're always entertaining.

Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2007 9:26 pm

woops typo, I meant IMpossible to dislike. I do agree on not taking too much at a time though, which is hard not to do cos his stuff just reads so fluidly, but I always end up enjoying it more when read slower.

Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2007 9:43 pm

No no, your original statement made sense. I was simply agreeing that it's not possible to dislike him.

Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2007 10:23 pm

Ok cool. Since I seem to have dragged it off topic a little, I'll flesh out my last comments.

Adachi is really a master at figuring out a scene's most effective units and breaking it down. Um, a little vague but for example I think he might visualize things in little panel phrases (as opposed to single images, as say, Hiraoki Samura in Blade of the Immortal seems to do [hense all that focus on chopping up and reconfiguring rather than simply mirroring or letting it stay right-left]).

A possible analogy might be with a film where say a shot might last a few seconds then cut, where in an Adachi manga a "shot" would last a few panels rather than just one. I notice a lot of his pages seem to break neatly into 2 or 3 of these multi-panel phrases, which are divided by slightly wider gaps than those between individual panels within phrases.

Not to go overboard on emphasizing breaks between panels (over content or composition or other virtues) but this is what I was talking about by taking it slow. When I was reading through a large chunk of H2 a couple years ago, I remember that I would enjoy reading it a lot slower if I was paying attention to these breaks, just following the page's rhythm rather than zipping through volumes really fast to see what happens next in the story. I would also find that after reading some Adachi manga like this and then applying it to some other manga, almost any other mangaka would not stack up very well and would just be completely tedious to read like this, they just wouldn't quite grasp the seemingly simple page mechanics or something.

Going back to the particulars of Adventure Boys, it nicely encapsulates Adachi's career in storytelling. A story collection like this, which basically mixes and matches elements to tell roughly the same story several times would get boring pretty fast in just about anyone else's hands. I think part of the reason he get's away with it is because he's focused on his presentation and rhythm of events rather than just the events themselves (ie just telling an old fashioned story). It's not a very adventurous style but it's subtle and really hard not to get hooked if you're paying attention.

Fan Boy Joined: 17 Nov 2006 Posts: 6

That was really quite wonderful. Thank you for translating it.