A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Yuri Narushima is the mangaka who created Planet Ladder (Volume 1), a fantasy series noted for the extreme complexity of its background-- and by extreme, I mean that two volumes in, there was a diagram of seven planes of existence, their political set-ups, and the ways in which they were related to each other that looked like a circuit board and was just as easily comprehensible-- and the fact that the character with the most poignant and tragic backstory was the spirit of a Japanese engineering student who was swept out of the Earth during WWII, and eventually transplanted into the body of a giant robot chicken.

Planet Ladder, apparently loosely based on a Japanese folk tale, loosely follows a basic quest framework, in which a Japanese girl is swept into a fantasy world because she's the Chosen One who has been prophesied. (For those of you who hate Chosen Ones, note that this is satisfyingly upended later on.) She meets an emotionless constructed boy with a gold hand (I think he has a twin, but I forget the details) and has a femmeslashy relationship with a bad-ass woman named... er... Bambi.

In an interlocking plotline, a young man rules a world which succumbs to a horrifying disease which makes your limbs, including your head, suddenly fall off. He is saved only by being put in total isolation. By the time the heroine meets him, he is so traumatized that he passes out if anyone touches him. His sole companion is the giant robot chicken. This is because a scientist was trying to save the population by transplanting their souls into robots. But before this plan could be launched, almost everyone was dead, with only one robot finished, so the last dying man's soul had to be popped into that one. That prototype robot happened to be a giant chicken. Just go with it.

There's also a complicated cross-dimensional political story which I found almost totally incomprehensible. It did not help that in an early volume, when I was still trying to remember who was who, Tokyopop's handy character guide switched the descriptions of the hero and the villain.

Complete in seven volumes, with a somewhat rushed finale but pleasing conclusion. Dense epic fantasy with angsty men, tough women, and a giant robot chicken -- what's not to love? The art's good too.

Young Magician, The: Volume 1 (Young Magician (DC Comics)) also uses the narrative strategy of dropping the reader directly into the middle of the action and letting us try to put together the sense of the quite complex story as we go along. One does get the sense that there is a coherent story, but the fly-on-the-wall viewpoint makes us work to understand it.

As best as I can figure out, the Guino clan of magicians adopted a traumatized, amnesiac little boy during the Crusades and attempted to teach him magic. The boy, Carno Guino, bonded with another magician, Rosalite, whose body stopped growing when she was a child.

It's now modern times in Hong Kong (the magicians are either near-immortal or operating out of a timeless dimension) and Carlo and Rosalite are trying to stop a magician from another clan who is imitating Jack the Ripper in order to read the future in human entrails.

Insanely complex, with tons of largely-untold backstory. The foreground has an unusual amount of social realism, with a sub-theme about the difficulties of racial minorities in Hong Kong. (One character is a Filipina maid, and another is East Indian/British.) The conclusion alternates rather gory magical battles with lengthy infodumping about the relationship of magic and genetics. The tough-talking Carno is apparently one of two main characters, and the other one doesn't even appear in the first volume.

I await the arrival of some sort of Fowl of D00M.

This is the most appropriate use of my cockatiel parakeet of D00M icon since I posted about the Bleach episode where it first appeared, for this series prominently features a cockatoo. And not just any cockatoo! A cockatoo with a secret.

Karasu is a scruffy blonde agnostic angel with glasses and a soul-patch. As seems to be usual in manga, Heaven is some cross between a totalitarian dictatorship and an uptight beaureaucracy. Karasu has been sent down to Earth to retrieve a devil who's been living with humans. This is forbidden, as is devil-angel sex and other fun stuff.

The devil, Shirasagi, is really cute, incredibly sweet, loves God, wants to do good, and is currently helping small children as a pastor. With a cockatoo. He has black hair and wears a cross.

Sparks fly. Karasu gets in trouble with Heaven. Shirasagi is kidnapped by Beelzebub, who used to keep him as a sex slave in a giant birdcage in Hell. Karasu gets knocked out trying to protect Shirasagi, and the cockatoo flutters around his unconscious body looking both mournful and strangely fierce.

Two miscellaneous notes of interest:

1. If you look closely at the last panel of the first page of chapter three, you will see that some anonymous dude is giving Beelzebub a blow-job.

2. Beelzebub is the Archduke of Hell. The typeface made me repeatedly read this as "Artichoke," ie, "The Artichoke is waiting for you underground."

( Most hilarious spoilery reveal ever )

oyceter has kindly offered to make me a much-needed "Manga fowl of DOOM" icon, starring the giant robot chicken from Planet Ladder, the floating research chickens from Yami no Matsuei, the garuda/giant chicken from Genju no Seiza, and the parakeet cockatiel from Bleach.

Can you suggest to me any significant chickens in manga or anime that I missed or have forgotten?

Also, I can only find images for the research chickens and the parakeet. Can anyone supply me with an image of the giant robot chicken and the garuda/giant chicken? Thanks!

the_red_shoes attempts to make chicken stock:

"Putting it v, v charitably. I tried to make REAL chicken stock once in our first apt here from the leftover carcass of a (boughten) roast chicken, bones fat scraps and all. It looked like Hannibal Lecter's apprentice had been carefully preparing for a life of extremely unappetizing crime in our kitchen, practicing on pullets while Working His Way Up. I wound up with this horrible watery-yet-gluey mess with a visible inch-thick scum of frothing fat on top with horrible bobbing mangled things occasionally poking through it only to be drowned again in the percolating ooze. The cats hid from the smell. (The landlady upstairs said "What is that?" I said maybe her cat had left a dead bird in the hedge, or something.) T wanted to decontaminate the pot by leaving it in the back yard to get rained in. You remember when Meg's jelly won't jel in Little Women? It was like that, only extremely gross."

This reminds me of the biology class assignment I got in tenth grade, which was to boil a whole chicken, until the flesh fell off the bones, then dry the bones and reconstruct the skeleton. We were given a month and a diagram of a chicken skeleton to do this. I put it off till the night before because I was so terrified of the assignment, then made shamefacedly confessed and made my Dad drive me to the grocery store to buy a whole chicken.

Several hours of boiling (the chicken), yelling (Dad's), and weeping (mine) later, the meat was not off some bones, while others had turned to jelly or even dissolved. Dad, having refused to go to bed and leave me alone with the chicken, suggested that I put the bones in the oven to try to dry them out. Several hours later, we had a pile of bones that were more-or-less dry enough to glue together. That was when we discovered that the bones did not match the anatomy diagram. It was like a jigsaw puzzle... FROM HELL.

By 3:00 am, we were pretty much randomly gluing bones that looked sort of right to other bones that were sort of in the right place. Eventually we achieved a chicken-like object, although there was still a pile of bones that we didn't know what the hell they were or where they should have gone, and went to bed.

The next morning we awoke to see the Frankenchicken lurking there atop the tabletop, lopsided, mutant, malevolent. I burst into tears and said I wouldn't turn it in at all, because I'd done such a bad job and I was embarassed to be seen with it. Dad, who is a very wise man in some ways, said that on the contrary, he had no doubt that everyone else also left it to the night before and probably gave up well before we did. Not only did he drag me and the Frankenchicken to school, he accompanied me into the classroom because he was so curious to see what the rest of the kids had come up with.

Some kids had their very own Frankenchickens, which much like ours were lopsided, wet, smelly, only vaguely chicken-like, and sometimes with extra vestigial limbs. Some kids had partial chickens. A few despondent folk carried plastic bags of bones, with maybe a leg or a wing glued together. One boy had taken all the bones and glued them into a solid ball, like Darth Vader's prototype Chicken Star.

And then there was Elizabeth Sugar. Elizabeth Sugar was clearly the only person in the class who had actually bought a chicken and boiled it the day the project was announced. I suspect that she went through several chickens before getting the hang of the project. Her bones were polished and gleaming and wired together. Her anatomically perfect chicken skeleton was mounted handsomely on a polished wood base, and was posed as if poised for flight.

Elizabeth Sugar was chosen as valedictorian, to no one's surprise, and went to Harvard to study genetics. I believe that even as we speak, she is mapping the chicken human genome.

Me? I became a writer.