DRAWN & QUARTERED
Graphic Arts As Literature
If there's one thing that can be said about Japanese culture, it's that the country has a love affair with anything cute. Translated ‘Di Gi Charat’
comic is 14-karat failureBy Jason S. Yadao
jyadao@starbulletin.comJust look at everything that's emerged from there in recent history: Hello Kitty and her Sanrio friends; Pikachu and the Pokemon menagerie; the fluffy Totoros and soot sprites of "My Neighbor Totoro"; pop singer Hikaru Utada.
The latest cute trend to emerge: catgirls, complete with big eyes, pointy ears and tails. And the latest example of this to arrive in the United States, courtesy of Viz, is "Di Gi Charat." The first translated volume of the manga (comic book) hit U.S. store shelves a few weeks ago.
You want cute? You want cuddly? You want highly merchandisable characters? It's all here. The main character of Digiko, in fact, started her life as the mascot of Gamers, a chain of anime and video game stores in Japan. When her popularity soared, an entire cottage industry was born: Along with the manga series came an anime series, toys, key chains, posters and all the little trinkets that come with being a popular Japanese character.
Digiko's story, beyond "bring in lots of real-world customers to Gamers to make piles of money off merchandise and collateral sales," is that she's a space princess sent to Earth to escape an alien invasion on her home planet, Di Gi Charat. She comes accompanied by quiet fellow catgirl Puchiko and Gema, an odd, blobby creature best described as a circle with two lines for eyes.
Her goal while on Earth is to become the self-proclaimed "superstar" of Gamers, where she is employed in exchange for a home and a regular income to make ends meet. But once her friendly rival, rabbit-girl Rabi En Rose, shows up, hi-jinks ensue.
Unfortunately, even with that background, it's often difficult to figure out what's happening.
Part of the problem lies with the original format: The manga was drawn not by one artist, but several artists, known collectively as Broccoli, who have their own ideas of where to take the characters. What results is a collection of short stories and a variety of art styles that can be jarring to readers expecting a single, cohesive story.
The larger problem, though, lies in how this series just isn't friendly to its North American audience. The original Japanese manga came after the anime series, meaning audiences there knew what to expect with the characters.
Several key characters -- Mirataku, who absolutely adores the ground Rabi En Rose walks upon, and Murataku, who does the same for Puchiko -- also suffer from this omission. They simply pop in and out of some panels in the early parts, and readers are left to guess at their importance -- and their names, for that matter -- until later stories.
Since no U.S. company has released the anime, let alone even announced that they have licensing rights to release it here, audiences here are left with some sizable narrative gaps. Gamers gets destroyed, a bell sucks in Digiko's UFO, the characters present a special concert ... but we never see any of this. All we get are little dialogue hints in the aftermath -- "And remember when such and such happened, in the anime?" and that's that.
Also, in an attempt to provide a more "authentic" reading experience, Viz chose to leave sound effects in the original Japanese text, with a translation index in the back of the book. The problem here is that the index relies on page numbers, and only 13 out of the 152 story pages are actually numbered, rendering the index largely useless.
It's a shame that this anthology is fundamentally flawed, because these characters certainly deserve better. As it stands, only hard-core fans who have followed the Di Gi Charat phenomenon in Japan will enjoy this collection. Anyone else craving a Di Gi Charat fix would be better off importing the merchandise straight from Japan.
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