I knew what manga was long before I knew what 'manga' was. That is to say, prior to sitting down and getting acquainted with any of the titles in the comic book stores, I recognized the distinctly different art style which looked nothing like the Spider-Man and Superman comics I'd been introduced to as a kid. Even Transformers, a Marvel monthly based on a cartoon series adapted from a Japanese toy line, was written by American writers and drawn by American artists. Manga looked odd, different.
Foreign.
Characters with big googly eyes and oddly-proportioned head-to-body ratios engaging in long-running martial arts battles replete with Three Stooges-type sight gags did little to set my childhood mind on fire. Besides, they were all in black-and-white! Didn't anybody tell them comics were printed in color? I mean, hello! When combing through back issue boxes at the friendly local comic book shop, I skipped this strange Asian stuff in favor of things my ten-year-old brain found more interesting...like Transformers (the first comic I actively pursued collecting as a hobbyist).
All that changed as I got older. While Transformers was fine to read and enjoy as a kid, and had a nice resurgence with a Unicron-themed storyline as I entered my teenage years, I was looking for something different. Image wasn't a thing yet, but Dark Horse was, and as I'd begun developing a taste for films like Alien and Predator, I started checking out this company that produced mostly black-and-white books. As I picked up new issues, I also browsed the ads for other books just to see what might be coming soon or currently available. It wasn't long before I realized Dark Horse was translating some of those weird Japanese books, and some of them looked pretty darn interesting: mysterious women running around with swords, epic space battles between ships that looked nothing like anything I'd ever seen in Star Wars, and normal guys looking just as confused as I did trying to take it all in. The book was Outlanders, the writer/artist was some guy who's name I had no idea how to pronounce ("Johji Manabe"), and I decided I wanted to read an issue and see if it was any good.
Unfortunately the issue with the advert for Outlanders was an older book and I was informed by Bob, the kindly owner of the comic shop I frequented (is it just me, or was every comic book store in the 90's owned by a guy named 'Bob'?) that it was no longer being printed because the story had finished.
The story had finished? What the what? Comic books didn't "finish"! They ran on and on and on, they kept going like the Energizer Bunny. Superman, at this point, had four monthly titles alone and had been in print non-stop for sixty years! Spider-Man, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, Justice League of America, Batman...these books all had issues numbering in the triple digits by now. Sure, one story arc might wrap, but another would begin next issue and the characters would figure out how to deal with it until it was resolved and another problem cropped up a few weeks later. Comics, in my limited understanding, didn't "end" unless they were cancelled.
Had Outlanders been cancelled? Why? Did it suck?
No, Bob explained, it was always meant to be a limited series. It had wrapped up its run in Japan, been translated by Dark Horse, released in 32 monthly installments here in the US, plus the occasional special issue, and that was it. The story had been told, and the writer moved on to tell a different one.
Now I had to know more. Outlanders might not have been available any longer, but there was another book the same Manabe guy had written and drawn that Dark Horse was in the middle of publishing. Was I interested in seeing that one maybe? You bet your nuclear fusion cannon I was! Thus, on a cold December evening in 1993, I purchased my first-ever manga. This one, right here:
Caravan Kidd, Part 2, #7.
One can look back on one's life and reminisce on the times one's horizons are expanded tremendously, and this right here was a biggie for me. Strong female protagonists, dopey male sidekicks, comic relief, mature themes, and that eye-opening moment where I realized everything I knew about comics was wrong. This one book blew the doors off my expectations, even if I couldn't really understand one bit of what was going on.
See, one of the first things I learned about comics as a kid was that whole "shared universe continuity but free-standing narrative" rule espoused by Marvel and DC. For the most part you could pick up any Superman or Incredible Hulk issue, and read it as a self-contained story. You might miss some minor in-joke, and you might not know the origin story of whatever villain the hero was facing, but you wouldn't lose anything because at the end of the day, Spider-Man was going to beat Doctor Octopus, and things would return to normal. It was like watching the original Star Trek: by the end of the episode, everything was all tidied up, the bridge crew shared a chuckle, and it was time for the Enterprise to move on to a new adventure next week.
Caravan Kidd worked nothing like that, which was completely ahead of its time as far as I was concerned. My first encounter with it was the equivalent of picking up a sci-fi novel, flipping to chapter seventeen, and starting to read from there with none of the context or character background provided in the previous pages. To viewers deeply engaged in recent or current television shows like The Walking Dead, Lost, and Game of Thrones, where you absolutely need to start from the beginning and follow along each week or you'll be lost (as each episode builds on the groundwork laid before it), this is one of those "no duh" moments. It's just how entertainment is done nowadays. But this was 1993, and the only real period-specific analog to this in the entertainment world I can think of was Twin Peaks, and I didn't watch when it was originally broadcast because it was about a bunch of weirdos in a town trying to solve the murder of a young woman, and mom wasn't cool with a sixth grader watching something that strange. The hottest television shows of the time, The X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation, were both very much a 'monster/alien of the week' deal where you could miss a show here or there and pick it up next week without any problems.
This particular issue of Caravan Kidd was probably the worst starting point I could have picked: I didn't know the back-story of the main characters, I didn't understand who the secondary people were, and while it was clear a war was going on, I had no idea why it had started or what the ultimate goal was. The issue's sub-title was "Steel Storm: Prelude", which portended the actual story starting next issue. Despite all that, I found myself drawn in to this world where a badass female militia took over an Imperial battle cruiser with the intention of turning its guns on its fellow Imperials. Damn, man, even the Rebellion never managed to take over a Star Destroyer in the Star Wars movies...this was awesome! Without even knowing the first thing about these characters, I wanted to know more about their stories: why were they fighting, who were they fighting, what was so special about this 'Mian' chick, how did she know the leader of the all-girl militia, why was she headed to this place I could barely spell, let alone pronounce, and what would happen when she got there?
This touched off a long-running search for back issues of Caravan Kidd across every comic book store in the state, and some in other states, until after exhaustive searches and countless phone calls, I finally managed to piece together a full collection of what had come before. Not only that, but my interest in Caravan Kidd spilled over into other areas. I began hunting Outlanders as well, and suffered the same problems. Dark Horse published new manga titles, and I made sure to grab them up every month. I went from Bob holding 2 issues a month to nearly a dozen, and I scoured back issue boxes and quarter bins for anything manga-related I could find.
For this reason, Caravan Kidd holds a special place in my heart. Without it, my love for comics likely would have waned as I outgrew the juvenile sensibilities of the traditional superhero books of my youth. But because of it, I remained a huge fan and collector of material that otherwise I might never have taken a chance on. This was a time where comic book shops didn't have whole walls devoted to manga, where you couldn't walk into a Barnes & Noble and find shelves filled to bursting with the latest tankobon offerings from a dozen publishers, or just hop online and hit up Amazon or eBay and pick up a full set of books you'd missed in one fell swoop.
If you wanted to read and collect manga, you really had to put in the leg work.
I'm sure that sounds like I put on my hipster glasses for a minute, and maybe I did, but the ultimate goal of doing so isn't to insinuate I'm better you (why remind you of the cold, hard truth more than necessary?). It's to try and shed light on just how ground-breaking this stuff was at the time. The Japanese were telling stories about adult themes, stories of sacrifice and betrayal, war and genocide, love and asking questions about what it means to be human, in their mainstream comics way before Western writers and artists were approaching things this way. Nowadays it's easy to take this for granted, but before the days of Preacher and The Authority, before guys like Garth Ennis and Brian Michael Bendis were hauling the medium to its next tier, before Alan Moore and Frank Miller were lauded the world over for turning the genre on its ear, manga was creeping in through the cracks and inspiring a bunch of people with the way it could and did depict both fantasy and reality.
Caravan Kidd wasn't the first book to do this, but it was the book which opened my eyes to the fact it was being done. It led me to expect more from the industry, to support the publishers doing it with my money, and more importantly to seek out and grow my horizons. Caravan Kidd was the first comic series where I followed it hardcore right up to the point where it ended, and cried when it finished--not because the story ended in a bittersweet fashion, but because I'd become invested in these characters. They meant something to me. I'd watched them endure happiness and heartbreak, success and tragedy, war and rebellion. I wanted them to go on forever. If Superman could run for hundreds and hundreds of issues, it wasn't fair Caravan Kidd had to end after thirty. They had to leave, but I didn't want them to.
Fortunately Johji Manabe knew better. Just because the comic was over didn't mean the story ended. In fact, it ends in such a way that it's clear it's far from over. But he told the story he wanted to tell, and it was time to move on. Because of this, Mian, Wataru, Babo, and all the others who survived the wrath of Empress Shion and her Empire's brutal expansion and eventual destruction can live on forever. That there is more story to tell wasn't the point--my imagination was captivated and remains thus even twenty-three years after I first read that finale and cried those tears.
There's nothing particularly unique about Caravan Kidd. It wasn't the only comic that could have opened my eyes to these larger, wider, more expansive possibilities. In fact, I'm sure there are readers shaking their heads right now and thinking, "Viz was doing stuff like this long before Dark Horse got involved," nodding toward 1987's Mai the Psychic Girl or 1989's Crying Freeman as their evidence, and they're right. The point isn't to argue about who did it first, or who did it best, but that books like these existed at the right time for me to find my way into their worlds. That's why it holds a place in my heart. That's why I recommend it to anyone who wants to get into manga but is put off at the idea of having to read dozens and dozens of entries in long-running series like Bleach or Dragon Ball. Caravan Kidd is easy, fast-paced, often humorous, but serious when it needs to be, and Dark Horse collected the full run into three trade paperback volumes, each of which tells 10 chapters' worth of the story of the red-haired, fox-tailed, sword-slinging Mian Toris, her human companion/pet Wataru, and their black marketeer assosciate Babo, all caught up in a continent-spanning conflict with a full spectrum of good guys, bad guys, and bounty hunters looking for the girl who always manages to stay just out of reach despite the six million dollar reward on her head.
It isn't perfect, but it's perfect to me, and that's what makes me pull it off the shelves for a read every couple of years.
Thanks for reading and (hopefully) enjoying this trip down memory lane. I composed this essay on a whim and just started pounding the keys until it was finished, and it reads much differently than the usual tone I take with my "Michael's Long Box" column. That said, if it inspires you to either seek this one out or dig into your own long boxes and rekindle some treasured memories, I hope you'll share the results either in a comment here or on your own Steemit posting. Either way, please let me know if you have experiences similar or different to my own with regards to any comics. We've all got our passions, so let those words fly and tag me, @ModernZorker, in them wherever they show up!
Did you enjoy this one? Want to read more like it? "Michael's Long Box" is an infrequently-updated series mainly focusing on 90's comics, so consider following me if you like that sort of thing. Here are some other entries for you to peruse: