Forum - View topicJason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Bastard!!
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2111 |
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And the only description I'd read beforehand was "Dungeons and Dragonball Z."
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Covnam
 Posts: 3644 |
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I was buying and reading Bastard as it was coming out. I'm pretty annoyed at viz for having canceled it. It'd be nice if another company picked it up or released the complete editions. Dark Horse would probably do a good job with it. In fact, they probably should have had it all along...
As for the content, I prefered the first half of the story to the second once the tone changed and there was a time skip. It might as well have been a new story. |
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Moomintroll
 Posts: 1600 Location: Nottingham (UK) |
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Bastard!! is the guiltiest of my guilty pleasures. It's utter knuckle-dragging, amateurish, nonsense but, somehow, despite recognising its many, many glaring faults, I'm strangely fond of it. In fact, the stupider it gets, the more I like it.
Maybe it's just that I get a pleasurable jolt of nostalgia every time I recognise another 1980s heavy metal reference (something which happens on pretty much every other page) and find the cheesy dialogue hilarious. This manga is like some sort of physics-defying wormhole through time and space connecting me directly to my 13 year-old fantasy and heavy metal loving self. Admittedly, my 13 year-old self had f*cking terrible taste... I'd presumed the series was cancelled by Viz due to low sales. Interesting (and yet completely unsurprising) to hear that sacrilegious blowjobs might have had something to do with it! |
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Brand
 Posts: 1028 |
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Man, I love Bastard!! it's just so over the top. My friend and I used to rent the VHS tapes of the anime all the time. One time the guy at the counter was like how can you watch this shit? And we were we like, we like this shit. It is one of the few anime I prefer the dub, it is also so over the top.
I remember watching it said friend when her boyfriend was like hey that's Spike (as in Cowboy Bebop) and we were like no that's Ninja Master Gara. He was like no, listen it's Spike, and we were like oh, shit it is.... I have every volume Viz published. I'm very sad they canceled it, I've been following it for years. I love the art work, it gets so much better and cooler looking as it goes along. And while Hagi draws some ugly looking dudes he will drop in a total beefcake hottie once in a while to break it up. I have the art book for it too, though I wish there was a newer one with some more of his modern art. I remember in the early 00' there was a girl translating Hagi's web blog which was great. There was fine stories of getting the wrong size paper several times and missing a deadline; playing mario golf and missing a deadline; riding a kickboard to the local art supply store and looking at cute girls; his mother visiting and asking when he would get married; sleeping under his desk; sunbathing on the roof and wondering why his apartment neighbors were looking at him funny. To bad it isn't around any more, it was a lot of fun to read and a great insight to the life of a mangka. Last edited by Brand on Thu Oct 07, 2010 6:53 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2544 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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YES! YES! YES!!!!!! A thousand time YES!!!!!!
I wasn't so sure if you were going to do an article on Bastard!! since you had given it a lower rating in your Complete Guide, but thank you so much for talking about it at great length. This is by far a title that is absolutely underrated and not known enough and it's a shame that it's been canceled and the OVA has been Out-Of-Print for years in North America. Just a little fix in terms of info, though, Jason: Bastard!! didn't switch to Ultra Jump until midway through Volume 22's chapters, so the timeskip between Volumes 18 & 19 had nothing to do with switching magazines. Anyway, I absolutely love this manga and I hope to the Hell that is ruled by the utterly insane Satan of the Bastard!! universe that this title can get some sort of rescue. Well, Jason, you got one article I would have loved to see done... Now can you do a Masami Kurumada title one day? (Yeah, right, like Jason Thmpson is ever going to do that)
Dark Horse would definitely be a great fit for the series, and they're the only company left that has the ability to license Shueisha manga aside from Viz.
Viz's cancelation of Bastard!! is odd as hell, since Volume 20 was not only solicited but also had covert art made and shown on online retailers listings, and the first hint of cancelation didn't appear until only a few weeks before release. It also wasn't the only title that had this odd cancelation news, as Kurohime also had the same exact thing happen to it, but with Voume 14 in that manga's case. I highly doubt it had anything to do with the content within the pages of the title, as the title had been walking the fence in terms of H-content for the past few volumes before Volume 19; Viz had plenty of time to stop it, and, hell, if the content was what forced Viz to cancel it then they should have done so after Volume 18... That way we would have ended on a cliffhanger like Japan was left at. Though since Jason doesn't even know why it was canceled, and he worked on it, it's obvious that Viz isn't going to talk about what happened to Bastard!! and Kurohime. |
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Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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Ah, Bastard!!. I never remember being so confused as to whether or not I should be happy a man's penis was censored.
The balls-to-the-wall insanity is what draws me to Bastard!!. You think TTGL is extreme? POW. Penises everywhere! BAM! Now we got boobs! BLAMMO! Boobs exploding! YEARG! ...Sorry, that was my Id speaking...but, yeah--Bastard!! doesn't skirt around lines. The fact that it's so up-front about its insanity is what drew me to it. I'd love to see this get re-released by someone. I'm gonna third the concept of Dark Horse license-rescuing it. It's darn-near impossible, but boy, would I be happy to see Dar--I mean, Porno Dianno. Yeah. Totally happy to see Porno Dianno again. Yep. |
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Dragynstorm
 Posts: 131 |
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Hahahaha! I remember getting to that volume and having to put it down, splash water on my face, and check it out again because I couldn't believe the crazy nonsense of it all. There's something just mind-blowingly fun about Bastard!!. I'm not quite sure what it is, but I can't deny that the series is just a blast to read. Dark Schneider may be a sexist prick, but he's an amusing sexist prick, one of the only I can not only deal with but be entertained by. Huh. =\ |
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midnighteve
Posts: 114 Location: Chula Vista |
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Dear GOD, after reading this review I want so badly to read this manga. It sounds so utterly brilliant and stupid at the same time! I just couldn't stop laughing at the selected dialogue!
It's too bad that Viz canceled the series, but it may have been for the best; that series sounds so damn manly that just reading it might get me pregnant! 
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Parsifal24
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The things you read at one in the morning it's scary
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tuxedocat
 Posts: 2183 |
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Highly amusing column. Good job! The following actually made me laugh out loud:
Mention of this manga always reminds me of the over the top excessiveness that was the 80's. It is exemplary of the decade, in so many ways. |
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ptolemy18
Manga Reviewer/Creator/Taster
Posts: 357 Location: San Francisco |
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These pages have to be seen to be believed! Hagiwara does go back and draw the two pages with actual artwork at the beginning of the next chapter. |
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ptolemy18
Manga Reviewer/Creator/Taster
Posts: 357 Location: San Francisco |
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Honestly, I'm not sure why Viz canceled it. Low sales were probably also a reason. |
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ptolemy18
Manga Reviewer/Creator/Taster
Posts: 357 Location: San Francisco |
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I actually had mixed feelings about giving Bastard!! such a low rating in MtCG. It's way more interesting than many other manga that I gave a two-star rating to. Then again, so is "Enmusu." In terms of sheer highs and lows and individuality, Bastard!! is a really good manga. Where it falls apart is consistency. Also, it's one of those manga, to me, that reads better when you don't know what they're saying, since so much of the dialogue is people saying "This is impossible!" "How can this be!" "Oh no!" etc.
D'arrgghh! Sorry, you're right. I am officially confused. So do you know why there was the timeskip, then? Incidentally, here is part of the interview with Hagiwara (reprinted by Viz in the early graphic novels) that I was using for source material: "The serialization for Bastard!! first started out as a weekly, then it went to a quarterly (seasonal 4x a year), then it went back to a weekly, and now its a monthly. The target audiences of the quarterly and the weekly are different so when I went back to the weekly, I had a meeting with the editors and we decided to start off with an outside story and then return to the main story arcs. I figured if I was going to do an outside story, I might as well do something that I could eventually link up to the main story arc. And of course, I wasn’t able to finish up the outside story within one tankobon volume. (laughs) The outside story started to take on a life of its own. So the first 18 volumes of the tankobon follow the main story, and then it goes to the outside story for a few volumes. I think I should probably get back to the main story pretty soon." (Hagiwara) My opinion is -- outside story arc -- BAD idea. Not that there isn't lots of mayhem in the hell scenes, but... seriously, he and his editor decided to skip to a new story in the middle of a fight scene?
I'll probably write about Saint Seiya at some point. 
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ptolemy18
Manga Reviewer/Creator/Taster
Posts: 357 Location: San Francisco |
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I actually find Bastard!! less annoying re: sexism than both Bakuman and many shonen/seinen romantic comedies. Unlike Bakuman, it's obviously a ridiculous booty-call fantasy, it doesn't pretend to be a 'serious look at male-female relationships and female psychology' or anything. And it's not all clingy and sweet like the typical shonen rom-com (i.e. KimiKiss). |
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tuxedocat
Posts: 2183 |
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All you have to do is take a good look at some of the music videos for hair metal bands in the '80's. You definitely see a direct correlation in the way the "sexism/booty-call fantasy" is presented. It definitely reflects the type of stuff that was hot in the pop-metal scene in the 80's, IMO. Those cheesey David Coverdale/Tawny Kitaen Whitesnake videos definitely come to mind here, as well as some of the D&D inspired power-metal videos, and I can't forget the horror element of Iron Maiden. Seeing how his later stuff got even more extreme makes me wonder if he was inspired by how metal bands evolved in the later 80's through the 90's. I'm thinking specifically about the death metal band Cannibal Corpse, who actually took a lot of flack for their album covers. |
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