They Copy Everything
Rumiko Takahashi’s work sits in the same space, for many, as Edgar Rice Burroughs’, but they don’t know.
Takahashi and Burroughs laid down considerable innovation as well as translating their forebears into what quickly became widely-copied tropes and terrain. For the past twenty years, it has been common to see follow a new adaptation of either’s seminal works criticisms of being generic or the most generic. This hit the revival of Ranma 1/2; the Disney John Carter adaptation of A Princess of Mars. It follows suit in comics and prose revisitations.
This could mean neither is worth revisiting, that it’s better not to do adaptations. Let the past be the past.
But, there are elements in both Burroughs’ and Takahashi’s work which are less copied, and those remain energetic and affecting. These aspects are less copied because they politically contradict the dominant cultural vibes adapting them. The nudity of Burroughs’ Mars, the socialization and even romance with nonhuman beings, might be embraced for a work by Philip Jóse Farmer or for an outright porny comic book, but egg-laying naturist girlfriends who kill needs to be downplayed for a major motion picture.
If you go back to Takahashi’s manga, she not only innovated in the love-hate polyons and gag structures replicated infinitely, but she brought to manga the erotic or deviating mind of girls — not a girl — of girls. She could have an entire classroom of girls or a group of women interested in sexy boys, in brassieres, in body parts, in nudity or in two people of the same sex kissing. She could have adult women, as a social class, single or married, young or old, turned on or sexually speculative.
Not an outlier, but a gender.
And, Takashi popularized an innovation more widely to all comics, of women or girls ugly crying. Even today, we have directors telling actors not to cry in a way that makes her ugly, comics artists recommending to never scrunch a girl’s face too much when she is upset, or to let her look puffy or distorted when made. Elegant, smooth anger, sadness, or upset, that’s the way!
We can tell these are nonsense. They seem nonsense.
But, these aspects rarely made it to even direct adaptations of Takahashi’s work, much less the art of her imitators. It became an option, but much more rarely deployed, and not necessarily any of our first thought of Maison Ikkoku.
Adapters or borrowers are more likely to establish the kind of slavery of Burroughs’ writings, or his casual racism, than they are the sexual curiosity of Urusei Yatsura or the patent naivety of the protagonists from A Princess of Mars or The Mucker. Almost no one adapting Burroughs, these days, or borrowing from him, wants to borrow his determination to keep throwing out madder and weirder and less believable content as a story rolls on. We do not see enough Tarzan riffs in which a kid is accompanied by his best friend ape in drag on a cruise ship.
Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy! has more in common with the expressive and agenda-forward nature of the first two thirds (at least) of Rumiko Takahashi’s body of work, than many of the comics and manga which are more deliberate (usually fantasy or science fictional) copies.
The original adaptation of Urusei Yatsura to animation invented a club of male admirers of Lum, the central alien who is now living and going to public school in Japan, in lieu of the equal-parts girls and boys horn dog classroom. They also made them Nazi fans who have a Nazi-adjacent club name, dress like Nazis, try to have Nazi displays at school events.
It sounds funny, but teenager girls doing wrestling moves on boys or men trying to attack them was still, by the 1990s, challenging enough to general Japanese culture that, despite Takahashi having popularized it decades before, there would be parent-teacher organization meetings about it showing up in new comics.
Nazis and slavery are more a comfort, it seems, than the sexual agency of women or girls if not done explicitly for the male gaze (even if the male gaze is also invited.
Anyhow, the next time you see an anime where a woman gets demon fangs but it’s awful soft, remember, that could go hard. Next time you see a dude land on a planet and fall in love with the first thing close enough to human of the socially approved gender, remember she could be brick-red with a bobbing head, proud breast, and equipment to lay eggs. People can sit or squat ugly like Takahashi had Maris or get angry like Princess Kurama or Benten.
