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maxwell-grant · 3 years

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Your Top Five Pulp Heroes that you wish were better known? By Pulp Hero fans, I mean. Since pretty much all of them except Conan and Tarzan are fairly unknown.

It’s actually quite hard for me to narrow it down to just five, because I’m having to choose between characters that are my favorites that I wish were more well-known and appreciated (which is all of them), and characters that aren’t quite my favorites but I very much think should have achieved great popularity for a myriad of reasons. So instead I’m going to pick some of each. These are not necessarily ranked by their importance or my personal taste, just 5 characters I felt like highlighting in particular.

Honorable mentions goes to characters I already talked about prior and don’t want to repeat myself on. These aren’t “lesser” picks, just ones that I already talked about: Imaro (who in particular definitely feels like he could, and should be, a pop culture superstar if he was only more well-known), Kapitan Mors (who’s got a lot in common with one of my favorite fictional characters, Captain Nemo, but also has a lot of interesting things going on for him as his own character). Sar Dubnotal (a character that appeals a lot to me and I think should be included much more often in pulp hero team-ups). The Golden Amazon (again, definitely a character that feels like it’s just begging to have a pop culture breakout, even comic books rarely if ever have female supervillains this ruthless and over-the-top), The Mexican Fantomas (who absolutely deserves a better name than what I’m calling him here, because he’s incredibly awesome and leagues ahead of just being a knock-off). And of course my homeboy, The Grey Claw, whom I would consider Number One of the list if it wasn’t for the fact that his obscurity has left him untouched by copyright and I got plans of my own for the character that wouldn’t be possible if he was more well-known, so I guess I’m ultimately glad he’s obscure (even if I’m still bothered by how little he’s known).

Allright let’s go:

Number 5: Sheridan Doome

Sheridan Doome appeared in fifty-four stories and three novels from 1935 to 1943. As chief detective for U.S. Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Sheridan Doome’s job was a grim one. Whenever an extraordinary mystery or crime occurred in the fleet, on a naval base, or anywhere the navy worked to protect American interests, Doome was immediately dispatched to investigate it. Fear and dread would always precede Doome’s arrival in his special black airplane. For, in an explosion during WWI, he had been monstrously disfigured.

He was six feet two inches tall; had a chalk-white face and head. It appeared as though it had once been seared or burned. For eyes, he had only black blotches; glittering optics, that looked like small chunks of coal. His nose was long, the end of it squared off rudely. He had no lips, just a slit that was his mouth. His neck was long, as white and as bony as his face…. Sheridan Doome looked more like a robot than a human being. He was tall and ghastly; his uniform fitted him in a loose manner. Long arms hung at his sides; his face was a perfect blank. He had no control of his facial muscles; consequently, his countenance was always without expression, chalky and bony.

But behind the ugliness was a brilliant mind. Sheridan Doome always got his man. Before Sheridan Doome became a staple in the pages of The Shadow magazine, two Doome hardcover mysteries were written in the mid-1930’s by acclaimed hard-boiled author Steve Fisher (I Wake Up Screaming) and edited by his wife Edythe Seims (Dime Detective, G-8 and His Battle Aces). Age of Aces now brings you both books in one huge double novel, presented in a retro “flip book” style. This book is currently Out of Print.

I sadly don’t have any more information on the character other than this. The book is unavailable for me to acquire in any capacity, and the text above is taken from the Age of Aces website as well as Jess Nevins’s personal profile for the character. I’m not even sure if any of those 54 stories even exist anymore, since although he was published as a backup in Shadow Magazine, there doesn’t seem to be reprints of them anywhere, at least as far as I can find, and the original Shadow magazines have largely turned to dust by now.

A character who combines aspects of The Phantom of the Opera and The Shadow, whose adventures are set in a backdrop that can easily lead to ocean adventures? That’s like, what, three of my favorite things in the world combined. I really, really wish I could at least read the stories this character stars in, but as is, this description is all I can provide. Again, time really has been cruel to the pulp heroes.

Number 4: Harlan Dyce

This is another character I’ve only been able to learn about through Jess Nevins’s archives and have not been able to attain any further information on, which is sadly the case with a lot of pulp heroes that nowadays only seem to exist as footnotes in his Encyclopedia or records in libraries. I don’t post more about these characters because I really would just be copying the stuff he wrote without much to justify me quoting him verbatim, and I hate the idea of doing that.

I especially hate that in Harlan Dyce’s case though. Here’s his description

“Dyce had brains, taste, money, ambition, and a total lack of physical or spiritual fear. But—

“Dyce was thirty-three inches tall and weighed sixty pounds.

“That was all the world could ever hold against him. That was what had made the world, most of it, in all the countries of the world, stare at Harlan Dyce, billed in the big show as “General Midge.””

Harlan Dyce is a misanthropic and venomous private detective. He has an “amazingly handsome face,” and the aforementioned brains. But all anyone sees is his stature, and he hates that and turns his cold eyes and acid tongue on them.

The only person Dyce likes and gets along with (besides his dwarf wife, a former client) is his assistant, Nick Melchem, a six-foot tall former p.i.’s assistant with bleak eyes and a strong body. Melchem ignores Dyce’s stature and treats Dyce normally, which Dyce responds warmly to.

Dwarfs may be the single most maligned group of people depicted in pulp magazines, even more so than the Japanese in the war years or the Chinese during the peak of the Yellow Peril’s popularity. Evil dwarfs, murderous dwarfs, sexually depraved dwarfs, they are all loathsome, ugly cliches that are, sadly, the only instances you see of dwarf characters being represented at all, with the only ones who are awarded any measure of sympathy are doomed henchmen or tragic villains. Even outside of the pulps, the only other examples of heroic, protagonist dwarfs I can think off the top of my head are Puck from Marvel Comics and Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones.

I’m not gonna say Harlan Dyce is great representation because I’m not a little person and can never make that kind of claim for a group I’m not a part of, but Harlan Dyce may be the first time I’ve ever seen a dwarf character in pulp fiction who was not a villain or a murderous goon or a victim, but an actual person and a heroic protagonist, and that definitely counts for something. I’m not sure how popular this character was or could be if someone picked up the concept and ran with it (and I’m pretty sure he’s public domain), but I definitely think this is a character that should exist and should be popular.

Hell, this character has Peter Dinklage written all over it, give it to him. Maybe then he will get to play a smart, fearless, cynical, misanthropic but good-natured and heroic character in something where he actually gets to keep these traits until the show ends.

Number 3: Audaz, O Demolidor

Audaz is a Brazilian character who was created and published by Gazetinha, the same publishers of Grey Claw as well as properties exported from elsewhere like Superman and Popeye, and much like The Grey Claw, he is also completely unknown even here. I’ll get to Audaz more in-depth sometime but here I’m going to provide a quick summary:

Audaz, The Demolisher is a gigantic crime-fighting robot controlled and piloted by the brilliant scientist Dr. Blum, his close friend Gregor and the child prodigy Jacques Ennes, who pilot the giant robot from a massive laboratory inside it's head rather than a cockpit. He takes on a variety of ordinary human criminals, mad scientists, supervillains and invading armies, towering over skyscrapers and grappling with jets.

Audaz was created in 1939 by illustrator Messias de Melo, a year before Quality Comics's Bozo the Iron Man and 5 years before Ryuichi Yokoyama's Kagaku Senshi, and decades before the debut of Mazinger Z. Although he is not the first giant robot of science fiction, he is the first heroic giant robot piloted by human pilots, and thus the first true example of "mecha" fiction.

Number 2: Emilia the Ragdoll

This is another Brazilian character, although nowhere near as obscure as Audaz as even a cursory Google search can show. Although Brazil did not have a “pulp era” in the same way the US had, we’ve long gotten past the point of sticking to it as a definitive rule, and I’m including Emilia as a pulp hero because she’s a 1920s fantasy literature character who was created under a publishing company that released pulp stories, because she doesn’t quite belong in the mold of fantasy literature characters she takes after, and because I like her and if I was putting a bunch of pulp heroes together in the same story, I would definitely include Emilia in it. It’s not like she really has anywhere else to go, now that she’s public domain and she’s outlasted her franchise.

As you can tell by the above image, Emilia’s had a lot of variations over the years and that’s because the work she was created for, Sítio do Picapau Amarelo (Yellow Woodpecker Ranch/Farm), has become a major bedrock of Brazilian fantasy literature, one of the only works created here that you can find substantial information about in English if you go looking for it. Here’s some descriptions of Emilia’s character:

Emília is a rag doll described as "clumsy" or "ugly", resembling a "witch" that was handmade by Aunt Nastácia, the ranch's cook, for the little girl Lúcia, out of an old skirt. After Lucia takes her on an adventure and the doll is given a dose of magic pills, Emília suddenly started talking, and would never stop henceforth.

Emilia has a rough, antagonistic personality, and an independent, free-spirited and anarchist behaviour. She is rogue, rebellious, stubborn, rough and intensely determined at anything she sets her mind on, eager to take off on just about any adventure. She is often immature and behaves like a curious and arrogant child, always wanting to be the center of attention.

She is extremely opinionated even when she constantly and confidently mispronounces words and expressions. Her attitude often gets her into trouble, and she very often has to fight against the villains who attack her home on the Yellow Woodpecker Farm and mistreat her friends.

In the stories, Emilia often takes the role of a heroine who travels through different realms and dimensions, as the books include not only figures from Brazilian and worldwide folklore, but also several characters both real and fictional, such as Hercules, King Arthur, Don Quixote, Thumbelina, Da Vinci, Shirley Temple, Captain Hook, Santos Dumont and Baron von Munchausen.

She's fought scorpions and martians and nymph hordes, her arch-enemy is an alligator witch, she rescued an angel from the Milky Way and tried to teach it how to become a human, and once shrunk the entire population of Earth to try and talk the president of the United States into ending war forever.

To little surprise, she has become the most popular character and the series’s mascot.

It’s a little strange to consider Emilia underrated considering she is one of the most famous original characters of Brazilian literature, but hardly anyone outside of Brazil even knows who she is, and regardless of the quality of the original stories (and Monteiro Lobato’s views on race that tar much of his reputation), Emilia definitely feels to me like a character that should be a lot more popular globally.

She is the only character from Yellow Woodpecker Ranch that has transcended the original stories, since she was always the most popular character and there’s been a couple of stories written about her that usually separate her from the ranch and just set her out on the world by herself. The latest story about this character has been a series called The Return of Emilia, that’s about her stepping out of the books in 2050 and discovering a Brazil that’s been ruined by social and ecological devastation, and traveling back in time via a flying scooter in order to try and prevent this calamity.

Now that she’s public domain, I definitely think there’s some great stories that can be told with the character that just about anyone could get to, and I definitely think she’s a character that deserves more appreciation. Anything goes in stories starring her and it’s that kind of free-for-all freedom that I think can benefit future takes on pulp heroes. I would be very happy to place Emilia among them.

Oh yeah, and there was one time she kicked Popeye's ass by tricking him with a can of mouldy cabbage instead of spinach, making him sick and then beating him, which possibly puts her as one of the all-time badasses of fiction, except she would be pissed at not being number one and likely embark on a quest to beat everyone else just to prove she could, because that’s how Emilia rolls.

Number 1: Luna Bartendale, from The Undying Monster (1922)

Not necessarily my favorite of the bunch, but one who sort of epitomizes what you asked, a character who is both incredibly obscure and incredibly underrated in every sense. Despite the book being somewhat known, mainly thanks to the movie, the character is so obscure that I don’t even have an illustration of her to display here, not even fan art, just one of the book’s covers that I think best conveys it. Luckily, the book is also available freely online, so you can all go check it out here. The movie adaptation does not feature the character of Luna Bartendale which makes it pointless to talk about.

To not spoil it too much, The Undying Monster is a very fascinating book, ahead of it’s time in quite a few ways. You expect it to just be a detective story centered around a werewolf cursed, except the subtitle of the book is “The Fifth Dimension” and then it goes to talk about dimensions of thought and post-WWI trauma and love and hypnotic regression that travels through time and ancient runes and Norse mythology. It’s not exactly an easy book to get through in one setting, but I’d recommend it much the same if only because it’s got supersensitive psychic sleuth Luna Bartendale, literature’s first female occult detective, and she’s an incredible character who absolutely feels like she should have become a literary icon.

She lives in London but is world-renowned for her many good deeds. She is a small, pretty woman, with curly blonde hair, dark eyebrows and a high-bridged nose, and a slight build. She has a voice described as a light soprano that "does not make much noise but carries a long way".

Petite, bedimpled and golden curled, Luna is completely in charge of events, dominating every scene that she appears in with her welcoming disposition and cleverness.

Bartendale has various psychic powers, including mind reading. She is well-versed in psychic and occult lore, is a “supersensitive” psychic, and has a “Sixth Sense” which allows her to trace things and people through both the Fourth and the Fifth Dimension. (The Fifth Dimension is “the Dimension that surrounds and pervades the Fourth–known as the Supernatural”).

Her extensive knowledge of occult rites and practices puts John Silence, Carnacki and Miles Pennoyer to shame, and she beats them all with her "super-sensitive" gift of being able to psychically connect with troubled souls and hypnotize them.

She uses a divining rod for various tasks, including psychic detection and tracking, and distinguishing between benevolent and malevolent forces. She has various (undefined) powerful psychic defenses, can carry on seances, and can even cure a person of “wehrwolfism.” And she can always rely on her massive, intelligent dog Roska for help.

Luna sadly doesn’t show up in the book as often as I’d hoped, but everything about this character is so delightful. In a lot od ways she hardly feels like a pulp hero, at least the ones I usually talk about. She feels like a lost protagonist from an incredibly successful kid’s adventure series where a kind and eccentric detective witch and her giant dog go around solving occult mysteries and encountering all sorts of weird supernatural beings while counseling and helping people, like Ms Frizzle meets Hilda. Like this character is just waiting for Cartoon Saloon to make a film about her.

Its not so much “this character should/could be popular but it’s clear why that didn’t pan out”, it’s more me being confused as “why the hell isn’t she super popular? This character should have had a franchise ages ago, holy shit put her in everything””

#pulp heroes #pulp fiction #answer tag #sheridan doome #harlan dyce #audaz #boneca emilia #luna bartendale

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docholligay · 5 years

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Comments for “Perfection, Oil on Linen, Date Unknown”

everybodyknows-everybodydies

oh my gosh oh my GOSH this is LOVELY I'M EMOTIONAL WOW

I’m so glad!!!

everybodyknows-everybodydies

THE EXTENDED METAPHOR OF MICHIRU AS A PIECE OF ART UNDER GLASS IS SO GOOD I LOVE THAT

Thank you! I was really On My Shit for this one, I have always loved Michiru as a museum piece.

everybodyknows-everybodydies

"things lose their value when you touch them, when you use them" U G H YESSSS LISTEN MY IMMEDIATE THOUGHT WAS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MONETARY VALUE AND PERSONAL VALUE AND CONTINUING ON WAS LIKE YOU REACHED INTO MY BRAIN AND GRABBED THAT THOUGHT TO CARRY IT THROUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh my god mouse, this is MY GARBAGE. Like, not just with Michiru, but in LIFE, I have no concept of keeping something in its box, under glass,because then why have it? For some imagined money you may never see?

everybodyknows-everybodydies

also the description of the city lights as "the Milky Way of mankind" is absolutely gorgeous I'm going to be thinking about that line all NIGHT

Thank you!!! I was rather pleased with that line myself

everybodyknows-everybodydies

Haruka sleeping curled up small even though she is a LANKY NOODLE AND TAKES UP SPACE = SUPERB CHARACTER DETAIL 10/10 I WANT TO HUG HER DANG IT

THANK YOU I LOVE THE IDEA CONSTANTLY AND ALL THE TIME

everybodyknows-everybodydies

AND THE BIT ABOUT THE MASTERS PAINTING OVER THEIR OWN WORKS I don't know if you had a specific one in mind when you were writing this but all I could think was the Artemisia Gentileschi painting (the name ESCAPES ME sorry) where she covered her brutally visceral depiction of a woman with a more male-approved and less disturbing version and AGAIN, MICHIRU AS A PAINTING OW OW OW

I think you’re thinking of Kathleen Gilje! https://kathleengilje.com/artwork/321721_Susanna_and_the_Elders_Restored_X_Ray.html The underpainting is actually fictional, that’s Gilje’s “thing”as an artist. BUT YES I LOVE THE IDEA. I didn’t have a specific one in mind, it was something I’d just been tossing around in my head, that you paointed amasterpeice over whatever it was you did first, and that whatever came first was lesser, what might have been.

everybodyknows-everybodydies

"her footsteps soft as church whispers" FORESHADOWING I DO EMBRACE THEE (AND that line is absolutely beautiful oh my word)

Thank you!!

everybodyknows-everybodydies

Michiru's quiet conviction that Haruka is beautiful and that's the word she KNOWS is right makes my chest hurt I LOVE

Listen I have FEELINGS about butch women and how one is not ‘supposed’ to think of them as beautiful or give them flowers or what have you but They!!! are not men!!!! And I’ve known many who like either of those things but feel like they aren’t ‘supposed’ to and ANYWAY YES HARUKA TENOH IS BEAUTIFUL.

everybodyknows-everybodydies

aND HAND-TOUCHING FULL OF EMOTIONS AND PINING I AM THE MOST BLESSED

I HOPE YOU WOULD!!!

everybodyknows-everybodydies

ANYWAY TLDR I'M ALSO FULL OF EMOTIONS ALL OF THEM GOOD THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS

I am SO happy!!

keyofjetwolf

(thought a quick reminder on the epilogue for this, if you didn't do it yet, because my brain is too delighted with the thought)

I TOTALLY FORGOT THANK YOU

keyofjetwolf

"Michiru had been a primed canvas from birth" The opening line is instantly amazing, I THINK I'M IN FOR A TREAT

THANK

keyofjetwolf

"she laid a sheet of plexiglass over what Michiru Kaioh might have been" --This whole extended metaphor is *kisses fingertips*, and this line especially got me.

Thank you so much!

keyofjetwolf

"She would stubbornly survive against all enemies and against all allies" --yessss, ugh, what a perfect line for Michiru, I'm furious.

THANK YOU, so much of what I think of for Michiru is her ability to make herself into an island,where she doesn’t even really care for the people who are ON HER DAMN SIDE, but it’s so hard for her to see that, all she sees is the rope (which is valid)

keyofjetwolf

"Michiru wandered out of the living room with its barren and spare decor" --I don't know why I'm so tickled at you noting how there's fuck all in their apartment/penthouse/whatever, BUT I REALLY AM

ahahaha MICHIRU HANG A PICTURE

keyofjetwolf

"She often pretended to her own sort of Sight, quickly adding to Michiru’s visions that she had seen the same, that the wind had told her one thing or another" --I feel so oddly catered to in this. Haruka and her "oh yeah the wind said the same thing to me, totally" and Michiru knowing it's utter bullshit, I'M DELIGHTED As much too by contrast of Haruka wanting the visions, jealous of them, and Michiru wishing they could just fuck off and she could be left alone.

I know you and I have a pretty similar idea about Haruka’s actual psychic ability, which is basically “zero.” But yeah, the idea that she thinks this is something intrinsic to being a senshi and not realizing it ‘s just Michiru’s “thing” and so trying to cover with “oh yeah I totally also heard that” is so central to me, because Haruka is trying so hard to be the senshi she thinks she needs to be, what’s she’s SUPPOSED to be

keyofjetwolf

"her footsteps soft as church whispers" --you drop brilliant shit like this so casually sometimes and I want to punch you in the fucking face, it's so good, I'm screaming

Thank you so much!

keyofjetwolf

"not the prince that came to rescue this sleeping beauty but the witch who had enchanted her." --We already talked about this line, I know, but it's somehow even better in the full context of the work and if it weren't so cold and windy outside, I WOULD come punch you in the fucking face.

THANK YOU I LIKED IT TOO

keyofjetwolf

It's all just so, so good. You did an amazing job capturing Michiru's bitterness and longing, in a way that's uniquely Michiru, cynically resigned to the whole affair. Yet then there are these little bursts of hope, and it makes it all that much sweeter. You always do fantastic with Haruka and Michiru, of course, but I think you may have outdone yourself a little here.

Thank you so much I tried very hard!!

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thatsailormoon · 6 years

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Episode 011: Usagi vs. Rei: Nightmare in Dream Land

Season 01 - Episode 11

Original Air Date: May 23, 1992

Many people are going missing at a local amusement park. More people go to the amusement park, proving that humans are fearless and maybe a little dumb.

Rei is well known for her fiery demeanor in the anime, and they start that super quickly. She’s especially vicious towards Usagi. I’m really thankful her attitude calms down in the future as their friendship develops.

Queen Beryl projects images on the floor. Now that I see this, I realize that her ... throne room? ... doesn’t seem to have walls. I guess setting up a portable screen wouldn’t have seemed quite as ominous.

Queen Beryl: You don’t have many opportunities left to redeem yourself, Jadeite!

I wonder if Beryl has a specific number of opportunities that she gives out. I can just imagine it now: It’s orientation day in the Dark Kingdom. The henchmen are all given training, their uniforms, and a book of coupons good for one opportunity to redeem yourself if you fail. Jadeite has already failed ten times. I guess he only has a couple of redemption coupons remaining.

Too adorable.

Buzzkill Luna. I know the girls have an important mission, but they also need to bond to grow stronger as a team. Part of the bonding process is having fun. Stop preventing Usagi from having fun!

Hahaha. That’s real friendship right there.

The Dream Princess controls an animatronic lion with an apple and calls it a remote control. Bitch, that’s no remote. That’s magic. Even here in 2018, controlling giant life-like robots with the wave of a hand would be pretty revolutionary.

This episode is full of Usagi adorableness.

I love that when the group splits up, Luna’s like “Smart people/cats this way. Dummies that way.”

Rei needs to work on her spying technique. True spying needs more subtlety than simply gawking at your target, out in the open, where they can see you.

Usagi and Rei fight over a random child. Nothing creepy about that at all.

No explanation is given to why Mamoru is at this amusement park riding the train all alone. He’s just some creepy lonely perv preying on 14 year old girls.

In this episode, Rei learns all about “odango atama”/”dumpling head.” Mamoru’s adorable nickname is spreading.

The first time Rei meets Mamoru, she says he looks like Tuxedo Kamen. Rei figures it out in their first meeting, and Mamoru actually wears a mask! How does no one ever realize who the senshi are? Magical Unexplained Plot Devices!

“Hey everyone! Breathe my breath.” Gross. That’s some really messed up hallucinatory breath you got there lady.

I love that they’re already establishing Usagi and Rei’s relationship, one episode after their first meeting. Isolating them together so soon is a great tactic to force them to get to know each other and work together. The classic anime may have had a lot of filler, but at least most of it served to develop the characters and their relationships.

Rei does not accept closed doors, and she doesn’t care about wanton property damage.

The Many Faces of Usagi: I don’t like being bossed around, so I turn into a vampire.

I like that the youma is polite when making everyone wait for her to transform.

And this was the moment I had to check to see if this episode was directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara.

It was.

First, the youma (Murid) makes people hallucinate with her stank breath, then she spies on them from the outer edges of their hallucination. Creepy.

Usagi and Rei’s downfall: a masked pervert.

That’s some strong ass hallucination breath.

Is this the first episode where we see a combo power? I believe so. Look at Rei and Usagi, working together, lighting that tiara on fire!

This was a cute episode all about Usagi and Rei bonding. I think in lesser hands, an episode about an amusement park with a dream princess could have been a little dull or childish, but Ikuhara managed to make an episode that was both funny and unsettling.

Come back tomorrow for episode 12!

#sailor moon #sailormoon #sailor moon anime #sailor moon classic #tsukino usagi #hino rei #mizuno ami #tuxedo mask #Kunihiko Ikuhara

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recentanimenews · 7 years

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FEATURE: Creative Spotlight: Kunihiko Ikuhara [Part 3]

Creative spotlights are easily digestible overviews of a director or animator’s body of work, style, and vision. My goal for these articles is to highlight some of the exceptional and possibly lesser-known creative voices in anime. I’m hoping these write-ups encourage people to explore more of what anime has to offer.

The spotlight for the next few weeks will be on Kunihiko Ikuhara, the mastermind behind Shoujo Kakumei Utena, Pengiundrum, and Yuri Kuma Arashi. This article is the third of four parts looking at Ikuhara’s career, and will be focused on Penguindrum.

Part 1: Ikuhara and Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon

Part 2: Shoujo Kakumei Utena

After the roaring success of Shoujo Kakumei Utena, one would assume that Kunihiko Ikuhara’s anime career was set. However, the entirety of the 2000s were an especially quiet time for the director. During this decade, Ikuhara vanished from the industry almost entirely, with his only credits being the opening storyboards for Aoi Hana and Nodame Cantabile. While we’ll never know for sure what Ikuhara was up to during this time, he was most likely developing the ideas for his next great anime.

In 2011, Ikuhara finally came out of hiding to show the world what he had been planning for the past 15 years, an anime called Penguindrum. Working with the animation studio Brain’s Base, Ikuhara gave his audiences another work straight from his heart. Skirting the lines between screwball comedy and urban fantasy, Penguindrum is an anime directly addressing the social aftermath of the 1995 Subway Sarin Incident in Tokyo. Under the guise of its cute penguins and ridiculous catchphrases like “FABULOUS MAX”, Penguindrum is the anime Ikuhara wanted to make to speak to the alienated youth of his country.

Penguindrum tells the tragedy of the three Takakura siblings who are bound by fate: Kanba and Shouma, the brothers, and Himari, the sister. The siblings peacefully live alone, quietly spending their days together until Himari abruptly falls ill and passes away. Devastated by the death of their beloved sister, Kanba and Shouma begin to fight, when suddenly Himari springs back to life wearing a bizarre penguin hat. The two brothers are then told by the sadistic alter-ego of Himari to collect a mysterious object called the “penguindrum” in exchange for keeping Himari alive.

Initially, Kanba and Shouma set out together to find the penguindrum for Himari’s sake. However, fragments of their pasts and repressed memories come back to haunt them as they cross paths with familiar faces. Ikuhara was already playing around with the notion of memories being unreliable in Shoujo Kakumei Utena, but he takes it further in Penguindrum where the anime’s narrative is built upon layers of fragmented memories. It’s not uncommon to see a flashback sequence from one character and minutes later the same sequence replayed from another character’s viewpoint. The emotional reality of each character in Penguindrum often explains their personality and more complex actions; how a character remembers an event is usually more pertinent information than the event itself.

The number 95 references the year of the Subway Sarin Incident in Tokyo

Throughout Penguindrum, Kanba and Shouma begin to relive their traumatic childhoods and end up walking down different paths to help Himari. In Kanba’s case, he resorts to drastic measures and becomes involved with the remnants of his deceased parents’ terrorist cult. Kanba ultimately wants to save Himari, but believes he is alone in his fight once his concept of family is shattered. Accepting his fate as the child of a terrorist, Kanba loses his place in society and takes extreme actions to save the girl he loves. Kanba is an outwardly happy-go-lucky soul, but his facade only hides his broken and lonely existence that is bound to his parents’ horrible actions.

Penguindrum deals with issues of isolation and loss of identity by framing them in a fictitious retelling of the aftermath of the 1995 Subway Sarin Incident. Ikuhara was heavily inspired by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. Murakami’s book was a collection of interviews with the victims of the sarin gas attacks, as well as some of the members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, who were responsible for the act of terrorism.

Murakami wrote Underground largely in response to the Japanese media’s failure to explore the perspectives of its own citizens. Murakami believed that the media was too wrapped up in the profiles of the criminals and the atrocity of the event that they excluded the human aspect of the tragedy. To understand why someone would harm his or her own countrymen may prevent an incident of this scale from happening again. In many respects, Ikuhara’s Penguindrum continues Murakami’s inquisition by examining the social factors that would cause an individual like Kanba to turn toward terrorism to achieve his goals. By examining Kanba’s childhood, his relationship with his family, and his place in society, we gain a clearer picture of his state of mind and consequently the rationale behind his extreme actions.

Like all of Ikuhara’s anime, Penguindrum is not shy about using visual metaphors to express its themes. One of the anime’s most poetic, yet deeply haunting metaphors is the child broiler. In Himari and Shouma’s flashbacks, we see the child broiler as a concentration camp where children abandoned by their parents or society are held. The children are loaded onto a conveyer belt and sent through a shredder until they turn into pristine shards of glass. This remodels the abandoned child into society’s ideal; an ordinary person who will grow up and study, graduate and then get a job. The abandoned child’s existence is made “invisible” as a result.

The child broiler is a heavily dramatized metaphor for how Japanese society mechanically shapes children with no purpose in life into upstanding citizens (at the cost of their individuality). In a series of shared flashbacks that explains how Shouma and Himari became family, a child Himari is sent to the child broiler but rescued at the last minute by Shouma. Shouma extends his arm out to Himari and hands her an apple, asking her to share the fruit of fate with him. Shouma saves Himari from the clutches of the child broiler by accepting her into his family, thereby binding the two by the sins of Shouma’s parents. The two siblings weren’t related by blood, yet bound together by a stronger, inescapable force. This is the bittersweet tragedy of Ikuhara’s Penguindrum.

Stay tuned next week for Part 4 of the Kunihiko Ikuhara spotlight, which will cover Yuri Kuma Arashi! Let us know your thoughts on Ikuhara in the comments below!

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Brandon is a Brand Features Writer for Crunchyroll and also writes anime-related editorials on his blog, Moe-Alternative. Hit him up for a chat on his Twitter at @Don_Don_Kun!

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