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“Mind in the Gutters” is a space for D. Bethel to discuss specific comics without any particular relevance or connection to Long John itself. The first discussion is the incomplete manga, Opus, by late celebrated animation director, Satoshi Kon.
Cover to Satoshi Kon’s Opus
It’s not a lie that much of Satoshi Kon’s manga, Opus (published stateside by Dark Horse Comics in November 2014), is basically an action-adventure version of 2006’s Stranger Than Fiction, a drama-comedy directed by Marc Forster and starring Will Farrell as an unknowing protagonist of a novel written by a novelist, played by Emma Thompson, in the “real world.” The major plot point of the film comes when the protagonist and the novelist actually meet and they both realize that they have either much less or more power, respectively, over their lives than previously known, and they are both horrified.
Kon’s Opus follows a similar meta-trajectory with the meeting happening much earlier and the fallout of such a meeting being much more catastrophic, manic, and ultimately absurd. The presence and similarity of Opus to Stranger Than Fiction naturally throws suspicion upon the former; however, when one realizes that Opus was the final long-form manga of Kon’s before he dove headfirst into directing animated works, and was originally published starting in 1995, suspicion is quickly turned on its head. Comparing the two works is not the goal, here. Rather, it is the examination of meta-textual works (specifically those where fictional character and possibly-fictional creator meet) and, despite how often they can be confusing head-trips (though not as confusing or confounding as intricate time-travel, I would argue), their apparent world-breaking nature actually belies a limited array of storytelling options. This is only confirmed by placing these two works––published in different decades, in different countries with different cultures––next to each other. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…