It’s very difficult to explain in simple words, but I think I’m attracted to his having a dark side,” manga artist Yoshinori Natsume says when asked why Batman appeals to him.
“He’s not entirely a complete hero, like a police officer. He has a sort of half-dark shape. It appeals to me as a character, and image-wise.”
Natsume is the writer and artist behind Batman: Death Mask, a new tale of the Dark Knight published in English by DC Comics’ manga imprint CMX and in Japanese by SoftBank Creative.
During an interview at a coffee shop near his studio in Shinagawa Ward, Tokyo, Natsume says that DC asked him to craft a new Batman adventure after he came to the American publishers’ attention through his Togari series.
Like Batman, Natsume seems at home in the dark – thematically and visually. Togari’s hero is a very flawed one: a teenage criminal from Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1867) who is executed, does a long stretch in hell, and is then sent back to modern-day Earth to battle even worse evils for reasons he doesn’t understand. Along the way, however, he begins to learn virtues such as compassion – but there are still plenty of violent fight scenes that play out in deeply shadowed settings.
Batman would seem like a natural fit for a mangaka with such tastes, but Natsume says, “When I was first asked to do something with Batman, I wondered if I could do it, because Batman is such a major character.”
In this page from Batman: Death Mask, a demon gleefully shows off its collection of cut-off faces, displayed like masks. Masks are just one of several cultural references Yoshinori Natsume (pic inset above) uses to give his comic a Japanese flavour.
When Natsume pondered what to do with such a well-established figure, it was oni, or Japanese demons, that finally gave him a way in. An oni is often depicted with two short, upright horns on its head, much like the pointy ears on Batman’s hood. In silhouette, Batman’s head looks very much like that of an oni.
The backstory in Batman: Death Mask concerns a period when a young Bruce Wayne was travelling the world and picking up arcane fighting skills. Natsume imagined that Wayne spent some of that time in a martial arts dojo in Japan. Many years later, memories of the period come back to haunt Wayne (by now also known as Batman), when a harmless-looking Japanese businessman tries to take over Gotham City with the help of a masked assassin.
The oni motif appears in various ways, including as an onigawara (“devil” roof tile) on the dojo. Natsume likens the fearsome faces on these rooftop decorations to gargoyles on Western churches. As one female character in the book puts it, “They have to look scary to guard against evil.”
“She says what I’m thinking,” Natsume confirms.
Other Japanese cultural references include ghostly floating flames called hitodama, a legend about a tengu (a class of supernatural beings) mountain goblin, and characters wearing hyottoko masks with comically pursed lips (as well as the more sinister mask mentioned in the title).
There may have been more such touches than the creator was aware of. In one scene, a horn on the onigawara suddenly cracks and falls to the ground – a dark omen.
“That may not be a traditional idea, but we often find in Japanese culture that when a framed photo falls over, someone in the photo will have a bad thing happen to them. Or if your shoelace breaks, something bad will happen to you,” Natsume says.
Based on those ideas, “I thought it (the broken horn) was not such a strange expression for us ... When you asked me about that just now, then I realised it was also a kind of Japanese flavour. I didn’t do it on purpose.”
Most of Natsume’s “Japanese flavour” in Death Mask is deliberate, but he is not the first Japanese artist to portray the Caped Crusader. Jiro Kuwata drew a Batman magazine serial in the late 1960s that has recently been collected in English as Bat-Manga!; and in 2000, Kia Asamiya (creator of Silent Mobius) published a manga story about Batman coming to Tokyo.
In addition, last year saw the release of an anime omnibus DVD called Gotham Knight, in which several Japanese animation studios presented their differing takes on the character.
Asamiya’s book, Batman: Child of Dreams, is one that Natsume likes. “I found his pictures, mostly in black, were very cool, and he was very good at deforming the characters (who include shapeshifters). And he also is good at drawing backgrounds, which I’m not very good at, so I found that cool, too.”
When it comes to dark images, Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, who never stints on the black ink, is another artist whose work Natsume admires.
How have Batman fans reacted to Natsume’s treatment of him?
“I learned that Batman written in a Japanese style mostly got a good reaction ... but people who did not know about Japanese manga or who had a kind of bias against Japanese manga said they were relieved that Batman wasn’t ruined, that their familiar Batman was not made different by being given great big eyes, for example. But some people who did know about Japanese manga would say it was not very different from the Batman they already knew, and they had expected more changes,” Natsume says.
“But I think it is hard to satisfy both sides at the same time. You can create a new Batman, and it may appeal to readers who are looking for something new, but it might at the same time ruin the image of Batman (for more conservative fans),” he adds.
Batman is one of pop culture’s moodier and more introspective characters, and Natsume plays with that, in his dark and shadowy way, by leading readers to wonder if Bruce Wayne might have committed some sins in Japan that are finally coming home to roost in the form of Gotham’s latest troubles.
Questions are also raised (and answered) about how Batman and a sinister oni character might be connected.
“I myself tried to keep the original flavour of Batman,” Natsume says. “To the basic theme of Batman, the question of ‘What am I?’, I tried to add my own Japanese manga sensibility.” – The Daily Yomiuri/Asia News Network