"Enjoy the Fun of Real"

Maybe, just maybe if I work at it for 10,000 hours as Malcolm Gladwell recommends, I might make comics to rival Alan Moore at his best. But I'm now fairly certain I will never tickle the bottom of Takehiko Inoue's feet.

It's painful waiting for week by week installments of 'Vagabond' his Miyamoto Musashi biopic, and I was even beginning to think when he had ten successive chapters about ghosts and apparitions, that maybe he'd lost it.
But I decided to check out his other series 'Real'. What's amazing is just how 'Real' it is. As in, I knew why he decided to do a series about wheelchair basketball. Just implicitely. But I didn't want to read it.

I don't know why, I think I just didn't want to be exposed to the usual uplifting story about cripples overcoming their own personal everests.
Through sheer physical geometry it's just impossible to look up to characters in a wheelchair.

But fuck... he just... can tell a fucking story. Like no other. And nothing seems overly manufactured or engineered. It's fucking tragic, it's funny, it's moving, it's inspiring. It's just so fucking 'Real'. If Take-chan set himself a high bar in the title, he is leaping over it like there's nothing else.

There's just such a deep psychological understanding of what is going on, he never chooses the obvious path. He can have bad stuff happen to arsehole characters and have you feeling for them. He can create really beautiful people and put them in the body of a drop-out.

Perhaps most mastefully, is that he can attack a concept from three different angles in one narrative without you being painfully conscious of it (as compared to the compartmentalised psychological profiles of the protagonists of 'Watchmen' from Rawjack the moral absolutist to Veidt the Machiavellian consequentialist.)

And he just has that underlying secret, that 'whatever you can do, that's what you focus on' and tells it without pulling any tricks, any surprises, anything.

Once again, to me reading about the handicapped is about as entertaining as watching a movie about the elderly, but Real is actually a lot like Grand Torino - it is done so well it is elevated to one of the best reads, ever, out of anything.

If anyone legitimises comics as a medium it will be Takehiko Inoue.

You can read it here