April 06, 2007
Junko Mizuno and Pure Trance
I don't often pick up new comics based on Internet suggestions. Well, to be fair, I don't often pick up new comics that aren't web comics at all. I have about half a dozen normal print comics that I follow regularly (usually in collections, since I don't much like the actual comic book format) and that's about it.
On the suggestion of Amazon I decided to take a look at Pure Trance. The reviews looked so overwhelmingly positive that I thought I'd just take the chance and try it. Naturally I ordered it through my local comic shop rather than Amazon. In some ways Pure Trance was the bastard step child of a genre that I hate (the gross out/mutilation/nothing is sacred genre is how I think of it... it includes stuff like Ren and Stimpy as well as more adult works), but somehow Pure Trance was brilliant in my eyes. There was drug abuse. There was torture. There were very disturbing eating disorders. There were grown in a jar, depraved artificial people... but there was also interesting plot, a disturbingly compelling world, beautiful art, complex characters (certainly much less 2D than expected), and a far more satisfying ending than I could have imagined.
Pure Trance puts me in mind of sugar coated arsenic. It's full of good and bad people doing good and bad things, but despite the fact that the plot careens around wildly including characters on and off, seemingly at random, somehow Ms. Mizuno manages to tie it all together. In some ways it reminds me of Berlin, except that at the end of Pure Trance I felt like the world was improving rather than dreading what was to come.
One of the things I loved about Pure Trance is that the world is developed rather than just the story. The bottoms and tops of pages are often used to discuss various people, animals, or objects that are only details of marginal importance on the page. As individual characters are introduced they are given descriptions that are sort of like bios and pretty splash pictures that don't always relate to the story. I wasn't always sure what the characters are going to do, but the bios helped me to remember who they were(on a deeper level than just their names). The future of Pure Trance is weird, but it is full of realistic people and intriguing details.
I've only managed to get my hands on one other work by Ms. Mizuno so far. Princess Mermaid is a retelling of the little mermaid, in a much more modern but Grimm cast. It's more of a conventional comic with a simpler format and fewer characters. I didn't find it as compelling as Pure Trance, but it was still very good. I'm definitely going to start collecting the rest of Ms. Mizuno's works, since she's done a number of other fairy tales that have been translated into English. I would recommend her comics to anyone who is interested in dark but compelling stories only slightly disguised by a thin veneer of candy coated artwork.
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