Junko Mizunos Princess Mermaid [Paperback]

 

 

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Junko has done it again! This is a very dark story and one should note that it's completely intended for mature readers. The art and story is wonderful but the publishing quality of the inside pages is rather low and does not do the art justice.

Junko Mizuno is one of Japan's most popular modern manga artists and designers, and her style combines kawaii-to-the-max images with vitriolic plots. "Kawaii" means cute in Japanese, like Hello Kitty and Sakura from CLAMP's "Cardcaptor Sakura," but Mizuno's purposes are not to draw eye-candy in the form of pretty, and sometimes quite naked, girls. "Princess Mermaid" is a bitter, ultimately tragic story of three mermaid sisters who dwell not in oceanic peace and harmony, nor even in angsty yearning to be become human. Instead, they - and we - are always aware that up above on the pretty, shining waves are industrial fishing ships that capture mermaids in big nets and sell them as food.--- Mizuno is working in one of the great genres of Japanese art, in which meticulously composed, utterly gorgeous images of stunning beauty are drawn in breathtaking elegance, and are used to portray a world of demons, monsters, revenge, and death. Examples in classical Japanese art include the Hell Scrolls and a variety of wood block prints and sculptures of Lady Oiwa, a beautiful woman murdered by her lover who returns to wreak genuinely horrifying revenge on him. Like earlier wood block print artists, Mizuno too draws on contemporary images and icons -- in her case, psychedelia, four-color illustrations, fairy-tale princesses and princes, mermaids, and charmingly drawn jellyfish -- all inhabiting a world of chaos, mayhem, plague, rape, stupidity, and utter greed, in brief, a world not unlike our own. --- Throughout "Princess Mermaid," the mermaids are images of a peaceful and fruitful world being destroyed. Yet the mermaids fight their enemies, for if they are cute and adorable, they are also ferocious. That they do not all live is perhaps inevitable, but their life-affirming desire simply to exist suffuses "Princess Mermaid" with a grim optimism and a hope that someday the ocean will be free of the industrial fishing ships that capture and kill mermaids. In the meantime, the mermaids try to survive as best they can. --- "Princess Mermaid" is not as darkly funny as Mizuno's over-the-top "Cinderalla" (note spelling) or her film noir take on "Hansel and Gretel." Instead, her mermaids have kinship with San, the forest girl in Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece "Princess Mononoke," and share San's murderous determination to survive, for example, by avoiding the faceless men who want their scales and eyeballs ("We"ll make a killing!" one diver exclaims, "Mermaids are so rare!"). --- So do not expect pretty naked girl eye-candy from "Princess Mermaid." It is vitriol-dipped satire, drawn with an unforgiving eye that recognizes death underneath all the cuteness. Nor is "Princess Mermaid" for children -- do not buy it thinking you'll get a pretty Japanese version of "The Little Mermaid." That it ain't. "Princess Mermaid" is marvelous, rich, beautiful, and superb. Just know what you're getting before thinking that it's another story of adorable talking hamsters a la Hamtaro.

while this book is darker than her other works, in terms of both artistic style and story, it still manages to live up to the quality of her other works. Mizuno has a distinct style that is diffrent to most other manga, it is both cute and grotesque at the same time. The story of this book is a retelling of the little mermaid, but with a twist. this book is simoly out awsome.

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