Welcome back to the complimentary show where I talk about something I love and today I'm talking about Nazika of the Valley of Wind the original manga that Hyamiya Zaki drew and was the basis for the anime film. This is the vis release from many many years ago now and is my primary copy of Nazika. There have been at least one release of this since then. And most people know Nazika through the anime film and that's kind of deceptive in the sense that when you think okay well there's a manga that's fine. The film of Nazika adapts this much, just this volume's worth of the story. This is how much Miyazaki had created of the story before he made the film and then he then went on later to do far more of the story than is actually in the film. Nazika is a true epic. That term tends to get thrown around a lot. Sometimes I think a bit too much and Nazika fits that bill more than pretty much anything that I would use that adjective for. It is set in this sort of post-apocalyptic future where plant life is overwhelming the earth. It has become extremely virulent and this sort of jungle life and this oversized insectoid life as you kind of get a sense of there is kind of overwhelming and driving humans out of out of the world. Essentially killing it off. It's all very poisonous in fact. And I get to one of the important things about Nazika is that Miyazaki conceived Nazika as this ecological fable. The environment is fighting back against us. We have been abusing the environment and so it fights back. But that was his view when he was originally creating the concept. As he aged, he took him I think 13 years to draw all of Nazika. His views on that matured and became much more complex and it becomes much less this simplistic view about environmentalism that humans bad nature good and it becomes much more about the question of how humans how humans should think about the natural world, how they should approach it. It is not simply some pure and holy thing that is where everything always works out. It is a system, it is a complex system that we have to live in. And as he later said, one cannot have a fully complete appreciation of environmentalism without first accepting that humans consume resources to survive. We impacted the environment just by existing and so it's finding out how to make those impacts responsibly and to integrate those into an environment that is kind of the key questions. But this is all told in this incredible huge war story, fundamentally. It is summarizing pretty much every Miyazaki theme all worked into this story. People are often looking for the Rosetta Stone of Miyazaki in his anime films. You're not going to find it there. You're going to find it in Nazika. Nazika summarizes. Miyazaki stuff because he has so he has a thousand pages to explore all these themes and to really get into all this. It is absolutely amazing. And the art is absurdly, absurdly detailed. He has this wonderful European style to his artwork, this sort of mobius-esque European style to how he draws things that does not look like manga. It does not look like other things. It's obviously, you know, it's obviously manga is obviously what he grew up with and so there are manga elements woven into this and your character designs and so forth are often pulled into this. But my gosh, there is so much in here about so many things about peace and humanity and how we treat each other and responsibility. And relationships and humanity as a whole, science fiction at its best deals with these topics. It actually goes into detail about some of these heavy, heavy subjects and Nazika does that. Nazika goes there with its story and if you see in the anime film, you know how that ends. That is not how the manga ends. The manga ends in a very, very different note. It is much more complex, much more detailed. There are moments in this manga that I'm sure I'll remember the rest of my life that were not in the movie. And that movie is incredible. But the I argue, I mean, Nazika is the most impressive work of the comic form that I've ever read, you know, period. This is what the comic medium aspires to in terms of complexity, in terms of depth, in terms of breadth of subject while still telling a essentially an action story. There's always stuff happening in Nazika. This feels like a Hollywood film in so many ways while also bringing up all of the subjects about why we do the things we do and how humans are and the fact that humans do good things and bad things and how we deal with that, how we take responsibility for our actions and for what we should do as people. Nazika is deep. And so I think if somebody is interested in manga, the difficult thing here though is that again, this does not look like your typical manga. You know, you're going to recommend that that somebody go and read something a little different there. You're going to recommend that somebody go and get into manga and start with Nazika. And it's like, this is not what most manga looks like really. So you're, you know, I would not recommend that folks start here as a primer on manga. But if somebody's interested in comics, interested in anything, you know, comic related, this would be a great thing to recommend to them to say, I don't care whether you like manga or not. This is an impressive comic work. And yeah, it's absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, it is in print in multiple ways. I should point out different translations have translated the terms in Nazika differently. So for example, there's the, the sea of corruption is this giant jungle. It's kind of overtaking everything. It's poisonous jungle. And it's called the toxic jungle. I believe in the anime series. And I think they used toxic jungle for the most recent version of that of the manga. But I think it's called sea of corruption in here. So you'll see terminology changes like that. From what I've read and what I've seen, you know, every translation has, has tried to be accurate. It's just, you know, there are different ways of getting across the poetics of some of these terms. And whether they, they are meant to be translated, right? Like the om, for example, are these giant insects, which in Japanese basically mean, you know, omu is a, I believe, an ancient form of, or a, a more archaic Japanese word for insect, I believe, released a word for insect. And so the question is here, do you, do you just call them insects? Or do you call them om? Because the word is meant to be a very, is meant to connote something different than just a regular insect, you know, that kind of thing. So there's certainly, I haven't seen any translation that I'm like, uh, that's, you know, that's bad. But yeah, uh, Nazika, for me, is, it's weird. It's very different. It is in this very distinctive black and white style that is brilliantly structured, brilliantly done. I've actually spent quite a bit of time analyzing how Miyazaki uh, constructs his pages, constructs his panels where things, you know, um, can get very intense. He does not use as far as I can remember. He does not use screen tone at all. This is all pen and ink. And just using that to represent, um, you know, various things like blood and mountains and things along those lines, you know, none of that is screen tone. It is all just a pen on paper. And it's just absolutely stunning work. So yeah, impressive work. It is, um, the, the Viz release was four volumes. I believe the current release is six or eight that are obviously each thinner and larger. So you get this, this in a lovely huge form. So be aware of that. Uh, yeah, Nazika, uh, is one of those manga that I, I intend never to, um, never to leave my side. I, I tend to always have a copy of Nazika with me because it is one of the greats.