A Moment of What The: Stan Lee Presents...

Manga.

I have actually read the first chapter of this-a preview of it was in September's Shonen Jump. (Yes, September's. Yes, this September's. SJ's publishing schedule is, like most magazines, given "publishing dates" in what appears to be almost totally arbitrary fashion.) Apparently, its initial concept came from Stan Lee, but the actual work (i.e., story, art, etc.) is all being done by the manga guy (who wrote a manga called Shaman King, which I don't really care for but my sister liked pretty well).

So what do I think of this bold (euugh) new chapter in manga and comics?

Bleh.

Far and away the best part of it were the first two or three pages. These were a prologue where some kind of Japanese feudal lord, oddly named Dunstan, who somehow a thousand years ago had sunglasses, and resembled a certain Westerner with longer hair in a ponytail, gloats over his weird-looking mechanical creations with a nameless, faceless female assistant and then commits Hara-Killi (I'm just writing it how it was spelled in Shonen Jump, thank you). The story itself picks up a thousand years after this, i.e. the present.

As for style? Awful. The art is okay, if rather creepy. Shaman King was okay in terms of visuals, occasionally pretty good; this is mostly comparable. My one complaint is that one of the series' "mechanical boys" looks a lot like a girl. Not only that, but he does girly manga-style sparkling, and even dresses kind of like a girl. (Okay, no, a lot like a girl. I mean, a halter top and a dress? For crying out loud.)

The writing is some kind of weird, amorphous melding of Stan Lee's style of overbearing comic book narration with manga-like phraseology. In a word: Gaaaaaah.

Further, the way the characters are supposed to be some kind of mechanical embodiments of destructive and "cleansing" forces (so, what, the bad guy is a baseball bat and the good guy is a bar of soap?) makes me think of some giant robot.

It starts generically, with a big oni-thing attacking a tower full of tourists, and then attacking random people; when it tries to crush a woman and her baby, the good guy shows up, stops it, and then blasts it. It turns into the bad guy, who looks just like the good guy only considerably less girly, and after they're threatened ineptly by the police, they fight. They blast each other into space, and then the good guy crashes back to the ground, where a weird-looking old man finds him lying unconscious. And that's the whole preview, which is probably a full chapter, more or less. Such is manga.

Also, there was this kind of funny bit where a SWAT officer goes totally insane when his truck gets crushed and goes postal on the bad guy, trying to shoot him to death with his assault rifle. Of course, the bad guy is a robot who can create forcefields with his mind, so it doesn't work. Then, the robot learns how to copy assault rifles, and turns his arm into about seven of them to shoot everyone with.

Oops.