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ANYWHERE BUT HERE
by Tori Miki

($12.95, duotone, 96 pages, Fantagraphics Books)

Reviewed by Mike Hunter

Have a case of "humor whiplash" here: went from reading Tim Kreider's exuberantly earthy The Pain - When Will It End? cartoon collection* this morning to the downright dehydrated drollery of Tori Miki's Anywhere But Here.

The latter has surely the most impressive intellectual credentials I've come across in a professional cartoonist. Besides his popular, award-winning humor manga, Miki is - as Nozomi Ohmori's intro puts it - "a prolific critic and columnist, drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, science fiction, and comics...Japan's foremost researcher on the dubbing of imported television series and movies...an erudite scholar of rakugo, Japan's...comedy style...well acquainted with the various gag patterns rakugo practitioners have perfected since Japan's pre-modern Edo period...[and] acknowledged as one of the intellectual leaders of Japan's alternative culture..." The introduction continues, "Tori voraciously quotes the whole repertoire of popular fiction, movies, and manga classics in his free-wheeling parodies...[many of which] work simultaneously on two or more levels."

The flavor of these wordless cartoons themselves almost defies description. You might as well play "Charades" to get across a mathematical equation. (Stephen Wright's standup comedy regularly approaches the taste of the cuisine gathered here.) To convey his oddities with precision, Tori Miki's drawings are graphically superb. Created on a nine-panel grid, rendered with masterful minimalism (and beautifully colored in duotone), there are spatial disruptions reminiscent of Escher and Magritte, Monty Python-esque absurdity, turns of narrative that go beyond the predictable twist of a punchline into surreal realms.

A recurring cast of characters, led by a caricature of the cartoonist himself, play havoc with the conventions of comics - panel borders are scissored through and penetrated, those spiky-edged "surprise bursts" are, after witnessing a series of startling events, stacked on a table by Tori - satirize popular conventions, exaggerate everyday travails. (Tori explores a tunnel, across a jungle sees a stepped pyramid, atop which he finds a cookpot. The final panel shows him emerging from burrowing beneath a kitchen counter and proffering the searched-for object to his girlfriend.) A dowager's hairstyle expands 'til she floats off, the last panel showing an astronaut landed on the new world, the woman's tiny figure sticking out
upside-down from its surface.

These are examples of the more conventional gags found in Anywhere But Here. In most, the humor is so visually deft, or downright bizarre, one imagines an aura of interrobangs** circling baffled readers' craniums. As Ohmori notes, "...even avid Japanese fans familiar with Tori's work [might have to] cogitate and ponder, and finally feel the laughter bubble up from within."

If Anywhere But Here is intended to tickle the cerebrum more than the funnybone, that goal means it also richly rewards repeated readings with greater appreciation of its depth and the remarkable range of its creator's wit. For appreciators of graphic narrative, it's a remarkable display of virtuosity, and an unceasing source of delight.


*Literally laughed so hard I cried! Acidic humor not intended for bluenoses,
$14.95, from Fantagraphics...

**See http://www.interrobang-mks.com/

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