Old City Blues

Writer/artist Giannis Milonogiannis says in his afterword to this collection that his aim with this title was to write what he felt like drawing and channel all of the stuff he loved as a kid.  Based on what I read, it’s clear that he holds a deep-seated affection for Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira” and the collective works of Masamune Shirow — “Appleseed” and “Ghost in the Shell” in particular.  It involves the efforts of Solano, a detective in Division Ten of the New Athens Special Police, and his efforts to investigate the death of the Hayashi Corporation, the robotics company who re-built Athens into the modern metropolis of New Athens.  This was Milonogiannis’ first major work and the storyline reads like it as well.  If you’ve got any familiarity with the works that inspired him, then you’ll be able to see all the twists and turns coming very early on while the dialogue we get is functional at best.  Still, it all holds together in the end so he deserves some credit for that.

Yet even though there’s some very liberal “borrowing” going on here, I still enjoyed this title.  Mainly because Milonogiannis is channelling the kind of manga that defined the market and got me into it before the unflipped revolution began.  There’s also the fact that in the current wave of creators inspired by manga, you don’t see a whole lot of them channelling Otomo or Shirow.  Even Adam Warren, who clearly worshipped at the Shrine of Shirow in his earliest “Dirty Pair,” miniseries, has long since graduated into his own style.  Though clearly inspired by manga, Milonogiannis’ thin, intricate linework still has its own rough personality which still makes it distinctive.  I also like the fact that he eschews manga’s most recognizable and copyable trait — the big eyes — in favor of simple little dots and lets the emoting of the characters be done by their eyebrows and mouths.

The best definition I’ve read about the difference between a rip-off and an homage is that the former is something you don’t like, while the latter is something you do.  Based on that “Old City Blues” definitely qualifies as an homage.  It’s not as good as the stuff that it claims inspiration from, but it’s a welcome reminder of their influence and, certainly in Otomo’s case, their quality.