Stumbling upon a pinnacle

[elfs]

Have you ever picked up a book, portfolio, comic book, or CD by an artist or performer you didn't know, made you way through the work, and at the end thought to yourself that what you just read was so fresh, so new, so wonderful that you just had to get more of it? And when you did, you were disappointed to learn that what you'd found was either anomalous or the high point of his creative output, and everything that came before that was rough-edged and unready, and everything after was an attempt to recapture that high point?

I had that happen this weekend. A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon Onikubo Hirohisa's manga, Preference for Pleasure (more of that stuff you'll never read in English, sad to say) and his pencils were lush, beautiful, sweetly feminine in a way, and his stories were cute, touching, complex and humane. So I said to myself, "I should get more of this."

After stumbling around the Internet on and off looking for it, I finally found some this weekend and downloaded it. And I had that awful, sinking feeling. The lush pencils were still there, but they were often muddied with really crappy zip-o-tone, or completely unnecessary color (probably commercially more viable). Even when they weren't, the printing was terrible. But worst of all, the themes of the rest of his work is all mean, vicious stuff. Lots of interpersonal violence, lots of unhappy endings, lots of abuse of one gender by another (at least he's relatively even-handed about it in his stories, even if his cover art is mostly unhappy women), the worst of what we've come to expect of hentai without dropping into total guro.

I hate when that happens.

Comments

[tagryn]

I think sometimes what happens is that the person has had years of struggling in obscurity to refine what becomes the initial "breakthrough" that vaults them to recognition, but either rushes the follow-up to capitalize on success, or simply used up all their original ideas on that first offering. Its also a lot more scary to try exploring something new than just putting out a variation on the same theme as what brought fame and fortune, especially if you're now making your living from XYZ (whatever XYZ happens to be).

[woggie.livejournal.com]

That one set of stories, he was either in love, or it was something his publisher made him do to prove he was capable of writing something which wasn't just mean-spirited. Or perhaps the sweet stuff just doesn't sell as well with his publisher, which would be a pity.

Sucks.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I don't mean to imply that the stuff was saccharine. There are real characters with real conflicts, but there are, if not happy endings, at least meaningful ones with people making real choices trying to be happy. It's a decent attempt at story-telling.

Which makes all the ordinary crash-bang stuff just all the more sucky.

[woggie.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to suggest you were saying the stuff was saccharine. There's mean-spirited, there's sweet, and then there's saccharine, and it's a continuum.

This is the set of questions which always makes me wonder how a person loses the ability to tell a good story, and if there are any means of re-learning how to do it.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Don't suppose it's possible the second stuff you found is earlier work?

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hate that. A couple of my favorite works are by artists/authors I don't otherwise like.