Masaomi Kanzaki
Xenon

About twenty years ago, a small group of people happened to stand indifferent to the amazement of a young boy who suddenly stopped in front of the newsstand in a square designed like a flag-raising square, around which a settlement in the Asti region rose then as it does now, always undecided whether to be a large village or to abandon all hesitation and become a city without ifs and buts.

If I had thought that those people cared about anything, maybe I would have felt like explaining to them that my amazement was justified; the cover of the first issue of "Zero" by Granata Press was prominently displayed at the newsstand, featuring Kenshiro in all his exuberant rage. I was well-acquainted with Kenshiro, like many other anime from the good old days, and I was also a fan of comics, but I had never heard of manga.

Today's comic-hungry kids, overwhelmed as they are by an overly abundant supply, cannot understand what Granata Press meant for their peers with the same interests twenty years ago.

The first issues of the magazine "Zero" were more than decent, the convent served three good dishes: Ken, Baoh, and Xenon, and additionally some informative columns on productions from the Land of the Rising Sun. I won't say anything about the first title and will quickly move past the second one in the list, just to say: horrible drawings and a very entertaining story.

With Xenon, it was love at first sight. A great story with a cyberpunk flavor. The author is someone named Masaomi Kanzaki, Japanese, never seen in a photo. The protagonist is someone named Asuka Kano, also Japanese, a boy, transformed into a xenon cyborg by an organization that has every right to call itself criminal, whose name, as I remember it, should be "Bloody Sea," but some disagree, like Wikipedia, which says "Red Sea." The name doesn't matter much to the boy; he can't seem to take the prank played by the said organization lightly, also because the same, still not satisfied, also sees fit to involve his mother in criminal chronicles in a manner not exactly marked by sobriety. He is quite upset and sets out to make them pay. Light doses of action and even a bit of feeling that never hurts. This is the story in a nutshell.

What struck me most about that comic were the drawings; I found them fantastic. Describing Masaomi Kanzaki's style of that time is not easy, as with any artist with a very particular style, so I'll mention the peculiarities that I consider most important: thick, bold, and decisive lines, sharp outlines, erratic shading, eyes prominent in the proportion of the characters' faces, in line with the manga school but in a whole other direction compared to TV-eye style candy candy, here we are on another planet, always very dark atmospheres, massive use of screen tones, and occasionally a watercolor page that left me stunned.

The manga in question lasted briefly and concluded with an open ending. That ending was so open it wasn't clear it was actually an ending. In the years that followed, every visit to Lucca Comics was an opportunity to ask about a possible resumption of the manga or publications of other works by Kanzaki. Nothing, that's what I had to content myself with for a long period. Meanwhile, I witnessed the success of Japanese comics in Italy. It reached the point where you could find everything at the newsstand, of which at least 70% in my opinion was crap... can you say crap on the internet?.. and without having to search in the muck you would find successful comics that, in my judgment, were even embarrassing for the stories told and the quality of the drawings.

Kanzaki, who had become one of my favorite artists, seemed to have no market. Yet I wasn't the only one who appreciated him. Claudio Castellini, who is certainly not a newcomer, took inspiration from Xenon to create some drawings for the first issue of Nathan Never.

When Xenon had firmly found its place among my memories, I happened to come across the first Japanese volumes of "Kaze" at Lucca, and I acquired them in no time. I didn't care much about the story; for me, it was enough to have the chance to feast my eyes on Kanzaki's pages again. And in that case, there was really a lot to enjoy. It was the only taste for many years to come, during which time there was the chance for my little enthusiasm for manga that "Zero" and Xenon had managed to ignite to fade. A few years ago, Kanzaki's name resurfaced before my eyes like a mushroom in a field of magazines, newspapers, and comic books at a newsstand. Something was off, though; the drawings on the cover weren't his, or at least that's what I was convinced of at the time. So I took a spin on the internet, partly out of curiosity and partly out of nostalgia, and I found out about the betrayal.

I'm not talking about the stories and genres tackled; I haven't read his new manga, but I've seen the drawings, and it's to those that I direct my discussion: almost total shift in style towards something horrifically close to a mockery of manga style, simplified drawing and, worst of all, tremendously impoverished, total absence of watercolor pages. The abandonment of screen tones, I think, is a general situation that must be accepted with the advent of new technologies, but how sad! Final result: total wipeout of the special atmospheres created in the pages of "Xenon" and "Kaze." I don't know the reasons for the change I'm talking about, there may even be valid ones, but it seems evident to me that the author has sold out to the market in an ignoble way, betraying old-school admirers. My disappointment is no longer that of a disappointed reader, but that of one of the aforesaid admirers who cherishes a very fond memory of Xenon and the way it was drawn.

Editorz, why is there no comics option in the drop-down list for category selection?