COMICS RIFFS I LOVE: Two excerpts from Tatsuya Egawa's BE FREE! (Patreon)

The great mangaka Tatsuya Egawa is probably best known in the West for Golden Boy and (to a lesser degree) Tokyo University Story, but for me his towering achievement was his breakout manga Be Free!, a wild, absurdist, narratively adventurous high-school comedy that blew my g-d mind when I stumbled across it in the Bay Area back in 1990 or so.

The 12-volume series was—and still is—a frickin' treasure trove of imaginative storytelling approaches. (The volume-long "love scene amid a yakuza battle" alone is worth the price of admission, chock full of "how did he think of that?" imagery I should've ripped off more extensively.) Here are two Be Free! scenes I scanned for a convention panel (hence the censoring) a few years ago, starting with a tropical beach scene from the last volume:

Time for a passing shower, rendered as one brief but very intense cloudburst below:

Now that is some g-d rain!

The other Be Free! example is a flashback scene from the aforementioned volume-long love scene, in which wacky teacher and trickster protagonist Akira Sasanishiki is having a relatively casual conversation with another teacher (whose name escapes me at present, alas)...

...only for our hero to suddenly, abruptly, dramatically, belatedly realize that he's become infatuated with her:

Yes, folks, the "pikaa" glow around the teacher is a visual metaphor for early, overwhelming infatuation from the besotted POV of the infatuated, which is a brilliantly offbeat concept. No idea as to why the hell I didn't rip this off for Empowered at some point.)

Now that's infatuation, folks!

TBH, I haven't reread Be Free! in full since the late 90s, an oversight which I hope to correct someday soon. Then again, that applies to a fair number of 90s-era manga that were stupendously important to me during that decade— Kazushi Hagiwara's FRPG spectacle Bastard!!, Fujihiko Hosono's romcom turned noncom Mama, Kenichi Sonoda's Gunsmith Cats, even much of Shirow Masamune's work. 

As influential as those books were to me back then, in the 2000s I moved on to new manga obsessions and influences—Hiroaki Samura, Oh! Great, Naoki Urasawa, Ai Yazawa and many more. Nowadays, I have a yet another new round of mangaka whose work inspires and influences me just as much as the 90s-era creators did; I'm quite happy to say that I'm not death-gripped by nostalgia for the manga of my youth, though certainly I'm not of the "only new stuff is kewl" bent either.

I do like to break out some of the older manga when I get a chance, though, and try to rediscover the magic of the narrative and artistic flourishes that thrilled me decades ago—and keep an eye peeled for riffs I can, well, borrow. And lemme tell you, folks. few comics are as rife with rippable riffs as Tatsuya Egawa's Be Free!