What is Sonic Council: Part 1, The Manga
Howdy there Council Club members!
I thought I'd take a moment to talk about the history of Sokko Seitokai: Sonic Council! Now, I've peered into my crystal ball I know what you're thinking. What in tarnation is a Sonic Council? Where did it come from? Where did it go? Where did it come from that Seitokai Joe? Well! I'll tell ya! Just sit right there and heed my tale, weary reader! And soon all the mysteries of the Sokko Seitokai shall be revealed. Soon, our answers shall be found in the ancient tomes of the 1990s! Crack em' open! Lets talk about Gamest magazine! A Japanese magazine that covered all things arcade that ran from around 1986 to 1999, and was eventually succeeded by the still running Arcadia magazine.
Now Gamest, at least as far as my uneducated bean brain knows, was a pretty big zine in its time. A regular part of the Japanese cultural gaming zeitgeist. And, having owned a couple here, I can tell you, they were stacked. Thick. Girthed up. A few hundred pages each month. They covered all kinds of things related to arcade games, such as previews, reviews, advertisements, interviews, game guides, tips AND tricks, and even ran the numbers for high scores and tournaments from around Japan. They were an absolute wealth of knowledge. Each publication a feast for the hungry gamers of the 1990s. And oh, my goodness, was the art ever delicious on these things. Every month featured a cover spread of some truly stunning art. The best pastels and water colours the 90s had to offer.
In truth, its this art that captured my attention to begin with. I found a few copies at a local thrift store and was enamored with them. I took one glance and quickly snatched them up. But something that caught my eye as I was flipping through their painfully dense pages (if you know how Japanese print design is, ya know) were these lil manga vignettes of various arcade games, just a few pages each, tucked away and hiding between all the many previews and guides. They had comics of all the classics: Street Fighter, Tekken, Dark Stalkers, The King of fighters- and the odd dark horse here and there like a Fighter's History. It was a delight! Strangely, I feel like I've not heard much talk about these old comics. It's like there's a gap in the cultural mind space that shouldn't be there. And I suppose so! If they've no translations or publications outside Japan! But with the ferocious determination that fans outside of Japan have for collection and documentation, gobbling up all they can, you'd might think otherwise. Alas! It was the first time I personally had encountered them.
Gamest would actually go on to publish collected volumes of these stories outside of their main arcade publications called, most astutely, Comic Gamest! And they were just as gorgeous and just as packed!
And it is within the dusty depths of my Comic Gamests that I would find our long lost Sonic Council! Flipping through its pages and finding some very similar looking characters to a random lil game I just so happened to stumble across in the even dustier depths of the thrift dungeon.
Yippee! Finally! After much a due, we get to the centre of this tootsie pop. What the heck is a Sonic Council? It was Gamest's very own original comic! Illustrated and written, in most part, by one Masashi Ogawa.
Sonic Council is primarily a high-school battle manga, so I'm sure you know the deal. Characters throw themselves into big one-on-one fighting game style fights! Punch! Kick! Throw! And Occasionally explode! The manga focuses around the titular Sonic Council -a kind of student council, but, you know, if a regular student council was made up of a bunch of battle freaks. So, much much better!
Our main battle freak is Ai Honda! A nigh invincible girl with a passion for fighting and a total disregard for self-preservation.
She serves as the council's vice president, next to Yuko, the Council President and resident battle genius. We follow the Sonic Council as they take on rival gangs, such as the school's devious disciplinary committee, and fight the various battle obsessed councils from other schools. And it rules!
The comic is broadly a parody of the fighting game genre at large, punching up at the genres various archetypes and conventions. So much so that even little button notations appear in panels whenever characters do their special moves. Which is just such a cute idea. I love it. The entire comic is just so fun. And Ogawa's designs are so wonderfully charming. One of the manga's big stand outs for me was this claw girl, Mouri Hekiru. She's just everything to me. The big jacket, the striped socks, the big bow, her lil rosy red cheeks and big ass knives. Omg. I wish that were me.
It breaks my heart she didn't make it into the game. I believe she's meant to be the series kind of Vega stand it, but I adore how the bow on her head gives her a kind of wolverine affect. Fantastic stuff! It speaks volumes to Ogawa's strength in character design. Unfortunately, there's not too much to bite into with the manga. The series has 2 volumes of collected works from Gamest Comic, and 3 volumes that were published in Kodansha's Afternoon KC (which are mostly the Gamest run with updated art and a few new beats and content).
Gamest would eventually discontinue its run after its publishing company went out of business in 1999, and it seems Sonic Council was lost in the shuffle. The author moved on from Sonic Council to a few other works here and there afterwards, including a women only offshoot of Kinnikuman, which, naturally, had some excellent character designs.
Now, Ogawa's involvement in the collaborative mixed media nature of Sonic Council, is a little muddled. Ogawa is responsible for a good portion of the planning and writing for Sonic Council but it appears Gamest didn't always keep him in the loop of what was going on, much to his own chagrin. It seems the work would change hands from time to time without his knowledge or input. If Japanese Wikipedia is to be believed, he didn't even know the game existed until he saw a preview for it in a magazine, which, good gracious, if the entry is to believed, elicited some choice words from the man in a stray interview. I 100% understand the frustration he'd have with Gamest for treating it like they owned it, which, by unfortunate right, they probably did. Gamest more than likely saw the project as their own original entry point into the cultural arcade. I get the feeling they were trying to make it into a bigger franchise, primarily, as a vehicle for Gamest Magazine, and not so much as a vehicle of Ogawa. Still! Sonic Council sprang from his mind. It was his little mind baby. And one is bound to be protective of that. Losing control of your creation is not an easy feeling.
Regardless! I hope can he understand the joy that I at least have found in his work. It is, ultimately, because of the game and its use of his lavishly 90's character design that got me hooked into the broader Sonic Council universe to begin with. And now here I am pouring over his old manga, grinning form ear to ear. It's so cute, so cool, and so much fun. I hope he's proud of his work in the end. Lord knows, I appreciate it.
Next up! We'll talk about the game itself! Hope to see you there ^_^
Also! I'm currently working on collecting the manga! Hopefully I can get some proper scans of them soon but until then enjoy a few examples direct from the source (my bedroom)!
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