Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

I may get bollocked for this here, but is it fair to consider this a significant modern work of literature? I honestly think the story is on par with Tolkien as a major work in the fantasy genre and better than almost any post-war fantasy story I've read. Certainly leaps off the page more than A Song Of Ice And Fire and the like. Honestly it goes under the radar for most people but I think it might be the finest piece of art Miyazaki has made, more than his movies.

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I do love it and wish they’d done the movie more true to the original. Miyazaki is fantastic.

is there any relation to the odyssey?

Just the name.

I read the first volume and thought it was very underwhelming at time. The art lacks detail in many places (so much so that certain characters are not even well distinguished) and the plot is rather cliche. It is certainly not bad, but I wouldn't purchase another volume. Also, simply being manga, it is rather difficult to portray some of the fight scenes in the sky without some difficulty.
In general, I do see some influence from the Holy Grail myths. A sacred stone, a sleeping/dying king, etc. are all common motifs in the grail sagas. This would be the most interesting component of the manga to me, but at that point, I'd just rather read a grail saga.

Oh it's a great story but no it wouldn't be a significant work of literature. If anything it's just another environment post-apoc story. I still love it because of the message it trying to tell.

It's pretty good for a fantasy story, but I wouldn't call it significant or on par with Tolkien or even GRRM.
Also, .
>but Yea Forums sucks they don't talk about muh favorite chinese cartoon books
Shut up.

so it's actually just manga?

There's more to literature than story, especially for something like Lord of the Rings.

The first couple of volumes are just origin story. Once you pass the part of the plot that's covered in the film the main character stops being a Mary Sue and the plot goes in very unexpected directions with some pretty original takes on sci-fi concepts (e.g. bio-engineering type stuff, biological computers etc.). The rest of the story follows her grappling with the much more difficult and morally complex reality of living up to the messianic prophecy of the first couple of volumes and she has to develop into a more pragmatic leader instead of the doe-eyed idealist of the first volume / the movie adaptation. I can understand it being a slow start though, the second act and the final climax are probably my favourite parts.

On a thematic level, the story is essentially a morality play about coping with living as an ordinary person amongst the inevitable, likely imminent decay of our current civilisation as it transitions into something new, uncertain, and unrecognisable to us (referring to the story that occurs in the books pages, not the apocalyptic backstory). I don't want to give any significant spoilers but the ending is essential early 20th century modernism taken to its most literal logical conclusion. Do spoiler tags work on this board?

Sorry, I didn't meant story in the literal sense. If anything the things I love most about Nausicaä is its thematics and its world-building. Sure it falls prey to some obvious tropes (such as barely-masked fantastical twists on racial stereotypes, albeit cleverly inverted with the Africa/Middle East stand-ins representing religious America if anything, and the technologically advanced white-looking race being closer to Russia in politics than western Europe), but its takes on some offbeat science fiction concepts uncommon at the time (like the aforementioned focus on bio-engineering or 'biopunk' technology), and the intricate designs of the flora and aircraft etc., with some nice detailed sketches in the hardback box set, are quite inspired. But really all that is just attractive window-dressing. Its the thematics of a 20th-century creator coming to terms with living in a godless, globalised society focused on its own mortality and rhetorical conflicts- and how to keep on living in that era of uncertainty and endless omens of doom- that first captured my attention as a teen and draws me back to it again and again now.

>liking GRRM over Miyazaki
Fuck!

It’s just one of the greatest

imagine being so set in your ways that you'll instinctively choose airport fiction like GRRM over something better purely because it's a graphic novel and you have a preconceived distaste for the entire medium as 'not real literature' (implicit)

As medieval illuminated texts show, for example, the proportion of text to illustration in 'serious' literature is not a constant through the ages

Miyazaki is on the same level as GRRM. Read more manga.

Edgy/realism does not equal good. With Nausicaä Miyazaki combines the wonder of his kiddie movies with the gravitas of a boomer realising the future is rapidly vanishing in front of his and the childrens' eyes and encapsulates both his love and his cynicism towards humanity and nature in one swoop, something that could easily be contradictory but is articulated well across the span of the story. It's the closest thing to a true autobiography of the man imo and even separated from the rest of his body of work it stands out to me.

I won't pretend I have the wits for an exhaustive back-catalogue where I read every bestseller list every year etc. like some entirely valid fanatics of literature; I've probably read about ~1500 books at a vague estimate in my life and many of those before I turned 18 (which when you break it down isn't as much as it seems); and my favourite novel is probably still David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which I read when it first came out as a teenager. But like that book, it at least gripped me with a deep emotional connection beyond the biographical or even shared values, and I have to personally respect that even if you don't share the same experience. It's irrefutable. To me a good book is about how it touches you, more than how acclaimed it is, I mostly just started this thread to see whether it has much of a reader base on here.

In a way yeah, considering the limits of the medium Nausicaa and Blame! are among the sole works that could be compared in scope to the greats of fantasy/scifi literature.

It's weird how the West doesn't have anything of the sort.

Miyazaki is a hack propped up in the west by Disney marketing. He can draw and animate well enough, but his stories are ultimately as shallow and disposable as anything sold in an airport bookstore. The Nausicaa manga is essentially the same as ASOIAF, a lot of "worldbuilding" that ties a bunch of flat characters together into a story that goes nowhere and ends abruptly when the author loses interest in writing it. There are far better manga out there, but because they didn't get the mouse's stamp of approval nobody dares to call them masterpieces.

I think few western artists post-1950s have the attitude where spending such a significant portion on your life on a single, unchanging idea is seen as the 'correct' approach, outside of a few oddball architects from Spain and suchlike who spend their whole careers on one passion project to make an artistic point.

>implying the character who is set up as the big villain in the second act only to be reduced to a dying old husk of a man who Nausicaä sets free in an act of radical compassion while going through a suicidal crisis over the weight of her responsibilities is "flat characters"
Everything's flat if you are reductive to the point of absurdity. The characters and plot in Nausicaä have plenty more internal logic and consistency than any major western fantasy series from the last 20 years I've read. I agree with some of what you say about him as a screenwriter, he paints a beautiful scene but he's terrible at making shit up as he goes along, but Nausicaä is his one narrative triumph where he writes a story that does the artwork justice. Disney doesn't come into it, he was already getting popular in the West before Disney came into the picture among crowd who knew to look for it, Disney just accelerated it. Spirited Away (and therefore his subsequent movies) would have had some broad-audience breakthrough in the west regardless of Disney, just not as much, whatever you think of them quality-wise.

Dumb take. Hard to believe even. But I don’t care if you’re sincere or not.

>There are far better manga out there
name some

I meant less about the obssession with a subject or even merit and more about the epic scale of the world/story itself. I can't think of any western comics that focuses on a large, complex fictional world like the wasteland of Nausicaa or the megastructure of Blame!. Which is weird, since the west has always been better at that, but we are surprisingly lacking with comics. The closest thing of that I can think are things like Transmetropolitan or Big Questions, and even then I would be stretching it.

American comics were crippled by the comics code stuff and then the big two completely dominated the market so the scope of American comics is tends to be very limited and the market for American comics is practically non-existent these days, esp. compared to Manga. The French put out some good shit though, I would personally put Moebius above Miyazaki and Nihei.

Yeah, you're right. And most "alternative" authors focus solely on realistic/confessional works that are very rarely remarkable.
To be honest I always forget about Moebius. I could never finish The Incal because I hate Jodorowsky's writing. I guess I should give it another go.

Btw, I just remembered two online comics: Rice Boy and Stand Still, Stay Silent. The former has a very interesting and weird world and story. The author also has other comics with the same amount of depth, it's really worth checking out.
The latter is a pretty straightforward post-apocalyptic zombie story but the art is stunning, so it kinda manages to create an otherworldly feeling.

I think this stands out as a perfectly solid graphic novel, not just "muh weeb manga". It really reads like a novel. Nausicaä is a really good comic.

peak french comics

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Imagine reading manga for the story

based naustica. friendly reminder manga is redbilled. anime has a lot of weird "rules" in japan and is watered down manga.