Fire! (ファイヤー!, Faiyā!) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Hideko Mizuno. It was serialized in Shueisha's magazine Seventeen from 1969–1971.[1] It is about the rise and fall of an American rock star named Aaron. It won the 1970 Shogakukan Manga Award.[2]
Aaron Browning is an American teenager who gets sent to juvenile prison after being caught with a delinquent named Fire Wolf. He finds solace in music and later manages to sort-of bond with Fire Wolf himself, and he ultimately leaves to Detroit determined to make it in the musical industry. He leads a band named Fire! and seeks to lead people to freedom with their music.
The hedonistic Aaron is neither a 'boy next door' character, nor a 'shining prince', and Sandra Buckley states that it was his 'non-conventional, rebellious behavior' that was part of the attraction for the fans of Fire!. It was innovative for shōjo manga by having the first sexually explicit scenes in post-World War II manga, and by having a male protagonist.[1] The model for Aaron was Scott Walker of The Walker Brothers.[3]
The story has been read as a "conservative morality tale", but Buckley states that this ignores the two-year run of readers following Aaron's exploits avidly. There are accounts of teenage girls queueing for the next issue to come out.[1]
References
^ abcBuckley, Sandra (1991) "'Penguin in Bondage': A Graphic Tale of Japanese Comic Books", pp. 170-171, In Technoculture. C. Penley and A. Ross, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota ISBN0-8166-1932-8
^小学館漫画賞：歴代受賞者 (in Japanese). Shogakukan. Archived from the original on 29 September 2007. Retrieved 19 August 2007.
Frederik L. Schodt (1983). Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Kodansha.
Shamoon, Deborah (2018). "Fire!: Mizuno Hideko and the development of 1960s shōjo manga". In Darling-Wolf, Fabienne (ed.). Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315689036. hdl:11343/222387. ISBN9781315689036.
