[/floatl]LA Times: Charisma Man - An American geek is reborn in JapanFrom his window seat in the Roppongi bar district, Neil Garscadden eyes an exotic street parade: the reggae-styled hipsters, the Nigerian nightclub hawkers, the soft-stepping geishas, the secretaries in miniskirts and impossibly heavy eye shadow. The nuances of the scene, Garscadden insists, would be lost on a mere tourist. This, he says, is a job for Charisma Man. With his blue eyes, tousled blond hair and foreign passport, Charisma Man is a sake-sipping man about town, suavely negotiating the intricacies of Japanese culture. Women adore him. Men respect, even fear, him. Life in the East bends to his every whim. "It's great to be a Western guy in Asia," he says. "I've got lots of money, chicks dig me -- everybody respects me." Well, not everybody. In this land of anime, Charisma Man is a comic strip character created in 1998 by Larry Rodney, a Canadian then teaching English in Nagoya, to lampoon what he saw as the absurd hubris of many Western men in Japan...After an eight-year run in an alternative expat magazine, the black-and-white five-panel monthly strip was discontinued in 2006. But now Charisma Man is back. Following their 2002 collection of the first four years of Charisma Man adventures, Rodney and Garscadden are teaming up to publish a book containing both old and new installments. And there's even talk of a new monthly strip. (They dismiss Charisma Man comics between 2002 and 2006, saying the writers took the character in an uncharismatic direction after Garscadden also left the picture)..."I found references to Charisma Man in academic journals dissecting cross-cultural aspects of Asian studies," Rodney says. "Years after I moved back to Canada and forgot all about the character, I mentioned to some guy who used to live in Japan that I invented Charisma Man. He shook my hand like I was Mick Jagger...more...
