Whether it’s Joseph Campbell or any other anthropologically inclined philosopher, most will agree that every culture emphasizes to its children the Rite of Passage. This can vary from having the vagina sewed shut to having an erection in class (no, I’m not a genital fetishist). Even if it’s going through the motions on some arbitrary ritual, a severe part of the human experience is to catalogue the  transition to adulthood with a concretely described event, even if there’s a particular air of humiliation, deprecation, and mutilation. The Hero’s Trial itself may be totally unrelated to the circumstances being imposed—for example, in the modern setting, menstruation may be a female’s most common rite. But the emotional landscape around it is what makes it a surmountable event. Big Clay Pot is an awkward but touching retelling of one such story in an ancient setting. It imposes an innately Western philosophy on Eastern story, with an emotional docility that evokes the pacifying spirit of a Hermann Hesse novel.

Drawing with a thin line iconic characters in the American style, Scott Mills starts out the story in a screwball style, settles down to school-girl drama, and ends it all with Hollywood melodrama (with a touch of tragedy). A young Korean girl named Sun Kim comes a southern Japanese, fleeing a vaguely hinted past (she only says, “I am…no longer welcome in the village of my birth. I don’t mind too much”). After angering several natives, she hides under a reclusive old man’s wing. He begrudgingly takes her in and teaches her how to survive. She falls in love with him and he reveals the emotional malaise of his passed-away wife. All of this ends with an emotionally accented irony that puts the story into perspective. It’s a quaint and clichéd story that’s been heard before though; a young girl grows up by falling in love with the world-weary old man, and in the process, teaches him how to learn-to-love/live again. And yet, Mills injects a lyrically authentic style (each page has a laborious but functional Japanese translation) than even the typical Japanese manga allows itself. Typical Japanese comics have a self-consciousness of their Western perceptions, and do their best to get the same adrenaline aesthetic of American pop culture with sharp-edged panels and fast pacing (has anyone ever commented on the possibility that the big eyes in manga and animé is a cultural refutation of the slanty-eye stereotype?). Pot rejects current aesthetics for an accurately ancient feel, with lush delicacy, simple layouts, and fleshed out by half-tone blacks and whites.
  
Mills’ form is sound, but he treats most of the book as a novelly cute foreign tale. (Almost all the humor in book is too simple to really work.) Nevertheless, he ends the book on a stride by clinging to a two indelible and emotionally resonant images: the final image of Kokoro, and the final image of the big clay pot. Big Clay Pot isn’t necessarily a spectacular showcase of an artform at its echelon, but it’s definitely the type of comics that should be in abundance. Simply, it has no pretensions, and asks you not to think of it especially highly only because it is a comic book; it’s natural, fits in the form without drawing too much attention to its sequential techniques, and manages to come out exquisitely simple. The market should be flooded with more works like this.