Somewhere in West Virginia, a nondescript 30-something walks towards his mailbox.
“Bill… credit card offer… bill… alumni mailing… mysterious, magazine-shaped envelope with no return address… Wait, could this be — (rip, tear, rustle)…”
“It’s… it’s the shôjo issue! But… it’s the Wizard shôjo issue.”
The cover: I certainly never needed to see Michael Turner’s rendering of Tohru from Fruits Basket. What the hell happened to her ribs? And her feet?
Page 13: “Grrrl Power!” A “roundtable” of “hot industry headliners” talks about “the shôjo phenom.” Oddly enough the roundtable consists of Brian Bendis, Mark Millar, Geoff Johns, and Frank Miller. It starts off well enough, with everyone using words and phrases like “exciting” and “new markets” and “crossover.” Eventually, though, references to “ungrateful little brats” pepper the discourse, as do calls for protectionist trade measures that would not be out of place in one of those “Buy American” commercials that featured Vicki Lawrence as “Mama.”
Page 28: “Women in Uniform!” In this pictorial, readers see a variety of shôjo school uniforms as re-imagined by Greg Horn. I almost lose consciousness, but before the blackout, I picture a resort developer in Las Vegas having a “Eureka!” moment as he finally pinpoints just the right look for the cocktail waitresses who work the casino floor.
Page 48: “Who’d Win? Special Magic Girl Edition!” Okay, Alice Seno doesn’t carry a wakizashi, Sailor Venus has never crumpled anyone’s windpipe with a bo, and Sakura does not, to my knowledge, fling Clow Cards like shuriken, rending the flesh of her enemies. And what does Wolverine have to do with any of this? Of course he’d be able to kill them.
Page 65: “Cartoonist Sympathizers.” This is an extraordinarily uncomfortable interview with some of the creators working on OEL manga. Even after repeated, almost pleading inquiries, it still seems clear that they “wouldn’t really rather be drawing X-Men.”
Page 79: “Domestic or Imported?” An interesting compare-and-contrast piece on the relative merits of up-skirt fanservice visuals and Spider-Woman’s persistent camel toe. A little something for the regular subscribers, I guess.
Before I could go any further, I woke to find one of my dogs swatting at me with alarm. I’d obviously been thrashing around and screaming in my sleep. It had all just been a horrible, haunting nightmare.
But… what had been in that empty, magazine-shaped envelope sitting on the kitchen counter?
(Edited to add a quick note for anyone finding this via The Comics Journal Message Board: I will be doing a review of the actual TCJ Shojo issue for my Comics World News column, Flipped. It should appear Monday, July 25. Short preview: TCJ 269 was just astonishing in its scope and depth.)