It’s Manga Month in the latest Previews catalog! The galas! The parties! The tiny little logos next to the manga solicitations!
Okay, so neither of the covers highlights a manga property or mentions this special focus. But there is an explanatory blurb in the Splash section:
“In short, manga has shown that it has a right-hand seat in the Western comics market, and many long-time readers are now convinced that what was once thought a ‘fad’ has now become a staple in the comics shop.”
Don’t worry, though. It’s still pretty much business as usual. There is a handy checklist of the month’s manga offerings. And one of the Gems of the Month is a manga title (Dark Horse’s Path of the Assassin). And Dark Horse moved its manga titles to the front of its section. And five of the sixteen Featured Items are manga, too.
It’s an odd bit of timing, but I find myself more interested in the Western titles this time around.
I really admire the work Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, and their new book, De: Tales (Dark Horse), looks like it’s right up my alley: “Brimming with all the details of human life, their charming tales move from the urban reality of their home in Sāo Paulo to the magical realism of their Latin American background.”
I dearly love revisionist fairy tales, so I’m inclined to pick up Wonderland #1 (SLG Publishing). The fact that it’s got art from Sonny (My Faith in Frankie) Liew virtually cinches it.
I seem to remember David Taylor being very excited about the announcement of Basilisk (Del Rey). That’s always a good sign. Plus, it’s the first “mature” title from the publisher. (That means I’ll probably get it from a bookstore so I can mitigate the higher price point with my discount card.)
Del Rey also has the first softcover installment of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha. I’ve been slowly making my way through the hardcovers from Vertical, and I certainly like the heft of them, but the $9 price differential does give the softcovers a certain allure. We’ll see.
Oh, and Del Rey prominently re-lists some first volumes of their more popular titles. I could throw in a joke about the out-of-sequence arrival of some of their books, or I could just congratulate them on giving a little more focus to the Direct Market. I’ll go with the latter.
To my complete surprise, Antique Bakery (DMP) apparently transforms into a crime drama in the fourth and final volume. Fumi Yoshinaga had better not skimp on the cakes, damnit.
Fantagraphics offers up a big hardback collection of Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting. This pleases me a lot, as does the rather significant discount being offered at Amazon.
Behold the power of the Featured Item! I probably would have skimmed right over Shinsuke Tanaka’s Wings otherwise. It sounds like a cute all-ages book, provided its release isn’t affected by the ibooks, inc. bankruptcy filing.
NBM has another installment in Rick Geary’s wonderful Treasury of Victorian Murder series, Madeleine Smith. I’ll probably hold out for the less expensive softcover version, but it will be mine eventually.
Neal Shaffer and Joe Infurnari’s Borrowed Time (Oni) sounds intriguing. In my experience, if an Oni title sounds intriguing, it usually is. Oni also offers an omnibus version of the first three volumes of Love as a Foreign Language for $11.95, which might annoy the people who bought them individually at $5.95 a pop.
Rabbits and robots might make me overcome my natural aversion to stories about “the disappointments of early adulthood” to give Jeremy Tinder’s Cry Yourself to Sleep (Top Shelf) a try.
So, to summarize: Previews celebrates Manga Month without really changing how they do things, and David gratefully learns about a bunch of comics that he wants but probably won’t buy from a comic shop because he’s too cheap.