Is “classic” an alluring adjective, and does literary merit guarantee longevity? Those are some of the questions on Robin Brenner’s mind at No Flying, No Tights:
“Then there’s my other problem: I keep running up against what Mark Twain identified as a classic: A book which people praise and don’t read. Perhaps I’m being harsh, but there are a fair number of graphic novels out there that may well be extraordinarily well crafted — but can anyone read them?”
Time’s running out to enter TangognaT’s blog anniversary manga give-away. She’s added some extra incentives and wonders where the love is for some of the titles up for grabs.
Writing for the Patriot-News, Chris Mautner goes deep into geek territory, looking at Genshiken (Del Rey) and Welcome to the N.H.K. (Tokyopop). I love the former, and I’m on the fence about sampling the latter. I feel like I should, because portrayals of otaku culture can’t all be good-natured benevolence, can they?
At Read About Comics, Greg McElhatton has high praise for the first volume of Housui Yamazaki’s Mail, giving it the edge over the Yamazaki-drawn Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (both from Dark Horse). I’m partial to Kurosagi, but I’ve really enjoyed both of the volumes of Mail that have been released so far.
And as soon as I clicked “Send” on the e-mail with this week’s Flipped column attached, I browsed around the blogosphere and discovered that Jog had written about the same topic (that everyone should buy Fumiyo Kouno’s sublime Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms from Last Gasp), only much, much better. Ah, well.