The Manga Curmudgeon

Spending too much on comics, then talking too much about them

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Upcoming 12/17/2008

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No publisher is as capable of making me go all Team Comix as Fanfare/Ponent Mon. If they’ve got a new release, it’s bound to be my pick of the week. If they’ve released anything in a calendar year, it’s bound to be somewhere on my theoretical list of the year’s best. (I say theoretical because I’m deeply ambivalent about my ability to concoct a list without over-compensating for my personal biases and anxieties about looking… well… dumb.)

So this week I will urge you all to at least take a look at Jiro Taniguchi’s The Quest for the Missing Girl, which fuses Taniguchi’s facility with evoking sense of place and his fondness for detective pulp in some very effective ways. I reviewed it over at The Comics Reporter.

And speaking of Fanfare/Ponent Mon and year-end round-ups, Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary (which I reviewed here) has deservedly been popping up on several, including this one at Manga Recon. I point to this one in particular because it’s one of my favorites. I love the format, and I think it allows for a very natural eclecticism of tastes. It’s a great example of the kind of thing a good group blog can do really well.

Here’s this week’s ComicList, by the way.

Upcoming, updates, upbraiding

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I’m going to be lazy in my assessment of this week’s ComicList and just point you to stalwarts like Jog, Matthew J. Brady, and Chris Mautner and Kevin Melrose. I will just note that the soft-cover version of the second volume of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack (Vertical) seems to be due in comic shops.

And with that lazy segue out of the way, I’ll move into a quick update on my Black Jack Preventative Medicine Giveaway, which is bustling right along. I’ve gotten some great entries so far, and I can’t wait to post people’s thoughts on how to make the comics industry healthier. Even with under a dozen entries so far, people are covering a lot of ground from a number of different perspectives.

Thanks to everyone who’s linked to the contest. Well… almost everyone. I continue to be shocked by the number of sites and individuals who swipe content from hard-working bloggers like Brigid Alverson and post it as their own. Seriously, that just sucks. If you’re trying to generate content for your site, do it the old fashioned way and just write it, if you’re capable of such complex thinking. Cutting and pasting isn’t writing, and doing so without any kind of attribution is plain old plagiarism.

Angoulême selections

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Awards season plows forward as the legendary Angoulême Comics Festival announces its official selections, including some comics from Japan and one from China:

  • “La Force des Humbles,” by Hiroshi Hirata, published by Delcourt
  • “Les Gouttes de Dieu,” by Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto, published by Glénat (and yes, it’s that wine manga)
  • “La Pluie du Paradis,” by Yu Lu, published by Casterman
  • “Undercurrent,” by Tetsuya Toyoda, published by Kana
  • “Le Voleur de Visages,” by Junji Ito, published by Tonkam

    • (Via Dirk Deppey.)

    Pardon my dwelling

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    So today I woke up in a world where Tove Jansson’s timeless gem Moomin (Drawn & Quarterly) can be nominated in the same award category as the Witchblade Manga (Top Cow). I’m not comfortable with this, obviously, and I’m even less comfortable with the possibility that I live in a world where the Witchblade Manga could possibly beat Moomin for that award. Because the pool of people eligible to nominate works for the awards is identical to the pool of people who decide which of those nominees will receive Harveys:

    “Nominations for the Harvey Awards are selected exclusively by creators – those who write, draw, ink, letter, color, design, edit or are otherwise involved in a creative capacity in the comics field. The Harvey Awards are the only industry awards both nominated and selected by the full body of comic book professionals.”

    Greg McElhatton notes that the Harvey nominations are “SO easy to stack,” and if anyone was on the fence about that, well… Witchblade Manga. The prosecution rests.

    This is a problem. It’s not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things, obviously, but it’s a problem for the Harvey Awards, because the possibility of shoving a piece of crap into the field of nominees unfairly casts the worthiness of everything on the slate into question. If I can conclude, not unreasonably, that a bunch of people who work for Company A sat around the break room and decided to force a piece of crap onto the ballot, then I can conclude just as reasonably that a bunch of people who work for Company B sat around the break room and decided to force something brilliant onto the ballot. A desirable outcome doesn’t make a leaky process any more ethical.

    Of course, it’s a universal problem for awards programs of any sort. All of them have to decide where they want to land on the continuum between potentially out-of-touch gatekeepers and a democratic process that leaves itself open to abuse. I think the simplest solution would be to use precisely the same pool of potential nominators but to prohibit them from nominating any work published by the company that employs them. (That’s how nominations work in the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens program.) That would still leave open the possibility of collusion among publishers, obviously, but that seems less likely than self-promoting ballot-box stuffing.

    There is the remote possibility that what one might consider counter-intuitive nominees (some listed here by Dirk Deppey) wound up there as the result of an entirely democratic groundswell of support, heretofore unexpected by the casual observer. I’m cynical, so unless I get a bunch of e-mails or comments that support that optimistic possibility, I’m going to suggest that the Harvey Awards nomination process is broken and needs to be fixed if the sponsors want to cultivate a reputation for promoting meritorious work. Because there’s plenty of meritorious work nominated, and it’s not fair that it stands a real chance of losing to something awful because the system can be massaged.

    For further reading, please see Brigid Alverson’s noble attempt to list more award-worthy works. I thought about doing that, but then I decided that the bar was set so low that I’d never stop.

    Flower power

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    The Beat is the first to share this year’s list of Eisner Award nominations, and many of them make me very, very happy. None quite so much as this one:

    Best Writer/Artist
    Fumi Yoshinaga, Flower of Life; The Moon and Sandals (Digital Manga)

    See? A panel of experts agrees that Yoshinaga is awesome, so go out and buy all of the available volumes of Flower of Life, thus pressuring DMP into releasing the fourth.