The Manga Curmudgeon

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

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Upcoming 11/4/2009

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It looks to be a manageable lot on this week’s ComicList, at least for me. That’s just as well, as I used a Borders buy-four-get-the-fifth-free deal as an excuse to overspend on manga last weekend.

fireinvestigatornanase3Fire Investigator Nanasd (CMX), story by Izo Hashimoto and art by Tomoshige Ichikawa, is the kind of book that makes me happy for a handful of reasons. It’s not brilliant, but it’s entertaining, and it combines mystery and adventure in pleasing ways. It’s got an appealing, highly competent female lead and puts her through the arson version of The Silence of the Lambs as she fights fires and looks into their origins with the aid of a serial arsonist. And, unrelated to the book’s quality but still welcome, the first search result for the series actually takes you to the publisher of the book, which almost never happens. I know. Weird things make me happy.

ludwigii2One of my Borders purchases this weekend was the first volume of You Higuri’s Ludwig II (Juné), which is… well… weird. As Kate Dacey noted in her review, it contains the holy trinity of Higuri historical fantasy: “beautiful people in beautiful clothes, political intrigue, and darkly handsome protagonists who are touched by madness.” The titular protagonist is one of those rulers every citizen of a monarchy should dread: a delusional opera queen. As is usually the case with Higuri yaoi (or near-yaoi), the gorgeous art and weird nuances are carrying me past the sordid but strangely listless seme-uke shenanigans between Ludwig and his devoted manservant. We’ll see if those features continue to offer sufficient compensation to make me want to track down volume two.

stumptown1Do you miss the days when Greg Rucka did creator-owned work? Well, there’s good news for you, as he returns to Oni (home to his Queen and Country and Whiteout) with a new detective series, Stumptown, illustrated by Matthew Southworth. Once again, he seems to be following the gritty misadventures of a strong female protagonist, a private investigator named Dex in the midst of a high-stakes missing-person case. The art looks terrific, and Rucka certainly has a strong track record with undiluted noir.

hikarunogo17Viz unleashes a thundering herd of titles, many of which I like very much, but I’ll fixate on one because it’s great and I feel like I’ve been neglecting it: Hikaru no Go, written by Yumi Hotta and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, which reaches its 17th volume. This looks to be a particularly eventful installment. Protagonist Hikaru has lost his ghostly go mentor Sai, and he faces off with his rival, gifted prodigy Akira. It’s a great series, smartly written by Hotta and beautifully drawn by Obata.

Upcoming 10/28/2009

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I’m not crazy about Diamond’s “and the rest” listing format, but the usual sources are being a little wonky, so let’s pop over to its roster of the week’s releases.

redsnowDrawn & Quarterly returns to the gekiga well for Susumu Katsumata’s Red Snow, a collection of short stories set in “the pre-modern Japanese countryside of the author’s youth, a slightly magical world where ancestral traditions hold sway over a people in the full vigor of life, struggling to survive the harsh seasons and the difficult life of manual laborers and farmers.” The setting alone is enough to intrigue me, as is the fact that Red Snow sounds like it explores gekiga’s softer side. The stories were originally published in the late but legendary Garo, published from 1964 to 2002.

It was published in French as Neige Rouge in 2008 by Editions Cornélius, whose web site is adorable but virtually impossible to navigate if you want to do anything so prosaic as find information about their books, so I’ll simply point you to the Amazon.Fr listing for the title. I was hoping to find some sample pages, but none seem to be available. It doesn’t even seem to have been pirated yet, but please don’t feel compelled to disabuse me of that happy notion.

marveldivas4In an entirely different category altogether, Marvel releases the fourth and final issues of its Marvel Divas mini-series, which I’ve enjoyed. Here’s the summary: Firestar’s got cancer, the Black Cat can’t get a start-up loan, Photon is being wooed by a booty call who won’t take the hint, and Hellcat is chronicling it all for her next book when not fending off unwelcome visits from her ex-husband, the Son of Satan. The series isn’t everything it could be, but it takes its cast more seriously than they might have reasonably expected, and the chances of any last-act evisceration seem promisingly slim.

aria5And in a belated but welcome development, Tokyopop releases the fifth volume of Kozue Amano’s elegant fantasy travelogue, Aria. (They published the fourth volume last December.) So either rail at the delay or revel in the return, your choice. I’m inclined toward cautious revelry, just because it seems like another small sign of Tokyopop’s stabilization after a very, very bad year or so.

Update: In the comments, Travis McGee notes that one can find the catalog of Editions Cornélius “by clicking on the pig in the doghouse in the bottom right corner.”

Upcoming 10/21/2009

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Last Wednesday’s lean times are over, so check under your sofa cushions and empty the ash tray in your car, because it’s time for a look at the current ComicList:

real6It’s tough to pick a book of the week, as there’s interesting material in varied formats, but I ultimately have to settle on the sixth volume of Takehiko Inoue’s Real from Viz Signature. This excellent drama looks at the lives of wheelchair basketball players so vividly and with such specificity that you don’t need to have the slightest interest in sports to become engrossed. I certainly don’t have any interest in sports, and I think the book is terrific and deeply underappreciated. So please give it a try.

whatawonderfulworld1Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of the books in Viz’s Signature line and an admirer of the imprint in general. I honestly can’t think of one I don’t at least enjoy. That said I do question the wisdom of unleashing quite this much product on the market at once. In addition to the aforementioned volume of Real, there’s the fifth volume of Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys, the fifth omnibus installment of Inoue’s Vagabond, and both volumes of Inio (solanin) Asano’s What a Wonderful World! That’s $71.95 worth of comics, retail before taxes. It’s a lot. But perhaps strong sales of books like the first volume of Rumiko Takahashi’s RIN-NE (which arrives Wednesday) will help carry Viz’s less commercial titles. And RIN-NE is a lot of fun, as you would expect from Takahashi. Kate Dacey has an enthsuiastic review of the first volume at The Manga Critic, and you can sample the title at The RumicWorld.

Noted just for the novelty of it, Del Rey launches its floppy comics line this week with The Talisman: The Road of Trials, based on a Stephen King/Peter Straub property, written by Robin Furth and illustrated by Tony Shasteen. Del Rey Comics doesn’t seem to have a web site yet, but you can see a preview at Entertainment Weekly’s site.

bookaboutmoominThe New York Times ran a Reuters story pondering the potential international appeal of Tove Jansson’s Moomin properties without ever mentioning the fact that Drawn & Quarterly has been releasing beautiful hardcover collections of Jansson’s comic strips for a few years now. Whether Reuters notices or not, Drawn & Quarterly continues to earn excellent karma by releasing Jansson’s The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My. (Scroll down on to the bottom of this page for more details and a preview.)

underground2I enjoyed the first issue of Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber’s Underground (Image), a five-part mini-series about socioeconomic machinations and spelunking peril in a mountain town in Kentucky. I fully expect to enjoy the second issue as well.

I also enjoyed the first volume of Svetlana Chmakova’s Nightschool (Yen Press), collected after serialization in Yen Plus. It’s a complicated supernatural adventure about various factions of night creatures and the humans who oppose them. It’s got terrific art and a promisingly chunky plot. The second volume arrives Wednesday.

Audience development: Mail

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I’m just not feeling the ComicList this week. When the big manga releases have been in print in English for years, I just can’t get all that excited. I’ve also got to say that the publisher’s utter lack of anything resembling even minimal marketing efforts bothers me. They seem to understand how competitive the market is for translated manga, but they’ve never sent out a press release, haven’t built even a rudimentary web site, and have given only a single interview barely a week before the release of their first round books.

Listen, I’m not saying I want more press releases in my inbox, but I am saying that even successful, high-profile publishers with good bookstore saturation work hard to spread the word about their products. It’s not encouraging to see the much-anticipated direct entry of a major Japanese publisher into the translated-manga market be conducted with a caution and reticence that seems to verge on agoraphobia.

So forget the new stuff. I’ll take the occasion and the fast-approaching Halloween to recommend a really entertaining but neglected horror comic:

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You may know Housui Yamazaki as the illustrator of the very entertaining The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, written by Eiji (MPD Psycho) Otsuka. Or you may not; it’s got a devoted following, but it’s never exactly set the sales charts on fire. That’s obviously a shame too, but today we’re talking about Yamazaki’s solo effort, the three-volume Mail.

If Kurosagi can be described as an older-skewing Scooby Doo with actual ghosts, Mail is more in the line of The Twilight Zone hosted by Richie Brockelman, also with ghosts.

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Master of ceremonies Reiji Akiba can see ghosts. (Exactly how that came to be is explained in an origin story in the third volume.) They’re definitely on the malevolent end of the spiritual spectrum, but not to worry. He’s got just the means of dealing with them.

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Yes, it’s exorcism at gunpoint. The majority of the three volumes are a collection of stand-alone stories, with generally innocent people running afoul of nasty ghosts and Akiba coming to their rescue. I’m not going to claim that it’s a wildly novel concept, but Yamazaki executes it very well. I could have read more volumes of the series, but I’m happy to revisit the three I have, especially at this time of year.

Yamazaki is a sharp and imaginative illustrator, and he really has a handle on episodic storytelling. He’s got a sly sense of humor and a knack for building suspense in a relatively small number of pages. If you’re looking for some stylish shivers in a series that doesn’t demand a big investment of time or dollars, Mail is an excellent choice.

There are a number of series that fall into the category of engaging, episodic horror. What are some of your favorites?

Upcoming 10/7/2009

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This week’s ComicList has some welcome, off-the-beaten-path items, so let’s dig in.

The arrival of one book from Fanfare/Ponent Mon is a welcome delight. The arrival of two seems positively decadent, but that’s what they do, and both are from master illustrator Jiro Taniguchi. Which excites you more will depend on your taste for Taniguchi. Summit of the Gods, about fateful trips up Mt. Everest, is in his man-versus-nature vein, like The Ice Wanderer and Quest for the Missing Girl. A Distant Neighborhood is more slice-of-life, kind of like his story in Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators or The Walking Man (if it had a plot). I picked up the first two volumes of A Distant Neighborhood at Small Press Expo and can heartily recommend it. I’ll cover it in more depth later, but it’s about a middle-aged man who wakes up as his teen-aged self shortly before his father’s disappearance.

masterpiececomicsThere are two arrivals that can be described as clever ideas executed extremely well. R. Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics (Drawn & Quarterly) was another SPX purchase. In it, Sikoryak fuses classic literature with classic comics in some extremely witty ways. Blondie and Dagwood are reinvented as Adam and Eve, Mary Worth becomes Lady Macbeth, Bazooka Joe does Dante, and so on. The juxtapositions are great, and Sikoryak’s ability to adopt such a variety of visual styles is very impressive. The book is more amusing than absorbing, but there’s an amazing amount of craft on display.

I’ve already written about The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks (Random House), mostly for its weird crediting of author Max Books and illustrator Ibraim Roberson on the review copy I received and the web listing, some of which seems to have been fixed. Brooks inserts zombies into various, far-flung scenarios – the colonial Caribbean, a Foreign Legion outpost in northern Africa, even pre-history – offering a faux-anthropological examination of zombie encounters through history. Again, it’s clever, and Roberson draws the heck out of it. I’d recommend it for zombie fans looking for a marginally fresh take on the (in my opinion) exhausted topic.

I tend to like the shôjo titles CMX publishes. I’ve heard effusive praise for Ken Saito’s The Name of the Flower, and I’ll track it down at some point, but in the meantime, I was glad to receive a review copy of Oh! My Brother so I could get a sense of Saito’s style. It’s got its strong points, mostly in terms of interesting characters and nicely delivered emotional moments. It’s about a girl who finds herself sharing her body with the spirit of her dead older brother, trying to help him with his unfinished business. That could have turned into something really unsavory, but Saito takes a sweet, sensitive approach to the material, thankfully. Some of the storytelling is a little sketchy, but there’s a nice, sentimental core to the work. I suspect Brother came before Flower, though I can’t seem to find any confirmation of that.

kiminitodoke2Viz releases many, many books this week, some of which will very likely show up on the Graphic Book Best Seller List over at The New York Times, but my attention is fixated on the second volume of Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You, written and illustrated by Karuho Shiina. It’s about an outwardly off-putting girl trying to convince her classmates that she didn’t crawl out of a well to claim their souls. I liked the first volume a lot.

I couldn’t find it on Image’s web site with a sextant and a dowsing rod, but I’ll definitely pick up the second issue of Brandon Graham’s King City, as I really enjoyed the first. It’s a pamphlet reprinting of a book Tokyopop originally published as a paperback. I missed it in digest form, so I’m glad Image and Tokyopop are giving readers a second bite of the apple, particularly in a format that’s probably friendlier to Graham’s illustrations.

Upcoming 9/30/2009

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With recent travels significantly augmenting my already menacing “to read” pile, it’s not like I need new comics, but there’s a new ComicList all the same. Fortunately, it’s manageable.

aya3If you haven’t been enjoying Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie’s charming, multi-generational soap opera about life in the Ivory Coast during the 1970s, then you probably aren’t prepared for Aya: The Secrets Come Out, the third volume in the series. You should rectify this, because the book is a real treat with an endearing, cantankerous cast and pitch-perfect illustrations. The book sold out at SPX, which made me happy.

refreshrefreshI really enjoyed Danica Novgorodoff’s mini-comic, A Late Freeze, so I’m looking forward to Refresh, Refresh, Novgorodoff’s graphic novel adaptation of a screenplay by James Ponsoldt, which was in turn adapted from a short story by Benjamin Percy. It’s “the story of three teenagers on the cusp of high school graduation and their struggle to make hard decisions with no role models to follow; to discover the possibilities for the future when all the doors are slamming in their faces; and to believe their fathers will come home alive [from the war in Iraq] so they can be boys again.”

Ah, and it’s time again for a new volume of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics anthology, this time guest-edited by Charles Burns with series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden. The contributors list seems a little “usual suspects” to me, but the collection is always worth a look. And the seasonal outburst of “best according to WHO?” discussion may again warm us during these chilly early days of autumn.

Upcoming 9/23/2009

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Time again for a look at this week’s ComicList:

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Summer is over, and school is underway, but if you want to recapture that sense of freedom and possibility, pick up Matthew Loux’s Salt Water Taffy: The Truth About Dr. True (Oni Press). This series about young brothers spending a silly and mysterious summer at the shore has been a real treat so far. Check out the series site, which includes added webcomic adventures, and read this interview with Loux over at Comic Book Resources. The site has also promised a chunky preview of the book sometime today. (Update: It’s here.) Here are my reviews of the first and second volumes of the series.

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Dark Horse rewards the loyal with the 12th volume of Hiroki Endo’s meaty science fiction saga, Eden: It’s an Endless World! There tend to be long gaps between new volumes of this excellent series, but I can be patient as long as they keep coming. Here’s my review of the series over at The Comics Reporter.

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I arrived late at this particular party, but I’m still happy to see the sixth volume of Banri Hidaka’s V.B. Rose (Tokyopop). I’ve enjoyed the first three volumes of this story about a promising amateur designer who goes to work for a couture bridal shop. It’s got endearing characters and almost enough sparkle to necessitate protective eyewear.

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Vertical delivers more morally ambiguous medical madness with the seventh volume of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack.

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I was shocked by how much I liked the first volume of Kiminori Wakasugi’s vulgar, improbable, totally hilarious Detroit Metal City (Viz). The second volume arrives this week at better comic shops and braver bookstores everywhere.

Update: I almost always forget to look at Image’s listings, because they don’t publish a whole lot that seems like it would interest me and because I’m still bitter that they aren’t publishing more of Andi Watson’s Glister. I also find their web site completely impossible to navigate or search, so I won’t even bother linking to it. While I think this is a largely defensible position on my part, it sometimes leads me to miss neat comics like the following.

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Underground, which mercifully has its own, entirely navigable web site, is written by Jeff Parker and illustrated by Steve Lieber. I liked Parker’s Agents of Atlas mini-series a lot (Marvel), and I thought Lieber’s work on Whiteout and Whiteout: Melt (Oni) was great. Also, Me and Edith Head, drawn by Lieber and written by Sara Ryan, is one of my favorite mini-comics ever. So I’m naturally inclined to give the comic a try, even though it’s about a cave, and claustrophobia prevents me from even considering entering one. I couldn’t even finish Nevada Barr’s Blind Descent, and I like Barr’s mystery novels a lot. But it’s Parker and Lieber, so I’ll certainly muster as much courage as possible.

Upcoming 9/16/2009

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It’s a quality-over-quantity week for manga in the new ComicList: not a ton of arrivals, but each is welcome.

llc2CMX releases the second and concluding volume of Natsuna Kawase’s The Lapis Lazuli Crown. It’s one of those charming romances where you can readily understand why the protagonists like each other. Here’s my review of the first volume. I’m less smitten with CMX’s other Kawase offering, A Tale of an Unknown Country, but it’s still a solid earlier work from the creator. And if you look at how far Kawase progressed as a storyteller between Tale and Crown, Kawase certainly seems like a manga-ka to watch.

In other CMX news, I really need to catch up with Yuki Nakaji’s Venus in Love, a charming story of love among the co-eds. It’s up to its seventh volume.

The rest of the week’s heavy lifting is performed by Viz, which offers new volumes of a couple of always-welcome series. Writer Tetsu Kariya and illustrator Akira Hanasaki continue to build the food pyramid with Oishinbo: Vegetables, the fifth volume in Viz’s reprinting of the A la Carte excerpts of the long-running series.

The fourth volume of Pluto: (Naoki) Urasawa x (Osamu) Tezuka was packed with shocking twists and a surprising amount of very effective tear-jerking. As Urasawa’s works always seem to get better as they progress, I’m predicting more of the same with the fifth volume. Oh, and for a preview of Urasawa’s current project, Billy Bat, check out this piece by Adam Stephanides at Completely Futile. It’s being serialized in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning, so don’t expect it to end up in Viz’s Signature line when it’s licensed.

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Upcoming 9/10/2009

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Looking through this week’s ComicList, it’s fairly obvious which book gets my strongest recommendation. Heck, if I had the programming skills and no aesthetic conscience, I’d make the cover image above spin and fire sparkly rainbows. Yes, the long-awaited sixth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s exercise in pure delight, Yotsuba&! (Yen Press). Yen rescued the much-loved title from ADV, and Yen is also republishing the first five volumes, also due out this week. I briefly contemplated re-buying those first five as a show of appreciation to Yen, but someone wisely suggested I dabble in as-yet-untried Yen titles instead, which is an excellent idea. I think I’ll start with Hyouta Fujiyama’s Tale of the Waning Moon, which seems to promise funny boys’-love fantasy.

modelsinc1I have to admit that I have been unable to resist the lure of Marvel’s recent spate of quirky, off-brand titles featuring Patsy Walker, also known as Hellcat. This week’s example is Models, Inc., written by Marc Sumerac and Paul Tobin and illustrated by Jorge Molina and Vincent Villagrasa, along with assistance from three inkers and five colorists. Dave Sharpe shoulders the lettering duties all on his own. Anyway, it’s Marvel’s model characters gathered to solve a murder during Fashion Week. For bonus irresistibility, it’s got a back-up story featuring the dapper, saintly, and adorable Tim Gunn. And neither of the promised covers look like sexist nightmares.

Oh, and just as a reminder, the new chapters keep coming at Viz’s SIGIKKI site. I think that Kumiko Suekane’s Afterschool Charisma, a loopy tale of teen-aged clones of famous historical figures, is emerging as one of the year’s great guilty pleasures. I could read a hundred pages of Clone Freud maliciously working the word “daddy” into every conversation.

Upcoming 9/2/2009

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Time for a quick look at this week’s ComicList:

stitchesIn a given year, you usually get one original graphic novel as ambitious and accomplished as David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp (Pantheon). That splendid book will have to make room for David Small’s Stitches (W.W. North), due to arrive Wednesday. It’s an extraordinary autobiographical graphic novel about the horrors of Small’s childhood, but it’s completely without self-indulgence or meandering. Small’s ability to compose his experiences into a complex, disturbing narrative is absolutely miraculous. It’s a true story that flows and breathes like the best made-up story, and I think everyone should read it. I really, really do.

I was quite taken with Natsuna Kawase’s The Lapis Lazuli Crown (CMX), though I found myself a little less impressed with Kawase’s earlier work, A Tale of an Unknown Country (also CMX and due this week). It’s not without its charms, but it’s easy to see how much Kawase refined her storytelling skills between the two works. I agree with Johanna Draper Carlson’s review of Country.

sandchron6This is one of those weeks when Viz decides to release loads and loads of manga upon an unsuspecting public, including many of their very best shôjo titles. Those include:

  • the 11th volume of Kazune Kawahara’s High School Debut
  • the 7th volume of Chica Umino’s Honey and Clover
  • the 18th volume of Ai Yazawa’s NANA
  • and the 6th volume of Hinako Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles.

    • If the total at the cash register doesn’t already have you crying, not to worry. The comics themselves probably will.