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Short list

November 29, 2006 by

Once again, ComicList courteously offers regular and manga versions of the week’s offerings, which feature a focus on new printings of good books.

Evil Twin provides a second printing of Action Philosophers: Giant-Sized Thing #1. NBM rolls out a revised version of the soft-cover of A Treasury of Victorian Murder: The Borden Tragedy, promising “a whole new section of newspaper clippings of the day!” And while I’m not familiar with the book, having been deep in spandex country during its initial printing, people are sufficiently excited about the new collection of Ragmop from Big Bang to make it their pick of the week.

But there’s plenty of brand-new material too.

A new issue of Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting (#3, in this case, from Fantagraphics) is always welcome.

I’ll throw in my lot with MangaCast’s Jarred on the manga front, singling out volume three of Fuyumi Soryo’s ES: Eternal Sabbath (Del Rey) as the pick of the week. It’s intriguing, character-driven science fiction.

Antique Bakery (DMP) has left me incapable of ignoring anything by Fumi Yoshinaga, even if I wasn’t crazy about some of the story elements of the first volume of Gerard & Jacques. But it’s Yoshinaga, so volume two is on the shopping list.

Filed under: ComicList, Del Rey, Evil Twin, Fantagraphics, NBM Leave a Comment

Based on the hit manga…

November 16, 2006 by

Speaking of Nodame Cantabile, it seems to be enjoying a bump from the release of its TV drama adaptation. ComiPress shares the latest Tohan Top 10, and Nodame occupies three spaces on it, with the most recent volume just ahead of the first and third. It’s like the Cartoon Network Effect, only with live actors.

And what does the Daily Yomiuri think of that program?

“[I]t displayed potential for the first 15 minutes.”

In other multi-media news, Anime News Network notes the joyous arrival of the Sgt. Frog anime in February, and that the invasion began a little early.

And last but not least, that trailer for the Death Note sequel is really, really creepy. But so is the trailer for the first one.

Filed under: Del Rey, Media, Sales, Tokyopop, TV, Viz Leave a Comment

Around the world

November 16, 2006 by

Is Birmingham, England, the next big hub of the comics industry? Possibly, argues this piece in the Birmingham Post about StripSearch, an initiative for would-be cartoonists helmed by Hunt Emerson and John McCrae. The goal?

“‘We have given them the strength to break out of their nine to five hell,’ adds John ‘And throw them into comic hell…’”

There’s also a manga primer attached to the piece, and… well…

“Manga characters almost always have large eyes, small mouths, and they also usually have abnormal hair color.”

It reads like narration from a documentary on some startling genetic disorder, doesn’t it?

Still, the Midlands Comics Collective sounds like a wonderful idea, and they’ve already published an anthology. Some of the creators are also featured in The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga.

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It’s not just Nana. Apparently, Nodame Cantabile has inspired a themed café, though how anyone could want to eat after looking at a recreation of Nodame’s room is beyond me.

Filed under: Del Rey, Linkblogging, Media Leave a Comment

Updates, reviews, and long-awaited Scandinavian cartoons

November 15, 2006 by

Lyle has shared the cover of that issue of SF Weekly that featured the article on Yaoi-Con. It’s been suggested that they modified the artwork without the creator’s consent. Brigid has also found some letters to the editor in response to the article.

At The Beat, Heidi MacDonald links to an article from the Associate Press on controversial graphic novels in libraries, sparked by the dust-up in Marshall, MO. It’s a well-sourced and interesting read.

At Journalista, Dirk Deppy has heard reports from a reliable source that Yumi Hoashi left her post as head of Viz’s magazine division for a new gig, a theory posited by Simon Jones (whose blog might not be safe for work). Jones also provided me with my heartiest guffaw of yesterday, which was much appreciated:

“Won’t somebody think of the children!… who… read… the Comics Journal…”

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Brigid has also reviewed Inverloch from Seven Seas for Digital Strips. I liked the first volume a lot and keep meaning to track down the second. Johanna Draper Carlson reviews one of my favorite books, Girl Genius from Airship Entertainment. And Jamie S. Rich, author of 12 Reasons Why I Love Her from Oni, also loves June Kim’s 12 Days from Tokyopop.

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As for today’s comics, the clear front-runner (for me, at least) is Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Book One from Drawn and Quarterly. (Go here, scroll down, and click for a preview.) I’ve been looking forward to this since Free Comic Book Day, and my anticipation has only intensified thanks to the Moomin references in at least two of the manga versions of Train Man.

Speaking of that subway Romeo, Del Rey offers its one-volume shôjo take on the story. (Count Jog among the unmoved.)

If forced to pick only one item from Viz’s rather substantial list of product, hunger would win out and I’d opt for the second volume of Yakitate Japan.

The ComicList has thoughtfully compiled a manga-centric list of the week’s releases, and the MangaCasters have gone through it with a fine-toothed comb.

Filed under: Airship, ComicList, Comics in libraries, Del Rey, Drawn & Quarterly, Linkblogging, Marshall library controversy, Media, Seven Seas, Viz 1 Comment

You're always a day away

November 7, 2006 by

Another week, another opportunity to ponder the mysteries of the ComicList. Some weeks I get lucky, and Del Rey titles show up earlier than they do from Diamond (as with the excellent Genshiken vol. 7). Some weeks I’m left to writhe in jealousy as everyone else gets Love Roma vol. 4 before I do. MangaCast has a preview of Del Rey’s shôjo version of Train Man, which I believe is due in bookstores today, if not in comic shops tomorrow.

I’m curious about Project Romantic from AdHouse, but it wasn’t a book that I was confident in buying sight unseen. I’m sure I’ll get the chance when I hit Columbus for the holidays.

The concept for Hero Heel (Juné) tickles me, focusing on unexpected romance among actors in a super-hero TV show. Pick your favorite Heroes actors and play along!

Looking for something in a chic, josei, nouvelle manga style? Fanfare/Ponent Mon is releasing a new printing of Kan Takahama’s Kinderbook.

Mmmm… Greek food. Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey travel to the cradle of democracy for Action Philosophers #7: It’s All Greek To You.

Oni releases the second issue of Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt’s The Damned, a solid fusion of mob drama and supernatural weirdness.

I’m intrigued by 12 Days from Tokyopop, either in spite or because of its faintly nauseating premise. Here’s a preview from editor Lillian Diaz-Pryzbyl.

And of course, there’s always Death Note vol. 8 (Viz – Shonen Jump Advanced). MangaCast notes that the first volume of this series keeps popping up on Japanese best-seller lists.

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It seems that John Jakala is not alone. At Read About Comics, Greg McElhatton looks at the first two volumes of Drifting Classroom (Viz – Signature) and finds them really, really loud:

“With The Drifting Classroom two of its eleven volumes are now translated, and I can’t help but wonder if publishing the other nine books could somehow result in a worldwide shortage of exclamation points thanks to its relentless intensity.”

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And in this week’s Flipped, I take the really ill-advised step of reviewing Osamu Tezuka’s Ode to Kirihito (Vertical), in spite of the fact that tons of people have already done it really well. Here are some more successful examples:

Filed under: AdHouse, ComicList, Del Rey, Evil Twin, Fanfare/Ponent Mon, Flipped, Juné, Oni, Tokyopop, Vertical, Viz 3 Comments

Regional specialties

October 31, 2006 by

The Mature Graphic Novel section has not yet reached north-central West Virginia. I swung by Books-A-Million last night to see. It did look like there were fewer Juné and Blu titles than usual, so maybe they’ve been sorted out and it’s in the works. (The manager, who’s an acquaintance, wasn’t on hand to ask.)

One thing did strike me as I was browsing. It’s too bad Viz didn’t put out a Bleach box set in time for the holidays, like Tokyopop did with Kingdom Hearts. A conveniently bundled, nicely packaged chunk of the early volumes might entice the curious.

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I’m kind of baffled by the ComicList for the week. The list itself says the only Del Rey offering for the week is the second volume of Basilisk. Jog seems to think that the fourth volume of Love Roma is arriving. The e-mailer from the local comic shop suggests that the seventh volume of Genshiken will arrive. Should I focus on the happiness of new Genshiken, or wallow in the bitterness of delayed Love Roma gratification?

There does seem to be general consensus that this week will see the arrival of the second volumes of Off*Beat and The Dreaming and the fourteenth of The Kindaichi Case Files from Tokyopop. Okay, so maybe it would be nice if these suspenseful stories had dropped the day before Halloween instead of the day after. But it’s close enough.

Not to be outdone in the second volume category, Seven Seas releases the sophomore installment of Inverloch, a web-to-print fantasy story from Sarah Ellerton. I liked the first a lot.

It seems like it’s been weeks since a new volume of a post-apocalyptic survival manga showed up. Dark Horse leaps into the breach with the fifth volume of Eden: It’s an Endless World! For more science fiction, you could always check out June from Netcomics.

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There seems to be a mad flurry of manga reviews of late, and MangaBlog’s Brigid has been staying on top of them.

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So I’m glancing at the Taiyosha Top Ten over at MangaCast, and I can’t help but notice that Nodame Cantabile has really parked itself there. Volume 16 debuted at number one, with a special taking eighth place the same week. And it’s still in the top 10.

No particular point to that observation, aside from the fact that I like the book and its success makes me happy.

Filed under: Blu, Bookstores, ComicList, Dark Horse, Del Rey, Juné, Sales, Seven Seas, Tokyopop, Viz 6 Comments

Listing

October 4, 2006 by

Ah, the ComicList… some weeks are famine, others are feast. Guess which kind we have this week?

  • CMX releases the eagerly anticipated Emma, which I had reviewed in proof form a while back. The finished cover is quite lovely with an appealingly antique-y paper stock.
  • Pantheon brings the new Marjane Satrapi book, Chicken with Plums. The book made Entertainment Weekly’s Must List without any mention of it being a graphic novel.
  • Tokyopop offers the fourth volume of the little book that might, Dragon Head.
  • Viz has the fourth volume of Ai Yazawa’s Nana, which gets better with every installment. And it started really well.

Okay, that isn’t quite as burdensome as it seemed at first glance, but there’s still lots of nice stuff. The MangaCast of characters hit the highlights of the week’s manga releases. And folks like Jog and Daves Carter and Ferraro take the week’s shipping list out for a spin.

If you’re still looking for reasons to part with your hard-earned cash, there are lots of well-written reviews floating about the blogosphere:

  • Johanna Draper Carlson covers two of my favorite books (Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators and Girl Genius) in her latest column for Comics Unlimited.
  • Dirk Deppey thoughtfully examines the excellent American Born Chinese and continues his scanlation tour.
  • Lyle keeps watch on Shojo Beat previews with a look at Tail of the Moon.
  • Updated to add: Steven Grant reviews two Del Rey books, Ghost Hunt and Q-Ko-Chan, in the latest installment of Permanent Damage. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the first volume of Ghost Hunt, but it sounds like it may be worth another look.
Filed under: CMX, ComicList, Del Rey, Fanfare/Ponent Mon, Linkblogging, Pantheon, Tokyopop, Viz 1 Comment

I want a bean feast

September 30, 2006 by

The latest Previews catalog has me in a Veruca Salt kind of head space.

David Petersen’s splendid Mouse Guard (Archaia) concludes with issue #6, but the solicitation text describes it as “the first Mouse Guard series,” all but promising there will be more.

I hadn’t noticed that Housui Yamazaki, who provides illustrations for the excellent Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, has his own book, Mail, also coming out from Dark Horse. This demands further investigation, particularly since the protagonist from Mail will apparently cross over into KCDS. (I don’t like typing “cross over” when discussing manga, but I’ll reserve judgment.)

As I like Hiroki Endo’s Eden: It’s an Endless World!, and I’m also a fan of collections of shorts, chances seem good I’ll also like Endo’s Tanpeshu, also from Dark Horse.

DC – Wildstorm gives me the opportunity to enjoy a comic written by Gail Simone without having to try and wade through seventy-three different crossovers with the debut of Tranquility.

DC – Vertigo revives a book I enjoyed a lot, Sandman Mystery Theatre, with a five-issue mini-series, Sleep of Reason. Based on the pages shown in Previews, I’m not entirely sold on the art by Eric Nguyen, but I love the protagonists in this series.

Do you like Masaki Segawa’s Basilisk? Del Rey gives you the opportunity to read the novel that inspired it, The Kouga Ninja Scrolls.

Evil Twin Comics unleases another Giant-Sized Thing on the comics-reading public with the second collection of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s excellent Action Philosophers!

Dave Carter notes that the singles of the second volume of Linda Medley’s marvelous Castle Waiting (Fantagraphics) series aren’t doing that well, despite strong sales of the beautiful collection of the first. Fantagraphics gives you the opportunity to correct this sorry state of affairs with the December release of the fourth issue.

Go! Comi rolls out its seventh title, Train + Train by Hideyuki Kurata and Tomomasa Takuma. (In the future, all manga publishers will have a book with “train” in the title.)

I’ve heard a lot of good things about SoHee Park’s Goong (Ice Kunion), a look at what Korea would be like if the monarchy was still in place.

Last Gasp, publisher of Barefoot Gen, offers another look at life in Hiroshima after the bomb with Fumiyo Kouno’s Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms.

If Marvel’s current efforts at politically observant super-heroics make you roll your eyes, you might find respite in Essential Defenders Vol. 2, which includes mosst of Steve Gerber’s mind-bending Headmen arc. It strikes me as idiotic not to include the entire arc in one place, which this book just misses. It has Defenders 15-39 and Giant-Size Defenders 1-5, but not #40 and Annual #1, the conclusion of Steve Gerber’s deranged masterpiece of deformed craniums, clown cults, and women in prison.

NBM offers two books that go onto my must-buy list. The first is the paperback edition of the eighth installment of Rick Geary’s superb Treasury of Victorian Murder series, Madeleine Smith. The second is Nicolas De Crécy’s Glacial Period. De Crécy contributed a marvelous short to Fanfare/Ponent Mon’s Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators, and I’ve been hoping to see more of his work in English.

Oni Press rolls out Maintenance, a new ongoing series from Jim Massey and Robbi Rodriguez. I reviewed a preview copy earlier this week; the book looks like it will be a lot of fun.

Seven Seas unveils another licensed title, Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl, a gender-bending comedy by Satoru Akahori and Yukimaru Katsura. If you’ve been waiting for some shôjo-ai to come your way, now’s your chance.

Tokyopop – Blu promises that Tarako Kotobuki’s Love Pistols is “too crazy to be believed.” Human evolution isn’t just for monkeys any more, people.

Filed under: Blu, Dark Horse, Del Rey, Evil Twin, Fantagraphics, Go! Comi, IceKunion, Last Gasp, Marvel, NBM, Oni, Previews, Seven Seas, Wildstorm 6 Comments

Kiss her now

September 29, 2006 by

Dirk Deppey takes a look at Nodame Cantabile 6 (Del Rey) in today’s review. While I agree with him generally about the book’s merits, reading the review made me realize that the potential for romance between Chiaki and Nodame was maybe the least compelling aspect of the book for me. As Deppey puts it:

“Its two ostensible romantic leads are so wrapped up in their own little worlds that they themselves become the obstacles. It’s a wonderful display of delayed expectations, as situation after situation that a lesser writer might have played for sentiment instead becomes another lost chance, advancing the story but not necessarily the leads’ would-be relationship.”

In other words, it’s the just-kiss-already complex, but handled much more deftly by Tomoko Ninomiya than is the norm. It isn’t that I have any objections to a love match between the two, which would be pointless anyways, given its inevitability. It’s just that other elements of the book are more engaging to me. Deppey succinctly identifies these as well:

“With the conclusion of exams and subsequent graduation, the students find themselves wondering what their next step will be. There’s a wistfulness in the presentation in these sequences, perfectly capturing the sense of a tight-knit group of students facing the end of an idyllic period in their lives.”

It’s the vibe of the school and the ability of the setting to believably accommodate such an appealing group of eccentrics that draws me back volume after volume. And maybe it’s the very inevitability of the Chiaki-Nodame relationship that makes me discount it as a draw. It’s such a given part of the landscape that my attention wanders to the parts that are unexpected.

And it isn’t as though I’m immune to the just-kiss-already. I’m an unrepentant ‘shipper when it comes to Kasukabe and Madarame in Genshiken (Del Rey). They’re opposites in obvious ways, but they click for me because of their similarities. Each has an ingrained prejudice against the other’s type, but they’re prejudiced in exactly the same way.

It isn’t a case of wanting them to see past their respective surfaces and find the wonderful person underneath, because I’m not convinced either of them is a wonderful person. I think they’re both hostile narcissists, prone to disappointment in the people around them but pleased that it presents them with the opportunity to be critical. They’re united in their virtually identical contempt. Swoon!

Genshiken also offers an element of suspense. It isn’t the kind of book that seems inclined to focus on anything as direct as will-they-won’t-they, so the Kasukabe-Madarame relationship could exist entirely in my head. That seems like the perfect side-effect for a book about obsessive, overly analytical fandom.

Filed under: Del Rey, TCJ 4 Comments
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