The Manga Curmudgeon

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

You are here: Home / Archives for DMP

The year in fun (2007)

by

From a fun comics standpoint, 2007 was absolutely awesome. You know how I know? I had a hard time keeping the list below to 26 items. Okay, it’s an arbitrary number, and I could have just listed everything, but I thought I would make a stab at some pretense of discernment.

I’m not saying these are the best comics of 2007, though I’d put several in that category. I’m never entirely comfortable with that label, because I haven’t read everything and worry that my tastes are too narrow to make a reasonable stab at such a project anyways. But I have no trouble telling which comics I had a lot of fun reading, so here they are.

(Doesn’t the jump create a breathtaking level of suspense? Well, doesn’t it?)

(Updated because I can’t keep my years straight.)

  • 10, 20, and 30, by Morim Kang (Netcomics): Korean josei, basically, following three women of different ages and temperaments as they manage romance (or the lack of it), work (or the lack of it) and family (or an excess of it).
  • Aya, by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie (Drawn & Quarterly): In my defense, this came out really early in 2007, so I must have been confused and thought it was on last year’s version of this list. Because seriously, it’s one of the best graphic novels of the year and delightfully fun to boot. A sensible, ambitious young woman in the prosperous Ivory Coast of late 1970s keeps her head as the people around her leap into amusing, romantic misalliances.
  • Azumanga Daioh Omnibus, by Kyohiko Azuma (ADV): It’s tough to pick which delights me more: the resumption of publication of Azuma’s Yotsuba&!, or this big fat bargain collection of his very funny comic strips about a group of high-school girls and their eccentric teachers.
  • Black Metal, by Rick Spears and Chuck BB (Oni): Antisocial metal-heads discover their secret destiny while playing old vinyl backwards. Very funny, with appropriately and appealingly crude visuals.
  • Bloody Benders, The, by Rick Geary (NBM): I should probably feel some kind of regret that Geary will never run out of gruesome tales to fuel his Treasury of Victorian Murder series. I don’t, because they’re consistently brilliant, informative, insightful, and unsettling. For the high-minded voyeur in all of us.
  • Empowered, by Adam Warren (Dark Horse): Warren is amazingly skilled at walking a thin, frayed tightrope between lurid spandex cheesecake and a witty repudiation of the same. Terrific characters and genuinely funny, imaginative takes on potentially repetitive scenarios make all the difference.
  • Flower of Life, by Fumi Yoshinaga (Digital Manga): When people bemoan the fact that so many manga titles center on the trials and tribulations of high school students, they can’t be talking about this one, can they? I’m just going to come right out and say it: it’s every bit as good as Antique Bakery, which means it’s absolutely great.
  • Gin Tama, by Hideaki Sorachi (Viz): This one’s all about attitude: coarse, goofy, hyperactive attitude. A fallen samurai takes odd jobs in a world that’s handed the keys to alien invaders. There’s enough canny satire to balance out the low-brow antics, making this book a very pleasant surprise.
  • Glister, by Andi Watson (Image): A really delightful combination of fantasy, manor-house comedy, and singularly British sensibility. This book manages to have a warm heart and a tounge planted firmly in its cheek.
  • Honey and Clover, by Chica Umino (Viz): Okay, so this goofy, romantic tale of students at an art college is still being serialized in Shojo Beat and hasn’t come out in individual volumes yet. It’s hilarious.
  • Johnny Hiro, by Fred Chao (AdHouse): In a year that offered more genre mash-up comics than I can count, this was probably my favorite for the underlying realism of the young couple at its center. Giant monsters and ninja sous-chefs are just part of the challenges urban life presents to Johnny and Mayumi.
  • Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Book Two, by Tove Jansson (Drawn & Quarterly): Everyone knows these strips are timeless, international treasures, right? And that Drawn & Quarterly deserves some kind of cultural prize for getting them back in print? Okay, just checking.
  • My Heavenly Hockey Club, by Ai Morinaga (Del Rey): Under the flimsiest pretext of sports manga lurks a goofy love letter to two of my favorite deadly sins, sloth and gluttony. Easily the best screwball comedy that came out last year.
  • Northwest Passage: The Annotated Collection, by Scott Chantler (Oni): A handsomely produced collection of one of my favorite comics of 2006, featuring treachery and adventure in colonial Canada.
  • Parasyte, by Hitoshi Iwaaki (Del Rey): Okay, so the art is dated and, well, frankly just plain bad in a lot of ways. (Many of the high-school girls in the cast look like they’re pushing 40.) But there’s just something about a boy and the shape-shifting parasite that’s taken over his hand that warms my heart.
  • The Professor’s Daughter, by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert (First Second): There are certainly better, beefier works by Sfar, but this is still charming, beautiful stuff, with Sfar’s endearingly cranky voice getting a lovely rendering from Guibert.
  • Re-Gifters, by Mike Carey, Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel (Minx): A snazzy little story of romance, martial arts and self-esteem that avoids every single Afterschool Special pitfall through solid characterization, tight storytelling and spiffy art.
  • Ride Home, The, by Joey Weiser (AdHouse): I have yet to find a gnome living in my car, but maybe it just knows I’m on to it thanks to this charming, all-ages adventure about embracing change.
  • Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, by Bryan Lee O’Malley (Oni): This series of a young slacker in love just gets better and better, which hardly seems possible. Great characters, a spot-on kind of magical realism, and plenty of twists and turns to keep things fresh and moving.
  • Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil, by Jeff Smith (DC): The Mary Marvel sequences are enough to put this on a Decade in Fun list, but Smith’s re-imagining of the origin of Captain Marvel is delightful from top to bottom.
  • Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly): Not all comics about whiny losers who are unable to sustain interpersonal relationships are intolerable. Some, like this one, are absolutely delightful and have what may be the year’s best dialogue.
  • Suppli, by Mari Okazaki (Tokyopop): Damnation, how did this one slip under my radar for so long? In this beautifully drawn josei title, an advertising executive throws herself into work after the end of her seven-year relationship. It’s exactly the kind of book tons of people have been begging for: funny, intelligent, moving and grown up.
  • Umbrella Academy, The: Apocalypse Suite, by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá (Dark Horse): It’s hardly the first comic to portray the super-team as a dysfunctional family, or maybe even the 50th, but it’s a clever, fast-paced, wonderfully illustrated example all the same.
  • Venus in Love, by Yuki Nakaji (CMX): Aside from the novelty of its college setting (as opposed to the shôjo standard, high school), this book has ample low-key charm. A straight girl and a gay guy become friendly rivals when they realize they have a crush on the same classmate.
  • Welcome to the N.H.K., by Tatsuhiko Takimoto (Tokyopop): I can take or leave the manga this novel inspired, but the source material is tremendously appealing reading. It’s like if David Sedaris wrote a novel about straight, dysfunctional Japanese people.
  • Wild Adapter, by Kazuya Minekura (Tokyopop): Charismatic, emotionally damaged boys pose their way through the stations of the noir cross. Mostly style, but what style, and a reasonable amount of substance to keep you from feeling entirely frivolous. (If frivolity isn’t a worry, you can easily ignore the substance.)

    • Upcoming 11/14/2007

    by

    So clearly, the release of the week is Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together from Oni. The rest of the comics industry might be forgiven for just taking it easy in the face of such a formidable arrival, but they aren’t.

    Heck, even Oni isn’t, and they’re releasing Courtney Crumrin and the Fire-Thief’s Tale from Ted Naifeh. (I’ve really got to catch up on this series, because I’ve loved what I’ve read.)

    I’ll be covering it in more detail in next week’s Flipped, but I will say I really enjoyed Yuki Nakaji’s Venus in Love (CMX). It’s a sweet slice of college life about a girl and a guy who are in love with the same guy.

    A new title from Fumi Yoshinaga is always worth a look, and Digital Manga offers Garden Dreams. I tend to favor her contemporary stories to her period pieces, but I generally can’t resist either, and I’m intrigued that this one isn’t part of the Juné imprint.

    The previous volume of Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket (Tokyopop) offered the biggest bombshell in a while, and the eighteenth installment promises even more shocks. But really, the whole thing could be nothing but characters talking about their favorite onigiri filling and I’d still buy it.

    And yes, I’m still a Shojo Beat junkie, thanks to the inclusion of Honey and Clover and Sand Chronicles. Well played, Viz.

    In threes

    by

    Digital Manga is having kind of an interesting week.

    First of all, their Pop Travel Service gets a quick profile in the travel section of The New York Times.

    Then they announce a contest to encourage sign-ups for their mail order catalog, though I’m not entirely sure what that catalog will offer. Seriously, is it for manga? Merchandise? Cosplay accessories? All of the above?

    And this week’s ComicList notes the arrival of Yuno Ogami’s L’Etoile Solitaire, which the publisher describes as “its first original manga.” (It’s about romance in the hospitality industry.) The Juné blog partially answers a question before I can ask it, and points to Ogami’s English-language blog. I’m assuming the eventual plan is to “untranslate” the book and sell it in Japan, right?

    Brands across the water

    by

    The most interesting item in the latest Publishers Weekly Comics Week is Kai-Ming Cha’s piece on Digital Manga’s new initiative to co-brand licensed titles with the original Japanese publishers:

    “While manga has grown in popularity in the U.S., the Japanese publisher is usually cited only in the copyright notice while the book bears the brand of its American publisher. Japanese publisher names sometimes show up in ads for forthcoming U.S. titles. ‘You never see the Japanese corporate logo on manga licensed here,’ said [DMP president and CEO Hikaru] Sasahara… Sasahara noted that U.S. licensees rarely brand the name of Japanese publishers, ‘and that’s not good for [U.S. manga publishing] in the long run.’”

    I’m not entirely clear on why it isn’t good for publishing, though I can see why the co-branding would be useful for publishers on both sides of the licensing equation. It seems like a logical (though not always reliable) extension of creator loyalty… someone picking up a CLAMP title no matter who publishes the licensed version, or demonstrating a genre-blind willingness to try anything by Fumi Yoshinaga.

    It does strike me as something that would be more useful for smaller, more focused Japanese publishers that have more of a specialty or specific identity. Co-branding something as coming from a giant like Kodansha is kind of meaningless because its product is so varied. It would be like describing a food item as being from General Mills. Could be Haagen-Dazs, could be Pizza Rolls.

    In those cases, it would almost be more logical to identify the magazine that originally serialized the story, which would narrow things considerably and give well-informed potential customers a clearer idea of what they’re likely to get. I think it will definitely be meaningful for DMP’s boys’ love/yaoi audience.

    Oh, and this jumped out at me too:

    “‘We’ve gotten three or four inquiries to make Antique Bakery into a live-action movie or television drama,’ Sasahara said.”

    But what about a musical, damnit?! If they can turn Legally Blonde into one…

    Flower power

    by

    As I said in Chris Mautner’s reviewer round-up, I don’t think posting images with reviews is essential, but I do appreciate it when someone does it as well as Shaenon K. Garrity. I appreciate it even more when she puts her skills in service of a book I absolutely love, in this case, Fumi Yoshinaga’s Flower of Life.

    I’m kind of disappointed that I rarely see this title on bookstore shelves. There’s almost always at least one copy of at least two volumes of Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery (as it should be), but that’s rarely the case with Flower. (There is one awesome Borders in downtown DC that was like a Yoshinaga lover’s dream. They had everything.)

    Using John Jakala’s method of surveying, I notice that not a single copy of a single volume of the series is available in any of the Pittsburgh Barnes & Noble outlets. Things look better at the Pittsburgh Borders outlets. All five have copies of the first volume; four have the second in stock; only one has copies of the third.

    Previews review

    by

    There’s plenty of joy in the latest Previews catalog, and while orders are due many places today, timeliness issues have never stopped me before.

    ADV delivers the fifth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s absolutely wonderful Yotsuba&! (Page 215, AUG07 2389). I would link to the information on ADV’s web site, if such a wondrous thing existed in this day and age, so you’ll just have to settle for Amazon’s listing.

    More Fumi Yoshinaga is always worth noting, and Digital Manga delivers with Garden of Dreams, a shôjo title set in Victorian England (Page 280, AUG07, 3580).

    The easy pick of the month is the second volume of Moomin: The Complete Tove Jannson Comic Strip from Drawn & Quarterly (Page 286, AUG07, 3600). It’s glorious, timeless stuff, and it’s been beautifully packaged.

    Lots of people loved Lat’s Kampung Boy, and :01 follows up with Town Boy (Page 289, AUG07 3662). If you missed out on Kampung Boy, that’s available for re-order as well (AUG07 3663).

    If you aren’t already delirious, there’s more Andy Runton with the fourth volume of Owly: Don’t Be Afraid (or A Time to Be Brave) from Top Shelf (Page 354, AUG07 4028).

    Upcoming 7/18

    by

    I’m not going to lie to you. There’s plenty of good stuff arriving at the comic shop this week, but the bulk of my anticipatory energy is reserved for the final book in the Harry Potter series. I’m not going to dress up as a Death Eater and head to the bookstore at midnight, and I’m not going to hunt down purported spoilers on-line, but I’m a big nerd all the same.

    (I haven’t seen the fifth movie yet, because I’m waiting for the crowds to die down. I am really happy to hear from various reviews that the actor who plays Luna is spot-on. I love Luna. That probably means she’s going to die in the last book, doesn’t it? No! I can’t let myself believe that!)

    Okay, now that that nerd-splosion is out of the way, on to the ComicList for Wednesday. And really, there are some delightful books on offer. Since the site itself seems to have exceeded its bandwidth, I’ll point you straight to Diamond instead.

    Jeff Smith’s Shazam and the Monster Society of Evil (DC) has been a real pleasure to read, and it concludes today with the fourth issue. It’s been an extremely clean, purposeful book, and by “clean” I don’t mean “family friendly,” though it’s that, too. I just mean that all of the elements of Smith’s work are neatly and effectively in synch. (For those of you who passed on the individual issues, DC already has information up on the deluxe hardcover, due in October.)

    I’m still looking forward to Byun Byung Ju’s Run, Bong-Gu Run! (NBM), which is set to arrive at the local comic shop today.

    It’s a good week for fans of Fumi Yoshinaga, who has two books arriving: Don’t Say Any More, Darling (Juné) and the third volume of The Flower of Life (Digital Manga Publishing). I don’t really know much about the former, but it’s hard to go too wrong with this particular manga-ka.

    Of course, I’ve been posting about the latter ad nauseum, because it’s awesome. It’s like the high school down the block from Bakery Antique, with Yoshinaga operating on all cylinders and creating a lovely, funny world of exuberantly odd youth. No one quite occupies the same narrative turf as Yoshinaga, gently intersecting young and old, wise and foolish, and funny and sad. It’s just exquisite.

    From the stack: Flower of Life Vol. 2

    by

    In a comment, Danielle Leigh said the following about Fumi Yoshinaga’s Flower of Life:

    “(which I think is even better than Antique Bakery by some act of god or Yoshinaga)”

    It sounds kind of like madness or blasphemy, but after reading the first two volumes of Flower of Life over and over and giggling like a fool, I think I would go so far as to say the series is as good as Antique Bakery, though in different ways.

    Flower is certainly funnier. The comedy might lack the degree of nuance of Yoshinaga’s work in Antique, but jokes come thick and fast and are entirely successful. I don’t think I’ve ever been as tempted to scan and post sequences from a book, and the only thing stopping me is the fear that I would spoil Yoshinaga’s carefully constructed punch lines. I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed out loud reading a comic as often as I have with Flower, particularly throughout the second volume. The jokes don’t just work – they work over and over.

    Flower doesn’t quite have the emotional weight of Antique. That makes sense, as the characters are younger and have accumulated fewer scars. Their feelings are much closer to the surface, sweetly and hilariously so, which makes for a comparatively raucous affair. Their enthusiasms are so numerous and so fluid that the book moves along at an amazing clip.

    The lack of accumulated emotional baggage also makes Flower less structurally complex than Antique, with its carefully placed callbacks to earlier moments that gain depth and resonance as the characters reveal themselves. But the clearer canvas also allows Yoshinaga to play with youthful emotional extremes, and the characters ping off of each other in surprising, endlessly appealing ways.

    And Flower’s teen-comedy trappings really bring out Yoshinaga’s gifts as a parodist. Much of the second volume is devoted to that classic scenario, the school cultural festival, but Yoshinaga layers it with so many overturned expectations that it might very well feel like the first time you’ve ever seen one in a manga. But if Yoshinaga’s instincts for comedy have never been on better display, she’s just as generous with character development as ever.

    While Antique Bakery offers deep, often unexpected pleasures that reveal themselves over time, Flower of Life piles almost everything right on the surface, and it’s an absolute joy. They’re different animals, but they’re equally, distinctly delightful.

    March manga sales

    by

    Here are the top-selling manga in the Direct Market, pulled out of the top 100 graphic novels, via Newsarama.

    1 (2) NARUTO VOL 13 (Viz)
    2 (7) DEATH NOTE VOL 10 (Viz)
    3 (10) WARCRAFT VOL 3 (Tokyopop)
    4 (17) BERSERK VOL 16 (Dark Horse)
    5 (50) BATTLE CLUB VOL 4 (Tokyopop)
    6 (51) TRINITY BLOOD VOL 2 (Tokyopop)
    7 (53) FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST VOL 12 (Viz)
    8 (62) GUNSMITH CATS OMNIBUS VOL 1 (Dark Horse)
    9 (68) CRYING FREEMAN VOL 5 (Dark Horse)
    10 (69) ALCOHOL SHIRT & KISS VOL 1 (Digital Manga)
    11 (71) DAY WHICH I BECAME BUTTERFLY (Digital Manga)
    12 (73) SOLFEGE (Digital Manga)
    13 (74) BLACK CAT VOL 7 (Viz)
    14 (79) PRIEST VOL 16 (Tokyopop)
    15 (86) INNOCENT BIRD VOL 1 (Tokyopop – Blu)
    16 (88) IS VOL 12 (Viz)
    17 (91) KASHIMASHI MANGA VOL 2 (Seven Seas)
    18 (93) TSUKUYOMI MOON PHASE VOL 6 (Tokyopop)
    19 (95) ROSE HIP ZERO VOL 2 (Tokyopop)
    20 (96) READ OR DREAM VOL 3 (Viz)
    21 (97) MABURAHO MANGA VOL 2 (ADV)
    22 (100) KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE VOL 3 (Dark Horse)

    Nothing tremendously surprising here, with the sprinking of perennial sellers up top, a healthy handful of boys’ love and yaoi, and a strong performance for Dark Horse, which always seems to earn solid numbers in comic shops. Most of the manga action is confined to the bottom half of the top 100, but three books cracked the top 10. That’s an unusually weak performance for Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 12, but it did ship towards the end of the month.

    Dark Horse had a terrific month overall, taking the top graphic novel spot with the hardcover of 300 and solid showings for books like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Empowered. The first issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 cracked the top ten in floppies, which is quite an accomplishment for a publisher that isn’t Marvel or DC. And while coming in at the very bottom of the graphic novel list might not seem like a huge accomplishment, I’ll trumpet any traction gained by The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.