It probably won’t come as any surprise to you that I was a weird kid. One of the many, many ways I was weird had to do with beverages. Virtually anything one could imbibe just tasted better to me if it was served in a glass from my parents’ cocktail set, and it would taste better still if it was garnished in some way, preferably with a maraschino cherry. This applied to everything from soda (in the evenings, obviously, or as an after-school libation) to juice in the morning.

It’s not like I’ve turned into a huge drunk or anything. As I age I find that my tolerance is waning for such things, so I tend to drink for the taste of things. I don’t really get cocktail culture, and I die inside when I look at a restaurant’s “martini menu” and see ingredients best confined to the candy counter and not the bar. (I blame Sandra Lee. I could endorse a “Cocktail Time” segment in just about any cooking program, but not when it involves so much white chocolate liqueur, or any at all.)

But mixology does have its allure for me. As a result, today’s license request is served up by a handsome fellow in a vest with a shaker at the ready: Bartender, originally published by Shueisha in Super Jump, written by Araki Joh (which just sounds like a name you’d hear in a lounge, doesn’t it?) and illustrated by Kenji Nagatomo.

Bartender is about a guy who works in a tucked-away watering hole in the Ginza, mixing life-changing cocktails for a long line of customers from all walks of life. With his gift for mixology and the apocryphal wisdom of the booze peddler, Sasakura makes everything better through liquor. That, my friends, is a beautiful, uplifting message for a comic. Okay, maybe not, but it sounds like a lot of fun. It’s possible that 15 volumes of cocktails might be too much for the average reader, but we can all throw up over that bridge’s railing when we come to it, right?

Joh followed Bartender with Sommelier in Business Jump, so libations are clearly something of a fixation for the author. Sommelier sounds kind of like the wine snob’s equivalent of Black Jack, which could be all kinds of awesome, but I feel like I should only have one wine manga in the hopper at a time.

I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with anyone who’s read Setona Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare (Go! Comi) who hasn’t at least enjoyed it. The vast majority have loved it, which might explain why it’s been listed in the Top Ten of 2008’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens and why it was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2007. It’s just that good. So naturally, there must be great heaps of her work available in English, right? When you catch the scent of a special talent like Mizushiro, you trip over yourself to publish as much of her work as you can, don’t you? It’s the Yoshinaga Principle.

Unfortunately, there’s only one other work by Mizushiro in translation, the two-volume X-Day (Tokyopop), which is good. It’s not as good as After School Nightmare, but not much is, and it’s short, so why complain? Just be forewarned that it isn’t the pulse-pounding thriller you might expect. It’s more of an encounter group for the disturbed, and the disturbed are something of a specialty for Mizushiro. And that’s the big reason I’d like for more of her work to be available in English.

Casting my eyes over the Atlantic, I see a likely candidate called Diamond Head, originally published by Shogakukan and released in French by Asuka. What’s it about? Why, it’s about a high school with a twisted social structure, naturally enough. This is Mizushiro.

The protagonist, Nanao, transfers to a Catholic school and is quickly invited to join the club that serves as a sort of student court, resolving disputes between co-eds. The club consists largely of hot guys, including an androgynous one, so naturally lots of Nanao’s female classmates hate her for catching the eye of their princes. As Nanao reluctantly becomes involved with this cafeteria-based court of last resort, she becomes romantically entangled with her fellow judges.

So basically we have a messed-up school culture, complex romantic geometry, and just enough gender-bending to keep things unpredictable, plus drama, drama, drama. In other words, we apparently have all the things that make Mizushiro manga this close to a controlled substance. Viz? Would you be so kind?

(If you click on the button with the magnifying glass under the cover images on the listings for the five volumes of the series at Shogakukan’s site, you can see preview pages.)

We’ll take a break from the usual license request agenda today. I’ve been trying to think of something seasonal to highlight today. Unfortunately, I’ve already asked for Hikaru Nakamura’s Saint Young Men, so I can’t go with the whole “reason for the season” angle. While it doesn’t feature a virgin birth, reliable sources inform me that Makoto Kobayashi’s Chichonmanchi does launch with a virgin death, but I try to cap this blog at PG-13, so I’ll hold off on that for now.

But it is the time of year when many of us turn our thoughts to the neglected and abandoned. So what better way to mark this time of year than to ask for the rescue of three terrific titles that have yet to see their entire runs printed in English?

In fairness, Makoto Kobayashi’s Club 9 has been published in English in its entirety in Dark Horse’s defunct Super Manga Blast, but it hasn’t been collected in its entirety. It’s a sweet, hilarious tale of a country girl who goes to work in a big-city host club. Sophisticated slapstick is difficult to achieve, and this is one of the finest success stories I can conjure. Three of the five volumes of the series are still available from Dark Horse, and I suppose I could try and track down all the back issues of Super Manga Blast, but I gave up back-issue bins when I gave up super-hero comics.

Is there a title that’s inspired more seemingly fruitless yearning than Even a Monkey Can Drawn Manga by Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma? Viz serialized some of it in its defunct Pulp magazine and published one volume, but there are two more out there, shivering and hungry in some sad corner of manga limbo. Is that a just fate for this hilarious parody of instruction manuals and the manga industry as a whole? Do those of us who have read and loved the first volume deserve to be left hanging like this when we yearn to see what heights of satire and questionable taste Aihara and Takekuma reach in later chapters? That sounds pretty Grinch-y to me.

Once upon a time, before Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkonkinkreet won an Eisner and GoGo Monster blew many of our minds, Viz tried to publish a little series called No. 5. The two volumes Viz published tanked rather spectacularly, but this was before everyone recognized that Matsumoto is a genius, right? Times have changed, haven’t they? And while releasing Matsumoto may not exactly be printing money, perhaps it’s time to give the rest of the eight-volume series? This was also before Viz had its excellent SigIKKI initiative, and guess where No. 5 was originally serialized? That’s right: IKKI magazine. Perhaps the time is right to at least try and publish it online to see if there’s more of an audience today than there was in 2002?

While I won’t repeat myself on the subject, I’ll just throw out a reminder that it’s rather tragic that we only ever got two volumes of Atsushi Kaneko’s Bambi and Her Pink Gun from Digital Manga. What rescues are on your wish list?

The recent announcement that NBM would be publishing another comic about the Louvre got me thinking about their first in this series, Nicolas de Crécy’s Glacial Period, which is wonderful. So for this week’s license request, I’d like to take a break from Japan and head back to France, because there are too few comics by de Crécy in translation, and there are also too few comics about dogs who are auto mechanics. If some kind publisher were to pick up de Crécy’s Salvatore, we could ameliorate both of those shortages.

Dupuis has published the three available volumes, and they describe the story thusly:

“Salvatore is a garage mechanic. And a good one at that: he is known throughout the region! Someone who has elevated mechanics to the level of art. And yet, Salvatore lives right up in the mountains, far away from noise and people. He does not like people very much. Those who hurry him when he is savouring his fondue, or those who prevent him from enjoying a cigarette and reading the newspaper after a meal. So he shamelessly makes them wait. And sometimes, he even steals a part from the engines entrusted to him… Like well-oiled machinery, Salvatore has conceived a diabolical plan to find Julie, the one he loves. And no one will stand in his way, no one.”

The first volume, Transports amoureux, seems to feature a demanding pig. The second, Le grand depart, involves a found-object artist who happens to be a cow and an inconvenient litter of piglets. The third volume, Une traversée mouvementée, sees our cantankerous canine hero off on the road to find his true love. All three volumes feature de Crécy’s eye-catching, adorable but somewhat grotesque illustrative style.

Now, anyone who has read Glacial Period (and I hope that’s most of you) knows that de Crécy has a knack for idiosyncratic, anthropomorphous protagonists, and I see no evidence that he’s lost his touch. And if you can look into your soul and say that no, you really don’t want to read a comic where a dog makes himself fondue, then perhaps you need to sit down and think about your priorities.