The Manga Curmudgeon

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

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Kodansha debut

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Calvin Reid’s interview with Kodansha Comics honcho Yoshio Irie is up at Publishers Weekly Comics Week. Lots of confirmation of stuff we basically already knew but never had on the record (unless Amazon and Diamond count) and cordial but noncommittal discussion of future directions, plus (perfectly understandable, not-at-all unexpected) heartbreak:

“PWCW: Can we expect to see American versions of Kodansha manga anthology magazines for the U.S. audience?

“YI: Are printed anthology magazines a direction to go in at this point? Our bet is that it isn’t. It doesn’t really make sense to set up serialization magazines unless your aim is to generate new original series locally.”

Sigh. No American Afternoon, I guess.

Comps, complaints, companies

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Johanna Draper Carlson examines the new Federal Trade Commission requirements for bloggers to disclose “material connections” related to the products they discuss. I’ve always gone with transparency when it comes to this stuff out of some vague sense that it was ethical, though I can’t really pinpoint what exactly made me think that. It just seemed easier and clearer, though I don’t think less of anyone who doesn’t. It just works for me. As to whether or not use of the disclaimer makes me look amateurish, I don’t much care, because I am an amateur. This is a hobby.

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Kate Dacey examines a raging case of fan entitlement triggered by Yen Press giving a new cover to a light novel in a clearly sinister attempt to make it appealing for people who might enjoy it.

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And just to clarify or reiterate something from yesterday, I think the newsworthy aspect of Calvin Reid’s Kodansha scoop from yesterday is the fact that Kodansha actually spoke to someone about a development that’s been confirmed for over a year. I’m not minimizing that, honestly, and I’m really looking forward to the interview that’s due later today, but… The fact that they’re setting up an office in Manhattan is news, though it kind of feels like news along the lines of someone starting to leave toiletries at their lover’s apartment, you know?

And aside from their massive withdrawal of licenses from Tokyopop and smaller reclamation from Dark Horse, Kodansha has still been licensing material through other publishers. There are two upcoming titles from Vertical, and Del Rey has retained all of its Kodansha properties and continues to announce new ones. In spite of the loss of perennial cash cows Akira and Ghost in the Shell (which Kodansha Comics solicited in the August edition of Previews), or perhaps because of it, Dark Horse has been given some of those lost Tokyopop licenses and will be rolling out more CLAMP omnibuses in addition to the already available Clover collection. And Dark Horse still has Kodansha’s Eden: It’s an Endless World! and Oh My Goddess.

Even Viz has at least one Kodansha license, Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, which is available in regular and VizBig editions. I think William Flanagan suggested on Twitter that this is because Inoue is in the position to decide who licenses his work, Kodansha-Shogakukan-Shueisha rivalry be damned.

Don't startle the unicorn

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At Publishers Weekly, Calvin Reid accomplishes the seemingly impossible. He speaks to someone from Kodansha Comics:

“Irie said Kodansha Comics will begin gradually and announce more titles for its list later in the year. While the new line will focus on translating Kodansha’s prodigious backlist of bestselling titles into English, he did not rule out original publishing. ‘It is one of our eventual ambitions,’ said Irie.”

Reid promises the full interview in this week’s Comics Week newsletter, due Tuesday.

Extras, extras

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In addition to really good free comics, Viz’s SIGIKKI site also posts some fun supplementary content. Senior Editor Eric Searleman asked a bunch of nerds (me included) to describe that moment when they knew they were irretrievably lost to manga, and the results (with photo evidence) are here.

And for a company known for its professional decorum, the site’s blog is pretty freewheeling. It even recalls the glory days when Anne Ishi was tearing things up for Vertical. By way of example, here’s a piece by Senior Editor Leyla Aker on her attempts to purchase a trade paperback that ended up spanning two coasts and running the gamut of unfortunate things that can happen in a comic shop:

“Stand in front of guy at desk for a minute. He’s reading. No reaction. Out of curiosity I continue to stand there, shift my bag/jingle my keys so I’m sure he knows I’m there. No reaction. Finally I hazard human speech, excuse myself, say I’m looking for a certain DC compilation, and ask if they might have it. Without lifting his eyes, he’s says ‘No.’ The end.”

It might be safest for comic shops to assume that someone with a blog is visiting their premises at all times, you know? But the main point of Aker’s post is a nice hands-across-the-water story:

“But, like mom always said, you need a balanced diet to stay healthy, and at some point I’d fallen into the blinkered trap of disparaging superhero comics. I became U.S. comics anemic.”

I thought the comic that inspired this quest was kind of awful, but I appreciate the overall sentiment.

Simon says

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As many of us hoped he would, Simon Jones of Icarus Publishing (whose blog may not be safe for work) has weighed in on the leaked draft of a pitch letter from a scan aggregation site to a major publisher of translated manga:

“The reason print publishers have yet to fully embrace free online ad-supported publishing on the PC is largely because ad profits do not outweigh the diminished print sales due to free distribution. It doesn’t matter that scanlations have legit promotional qualities when the result is still a net loss for the publisher. Otherwise, publishers would be doing this themselves.”

Go read. Or wait until you get home, then go read. Either way, you should also go read the lively commentary on the subject at MangaBlog.

License request day: Tasogare Ryuuseigun

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I’m actually closer to retirement age than adolescence. (I’m probably not closer to actual retirement, and some portion of me will probably never move past adolescence entirely, but that’s neither here nor there.) So perhaps it’s natural that I would start looking for sensitive comic-book portrayals of senior citizens. Or maybe I’m just perversely looking for drastically unlikely properties to request for publication in English.

Whatever the reason, I’ve had a needling fascination for the niche category known as “silver manga” ever since I read about it in Paul Gravett’s Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (Harper Design). Even I doubt that the documented college-student fondness for Golden Girls reruns would translate into demand for comics from this category, and today’s featured title has a number of other strikes against its likely licensing, but it never hurts to ask.

So let’s carefully immerse ourselves into the deep end of the pool during adult swim, shall we? Let’s take a look at Kenshi Hirokane’s Tasogare Ryuuseigun (or Like Shooting Stars in the Twilight), originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Original.

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Here’s Gravett’s description:

“They can also find respectful portrayals of senior citizens in new, so-called ‘silver’ manga, in which they are no longer reduced to the cliches of either wise elders or grumpy old fools. Like Shooting Stars in the Twilight is the metaphorical title of one series, in which protagonists in their sixties and older are shown still enjoying romance and sex to the full.”

shootingstarcoverAs lovely as that sounds to me, I can easily picture a lot of the primary audience for manga in English recoiling in abject horror from the very idea. For me, that reaction just offers bonus points, but I know that doesn’t reflect a particularly commercial mindset.

You’re probably familiar with Hirokane as the creator of Section Chief Kôsaku Shima, the ultimate salaryman manga. If you aren’t familiar with it, check out John Jakala’s tribute to the title. I certainly share John’s desire for more of that book and for office manga in general, but John’s covered it nicely, so why be redundant?

bcocoverLike Shooting Stars won an Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2000, so there’s that in its favor. Working against it is the fact that the series is 35 volumes long and, as near as I can tell, still ongoing. And that’s putting aside the fact that it features dignified portrayals of senior citizens in a market that’s yet to demonstrate consistent demand about portrayals of people in their twenties. But as I said, it never hurts to ask.

Credits report

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Yesterday, Dirk Deppey featured a quote from Andrew Wheeler that was critical of the packaging of The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks from Three Rivers Press. Specifically, the publisher highlighted the author of the graphic novel while pretty much burying the artist’s name. Ibraim Roberson doesn’t actually have a cover credit for the book on the preview proof, though there’s a small signature next to the leftmost zombie. He doesn’t even get a credit on the publisher’s online listing for the book. He does seem to be credited on what’s likely the final cover for the book, shown below. Still, the initial cover credits were an undeniably bad choice, since Roberson’s gory, energetic contributions are pretty much essential. I’ve read about half of a preview copy of the book, and it’s a neat idea – a sort of anthropological, archeological look at zombie attacks throughout history. It’s not exactly rich in text, and Roberson does all of the heavy lifting. But anyway, here’s the cover that seems to likely to actually arrive in bookstores:

recordedattacks

It did make me wonder how other publishers and publisher imprints have handled this sort of thing, since graphic-novel adaptations of popular prose have made such headway lately.

inoddwetrust

Del Rey doesn’t credit Queenie Chan on their web site, but she fares better on the cover of In Odd We Trust, her collaborative adaptation with Dean Koontz. She gets a co-writer credit with Koontz and a separate illustrator credit. It’s sensible to me that Koontz’s name is big and bold up at the top, since he’s the main attraction for casual readers or newcomers to graphic novels.

Hunter

Darwyn Cooke actually comes out ahead of Richard Stark on IDW’s page for Cooke’s adaptation of The Hunter. The cover credits seem to strike an okay balance between the creator of the property being adapted and the adaptor.

babysittersclub

Graphix takes a similar approach with Raina Telgemeier’s credits on the cover of her adaptations of Ann M. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club books. The placement and proportion of Telgemeier’s credit is roughly similar, though her name is preceded by “A Graphic Novel By…” which I like.

maximumride

NaRae Lee’s credit on the cover of Maximum Ride (Yen Press), based on a popular property by James Patterson, is fairly dinky. It’s there, but it’s dinky. His prose collaborators seem to get better placement.

I can’t quite bring myself to delve into Marvel’s adaptations of books by people like Laurell K. Hamilton, Stephen King, and others. I know that they’re out there, and a glance at some of the covers indicates that their modus operandi follows the pattern of “big credit for name author, standard credits for comic writers and artists.”

Update: At The Beat, Heidi MacDonald notes that Amazon doesn’t seem inclined to credit illustrators.

Shame! People will see them and cry…

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Over at The Manga Critic, Kate Dacey takes readers on a tour of her Manga Hall of Shame:

“The flipside of being a gourmand is that I’ve encountered my share of truly dreadful stuff, too — the kind of manga with such incoherent plots, unappealing characters, clumsy artwork, and tin-eared dialogue that they beg the question, Who thought this was a good idea?”

My personal set of neuroses must be such that I edit out memories of truly dreadful manga that I’ve read, and that’s a blessing, because I know I’ve read a lot of it. So it’s much easier for me to define some qualities that render a comic unreadable for me:

  • Needlessly impenetrable logic systems: When characters need to provide a running narrative on what precisely they’re doing for a reader to have the vaguest clue, it’s all over. This is probably because I care less how the characters are using their incomprehensible power sets than I do about what the characters are like as… y’know… characters.
  • Fan service that isn’t remotely sexy: I honestly don’t have a problem with fan service, provided it’s actually enticing. When it ends up looking like some weird anatomical chart or it’s ultimately sex-negative, I’ll take a pass.
  • Indifferent execution: Is there anything sadder than a great idea that ends up stillborn because more energy went into the conceptualization than the execution? It’s probably unfair, but I get more irritated with comics that could have been great but wound up mediocre than I do with comics that never stood a chance of being anything but dreadful. At least resolutely dreadful comics can be fun… briefly.
  • Bait and switch: Along the same lines, I entirely over-personalize it when a good first volume is followed by an absolutely untenable second. I don’t know if that’s the result of editorial interference or if the creator only had once decent volume worth of ideas in them, but it really, really gets on my nerves.

    • Anyway, go over and share the pain with Kate. You’ll feel better.

    Shop talk

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    Over at About.Com, Deb Aoki has a terrific interview with Gaston Dominguez-Letelier, owner and founder of the highly regarded Meltdown Comics & Collectibles in Los Angeles. They talk about the various hassles of selling manga in a Direct Market comic shop, even for retailers who really want to sell manga.

    There’s also some jaw-dropping detail about the specific challenges for a retailer in L.A., including this tidbit:

    “Some junior execs, assistants, others [entertainment] industry types order tons of books from us, then find out that they can download them for free via fan translations from online share sites.

    “It’s not really something I can definitively put a dollar value on, but these free download sites have really impacted our manga sales to the college set and our younger readers-base. This kind of this would be the death of the book publishing if it wasn’t for buyers who prefer to have a physical book to read and collect.”

    Seriously, go read it.

    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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