Spending too much on comics, then talking too much about them
This has been a topic of conversation in the manga-oriented corner of Twitter lately, so I thought I’d run a poll. Note that I said “buy” instead of “read” in the poll’s title.
Also on the subject of classics, or maybe not, if you’re looking for a meaty read on the subject as it relates to the possibilities and perils of establishing a manga canon, click right over to this piece by Kate Dacey at The Manga Critic.
Time for a quick look at this week’s ComicList:
In 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.
This 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:
If the total at the cash register doesn’t already have you crying, not to worry. The comics themselves probably will.
First, there’s a new Flipped up over at The Comics Reporter. I worked really hard on it, and even I don’t even care any more, because, wow, what’s the opposite of a slow news day? Monday, Aug. 31, 2009, that’s what the opposite is.
Since Marvel and Disney are so 10:18 a.m., I’ll point you towards Brigid Alverson’s scoop that Kodansha is letting its licenses with Tokyopop lapse. I popped over to Wikipedia to see if there was any handy chart or graph that would allow me to compare original publisher and U.S. licensing agent, and voila. It’s incomplete and should probably be taken with whatever quantity of salt you usually apply to that particular resource, but it’s a start, and here are the titles I culled (with an updated pointer to Deb Aoki’s breakdown of which titles are unfinished):
A.I. Love You
Baby Birth
Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad
Blame!
Boys Be…
Cardcaptor Sakura (due for omnibus treatment from Dark Horse, I think)
Cherry Juice
Chobits (due for omnibus treatment from Dark Horse)
Clover (available in new omnibus from Dark Horse)
Confidential Confessions
Culdcept
Cyborg 009
Dead End
Deus Vitae
Dragon Head
Dragon Voice
Dream Saga
Et Cetera
FLCL
Flower of Eden (licensed but never published)
GetBackers
Girl Got Game
Great Teacher Onizuka
GTO: The Early Years
Harlem BeatRebound
Heat Guy J
Ice Blade
Initial D
Instant Teen: Just Add Nuts
Jing: King of Bandits
Kami Kaze
Kamichama Karin
Kedamono Damono
Kilala Princess
Kindaichi Case Files
Life
Love Hina
Magic Knight Rayearth
Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi
Mars
Mink
Miracle Girls
Mobile Fighter G Gundam
Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story: The Blue Destiny
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing
Parasyte (since published anew by Del Rey)
Peach Girl and spin-offs
Pixie Pop
Planetes
Le Portrait de Petite Cossette
Psychic Academy
Rave Master
Remote
RG Veda
Rose Hip Rose
Sailor Moon
Saint Tail
Sakura Taisen
Samurai Deeper Kyo (picked up by Del Rey)
Smuggler
Telepathic Wanderers
Tokyo Mew Mew and sequel
Tramps Like Us
Voices of a Distant Star
Warriors of Tao
Zodiac P.I.
Feel free to note any I missed in the comments, and I’ll update the list.
I overlooked a choice item on this week’s shipping list, as it was part of Diamond’s Adult roster of arrivals. (I hope I’m in the minority.) It’s Junko Mizuno’s Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu from Last Gasp, and it’s easily the pick of the week:
“Artist Junko Mizuno unleashes her unique graphic storytelling sensibilities on a tale that’s frequently adorable, sometimes grotesque, and surprisingly moving.”
It sounds like vintage Mizuno, in other words. Deb Aoki has an interview with Mizuno up at About.Com conducted at a signing at New People in San Francisco. Ryan Sands has some photos of the event over at Same Hat! Same Hat! (Oh, and Sands is interviewed by Kai-Ming Cha in the latest Publishers Weekly Comics Week about his upcoming Last Gasp project, Suehiro Maruo’s The Strange Tale of Panorama Island.)
In other fringe manga news, Viz has added another series to its SIGIKKI line-up, Temari Tamura’s I Am a Turtle:
“Follow this turtle down a Zen path through the wondrous natural world of Japan. Witness his simple life on a tea farm with his young master. Meet other animals such as his neighbor, the Sea Dog, an owl, a family of boars and, of course, more turtles! Come see how much better life can be when you’re a turtle.”
I don’t think that was ever really in question, was it? Looks like a quirky, well-drawn, reasonably charming offering to me.
Oh, and utterly unrelated, while looking around Diamond’s site, I noticed this article on the best fictional schools and was scandalized to find not a single entry from any manga series. This seems egregious, given the volume of such institutions available for consideration.
Over at The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon is assembling a roster of works to consider for the Best of the Decade, 2000 to 2009. Go take a look, then send Tom your own suggestions. The starter list is already amazingly formidable.
When writing this week’s Flipped, I surfed around for some information about Crown co-creator Shinji Wada, not being familiar with his body of work. I almost immediately discovered that Wada had given the world something called Delinquent Girl Detective (or Sukeban Deka), and I knew that this week’s license request was all but written.
“The series follows a delinquent schoolgirl who is taken in by the government and forced to fight crime to redeem herself,” claims Wikipedia. “She is given the codename ‘Saki Asamiya’ and a metal yo-yo that doubled as a badge and made to infiltrate high schools around Japan to investigate and stop the criminal activities.”
Clearly, awesome as Delinquent Girl Detective is as a title, it is merely a whisper of a hint of the absorbing lunacy of the series itself. Mentioning Sukeban Deka on Twitter led to a flurry of love for our yo-yo wielding gang girl gone undercover, most notably from Erica Friedman. Here’s her review of one of the live-action movies based on the franchise, which includes an overview of its multimedia history:
“Sukeban Deka began life as a manga, which was then made into an anime OAV and, in the 80’s, a popular three-season live-action TV show, all of which I have reviewed previously. For the basic plotline, general Yuri-ness and links to manga and anime on Amazon JP and Amazon respectively, click the link to the past review.”
You should obviously click through to that previous review, if only for this faultlessly persuasive opening gambit:
“But what, you ask, if I like shoujo manga, but I also like sex and guns and violence, and sex? Well, obviously, I wouldn’t have brought this up without an answer, would I?”
If I were a weaker person, I’d quote Jerry Maguire, but that’s a dated reference. I also haven’t seen the movie and hope never to do so. I could make even more dated references to 21 Jump Street, The Mod Squad, and juvie movies starring Linda Blair, but they really aren’t necessary, are they?
Sukeban Deka was originally serialized in Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume magazine, then collected in 22 volumes, then re-published in 12 volumes. I can’t seem to find any information at Hakusensha’s web site, but here’s a starter link from Amazon Japan. (UPDATE: Sean notes in the comments that the book moved from Hakusensha to Media Factory.)
Now, many of you are probably saying to yourselves, “Oh, yeah… a vintage, 22-volume shôjo series… I’m sure publishers will get right on that.” You’re probably right, but I must remind you that any commercially viable series that appear in these posts do so by pure coincidence. If I want to ask for dated, bat-shit crazy gang-girl drama, I will ask for it.
(Is there something you want to ask for from the manga gatekeepers? Drop me a line if you’d like to do a guest post.)
Before I delve into this week’s ComicList (which is impressive), I wanted to make sure to point you towards Christopher Butcher’s examination of San Francisco’s New People center and what it might mean for the evolution of otaku culture in North America.
Okay, moving on to the “bitter complaint” agenda item: as regular readers of this blog surely know by now, I’ve been obsessively stalking the progress towards English-language publication of Fumi Yoshinaga’s award-winning Ôoku: The Inner Chambers for a really long time. It’s included on Diamond’s shipping list, but @Toukochan informs me that the quasi-monopolistic distributor evinces a winsome disregard for residents of “the North (Update: Apparently, the problem is not with Diamond but with garden variety slapdash-ery at the local level. There will always be reasons to say “Screw you, Diamond,” but this is not among them. Apologies.)westeast Corridor” and often makes us wait for a week or more for new Viz titles. So when I said to myself, “Gosh, I really want to support manga for grown-ups in the direct market, and I also want to make sure I get a copy of this in a timely fashion, so I should pre-order it,” I should have replaced “in a timely fashion” with “at some point.” Screw you, Diamond.
On the bright side, Diamond will manage to deliver the fourth and final volume of Astral Project (CMX) in a timely fashion. I’m not sure how marginal and Syuji Takeya are going to wrap up the many concurrent threads of the story, but I’m sure it will be fascinating. I’m also sure that I will wish there were more volumes. (And I really need to track down a copy of Mai Nishikata’s Venus Capriccio, which has gotten a lot of review love. The second volume arrives Wednesday.)
Del Rey continues with the manga-fication of Marvel’s mutant franchise with X-Men: Misfits, written by Raina (Smile, The Baby-Sitters Club) Telgemeier and Dave (Agnes Quill) Roman and illustrated by Anzu. It’s all about Kitty Pryde’s admission to Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, which sounds like a promising take on the property.
Random House releases Josh Neufeld’s A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge, a journalistic look at various citizens’ experiences during and after Hurricane Katrina. I’m planning on posting a full review later this week, but Neufeld has done a fine job with the subject matter. It’s excellent graphic-novel reportage. Tom Spurgeon recently ran a meaty interview with Neufeld about the genesis and evolution of the project.
I already picked up a copy of the fourth volume of Naoki Urasawa’s excellent 20th Century Boys (Viz) over the weekend at a bookstore, which is what I probably should have done with Ôoku, not that I’m bitter or anything. Urasawa continues to fold complications into his thriller while introducing and expanding on his complex cast of characters. It’s well worth your money, though Northeast Corridor residents may have to wait. Also promising is the first volume of Shiro Miwa’s Dogs: Bullets and Carnage. I really enjoyed the prelude volume.
Erica Friedman graciously invited me to provide a guest review for Okazu, so I set out to find the highest-profile comic-book lesbian I could. And Batwoman is New York Times high-profile comic-book lesbian.
Over at About.Com, Deb Aoki provides a wrap-up of Tokyopop’s recent webcast, including a list of upcoming new titles and updates about ongoing series. If you’ve got a minute, check Deb’s listings, then take a look at the poll below and click whichever titles sound good to you.
I usually enjoy series that use eateries as a setting, so I’ve got my eye on Kou Matsuzuki’s Happy Café. I’m also a fan of whodunits, so I’ll certainly give Yoshitsugu Katagari’s Kokaku Detective Story a try. Higuchi Tachibana’s Portrait of M & N sounds like it could be really intriguing or go horribly awry. And the prospect of a bishie-infested, eye-rolling take on Wonderland draws me to Alice in the Country of Hearts by quinrose and Hoshino Soumei.
Time for a quick look at this week’s ComicList:
I’m looking forward to reading the second volume of Motoro Mase’s Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit, a creepy, slice-of-death story about a place that has taken social engineering to a slightly absurd but undeniably chilling new level. To promote order and the value of life, a government is randomly choosing citizens to die in their late teens or early twenties, and readers are invited to follow an ambivalent civil servant tasked with informing the soon-to-be deceased that they really lost out in life’s lottery. In episodic science-fiction or fantasy series, I’m almost always less interested in underlying subplots than the episode-to-episode structure, but I’m hoping Mase continues to build on the civil servant’s growing discomfort with the system he supports. I enjoyed the first volume, and I’ll certainly stick around for a while.
I meant to review the first issue of the Marvel Divas mini-series (Marvel, needless to say), but I kept forgetting to do so, which I guess amounts to some kind of a critique. It’s about four B- to C-list Marvel super-heroines who hang out, sip cocktails, and help each other through their personal problems, which range from terrible exes to questionable currents, booty calls gone wrong to power-driven health crises. The featured heroines mostly track with my preferred portrayals of them, assuming I had an opinion in the first place. Writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa seems to like and respect the characters, Tonci Zonjic is a competent illustrator, and Jelena Kevic-Djurdjevic’s cover for the second issue, due out Wednesday, is a vast improvement over J. Scott Campbell’s first-issue travesty.
CMX debuts a new series, Shouko Fukaki’s The Battle of Genryu: Origin. It’s a martial-arts manga about a boy with a mysterious family and an equally mysterious monthly power-up that significantly boosts his natural abilities. (Insert your own PMS joke, if you must.) I read a preview copy from the publisher, and I have to say that I’m just not the audience for this kind of thing. Most of these bare-knuckled-combat series seem virtually identical to me, and this one doesn’t offer any quirks or novelty to overcome the familiarity. It’s not as offensive as some or baffling as others, but still..