At About.Com, Deb Aoki continues her poll series asking for visitors to vote for the Best New Seinen (Men’s) Manga of 2008. While there are lots of great books on the ballot, I’m going to have to go with Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary (Fanfare/Ponent Mon) for its combination of publishing ambition and entertainment value. But it really is quite a varied list with lots of quality entries for a variety of tastes.
You thought you were done with voting for a while
Over at About.Com, Deb Aoki is running polls on 2008’s Best New Shonen Manga and Best New Shojo Manga series.
In case you’re curious, I picked Hiro Mashima’s Fairy Tail (Del Rey) in the Shonen poll and Hinako Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles (Viz) in the Shojo run-off. Neither choice was particularly easy, as there are fun new series on both ballots. The Shojo pick was particularly tough, what with books like Ai Morinaga’s Your and My Secret and Kazune Kawahara’s High School Debut in the running.
Looking forward
In an uncharacteristic burst of optimism, I devote this week’s Flipped to the exciting prospects of 2009. Deb Aoki has already weighed in on the topic over at About.Com, which probably renders mine redundant, but hey…
What does this mean for the three-martini lunch?
Writing for The New York Times, Motoko Rich looks at “the new austerity in publishing”:
“Venerable houses including HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster have all announced salary freezes or layoffs, or both. Simon & Schuster canceled its annual holiday party, held for the last few years at Tavern on the Green and scheduled in 2008 for Guastavino’s, a splashy banquet hall in Manhattan. One division of Random House had pizza, beer and wine in a room off the cafeteria for its holiday lunch instead of going out for pricey cocktails. Across the city, editors with Four Seasons taste are being asked to scale back on their lunch tabs.”
It’s not all parties and perks, though, as Rich looks at some of the costlier aspects of book publishing, such as returns and creator advances. No mention of the graphic novel sector of the publishing industry, but lots of houses with significant graphic novel imprints or distribution deals go under Rich’s scrutiny.
Update: Tina Anderson points to an analysis of book publishing’s “blockbuster strategy” from Anita Elberse at The Wall Street Journal:
“Yes, that’s right — amid the worst economic crisis to hit the United States in decades, publishing executives are still making what many see as outrageous gambles on new manuscripts.”
No josei left behind
The crew at Manga Recon put their heads together to discuss various manga that should be rescued from licensing limbo, that cold, airless place where a publisher has the rights to a given title, but their efforts aren’t rewarded with audience demand. Sometimes they come back. This year saw the return of Ai Morinaga’s Your and My Secret (rescued from ADV by Tokyopop), Slam Dunk (rescued from Gutsoon by Viz), Black Jack (rescued from Viz by Vertical), and the continuation of books like Parasyte (rescued from Tokyopop by Del Rey). And Aurora’s Deux imprint just saved Cigarette Kisses from Broccoli’s Boysenberry imprint, which has to count as one of the shortest sentences to licensing limbo in history.
I thought I would focus on one at-risk title in particular, Mari Okazaki’s Suppli (Tokyopop), because I really think it’s something special. Suppli is one of those all-too-rare books about grown-ups… people with demanding jobs and complicated personal lives, kind of like Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery. There’s plenty of smart, detailed character development and absolutely gorgeous art in Suppli, but don’t just take my word for it:
Kids' stuff
For whatever reason, I’m really enjoying the “best of/favorite” lists from group blogs this year. Case in point: the round-up from the crew at Good Comics for Kids.
I may not agree with every choice (Life Sucks? Seriously?), but it’s a great cross-section of different kinds of books for different age groups. And maybe it’s just me, but I often find lists focused on a younger audience full of books that could just as easily populate a general “best of/favorites” list. But that might just be me.
And speaking of good comics for kids, I just got around to reading the second volume of Satoko Kiyuduki’s Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro (Yen Press). What an odd, sweet, gently unsettling little book this is. I think it may need some Flipped love in the near future.
Upcoming 12/17/2008
No publisher is as capable of making me go all Team Comix as Fanfare/Ponent Mon. If they’ve got a new release, it’s bound to be my pick of the week. If they’ve released anything in a calendar year, it’s bound to be somewhere on my theoretical list of the year’s best. (I say theoretical because I’m deeply ambivalent about my ability to concoct a list without over-compensating for my personal biases and anxieties about looking… well… dumb.)
So this week I will urge you all to at least take a look at Jiro Taniguchi’s The Quest for the Missing Girl, which fuses Taniguchi’s facility with evoking sense of place and his fondness for detective pulp in some very effective ways. I reviewed it over at The Comics Reporter.
And speaking of Fanfare/Ponent Mon and year-end round-ups, Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary (which I reviewed here) has deservedly been popping up on several, including this one at Manga Recon. I point to this one in particular because it’s one of my favorites. I love the format, and I think it allows for a very natural eclecticism of tastes. It’s a great example of the kind of thing a good group blog can do really well.
Here’s this week’s ComicList, by the way.
On a similar note…
Writing for The Christian Science Monitor, Amelia Newcomb looks at the growing influence of Japan’s pop-culture exports:
“In France last year, for example, 1,787 foreign comic books were translated – 64 percent of them Japanese. In the US, total manga sales in 2007 rose about 5 percent, to more than $210 million, according to ICV2.com, a trade website. Otakon, a convention devoted to Japanese pop culture in Baltimore, saw a record-breaking 26,000-plus attendees this past summer.”
Readily available
Over at Good Comics for Kids, Robin Brenner has some good advice for comics publishers who want a presence on library shelves: keep your catalog in print:
“Unlike the general public, librarians cannot just walk down to the local book store or comics store and buy what they need. We have to go through vendors, and often we are limited to the vendors that our library is contracted to use. When our vendors are out of titles, we may or may not have an alternative option (say, ordering them via Amazon with a library credit card or purchase order), but this is not possible everywhere. When our vendors are out of stock, we’re stuck with kids clamoring for more titles that we cannot provide. When I brought up the problem with the Diamond Comics folks at the fair, including that juggernaut of comics advocacy John Shableski, they assured me that they could help me get whatever volumes I needed. On the one hand, yay! On the other hand, most librarians don’t have that direct option.”
The crowded middle ground
Surprising me not at all, Simon Jones of Icarus Publishing (whose blog may or may not be safe for work, depending on where you work) neatly summarizes the implications of the unfortunate closure of Broccoli Books:
“When one aims to appeal to a wide segment, be it through choice of licenses or a liberal number of imprints, it’s very difficult to develop enough of a personality to distinguish oneself in the market, especially one inhabited by some very dominant players.”
Not that niche publishers are rolling in profits commensurate with the gratitude of the audiences they serve, but it does seem like there’s very little room to breathe on manga’s middle ground and that the best remaining opportunities are for specialists.
So what’s going on with Kodansha’s self-directed North American publishing efforts?