The Manga Curmudgeon

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

You are here: Home / Archives for Linkblogging

At( )las(t!)

by

Publishers Weekly reports that Fanfare/Ponent Mon has a new North American book distributor, Atlasbooks Distribution, a subsidiary of BookMasters Inc. (via MangaBlog). AtlasBooks acquired Biblio Distribution in January according to this piece at ICv2, describing AtlasBooks as “the leading distributor (in terms of the number of client publishers) of small press books in North America.”

Dirk Deppey voices some pungently phrased enthusiasm for the development, and I certainly agree. Fanfare’s last North American distributor, Davis Marketing Services, never even built a web site, to my knowledge, and AtlasBooks’ small-press focus seems like a good fit on the surface of things.

I do hope this means that Fanfare’s catalog will start showing up in mainstream bookstores, because so many of their books are surpassingly lovely. Here are a few favorites:

Monokuro Kinderbook, by Kan Takahama: Sexy, intelligent stories about women from a variety of age groups and stations.

The Walking Man, by Jiro Taniguichi: An average salary-man type walks around his beautifully rendered suburban neighborhood. (I reviewed both Walking Man and Kinderbook here.)

Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators, by… 17 creators: Fabulously talented Japanese and European storytellers craft varied portraits set throughout the country. (I reviewed the anthology here.)

And to be honest, I’ve yet to read anything from the publisher that isn’t at least very, very good. Kiriko Nananan’s Blue is a little emo for my tastes, but her illustrations are glorious, and it has the distinction of being the only Fanfare title I’ve ever seen in a Barnes & Noble. If I haven’t yet become too absorbed by Taniguchi’s Times of Botchan (created with Natsuo Sekigawa), it’s more a matter of limited availability than disinterest.

Really, Fanfare’s name on a book is really a sign that you’re in for an absorbing, intriguing reading experience. Hell, I paid for shipping from Canada to get my hands on some of them. I hope AtlasBooks helps them crack the North American market.

This skyscraper walks into a bar…

by

My look at this year’s Eisner nominees continues in the latest Flipped over at The Comics Reporter. This week’s focus is Yuichi Yokoyama’s New Engineering (Picturebox), which I found more admirable than enjoyable, which I suspect is just a matter of taste.

Speaking of TCR, columns, and matters of taste, Chris Butcher has rounded up the most-requested items from that Five for Friday thread and added some thoughtful commentary. This should stop me from trying to squeeze a column out of the subject, but it probably won’t.

Death Kitty!

by

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition takes a look at the two-day, 300-screen run of the live-action Death Note movie. It will definitely be interesting to see the results of this programming experiment. (Here’s Viz’s press release on the event, and here’s the event site from Fathom, which will shout at you if you let it.)

Now, if Sex and the City does well at the box office and film executives decide that women like going to movies, what are the chances of a similar blitz for the live-action adaptation of Nana? (In all seriousness, I really hate these obnoxious “can women drive commercial success at the cinema” think pieces that crop up every time a Sex and the City or Devil Wears Prada or Enchanted promises to make more than a dollar, because the answer has been a resounding yes every time. The only summer movie I’m excited about is Mamma Mia, because what healthy person with the capacity for joy doesn’t want to see Meryl Streep sing ABBA songs?)

Oh, and just because someone at NPR likely wanted to unnerve me on the way into work, they also ran a short piece about Hello Kitty’s new role as tourism ambassador.

If Hello Kitty is unable to complete her term as tourism ambassador, she will be replaced by her runner-up.

Easy(going) reading

by

I can’t resist list-making. Over at MangaBlog, Brigid Alverson shares a request from a reader for “slice-of-life” manga. Excellent recommendations ensue, so I thought I would compile the titles that got multiple nods from the folks leaving comments.

  • Antique Bakery, by Fumi Yoshinaga (DMP)
  • Emma, by Kaoru Mori (CMX)
  • Flower of Life, by Fumi Yoshinaga (DMP)
  • Honey and Clover, by Chica Umino (Viz)
  • Japan, as Viewed by 17 Creators, by various gifted people (Fanfare/Ponent Mon)
  • Love Roma, by Minoru Toyoda (Del Rey)
  • Sand Chronicles, by Hinako Ashihara (Viz)
  • Suppli, by Mari Okazaki (Tokyopop)
  • The Voices of a Distant Star, by Mizu Sahara and Makoto Shinkai (Tokyopo)
  • The Walking Man, by Jiro Taniguichi (Fanfare/Ponent Mon)
  • The Day I Become a Butterfly, by Yumeka Sumomo (Juné)
  • Same Cell Organism, by Yumeka Sumomo (Juné)

    • There are plenty of great recommendations in the MangaBlog comments thread, both of slice-of-life series and good reads in general. If I missed a slice-of-life title that got multiple mentions, let me know, and I’ll update the list.

    Particles

    by

    Kate Dacey has more of her always-terrific reviews up at Manga Recon, looking at some recent shôjo releases. She saves me the trouble of thinking too deeply about Arina Tanemura’s I.O.N. (Viz).

    As Kate points out, it’s very much a debut work, but it helped me crystallize my thinking about Tanemura’s work. She’s undeniably talented (and very popular), but here’s the thing: whenever I read her work, I feel like I’m watching an audition for a musical-theatre repertory where someone has to prove that they can sing, act and dance without the requirement of making those qualities come together into something larger. I always feel like there’s some guiding principle missing from the mix in her manga.

    I’m almost always fond of the freakish supporting characters that haunt the fringes of Tanemura’s stories. It’s just the leads and what happens to them that don’t hold my attention. (Of course, I haven’t sampled Full Moon yet.)

    Librarians rule

    by

    If you can’t make it to your local comic shop for Free Comic Book Day, you can catch the spirit all month long over at Dave Carter’s Yet Another Comic Blog. He’s sponsoring his fourth annual Free Comic Book Month:

    “That’s right, free comics! Each day of May I’ll pick someone to receive a free comic, taken from my personal collection: duplicates, things I have in trades, and other stuff. My goal is to match up people with a comic that they haven’t read but that they may like. My tastes are wide and varied, so chances are I’ve got a comic for you.”

    Go take a look!

    Tangled webs

    by

    At Manga Xanadu, Lori Henderson looks at some of the ways manga publishers can use online resources to promote their material, and she makes a number of good points. The piece is framed at least partly around a certain kind of title that needs the help:

    “Even if most of the sales of titles come from brick and mortar retail, getting the word out about titles shouldn’t be such an issue in the internet age. If manga publishers would make better use of their online resources, C list titles would have a better chance.”

    Coincidentally, Viz has redesigned its online store, and it does seem like an improvement. Viz’s press release promises easier navigability and better search functionality, and a couple of quick tests seem to confirm those claims. Viz’s manga titles are listed by imprint on the store’s front page, which is handy, and there are some web-only discounts running down the sidebar.

    There are a few odd things going on. Clicking randomly through series, it seems like some volumes from some series aren’t available. (Just at a glance, some with only partial runs available are Kekkashi, Aishiteruze Baby, and Maison Ikkoku. Poor Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs and Yakitate!! Japan aren’t there at all yet.) Maybe Viz is still finishing up its listings, but that seems like something that should be corrected as quickly as possible. If a publisher is going to have an online store, which is never a bad idea if it isn’t going to be too burdensome to manage, then the publisher should have its entire catalogue available for purchase.

    That seems particularly important for the C list titles. If a book is having trouble finding space on bookstore shelves, then it’s not unreasonable for a customer to seek it out online. The publisher’s online store might not be the first place they look, but a certain percentage of them will wind up there sooner or later, and it would be best not to discourage them in their inquiries.

    And speaking C list titles and the Viz store, there seem to be some missed opportunities to give those books a push. Viz’s best-selling properties (Naruto, Death Note, Bleach, and the like) tend to eat up most of the front page’s visible real estate. I’m guessing you would have to work pretty hard to find retail markets where books and DVDs from these properties aren’t available. It’s not a bad idea for a publisher to brand itself with its successes, but why not use their rising tides to lift a few dinghies in the process?

    I’m thinking about something along the lines of Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” widget, but with a more activist bent. I’m not all that crazy about suggestive selling, but I’m less bothered by it when it’s in service of underperforming but worthy books. Offering discounts on those C list books with purchase of an A list property might be a good idea as well.

    Over and done

    by

    This week’s Flipped is up, and I’m still on a “Hey, that series that I really liked just ended, so I think I’ll write about it” jag. The latest manga from this weirdly large category is Fuyumi Soryo’s ES: Eternal Sabbath (Del Rey).

    Speaking of series that I really liked that just ended, John Jakala takes a thoughtful look at the conclusion of Minetaro Mochizuki’s exciting and thought-provoking Dragon Head (Tokyopop), and picks some highlights from the series as a whole. What he said, basically.

    Flower power

    by

    The Beat is the first to share this year’s list of Eisner Award nominations, and many of them make me very, very happy. None quite so much as this one:

    Best Writer/Artist
    Fumi Yoshinaga, Flower of Life; The Moon and Sandals (Digital Manga)

    See? A panel of experts agrees that Yoshinaga is awesome, so go out and buy all of the available volumes of Flower of Life, thus pressuring DMP into releasing the fourth.

    Wishful linking

    by

    I should just start a category dedicated to piggybacking on Danielle Leigh’s posts over at Comics Should Be Good. In her latest, she delivers a wish list to manga publishers. Here are some of my additions:

    I wish for more translation and cultural notes! Some publishers are consistently generous with these (Dark Horse, Del Rey, Go! Comi, etc.), and some are flat-out stingy. I’ve noticed that Viz has been adding these to some of their recent Shojo Beat releases, which is terrific, but I would love for this to become standard practice so I can start complaining that they aren’t extensive enough instead of nonexistent.

    I wish for more money to be thrown away on commercially iffy projects! I know this is impractical, but, hey, it’s a wish list. And while I don’t want to see more series abandoned before they’re completed, I would love it if publishers delivered more commercially counter-intuitive offerings every now and then. Okay, so I might be the only person who buys a manga about, say, retirees who decide to spend their golden years traveling, or stories about Japan’s agricultural bureaucracy or new mothers navigating playground culture, but I might not be, and you’d make me very happy.

    I wish books I really like would come out either faster or slower! There seems to be no happy medium here. Either I feel like I’m waiting forever for a new volume of Mushishi or Hikaru No Go or that I can’t possibly keep up with some series or another. Please be more sensitive to my utterly unpredictable whims.