The Manga Curmudgeon

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

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Tuesday linkblogging

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Just because I feel like it, and because there are tons of good things to read at the moment, here are some of my favorite links of the past few days:

  • Dirk Deppey makes me feel extremely lazy and under-read with his thorough list of his selection of 52 excellent comics from 2007.
  • Del Rey’s Dallas Middaugh offers his choices for the ten best manga of 2007 and asks the age-old question:

    “And there’s Publisher’s Weekly. PW has done a great job covering manga the past several years, and I know for a fact that several of their writers are big manga readers. So what in the world is going on with their ‘Top 10 Manga for 2007’?”

  • Schuchaku East’s Chloe F. is giving away a copy of Fumiyo Kouno’s sublime Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. (Found via Kate no Komento.)
  • Tom Spurgeon’s holiday interviews have been a real treat, and it’s strangely reassuring that, no matter how many times it’s explained, I still don’t quite get who the target audience is for Minx:

    “[Karen Berger:] So why don’t we come out with a line, really an alternate to manga, that deals with real girls in the real world, real stories, real situations. Give it that human touch with very strong protagonists and independent thinkers.”

  • I’ve really been enjoying Deb Aoki’s end-of-the-year pieces over at About.Com’s manga blog.
  • There are nuggets aplenty in this press release from Viz, including a new release from Takeshi (Death Note, Hikaru no Go) Obata and this bit of joyful news for librarians who have developed a situational allergy to rubber cement and are sick to death of taping the spines of certain books:

    “In January, the company will also publish new hardcover Library Editions of the first volumes of several popular manga series including BLEACH, DEATH NOTE, FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST, INUYASHA, NARUTO and RANMA ½. The content of these editions will match their original manga counterparts but now packaged with a rugged hardcover to make the volumes viable for years of library use.”

    • The best graphic novel of 2007

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    In a comment, Huff expressed the opinion that the publication of Fumiyo Kouno’s Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms was one of the manga events of 2007. Huff goes on to regret the fact that not nearly enough people have read it, and I have to agree. While I can’t say definitively that it was the best graphic novel published in English in 2007 (as I haven’t read all of them and don’t have any intention to try), I can say without hesitation that it was the best graphic novel published in English in 2007 that I read.

    The book has gotten under my skin, and I’ve read it repeatedly since its publication in March. And while I really do try and avoid being one of those nags that pops a vein when I find out that people haven’t read this or that book, this one is so good that it’s sparked my generally suppressed comics activist tendencies. So, in the hopes of persuading more people to read Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, here are some examples of what people have said about it. (If you’ve read and written about it, please feel free to send me the link or post it in the comments, and I’ll update this entry.)

    New York Magazine’s Dan Kois names it one of the best comics of 2007.

    Jason Thompson discusses the book in Otaku USA:

    “As plot summaries, Kouno’s tales sound melodramatically sad: a struggling young woman lives with her mother in the shantytowns of 1955 Hiroshima; a young girl in modern-day Tokyo learns more about her family’s past. But Town of Evening Calm is not a predictable lesson about prejudice, or a weepy melodrama; the plot feels real. The romances between the characters are charming, fitting nicely with the sweet artwork. The scenes of daily life—sitting on a grassy riverbank, sewing, children playing—are welcoming. The antiwar message is unspoken, and comes naturally from the desire not to see the characters die. Only occasionally does it become explicit, as when a dying victim of radiation sickness asks bitterly, ‘I wonder what the people who built the bomb are thinking … ‘Hooray, got another one’?’”

    Nick Mullins reviews the book at nijomu blog:

    “This is a quiet little book that I can see easily slipping beneath most people’s radar. And that’d be a pity, because Kouno has given us such a wonderful reading experience. She is a master craftsperson with a keen eye on the strength and fragility of the human heart. Her kind of artistic honesty will always be needed, but seems especially poignant for people in the U.S. these days.”

    Shaenon K. Garrity features the book in an installment of her Overlooked Manga Festival:

    “Manga fans may be a little taken aback by Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. In stark contrast to the fast-paced, plot-driven approach of most mainstream manga—and, for that matter, a lot of alternative manga—it’s slow, casual, subtle, and largely plotless. Kouno invites you to spend some time with her characters and their city, and then she steps aside. But what a visit.”

    Katherine Dacey-Tsuei gives it an A+ at Manga Recon:

    “Kouno’s refusal to impose an obvious dramatic structure on either story, her deft manipulation of time, and her emphasis on small, everyday moments, inoculate Town of Evening Calm against sentimentality and mawkishness. The artwork is clean and simple, with enough background detail to bring the streets of Hiroshima to vivid life. Kouno’s character designs have a slightly rough, clumsy quality to them; the adults’ large heads and large feet seem to belong to bigger bodies. Yet these awkward proportions don’t detract from the beauty of the work; if anything, the illustrations make Kouno’s characters seem more vulnerable, more imperfect, more fragile—in short, more human and more believable. And that honest vulnerability, in turn, makes it possible for readers from all walks of life to enter sympathetically into Kouno’s haunting yet life-affirming story.”

    Dacey-Tsuei subsequently includes it in her list of favorite manga from 2007, also at Manga Recon.

    I beg readers to buy it in a Flipped column:

    “So, you should buy this book, because it’s good in every way that matters. Reading it will give you genuine pleasure, and that pleasure will only be enhanced by the worthiness of the subject matter and Kouno’s intelligence and sensitivity in dramatizing it.”

    Jog recommends it in his inimitable fashion at his blog:

    “In the end, this is a deeply affirmative book, one eager to seat the reader on its final image of a train barreling toward the future, unsatisfied with merely soaking in the miserable facts of life and collecting awards for it – this book wants to address the here and now as well, and confront issues of society through its beguiling style.”

    Christopher Butcher sings its praises:

    “This right here? This is one of those important manga that you hear about every once in a while. Two short stories about the after-effects of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, years after the blast. I’ve already had the good fortune to read this and it’s absolutely incredible.”

    The book is nominated for inclusion in the Young Adult Library Services Association’s list of Great Graphic Novels for Teens.

    Monday links

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    This week’s Flipped is up, with lots of special guest stars making pitches for books they don’t think get the love they deserve. It’s the first of two parts.

    Elsewhere, Tom Spurgeon has an excellent interview with Jason (Manga: The Complete Guide) Thompson over at The Comics Reporter.

    And John Jakala isn’t crazy about the new BN.com. I shop at Barnes & Noble a lot, because the local store has a pretty great graphic novel selection, but my online shopping dollars tend to go to Amazon. I generally buy stuff that’s priced under Amazon’s discount cut-off at a brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble, and I can generally find everything I need in that category.

    One thing that does bug me about Amazon is when I request items to be grouped into a single shipping and they end up broken up into a few different deliveries. I know that it’s probably because different stuff is at different warehouses, but… cardboard! Packing materials! Fuel spent during shipping! I’m paranoid that my carbon footprint looks fat.

    Friday rambling

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    How I get in the holiday spirit: I substitute “killer bees” for key lyrics in many beloved Christmas carols. It works in almost all of them.

    Commercials I really hate: Okay, I get it, T.J. Maxx. There’s something pumped into the ventilation system at your stores that turns people into insufferable bargain braggarts. Consider me warned.

    Oh, and I can’t forget Jared, the Galleria of Jewelry, the bauble outlet of choice for viciously competitive people who weigh love based on brand names.

    Future shop: ICv2 runs through some upcoming releases from DC, including the single-volume Shirley from Kaoru (Emma) Mori. If I didn’t already own the entire run in one form or another, I’d also have my eye on the Starman Omnibus, one of my favorite super-hero titles ever. (Okay, writer James Robinson had a tendency to give his pet villainess, the Mist, the full Dark Mary Sue treatment to make her seem threatening, but it was great all the same, and the later issues give you the opportunity to see why many people liked Ralph and Sue Dibny.)

    Not dead yet: The fifth volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Dark Horse) is much better than the fourth, which cheers me. (Again, the fourth was still very good manga, just not what I’d come to expect from the generally stellar series.)

    Sir, it’s too good, at least? Mely notes that Stephen Sondheim has given his thumbs-up to Tim Burton’s movie version of Sweeney Todd, which has apparently been nominated for Golden Globe awards before it’s even opened in cinemas. (I’ve always found the Golden Globes to be the least persuasive of movie award programs.) I’m unconvinced. I love Sondheim, and I think he’s brilliant, but he has shown a worrying tendency to roll over for celebrities in the past. (I mean, he rewrote the lyrics to “Send in the Clowns” for Barbra Streisand. I know it’s his song, and he can do what he likes with it, but that song is one of the perfect gems of the musical canon.)

    Read the label

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    Tom Spurgeon points to a manga flap in Lexington, KY, involving a copy of Yuu Watase’s Absolute Boyfriend (from Viz’s Shojo Beat imprint and serialized in the magazine) in the children’s section of a Books-A-Million. I don’t really have anything much to say about the story itself, which reads like one of those “Can too much applesauce be fatal?” stories that local news outfits love so much. But Tom did make a couple of points about the Books-A-Million chain, and I wanted to chime in:

    “The one thing that jumps out at me is that Book-a-Million is a big growth account for manga recently, and it’s my understanding that the chain has shown up in some towns that haven’t had a bookstore in a while. That would mean the store has increased coverage for manga in addition to simply increasing the number of outlets where it’s available.”

    That was certainly the case here in north-central West Virginia. Books-a-Million was the first stand-alone chain bookstore in town, and it’s had a reasonably sized (and growing) manga section since it opened a few years back. It’s since been joined by a Barnes & Noble, which has its own substantial graphic novel/manga section.

    I vaguely remember reports of Books-a-Million having a special “adult graphic novel/manga” section separate from the general population for some of the spicier, plastic-wrapped offerings, though I’ve never seen that set-up personally. And I’ve never seen manga or graphic novels shelved in the children’s section, though admittedly I don’t spend a lot of time there.

    I can say without qualification that I think Absolute Boyfriend is probably the worse thing Watase has ever created, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s rated for older teens, as is a fair amount of the Shojo Beat line (or just for teens), so it sounds like it might have been carelessly shelved, if in fact it was in the children’s section.

    Rambling and linking

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    No, I won’t be needing a gift receipt: Whenever I set my mind to getting a start on holiday shopping, I always end up buying a lot of stuff for myself. I’m not proud of this, obviously, but there it is. I did manage to resist towels from Macy’s Hotel Collection, which are about as hot as linens can get, because they’re cripplingly expensive.

    Survey says: I haven’t done an exhaustive search, but based on anecdotal experience, the best manga selection to be found in Pittsburgh is probably at the Borders in South Hills.

    Weaponized baking: I always thought those cookie guns were among the stupidest kitchen gadgets imaginable until my partner bought one over the weekend. We made cheese crackers, and they are unimaginably delicious. And it really is fun to fire perfectly shaped drops of dough onto a baking sheet. I think my arteries are trembling in fear at this point.

    So I don’t have to: I can move the second volume of Kazuhiro Okamoto’s lovely Translucent (Dark Horse) out of my “to review” pile, because Katherine Dacey-Tsuei has perfectly summed up the book’s merits in the latest Weekly Recon.

    Minx links: J. Caleb Mozzocco takes an interesting qualitative/quantitative look at the Minx line to date over at Every Day Is Like Wednesday. The Washington Post names The Plain Janes one of the ten best comics of 2007. I don’t even think The Plain Janes is the best Minx book of 2007, but the inclusion of Aya delights me to no end.

    One year later

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    At Comics Worth Reading, Johanna Draper Carlson contemplates the first year and future of DC’s Minx imprint:

    “Is the line a success? I don’t pay attention to sales figures much, so I don’t know how well the books are selling either in the direct market or in the bigger bookstore field. That they’re doing a second year says to me that they still are optimistic about the idea. I’m guessing the books are most popular among schools and libraries, since they’re classically styled stories (teenage girl learns life lesson) that are easy to justify for purchase. I have yet to hear anyone really excited about them, though, in any market.”

    I’ve kind of been wondering about that too, so I took a quick look around. Here’s what Paul Levitz had to say in this September interview with ICv2:

    “[ICv2:] We wanted to talk a little bit about Minx, the new DC imprint, which was another event since the last time we talked. It looked to us from the first numbers we saw that the direct response was stronger than the bookstores which was sort of the opposite of what I would’ve expected. Can you comment on whether you’re finding that the case and what the overall response is on Minx?

    “[Levitz:] I don’t think the direct absolute numbers were larger than the bookstore numbers, but we certainly had an enormous enthusiasm in the direct market that was above and beyond what we were initially expecting which was great. There was a lot of passion for reaching out to the other audiences. We got some good support in the bookstores for the launch.

    “It’s a challenging project. You’re reaching out to a very different kind of audience. There’s not a natural connection immediately there day one that says these people are walking past this shelf, put it out and make it happen, but we’re nurturing it, we’re doing ok, and we think the material is very strong, and we’re optimistic that it will continue to build from here.”

    I can understand the desire to quash the notion that the books actually sold better in specialty comic shops than bookstores, because that certainly couldn’t have been the desired outcome. I don’t know if I’ll ever be clear on exactly who constitutes the “different kind of audience.” I’m sure there is a constituency of girls who might like graphic novels but aren’t interested in anything manga has to offer, though I don’t know if I’d think it was large enough to throw a lot of money at it. (We went to a play last night, and there was a tween a couple of rows in front of us who had a library volume of Guru Guru Pon-Chan. I don’t really like the series, but the play was so boring that I would have gladly given her ten dollars to borrow it.)

    As far as critical response goes, I haven’t seen much outside the blogosphere, and almost none from the target audience. (I could probably look a little harder, but I suspect that would lead me to the valley of MySpace, and I’d rather not.) There have been a few reviews in some newspapers, which I suspect was a result of the formidable PR push the imprint got at the outset. Some of the books have been nominated for the Great Graphic Novels for Teens list, so the imprint is on librarians’ radar.

    None of the Minx books that I’ve read have been bad, and one (Re-Gifters) was actually great. But I do get the sense that the line could benefit from more editorial rigor at the story phase.

    Parallel universe

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    I like to follow the ongoing discussions about the evolution of bookstores and comic shops (or Big Boxes versus specialists, if you like), so I thought this article in The New York Times was fascinating. It looks at the existing state of Germany’s book market – where small shops and big chains coexist peacefully and seem to thrive in each other’s company:

    “Germany’s book culture is sustained by an age-old practice requiring all bookstores, including German online booksellers, to sell books at fixed prices. Save for old, used or damaged books, discounting in Germany is illegal. All books must cost the same whether they’re sold over the Internet or at Steinmetz, a shop in Offenbach that opened its doors in Goethe’s day, or at a Hugendubel or a Thalia, the two big chains.

    “What results has helped small, quality publishers like Berenberg. But it has also — American consumers should take note — caused book prices to drop. Last year, on average, book prices fell 0.5 percent.”

    Alas, that delicate, consumer-friendly balance might be threatened by recent developments in neighboring Switzerland:

    “Just across the border, the Swiss lately decided to permit the discounting of German books — a move that some in the book trade here fear will eventually force Germany itself to follow suit, transforming a diverse and book-rich culture into an echo of big-chain America.”

    While I enjoy bargain-hunting as much as anyone, I do find the description of Germany’s book market kind of utopian. I’m still bitter about the closing of a mystery book shop in Dupont Circle, and few things make me depressed in quite the same way as those intermittent articles about independently owned, sometimes specialty book shops shuttering because they can’t compete with the seven or eight Barnes and Noble and Borders stores that have opened up.

    Of course, I’m a total hypocrite, ignoring these socialist leanings whenever a coupon shows up in the mail. And general principle couldn’t keep me from laughing and laughing at Meg Ryan’s misfortunes in You’ve Got Mail, but I don’t think that had anything to do with her character’s profession.

    Still, the article is well worth a read for a glimpse at another market approach to book sales, the competing interests of culture and economics, and lots of other related issues.

    Monday linkblogging, etc.

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    J.K. Rowling has revealed that one of the characters from her Harry Potter series of books, Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, was gay. It’s nice, but I’d have been more impressed if she’d actually revealed that in the text, ideally before the character died.

    On the one hand, she seldom devoted any space to the private lives of the Hogwarts faculty unless it was essential to the narrative (Snape) or factored heavily into a thematically linked subplot (Hagrid and Madame Maxim). On the other, it seems like his one relationship was pretty punitively disappointing. On another hand, I still think poor Tonks was the biggest beard in the fantasy canon, and that anyone who thinks Sirius and Lupin weren’t totally in love is kidding him- or herself.

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    While not everyone agrees on the tenor of that Tigra sequence from New Avengers #35, there does seem to be general consensus that Matt Brady’s Newsarama interview with writer Brian Bendis was the kind of tounge-bath seldom seen outside of the cozy, secluded nests mother cats create to welcome their newborns. Here’s one of my favorite responses, and probably the most comprehensive.

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    So I don’t seem completely grumpy, I’ll like to two reviews of books published by Dark Horse that made me happy, both the books and the reviews. First is Greg McElhatton’s look at Kazuhiro Okamoto’s far-more-interesting-than-it-sounds Translucent, and second is Ken Haley’s praise for the first two volumes of Adam Warren’s better-than-it-has-any-right-to-be Empowered.

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    I love this sauce. I think it would be good on just about any kind of protein, and probably many vegetables as well. (Maybe someday I’ll point you to a healthy recipe. Don’t hold your breath.)

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    Speaking of cooking, wow, I gave up too quickly on Kitchen Princess (Del Rey). I thought the first volume was pretty uninspiring, but I caught up with more recent installments via complimentary copies, and it definitely picks up steam. It’s still not life-changing, but there are lots of pretty pictures of food and some reasonably moving story material.

    Newsstand linkblogging

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    At Blog@Newsarama, Kevin Melrose points to a piece in USA Today about declining manga sales in Japan:

    “Sales of manga fell 4% in Japan last year to 481 billion yen ($4.1 billion) — the fifth straight annual drop, according to the Tokyo-based Research Institute for Publications. Manga magazine sales have tumbled from a peak of 1.34 billion copies in 1995 to 745 million last year.”

    It’s interesting to me mostly for the fact that it truncates the customary introductory element of most mainstream media articles on manga (“Big eyes and speed lines!” “Kids love it!”), favoring market trends instead. On the other hand, I would have appreciated more detail on the distinctions between sales of manga on paper and consumption overall, though those might not be readily available.

    As Icarus Publishing’s Simon Jones notes at his not-safe-for-work blog, falling pulp sales are less a new development than a continuing trend, and he suggests that this is less worrying than it might seem:

    “Continually slipping sales is always a concern, but personally I don’t see why a distinction should be made between manga printed on paper, and digital manga delivered via cell phones, or manga delivered in the form of a videogame spin-off. Manga isn’t going away because the Japanese love manga more than ever… the art form is simply becoming divorced from its traditional medium of paper. Reports of its waning influence seem greatly exaggerated.”

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    The New York Times also does a little trend-spotting, looking at the recent wave of comics created in part by pop stars like Gerard Wray, who’s writing the appealing Umbrella Academy for Dark Horse. Longtime comics reviewer and retailer Randy Lander is quoted in the story:

    “Certainly the comics industry benefits from the press that the crossovers sometimes generate. ‘It brings in people from outside the medium and people who haven’t been to a comic store since they were a kid,’ said Mr. Lander, who also owns the Rogues Gallery, a comic store in Round Rock, Tex. ‘Every entry point we can get is a good one.’”

    I’m surprised it isn’t part of a series, with follow-ups on TV and film creative types and prose authors who’ve broken in lately. But something tells me the Times has already done those articles, though the details have faded from my memory.

    Anyway, I enjoyed the second issue of Umbrella Academy almost as much as the first, though I found I missed the kid versions of the characters. At The Savage Critic, Jog reviews it with his customary skill:

    “…but there’s a sort of trust at work here between words and visuals that isn’t always seen in superhero comics.”

    True, but who wouldn’t trust Gabriel Bá?

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    Sigh. I love a lot of magazines, but Wired generally isn’t one of them. But the promise of ten pages written by Jason Thompson is worth the price of admission.