The Manga Curmudgeon

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

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The rest of the story

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More details on the Eightball #22 controversy are available in the New Haven Register. Most interesting to me is the reaction of the father of the unnamed student, who chafes at being viewed as a reactionary censor:

“‘I’m extremely upset with the administration for not following through with their word of contacting the parents,’ the father said. ‘It looks like we got some teacher fired (over) a Harry Potter novel or Catcher in the Rye.’

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“His wife said she became especially concerned when her daughter told her Fisher asked her ‘how the book made her feel,’ although the mother added that she has no idea ‘what his intention was.’

“‘She was victimized by him to begin with and over and over again for 2½ weeks now,’ she said. ‘We just feel like if people understand what he had given her, then they would understand that it’s not our daughter’s fault.’”

It’s an extremely thorough and nuanced report from Rachael Scarborough King, delving into aspects that normally aren’t considered in stories like these. The piece also gives a lot more detail than the badly written fear-news sound bytes at WTNH.

By way of example, one of Scarborough King’s sources is Charles Brownstein of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:

“‘Somebody could do a superficial glance of the material and not put the contextual pieces together, thereby perhaps seeing a panel with violence, perhaps seeing a panel with nudity and taking the image out of context as something that it’s not,’ he said. ‘The more people are educated about the category, the less those sorts of misunderstandings occur.’”

Conn jobless

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So what’s the graphic novel that’s started a flap in a Connecticut high school, as noted by The Beat yesterday? Nobody’s saying, but the teacher has resigned, according to this report in the New Haven Register.

“Superintendent of Schools Thomas Forcella said Fisher gave the freshman girl an ‘inappropriate’ graphic novel as part of an outside reading assignment. Forcella would not name the book or describe the objectionable elements.

“‘All I can say is it was, in my estimation, inappropriate for the grade level due to the content and the nature of the material,’ he said.”

Since all anyone can do at this point is throw out unflattering speculation, I’ll guess that

a) the book was something obviously literary (like Fun Home or Blankets) but featuring adult content, and the district is familiar with similar controversies that didn’t make the censoring agent look good, or

b) the district is reluctant to trigger a rush on the graphic novel among its freshman students by naming it.

Recommended reading

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I know he’s in Japan, but this piece in the Toronto Globe and Mail has a very Chris Butcher vibe to it. (That’s a good thing.) It’s a really solid list of recommended graphic novels for younger readers from graphica reviewer Nathalie Atkinson. (It seems like a list that would also serve adult readers perfectly well.)

And let me just say, I’m so damned happy to see Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Last Gasp) get this kind of high-profile attention that I barely know what to do with myself. Seriously. You’ve read it, right?

The fairness doctrine

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So I’m reading Greg Rucka’s take on the whole “Characters from Underrepresented Groups Are Tragedy Magnets” discussion, and looking at the “Bad things happen to straight white men, too” argument. And that’s fair enough. I mean, you only have to look through just about any given run of Spider-Man or Daredevil to see a rich tapestry of misery and misfortune, and it’s by design. They’re underdogs, and part of the pitch is that their lives suck but they keep trying.

On the other hand, this argument jumped out at me, and not in a good way:

“We live in a world where women are treated worse than men — where they are abused and attacked and degraded on the basis of their gender alone. It’s wrong, and it’s vile, and it’s evil, but it’s the truth, and refusing to recognize the same in fiction leads to dishonest fiction, and that’s bad writing.”

I think I prefer the “I’m ladling out abuse with a blindfold on” position to the “Not reflecting grim societal realities in my escapist power fantasies is irresponsible” gambit. Super-heroic fantasy is at least partly about portraying a better world than the one we live in. There are lots of societal trends, positive and negative, that aren’t proportionately represented in comics, and arguing that you’re just being honest by folding in some of the fouler ones strikes me as specious.

And this:

“It’s the same thing here again — this double-standard that says female characters should be allowed only highs, and not lows; that they should be spared harm, and treated with kid gloves.”

Okay, this might carry some weight if there was a litany of highs in the canon that someone could point to – moments of triumph or achievement for women and gays and characters of color. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I read super-hero comics with any regularity, so I might not be cognizant of a recent spate of success stories for characters in this category, but I’m guessing that trend hasn’t exactly blossomed during my period of inattentiveness. (Maybe I should count Black Canary’s “Wedding Planner”? It’s every woman’s dream, isn’t it, to marry the old man who cheated on you over and over again? You’ve come a long way, baby!)

A few legitimate success stories for these characters might not be such a bad idea. The grim bits might be less glaring if they were balanced by some victories that the minority characters owned. People might not care so much that Northstar dies over and over again and gets brainwashed by villains if he affected his own escape from those grim circumstances. If, instead of being a sexual help-maiden allowing a straight, white male super-hero to overcome his bitterness, the Scarlet Witch got her act together and reclaimed her heroic nature. If, instead of being supporting character cannon fodder or prisoners of misfortune, these characters got to save the day and feel good about it.

There’s a difference between survival and triumph, and it seems to me like the two things are being disproportionately portioned out to a certain class of character. Part of that is the difference between an A-list character and those who are further down the alphabet, obviously, but the A-list might become larger and more diverse and more interesting if everyone else got a chance to be victorious.

What sells, and where?

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It’s a couple of days old, but I found this comment at Journalista to be really interesting. It’s a very well-informed compare-and-contrast between what sells in comic shops and what sells in bookstores:

“I have a comic book shop, my girlfriend owns a bookstore. Here’s a quick list of what we’ve found:

“Naruto sells well everywhere.”

Okay, there’s a lot more, but given the big news of the day, I couldn’t resist. Anyway, go read, especially if you’re geek-ishly interested in the different audiences between the two kinds of retail outlets.

(Also, it’s kind of gruesomely fun to imagine creators rolling out comic-shop friendlier versions of work like Fun Home. I’m easily amused.)

I'm sure this won't become tiresome at all

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Well, that’s cutting it close. With only eight months to go, Publishers Weekly Comics Week is finally getting around to previewing the next New York Comic-Con. Which is in April.

I do think it’s a nice idea to make attendance easier for small-press operations, though I tend to agree with Chris Mautner that an example or success story would have been nice. Then again, with two-thirds of a year before the event, perhaps organizers will have time to execute the plan.

I kind of wonder why the story couldn’t wait until they could name-check an indie house or two, because… well… eight months is a long time. I’m sure it’s not Reed Exhibition’s strategy to use PWCW to alert indie houses to the opportunity when they could just e-mail them. Hell, I can e-mail them, and I use a Yahoo account.

Upcoming 8/29

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What evil lurks in the heart of the current ComicList? Well, none to speak of. I’m just trying to keep things fresh.

Aurora releases the first volume of Chihiro Tamaki’s Walkin’ Butterfly. In it, a girl confronts her body image issues by trying to become a model. (I thought models caused body image issues. Help me out here.)

There’s a lot of Del Rey product shipping this week. Depending on my mood, I’d peg either the sixth volume of Fuyumi Soryo’s ES or the second of Ai Morinaga’s My Heavenly Hockey Club as the highlight. I’ve already read this installment of MHHC, and it’s as delightful as the first. There are fewer deranged encounters with wildlife, but there’s a chapter where the elite titular team meats a plucky group of paupers out in the sticks that’s just a riot, even by this book’s standards.

On the down side, I found the first volume of Shiki Tsukai just too packed with inscrutable rules to be very engaging, kind of like Shakugan no Shana (Viz). As Katherine Dacey-Tsuei puts it:

“Even with the generous assortment of charts, appendices, and sidebars clarifying the nuances of its underlying “power to control the seasons” premise, however, I found this book fiendishly hard to follow, thanks to the characters’ jargon-heavy dialogue.”

A new release from Fanfare/Ponent Mon is always worth a look. This time around, it’s Tokyo is My Garden, by Frédéric Boilet and Benoît Peeters, with back-up from demi-god of manga Jiro Taniguchi. It’s about a cognac salesman living large in the title city. Having just read Ed Chavez’s enticing Otaku USA column on booze manga, this is a timely arrival.

As others have noticed, Viz begins its Naruto onslaught this week. Stock in dry goods and bottled water and pre-order those poor books that might get buried in the ninjalanche.

Two that shouldn’t be overlooked, also from Viz, are Kiyoko Arai’s pricelessly silly Beauty Pop (now in its fifth volume) and the second volume of Hideaki Sorachi’s quirky, action-packed Gin Tama (discussed here already). I wouldn’t go so far as to say all of the same people would like both, but they share an off-kilter sense of humor that serves each really well.

Flower power

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As I said in Chris Mautner’s reviewer round-up, I don’t think posting images with reviews is essential, but I do appreciate it when someone does it as well as Shaenon K. Garrity. I appreciate it even more when she puts her skills in service of a book I absolutely love, in this case, Fumi Yoshinaga’s Flower of Life.

I’m kind of disappointed that I rarely see this title on bookstore shelves. There’s almost always at least one copy of at least two volumes of Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery (as it should be), but that’s rarely the case with Flower. (There is one awesome Borders in downtown DC that was like a Yoshinaga lover’s dream. They had everything.)

Using John Jakala’s method of surveying, I notice that not a single copy of a single volume of the series is available in any of the Pittsburgh Barnes & Noble outlets. Things look better at the Pittsburgh Borders outlets. All five have copies of the first volume; four have the second in stock; only one has copies of the third.

Random happy linkblogging

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NPR is really getting its geek on lately. First they do that piece on the Eisner Awards for All Things Considered, and then they cover not just anime, but a really specific niche of anime fandom on today’s Morning Edition.

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I know that it’s kind of irksome when a publisher is specifically created to be a movie property shop, but since Tokyopop established itself as a comic publisher first, I’ll give them a pass and not get too cynical about their new deal with the William Morris Agency.

And who would have ever guessed that Princess Ai would be one of their first in-development properties?

(I said I wouldn’t get too cynical. I didn’t say I wouldn’t get cynical at all.)

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It’s impossible for me to be cynical at all about the news of the strong sales for Drawn & Quarterly’s collection of Tove Jansson’s Moomin strips, because I love them. I also squealed a little bit when I saw the second volume listed in the current Previews catalog.

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It’s very kind of John Jakala to suggest coping strategies for people who will be a little discombobulated by the slower release schedule for Bleach. From a purely selfish perspective, this means it will be easier for me to catch up. (Has anyone else seen that tacky Cartoon Network commercial for the Bleach anime starring Orihime’s rack?)

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Regarding the next wave of Minx books, I’m so delighted to see that Joelle Jones is drawing one of them. I think she’s just incredibly talented. I’m also happy that Andi Watson is following up on his Clubbing character. (Is Josh Howard drawing it? If not, I won’t mind too much, as I thought his illustrations were kind of serviceable.)

Brian Wood isn’t the first creator that would come to my mind when lining up people to create for Minx, but that’s neither here nor there.

A song in my nerd heart

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John Jakala’s discovery of the Bleach musical, beyond being conceptually delightful for its own sake, fills me with cross-nerd wishes. (I love musicals, too.) And I can’t think of a likelier source for an evening of song and dance than the works of Fumi Yoshinaga.

Her stories, particularly Antique Bakery and Flower of Life, are practically musicals already. They’re packed with intriguing characters with distinct voices, they shift in tone from ballad to patter, and they have a quirky improbability that would make for an easy transition from one form to another.

I can’t really think of a composer/lyricist right off hand. Sondheim seems too dark, though if he were in A Little Night Music mode, he might be just right. (Speaking of that, how come we have 7,000 revivals of Gypsy and none for Night Music? Is it because the lead in Night Music doesn’t really need to sing?) The creative team from Avenue Q might be closer to the mark, if they could tone down their satirical tendencies and accentuate their warmer, more humanist tendencies.

Of course, Kaoru Mori’s Emma is at an advantage, already having dancing girls. But surely there’s room on Broadway for both. And you could probably produce about four of Yoshinaga’s contemporary pieces for the cost of a costume epic like Emma.

And you could hardly go wrong with the work of Ai Yazawa. Paradise Kiss has “pop opera” written all over it, and Nana could draw in the Wicked crowd with its strong female friendships, but with a rock score.