The Manga Curmudgeon

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

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Yen for ICE

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In the just-arrived Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Kai-Ming Cha answers all our questions about the future of ICE Kunion: they’re joining forces with Yen Press, who will be picking up the current roster of ICE Kunion titles. That’s good news for people who’d been enjoying them. (I had wondered precisely what former ICE editorial director Ju-Yuon Lee’s presence on the SDCC Yen Press panel meant, and I’m glad to see she took their titles with her when she joined Yen.)

Well, okay, maybe all of our questions aren’t answered:

“Fans curious about the promises of free manhwa on the ICE Kunion Web site should note that the site will soon redirect people to the Yen Press Web site, where they can find all of ICE’s series now under the Yen Press label. Although [Kurt] Hassler said there was some confusion over who owned the URL, he said the matter is being resolved.”

Anything that keeps me in Goong…

Y'all come back now, y'hear?

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I thought Douglas Wolk’s PWCW piece on the impact of popular comics with tie-ins to other media was really interesting reading. I’ve wondered about that topic a lot, whether or not people who go into a comic shop to buy Buffy or Stephen King cover bands actually buy anything else. (But then I wonder if the people buying Naruto because they like the cartoon buy other manga as well.)

Anecdotally, the answer seems to be “yes,” but it’s barely possible to quantify actual comic sales, near as I can tell, much less the impact of a given property on sales of other books. Still, all of the retailers interviewed indicated that there were at least some subsidiary sales as a result of these kinds of comics. And while it goes against my preferences as a consumer, I can’t help but see the logic in making patrons walk past a bunch of other comics to get to Buffy.

The only way to get a less anecdotal sense of what the impact is would be to put some kind of survey mechanism in place, I guess. And how many casual readers, the kind who came just for Laurell K. Hamilton, would take the time to respond? And would the publishers be willing to expend the kind of money and energy to put the survey out there?

On a nitpicky front, I’m so turned off by describing people who don’t regularly read comics as “civilians.” There’s just something kind of sad and yay-rah desperate about it.

Elsewhere

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The good folks at Blog@Newsarama were kind enough to ask me to contribute an entry to their “I ♥ Comics” series, and it’s up today. Regular readers of this blog or my column won’t be even slightly surprised at the subject matter, but I did experiment with the scanner. (Hey, when it’s somebody else’s bandwidth, watch me go crazy!)

Geezers

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One of the extensions of the recent discussions about the commercial viability of manga for adult men – seinen – is similar disappointment with the state of josei – comics for grown-up women. Blogless Simon Jones notes:

“Though, looking at it, I’ve noticed that, while selling better than Senin, Josei doesn’t sell particuarly well either. While it’s obvious that females are the dominant manga demographic, I suspect it tends more towards girls rather than women and so the far more…chick lit-ish Josei or the arty stuff or the just plain older stuff just doesn’t sell as well. And in many respects, that’s a terrible, terrible shame.”

I’d add that one of the mildly annoying trends of manga publishing is that the price often goes up with the age of the target audience.

Over at MangaBlog, ALC’s Erica says:

“ALC Publishing works very hard at keeping the schoolgirlyness of our yuri to a minimum in order to reach a more adult audience. It’s harder than you might think.”

So is audience age as much or more of a factor than its gender? It’s certainly possible. There’s always talk about giving the current majority of manga readers – kids – someplace to go next when their taste for shôjo and shônen gives way to a desire for something sturdier. And there’s certainly sturdier stuff available, if you know where to look which, in my experience, generally isn’t on the shelves of Borders or Barnes and Noble in the U.S.

I wonder how many of the 87 titles scheduled for Fall release are aimed at older audiences, excluding the yaoi niche (which gobbles up 32 of those 87 slots)? Yen Press has With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, and Fanfare/Ponent Mon offers Awabi. Aurora’s parent publisher has an extensive josei catalog, though their early announcements don’t necessarily reflect that. And one could always surmise that Viz’s Shojo Beat imprint is pushing things in a josei-ish direction with Nana and Honey and Clover. (Nana is technically shôjo, but Honey and Clover is full-on josei, right? At least in terms of its publishing history?)

Paradise lost?

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Is Hiroki Endo’s Eden: It’s an Endless World! (Dark Horse) looking at a hiatus? That’s the word from Ed Chavez at MangaCast, who thinks this would be a big loss for fans of manga in general. He also notes how unusual it is for a manga publisher to leak this kind of news:

“I have never heard a comment like that made at a panel before, so for a fan like myself it really sent a message as to how much DH loves that title and how much it needs help, as well. I never want to see a title discontinued or put on hiatus and generally when they do suffer such fate fans of the series are often the last to know.”

He goes on to suggest that fans pick up a copy of Eden at their local bookstore and give the title a chance, which highlights what might be one of the problems the series is facing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it (or a lot of my favorite Dark Horse manga titles) in a bookstore. I’ve seen Banya, the Explosive Delivery Man with some regularity, and a handful of others, but their seinen stuff is generally confined to the Direct Market. That might be a regional thing, and larger urban areas may be blessed with stores that carry full runs of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service and Mail.

Even if it did find a home at your local Barnes & Noble or Borders, would it fly off the shelves? Kethylia isn’t convinced:

“This is not new news. The overaged fanboys can lament the demise of Raijin Comics and the failure of DMP to follow through with the seinen side of their initial “mandate” all they want. It just doesn’t change anything. They might be the ones to protesteth loudest on the Internet, and they might be the ones in control of the manga industry, but they’re not the ones with the buying power. And if it’s not clear to you by now who IS the demographic with the buying power, I’ll spell it out for you—Girls and Women. Who do not, surprise surprise, flock to Blood and Breasts in satisfyingly large numbers.”

It’s a persuasive argument, and seinen junkie Tina Anderson expands on it in the comments:

“Shonen does well for VIZ largely due to the fact that there are just as many women reading those damn titles from JUMP as their are men; I’m a fan of seinen, but damn if I always fail at trying to convert my (female) friends and get them to try it.”

It’s not hard to conclude that the seinen fan’s life is one of recurring disappointment and loss. DMP has abandoned titles like Worst and Bambi and Her Pink Gun, and even Dark Horse seems to be testing the shôjo (or at least shôjo-friendly) waters with books like Translucent and Red String.

For an extremely well-written qualitative look at Eden, check out Katherine Dacey-Tsuei’s review at Manga Recon:

“More importantly, Endo makes us care about the outcome of these battles by creating characters that the reader… well, I won’t say ‘identifies with’ in the sense that these characters inspire empathy. They don’t. Most are violent, misanthropic, and flawed, with little regard for others. Yet their fierce determination to survive and their desire to find dignity in dehumanizing circumstances make them compelling and believable, even when Endo’s narrative is not.”

Update: MangaBlog’s Brigid learns that reports of Eden‘s potentially imminent demise may have been exaggerated.

Upcoming 7/5

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I’m planning to spend Independence Day in the traditional fashion – drinking vodka lemonade and reading comics. (In spite of the holiday delay, I still somehow have plenty to read.) It’s just as well, as it’s a bit of a slow week.

Okay, so no week with a new volume of Dragon Head (Tokyopop) can actually be called “slow.” Even if I like them, there are some series that sit around for a while before I get around to reading them. This is one of the books I read as soon as I bring it into the house.

There’s a whole heap of stuff coming from Seven Seas. Since I have a demonstrated weakness for people-who-see-dead-people manga, I think I’ll have no choice but to give Venus Versus Virus a look.

For other perspectives on the week in comics, here are some links:

  • Matt Blind at comicsnob.com
  • Christopher Butcher at Comics.212.net
  • Katherine Dacey-Tsuei at Manga Recon
  • Chris Mautner and Kevin Melrose at Blog@Newsarama

    • God (of manga) complex

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    Before getting on to regular Right Turn Only business, Carlo Santos ponders the publishing fate of Osamu Tezuka in the world of licensed manga:

    “How is it that the most dependable producer of Tezuka’s work (in America) is a boutique literary publisher that’s targeted way above the heads of the kids who SHOULD be reading his stuff?”

    It’s a reasonable question, and it leads Chloe at Schuchaku East to suggest the following:

    “Granted, Princess Knight, Pheonix, Kimba- these are classics, why aren’t they making it to the masses? Well, for one, they’re a bit aged, and second, as thrilled as manga commentators would be to get their hands on a copy, manga remains a mass market industry aimed largely at preteens and teens.”

    It is a weird conundrum. On the one hand, Tezuka was constantly exploring different genres and reaching out to different audiences, so his stuff for older audiences is as much a part of his legacy as his stuff for kids. I don’t think it necessarily does a disservice to his legacy to make the mature-audience stuff available and package it for that audience. Tezuka was all about comics for people at every stage of life, and I don’t think that means he was all about grandparents reading manga for kids.

    At the same time, I’d like someone to pick up Princess Knight because the snippet Viz published was a lot of fun. (Would it be more accurate to call it a suspicion or a hope to say that I think Viz published that excerpt to test the waters and see what kind of demand for more they got from the Shojo Beat audience?) I honestly don’t think his work has aged all that badly, and I wonder if its original target audience – kids – would actually find it dated or kind of weird and cool. (I wouldn’t necessarily want to see it given the ivory tower treatment, though. Just put it in the customary paperback form with the rest of the Shojo Beat line, if it’s going to be done at all.)

    It leads me to wonder who these high-end collections of stuff like Peanuts and Moomin and Dennis the Menace are supposed to reach. Obviously, comics connoisseurs enjoy them, but I certainly hope that kids are spending rainy afternoons with them too. I don’t know any kids to ask, and they may look at those tomes and roll their eyes. (Well, I can’t let myself believe they’d do that with Moomin.)

    Insert "flexing muscles" pun here

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    According to this piece in Publishers Weekly (found via Blog@Newsarama), DC has joined forces with Flex Comix, a newish Japanese manga company that provides digital content for handheld devices, with eventual collections in print. Why would they do such a thing?

    “DC Comics president Paul Levitz described Flex Comi[x] as an ‘innovative force.’ Flex Comi[x] CEO Seiji Takakura said the new venture ‘will bring authentic Japanese manga to the worldwide English-language audience in new and exciting ways.’”

    That strongly suggests Flex’s interest is in building with a U.S. manga imprint to facilitate English-language licenses for its properties. And while DC probably wouldn’t mind having a first-look relationship with a Japanese publisher, something tells me that’s not their only interest in the partnership.

    Simon Jones of Icarus Publishing notes:

    “[T]his news combines manga, one of the biggest stories in the past ten years of comics, with alternative digital distribution, which may be the biggest news for the next ten. This will, at the very least, give DC valuable experience in both key areas as they develop a future online strategy for their own domestic output.”

    I think the experience is probably the key attraction. DC doesn’t seem to have trouble securing interesting properties for its CMX roster so much as marketing those titles as successfully as some of their competitors in the category. And given that Flex is in its early days in terms of content creation (it’s only seven months old), there’s no guarantee that it will funnel solid sellers (or even licensable properties, as Jones notes) into CMX.

    So that leaves digital distribution as the likeliest lure, which certainly makes sense. I suspect that any licenses DC picks up from Flex will be gravy, and that the success or failure will rest on the portability of Flex’s business plan and how it helps DC to position itself to digitally distribute its own properties when handheld technology catches up. (I think digital distribution of DC’s properties in Japan would also fall into the category of gravy, though I don’t know enough about the demand for U.S. comics in Japan to parse that. Every source I’ve run across indicates that demand isn’t exactly roaring, though.)

    Friday links

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    I’m disappointed that the producers of the Nancy Drew movie went with a Brady Bunch-ish “from the land of retro” approach to the material, but I always enjoy reading A.O. Scott’s reviews for The New York Times:

    “But as it is, ‘Nancy Drew’ stands as an example of how to take a foolproof, time-tested formula — a young detective using smarts and determination to solve a case — and mess it up with superficial cleverness and pandering hackwork.”

    If you’re looking for a revisionist approach to Ms. Drew and her peers in adolescent sleuthing, I’d recommend Mabel Maney’s Nancy Clue/Cherry Aimless books. They’re slash-tastic!

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    I don’t know if I’d call Ai Morinaga’s Your and My Secret a guilty pleasure, but I’m always glad to see some love for this unfortunately abandoned ADV series, especially if it comes from someone as smart as Katherine Dacey-Tsuei.

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    Quote of the week, possibly the month:

    “If DC had published a comic featuring a seductively posed zombie Lois Lane, its hardcore partisans would just want to know which Earth it was taking place on.”

    — Dick Hyacinth