The Manga Curmudgeon

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

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Secret comics Japan

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I can barely stand to read a comic on a computer screen, so the idea of squinting at a cell phone for that purpose is completely beyond my comprehension. But this piece at BusinessWeek.com is a fascinating look at the phenomenon’s early growth in Japan, mostly for what it suggests about the potential to reach what might be called casual readers. Reporter Kenji Hall initially looks at this from the angle of boys’-love fans:

“‘Women and girls in their teens, 20s, and 30s like BL for their portrayals of innocent love,’ says Toshiki Fujii, a manager in the cell-phone content division at Nagoya-based Media Do. ‘But now those who might have been coy about walking into a shop can find what they’re looking for online.’”

Hall goes on to explore the phenomenon more broadly:

“The good news for publishers is that those Net-savvy readers aren’t yet curtailing their spending on real-world goods. ‘Many are still loyal comic book readers who use downloads as a way to try something they might not normally buy,’ says Shuta Suzuki at publisher Shueisha.”

In other words, it’s a variation on the loss-leader concept, but instead of leaving a reader with a thick magazine to dispose of, there’s just a file on their cell phone to be deleted. So there’s convenience added to the privacy of nobody being able to tell what you’re reading. That strikes me as a fairly compelling combination of benefits for people who, unlike me, view the cell phone as something more than an irritating necessity, best used for calls to AAA or the ordering of carry-out.

Though relatively young, the cell-phone manga industry seems to be moving in a very specific direction: towards women.

“When Toppan Printing launched the country’s first Web site for mobile manga downloads in late 2003, it focused on big-name titles favoring male readers. As other publishers and distributors entered the fray, it was the comics for girls and women—boys love and another category called teen love—that lit up the charts.”

Or, like those crafty, low-key BL fans, are those shôjo and josei titles being read by men and boys who don’t want to be seen with the latest copy of Margaret tucked under their arms?

Flippedancy

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It’s Monday, so it must be time for me to pimp this week’s Flipped! Coming under scrutiny are two new series that focus on protagonists who might want to get their affairs in order: Black Sun, Silver Moon (Go! Comi) and Shakugan no Shana (Viz).

And here are a couple of links to folks who expand on last week’s column, either directly or indirectly:

  • Kristy Valenti offers some money-saving strategies for the manga shopper, and
  • John Jakala checks out another on-line vendor.

    • Not dead yet

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    The invaluable ComiPress has more details on the suspension of Monthly Shonen Jump (MSJ), via a translated letter from the publisher that was included in the latest issue of that anthology. People worried about the fate of some of the series featured in MSJ (particularly Claymore, currently being released in English by Viz) should be able to rest easier:

    “As of this writing, several works currently serialized in Monthly Jump are already going to be carried over to the new magazine.

    “As for Claymore, the anime adaptation of which just began airing, the manga will temporarily be serialized monthly on Weekly Shonen Jump, and later be taken over the new magazine.”

    So the series with an anime tie-in isn’t going to miss a beat, and the more popular stuff from MSJ will likely be repackaged in the new magazine. Maybe the venerable MSJ was triggering unpleasant parental nostalgia? Moms and dads looking over the shoulders of the current generation of readers and wistfully noting how much they loved MSJ when they were kids?

    Whatever the reason, it looks like the story isn’t quite as big as it initially seemed. It’s interesting, though, and I’ll be curious to hear details about the new anthology.

    From the in-box

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    The list of comics bestsellers for March in the current Publishers Weekly Comics Week shocks me by actually having something to say about one of the manga titles that made the top ten. Of course, it’s in reference to the 13th volume of Naruto (Viz – Shonen Jump), which is handy, because nobody’s really pondered that sales phenomenon yet. The other seven ranking manga titles, five of which have no anime or game tie-in to bolster sales, go without narrative. I’m too beset by the vapors to fill in the blanks myself.

    300 (Dark Horse) showed up somewhere on the list, though an apparent coding problem keeps readers from knowing precisely where. It didn’t make the top 10, though. I’m not saying that it means anything, because 300 is currently ranked first in graphic novels and 39th in books overall at Amazon, and the first manga title to land is an as-yet-unpublished volume of Fruits Basket which doesn’t show up on graphic novels until 12th place and is at #1,067 in books overall. I’m just saying.

    There’s also a nice, long interview with Alvin Lu, vice president of publishing at Viz. It’s a solid, informative piece about a company that doesn’t come under a lot of scrutiny, perhaps because they have such a consistent approach to publishing. They do their thing – licensed manga from Japan – without going out on too many limbs in the process. So it’s good to see a substantive discussion with Lu about what Viz tries to do and why. This quote pretty much sums it up:

    “Although Viz has changed over the years, the focus hasn’t. Even when we were a much smaller company, the goal was always to bring manga to a mass audience as much as possible, replicating the readership in Japan with the one in America. I don’t know if that differentiates us from the other [manga publishers], but we have not wavered in our core mission. It’s made our business strategy straightforward. We want to bring to the U.S. a library of manga that is created for every walk of life.”

    They still have a ways to go, what with the heavy focus on shônen and shôjo, but it’s nice to see that they have ambitions beyond that. It would make me happy if they accelerated up the timeline, but if they did, they probably wouldn’t be Viz.

    Also, those preview pages from Christian Slade’s Korgi (Top Shelf) are absolutely breathtaking.

    On the bright side…

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    At MangaCast, Ed Chavez looks at the imminent arrival of josei-centric manga publisher Aurora and wonders:

    “Why? Well, honestly who has been successful with josei. Whether you call it ladies or shoujo or Passion Fruit or whatever this has not hit its audience in the US. Yen Press is going to give it a shot (we will talk about that later) but what makes Aurora unique is that their parent company Ohzora is basically a josei manga publisher.”

    At The Beat, Heidi MacDonald shares Chavez’s skepticism on the category’s track record:

    “Josei manga is the long-lost ‘missing link’ between ‘Harlequin romance comics’ and ‘Sex in the CIty comics’ for women. Understandably, the genre has had little success in the US, despite entries by such important manga-ka as Erica Sakurazawa and Moyocco Anno.”

    I’m a little puzzled by the level of wariness. Nobody’s really made a concerted effort to focus on josei lately. It’s not like there’s a graveyard filled with the corpses of failed initiatives, and given the paucity of josei in print, it’s hard for me to be anything but enthusiastic at the prospect. Tokyopop’s done well with Tramps Like Us, and people greeted Antique Bakery with great enthusiasm (though that probably owed more to Fumi Yoshinaga’s reputation in yaoi).

    It’s largely unexplored territory, and I’ve been waiting for someone to really give it a go, so I’m going to side with Dirk Deppey’s somewhat more optimistic appraisal in today’s Journalista entry:

    “At this point, readers from those days [when Tokyopop tried unsuccessfully to sell the josei work of Erica Sakurazawa during the period when shôjo was still finding its footing — dpw] are starting to hit college-age, and might very well provide something resembling a stable market from which to grow over the long term.”

    I’d add to that the often-repeated notion that kids, and girls in particular, read upwards of what’s targeted at their age group. I think it’s high time that someone started thinking about what the audience for shôjo might be looking to read next and actually start providing it, instead of ceding readers to other entertainments that might address their interests and attitudes more directly.

    Deppey goes on to wonder if a replication of the Cartoon Network Effect might be helpful in heralding josei’s commercial arrival:

    “I suspect that you won’t see the sort of stampede effect that other manga demographics have experienced until a good anime geared toward adult women shows up on afternoon/evening television and pushes readers toward an equally good manga series — Ai Yazawa’s Nana, Chika Umino’s Honey and Clover and Moyoco Anno’s Hataraki Man would each fit the bill nicely — but we shall see.”

    It certainly couldn’t hurt. I don’t expect Oxygen or WE or Lifetime to announce a programming block any time soon, but stranger things have happened.

    Paper products

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    I was glad to see this announcement at Comics Worth Reading about an upcoming collection of Tyler Page’s Nothing Better. It started as a self-published pamphlet, then moved to a web-to-print model. After a somewhat mixed reaction to the first issue, the story grew on me, but the promise of an eventual collection and a preference for comics I can hold kept me from sampling new chapters on-line. Now, Page is looking for pre-orders for a volume collecting the first seven chapters. I’ll be ordering one, and I hope the plan works out.

    CWR also reminds me of another ill-fated floppy made good, Elk’s Run, by Joshua Hale Falkov and Noel Tuazon. It started out self-published, got picked up by short-lived Speakeasy, and, after Speakeasy’s implosion, seemed like it might be consigned to unfinished comics limbo until it got picked up for collected release by Random House’s Villard imprint. This is one of those books where I really wanted to know what happened next, so I’m looking forward to the arrival of the trade paperback.

    Now, when am I going to see a new issue of Lackluster World from Eric Adams?

    Updated with the happy answer: “Lackluster World #4 goes to the printer next week and will debut at SPACE on April 21 &22.”

    Simon says

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    Manga Jouhou’s Floating_Sakura has additional comment from Libre on its dispute with CPM (found via the ever watchful, consistently insightful, probably not-safe-for-work Simon Jones):

    “The license agreements for translations of the publications between BIBLOS Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as ‘BIBLOS’) and Central Park Media Corporation (hereinafter referred to as ‘CPM’) became invalid after April, 2006 when BIBLOS filed for bankruptcy protection.

    “Any and all translations of our publications by CPM are based upon the above-mentioned terminated agreements.”

    Much more at the link.

    Jones also digs up new details on Aurora Publishing, which has been whispered about since April of last year but had yet to yield any concrete information:

    “Well… maybe not ‘new.’ Aurora has been around since March 2006, and is a subsidiary of Ohzora Publishing, publisher of the Harlequin manga adaptations in Japan, as well as the ‘Project X’ series of biographical manga.”

    Here’s the link to a Comic Book Resources-hosted release from Diamond Book Distributors.

    (Updated to clarify some inaccurate phrasing on my part.)

    Saturday linkblogging

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    Paul Gravett, author of Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics and Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know (both highly recommended), gives an overview of the United Kingdom’s original English language manga scene.

    Webcomic creator and champion of overlooked manga of all flavors Shaenon K. Garrity makes a case for Keiko Takemiya’s To Terra… (Vertical), and makes a request of a certain on-line reference site:

    “(Okay, I just went over to Wikipedia and Takemiya only has a stub. An inaccurate stub. There’s a Wikipedia entry for every single individual Pokemon, and this is the best they can do for one of the most gifted and influential cartoonists in manga history? NOT COOL, WIKIPEDIA. Quit systematically deleting everything about webcomics and get to work writing some damn articles.)”

    At Manga Recon, Katherine Dacey-Tsuei gives Fumiyo Kouno’s Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Last Gasp) a well-deserved A+. If I haven’t said it lately, buy this book.

    At Blog@Newsarama, Graeme McMillan rounds up some news related to Osamu Tezuka, the God of Manga. While I’d love to see new editions of Frederik Schodt’s marvelous Manga! Manga! and Dreamland Japan, a collection of essays on Tezuka will certainly tide me over. (Now, when is Matt Thorn going to write the definitive history of shôjo? I’ve been hoping for it since he interviewed Moto Hagio in The Comics Journal.)

    Bibliopalooza

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    The Beat pointed to Booklist’s Top 10 Graphic Novels for Youth, which led me to discover that the magazine devoted the entire March 15 issue to a “Spotlight on Graphic Novels.”

    Other features include:

  • A piece on the building blocks of a library manga collection for teens, by Robin Brenner
  • The Top Ten Graphic Novels 2007, i.e., those books the magazine reviewed most favorably between March 2006 and January 2007
  • An interview with Gene (American Born Chinese) Yang and Andy (Owly) Runton
  • An interview with Alison (Fun Home) Bechdel, which includes discussion of the recently resolved controversy in Marshall, Missouri
  • And bunches of other awesome stuff.

    • Seriously, go, read.