The Manga Curmudgeon

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

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Times-liness

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At No Flying, No Tights, Jen ponders censorship and stereotypes evident in some recent coverage of comics and librarians. Particularly interesting are thoughts on a recent piece in The New York Times about Susan Patron’s The High Power of Lucky, an award-winning novel for young adults with the word “scrotum” on the first page. I particularly like Jen’s sum-up:

“Yet librarians doom themselves when they base their collection decisions on fear… I’m more worried that the people who flip out over a single word will make it impossible for librarians to buy anything that pushes the envelope…what would they say if they knew I put Same-Cell Organism in my library’s young adult collection?”

Edited: The original Times article on the controversy is here (and thanks to Dave Carter for sending the link), and there are several letters to the editor available for perusal.

At The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon takes a comics-centric approach to another Times topic, discussing books you haven’t yet read:

“In comics, saying you haven’t caught up with something yet has the regular advantage of letting the person who just spoke know that what they brought up is of interest, and the added advantage of flattering the art form in terms of there being so many things out there to explore.”

And if you haven’t had enough linkblogging from me, I basically devote all of this week’s Flipped to it, doing a drive-by of some recent events in the manga realm.

Faking it

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The question of how comics fans can get their wives and girlfriends to share their interest has come up again recently, but what about those poor targets of hobby evangelism? Why doesn’t anyone offer any strategic advice to guide their responses to this unsolicited knock at the door from believers bearing pamphlets? What should they do when the men in their lives give them a Fables trade for their three-month anniversary?

Perhaps the answer will come from France. A Parisian literature professor has developed a methodology that might help: just pretend you’re better-read than you really are.

The New York Times talks with Pierre Bayard (free registration required) about his not-yet-available-in-English primer, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read?

“Domestic life is another potentially hazardous zone. People often want their spouses and partners to share their love of a particular book. And when this happens, Mr. Bayard said, they can both inhabit a ‘secret universe.’ But if only one has read the book, silent empathy may offer the best way out.”

That month of the time again

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The new edition of Previews doesn’t arrive in comic shops until tomorrow, but you can get a look at the Manga Month 2007 Checklist here.

And what will you see when you get there? Pretty much everything manga-related that’s shipping, but condensed into a nice, two-page PDF. Look closely and you’ll see that Last Gasp will be striking again, with a re-release of Junko Mizuno: Pure Trance.

Elementary

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Another reason to bookmark Kevin Melrose’s Comics, Covered: he does interviews, this time with versatile comics creator Andi Watson. Watson’s “Princess at Midnight” was one of the highlights of The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, and Paris was one of my favorite comics of last year. And because I’ll take any opportunity to praise Paris artist Simon Gane, I’ll pull this quote from Watson:

“I think Simon was hoping to get away from the detail-oriented stuff he’d done before but I kept throwing the full-pagers at him because he does them so well, the research and attention to detail, the way he’ll dress a set, dress the characters and then have them interact, gush, gush, gush. So it’s fulfilling, but in a different way. It’s like Christmas every time I get pages in from someone like Simon. I can’t wait to open up all the files and see what amazing work he’s done.

“It’s also kind of depressing as an artist because you know you’re not as good.”

Watson goes on to note that a collection of Paris is due out from Slave Labor in July, complete with new illustrations from Gane. I don’t usually buy collections of comics I already own, but I’m sorely tempted.

Endocritiquery

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I’ve really been enjoying Hiroki Endo’s Eden: It’s an Endless World! (Dark Horse), though I don’t think the most recent volume is one of the strongest in the series. It detours from the larger narrative into worthy but very familiar territory. (It seems that prostitution can be a dangerous profession, especially when drug addiction is thrown into the mix.) It’s executed well, and by the end, things seem to be moving back into the story’s larger context, so I can’t complain all that much.

Still, it was nice to have the first volume of Endo’s Tanpenshu (also from Dark Horse) lying around to provide some examples of the creator at his best. It also provided fodder for half of this week’s Flipped. The other half is spent in probably pointless meditation on the ICv2 Guide #39 which, it must be noted, is created for comics retailers and not nerdy pseudo-pundits with laminated membership cards in Team Manga.

Anyway, back to Tanpenshu. I’m not the only one contemplating its many wonders. Greg McElhatton at Read About Comics and Dave Ferraro at Comics-and-More have reviewed it as well.

The bottom of the top

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At Newsarama, retailer Brian Hibbs has shared analysis of BookScan’s 2006 list of the 750 bestselling graphic novels. Hibbs notes that dollar sales for the category are up about 8.5% from 2005 estimates, and that manga publishers claimed 575 of the 750 slots. That’s about a 3% drop from last year’s manga estimate, but unit and dollar sales have both increased for the category.

There’s a significant change in methodology this year:

“This provided a very close approximation of what the year’s best sellers were, but there was always a chance that some books slipped through the cracks by not happening to sell enough copies that week to make the chart.

“This year, however, I have the actual year end chart.”

Since there’s only so much you can say about Naruto, I thought I’d look at the bottom 25 manga to see what could be gleaned.

  • CASE CLOSED V11 – 5/16/06
  • HIKARU NO GO V2 – 10/12/04
  • DRAGON BALL V5 2E – 3/??/03
  • MEGATOKYO V2 – 1/21/04
  • W JULIET V8 – 1/10/06
  • CERES CELESTIAL LEGEND V2 YUHI 2E – 2/4/04
  • SAIYUKI RELOAD V5 – 10/10/06
  • ALICE 19TH V3 CHAINED – 3/17/04
  • BEET THE VANDEL BUSTER V1 – 10/19/04
  • W JULIET V9 – 3/14/06
  • KAGETORA V1 – 3/28/06
  • ALL THAT PIKACHU ANIMANGA – 8/15/06
  • YU YU HAKUSHO V5 – 10/12/04
  • IMADOKI V3 – 10/10/04
  • KAMIKAZE KAITO JEANNE V3 – 4/26/06
  • DESCENDANTS OF DARKNESS V1 – 9/14/04
  • HANA KIMI V8 – 10/11/05
  • WOLF’S RAIN V2 – 2/1/05
  • YU YU HAKUSHO V4 — 6/16/04
  • HANA KIMI V3 – 1/11/05
  • DRAGON BALL Z V10 2E – 5/??/03
  • LA ESPERANCA V2 – 3/29/06
  • SENSUAL PHRASE V13 – 4/11/06
  • NAOKI URASAWA’S MONSTER V1 – 2/21/06
  • MAN’S BEST FRIEND INU MO ARUK – 6/??/06

    • Hm… not a whole lot, now that I look at them. There is a fair amount of evergreen material on the lower end of the scale. Less than half of the titles were actually published in 2006. Three were released in 2005, nine in 2004, and two in 2003.

    Here are some other points from the run-down that jumped out at me:

    “This year, the ‘worst selling’ book clears 4700 copies. In previous years there would be 200 or more items that didn’t have [year-to-date] sales in that amount.”

    That’s good to know, as it indicates overall growth in the category.

    “[I]t seems to me that manga, while still growing, is no longer doing so as ‘explosively’ as it once did. Nearly a 40% unit growth from ’03 to ’04, 22% from ’04 to ’05, and about 20% from ’05 to ’06. Factor in the differences in reporting methodologies, and it’s probably under 13% growth in 2006. Really, my supposition won’t be properly tested until next year’s figures, but I think we might be reaching a plateau for manga sales where the category becomes ‘mature’, and a more reasonable 5-8% growth a year is what’s to be expected.”

    Hibbs goes on to note that DC and Marvel both enjoyed massive growth in dollar sales and units moved. Both roughly doubled their numbers over 2005 estimates, though neither made tremendous gains in the number of titles placing on the list. (DC went from 42 to 59, and Marvel from 26 to 33.)

    “That’s it for ‘art comics’ – there’s no D&Q, there’s no FirstSecond (on that one I checked with a source, yup they’re all below the 4784 line; nope, not even American Born Chinese)”.

    That’s depressing. Both published some really superb books in 2006, and my anecdotal experience indicates that they each have pretty good bookstore distribution in addition to near-universal critical acclaim. Maybe some of this year’s books will show up on next year’s list.

    Check yourself

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    Over at TokyoSpace, ChunHyang has a terrific essay on editing. It’s filled with great advice for anyone who’s writing for public consumption, whether the final product takes the form of a paper for a class, a weblog entry, or a script for publication. After being jarred by fairly glaring typos in the early pages of two otherwise excellent manga series that I was reading over the weekend, praise for editing is reassuring reading. (And yes, I should practice her suggestions more often than I do.)

    In related news, Netcomics is hiring a full-time proofreader.

    Skating by

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    Okay, the terror of freezing rain followed by sleet followed by snow has renewed my interest in this week’s comics, perhaps because weather might keep them from arriving. I’m fickle and, though it seems contradictory, a creature of habit. Sue me.

    Praise from virtually all quarters has rendered the Nextwave: Agents of Hate trade paperback (Marvel) irresistible. I surrender.

    The week basically belongs to Viz, though, with new volumes of The Drifting Classroom, Monster, Train Man: Densha Otoko, and the debut of Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs, for anyone who’s still riding a cute-dog buzz from Westminster. (I can’t believe there isn’t a show-dog name generator somewhere out there on the web.)

    And while Del Rey doesn’t have any releases on the schedule, there’s a sprightly round of recommendations in comments on this MangaBlog entry. It was the final kick in the pants I needed to order a copy of Mushishi.

    Sex, politics and religion

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    Not necessarily in that order.

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    ICv2 weighs in on those anime-styled DC heroine figurines:

    “DC Direct’s attempt to create something akin to the sexy anime/manga figures so common in Japan has already stirred up some controversy and is likely to run further afoul of the puritanical streak in the American character. It should be interesting to see how far down the ‘fan service’ road DC Direct or other American companies will go — how long will it take before there is an American superheroine action figure with squeeze-able silicon breasts or panty-shot purveying mirrored bases (see ‘Yamato’s Ikki Tousen: Battle Sonsaku’)?”

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    I was hoping that if I waited long enough, someone would write a review of Kevin Huizenga’s marvelous Curses (Drawn & Quarterly) that I could just point to and claim, “I was just about to say exactly the same thing!” Procrastination pays, thanks to Dirk Deppey.

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    It’s not that this week’s ComicList is especially boring. It’s just that I’m feeling exceptionally lazy and disappointed. Television has been promising me apocalyptic levels of snowfall for half a week, and while I knew in some small corner of my mind that I would be disappointed, I still expended most of my anticipatory energy on the prospect of a blizzard that never was.

    Okay, I am a little excited about the prospect of more tawdry Borgia action from Heavy Metal, because it was like an uncensored Renaissance version of Dynasty. Jog explains it better than I can.

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    At Blog@Newsarama, Graeme McMillan wonders if Serenity really sells all that well. It’s never shown up in the BookScan charts to my knowledge, but I’ve never been entirely clear on how those are assembled to begin with. Do they factor in sales in Christian bookstores and other specialty shops of that nature? It’s possible that RealBuzz has moved a whole pile of inspirational manga through those venues.

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    And just to cleanse the palate, Simon (NSFW) Jones thoughtfully filters out the ero-manga offerings in the March edition of Previews Adult. Equal time, people.

    Monday linkblogging

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    A comics retailer and a librarian walk into a bar… This piece from halifax_slasher and this response from Robin Brenner make for great back-to-back reading. (Oh, and No Flying, No Tights has also completed a mammoth update.)

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    From the “I agree!” category, thoughts on Wild Adapter from TangognaT:

    “If you like reading stories about cool men who might or might not have romantic feelings for each other smoking cigarettes and shooting guns, you can’t go wrong with Wild Adapter.”

    And on 12 Days from Lyle at Crocodile Caucus:

    “Considering the amount of skill [June] Kim shows, I’m surprised that there wasn’t a small but loyal audience eagerly awaiting this book on the basis of Kim’s short stories (similar to how many people purchased The Baby Sitters’ Club off of the strength of Raina Tegemeier’s mini-comic work). Much like Telgemeier, Kim is an artist who’s storytelling skill suggest years of honing her craft under the radar. I know I’m sold on whatever project Kim creates next.”

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    From the “Grab your pointers” category:

    Dave Carter at Yet Another Comics Blog is looking for good sources of manga news. In addition’s to the ones already suggested in the comments, I’d add the always-interesting ComiPress and the weekly round-ups from ChunHyang.

    Joe Gross at Austin360.com is looking for manga recommendations. (Found via The Comics Reporter.) He already seems to be making a pretty good start with books like Eden, Monster, and The Drifting Classroom.

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    Kevin Melrose has re-launched Comics, Covered. The more Melrose the better, I say.

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    And this week’s Flipped is up, celebrating the recuperative power of fluff.