The Manga Curmudgeon

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

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Friday linkblogging

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I was going to review Go! Comi’s Train + Train, but Katherine Dacey-Tsuei covers everything I’d want to say over at Manga Recon. I particularly agree with her assessment of the art:

“Given the description of the Special Train, I expected Tomomasa Takuma to have a field day rendering the different cars. But he does little with the set-up, offering us only a generic-looking glimpse of the mall car. (Forgive me if I let out a grumpy sigh—the MALL car?! Wouldn’t a school have a library and a gym?) His action scenes are no great shakes, either. Despite the heavy use of speed lines, the characters look firmly tethered to the ground.”

TangognaT isn’t especially inspired by the debut either. It’s very competent shônen, but there’s plenty of excellent shônen out there. (Like, say, Bleach.)

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Speaking of excellent shônen, Shaenon Garrity places Kekkaishi in that category in the latest installment of her Overlooked Manga Festival. From her all-caps review of The Drifting Classroom to her declaration that “MANGA CAN HAVE ALL (her) BABIES” in reaction to Gerard and Jacques, Garrity is the funniest manga critic going.

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At Yet Another Comics Blog, Dave Carter offers a list of unlicensed manga he’d like to see in English. They all sound good, but Palepoli tops my list of nag-worthy books. Because I’m an essentially envious person, I had to look and see if it had been published in France. Doesn’t look like it.

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I’m also an extremely forgetful person, so I neglected to pre-order a copy of PINNED! from Yaoi Press. After reading the interview with Yamila Abraham in the latest Sequential Tart, I feel kind of badly about that. At least I can read the first volume.

Avril showers

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Simon Jones rounds up reaction to Del Rey’s announcement of its inaugural foray into global manga and offers his own perspective at the probably-not-safe-for-work Icarus blog:

“Whatever one may feel about such transparent marketing-oriented books, the silver lining of such appropriations of the medium by big multimedia companies is that it advances the cache of manga as a culturally relevant phenomenon…

“I wasn’t all too thrilled with Tokyopop’s CineManga, but I’ve mellowed out over time… if those books manage to give manga more exposure to young kids, that’s one in the win column. Make 5 Wishes will hopefully do the same.”

I tend to agree. Make 5 Wishes doesn’t immediately sound like it promises to be an artistic triumph, and in spite of my well-documented fondness for manga aimed at tweens, I probably won’t be rushing out to snag a copy. But if it sells well with its target audience, it might give Del Rey more leeway to take chances with global creators who don’t have to collaborate with the TRL set.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Del Rey demonstrates excellent taste in the manga it chooses to license, and its production values are among the best in the category. But I sometimes have to remind myself that they aren’t some plucky boutique publisher. They’re part of a huge publishing empire, Random House, and they’ve got a partnership with one of the largest Japanese manga publishers, Kodansha.

In other words, they’re a corporate division. Miraculously, their status as such has not resulted in crappy titles, indifferently produced, but in really, really good manga. I don’t love everything they publish, but I love a lot of it.

At the same time, corporate divisions have to show results, particularly when they’re trying something new. Del Rey isn’t just trying to sell the audience on global manga; they’re selling Random House on it as well. So, as Tina Anderson suggested in comments over at MangaBlog, if it seems like they’re skewing the experiment in an excessively populist direction to guarantee initial success, they probably are.

If they keep rolling out global manga inspired by collaborations with pre-rehab pop stars or the cast of Hannah Montana, then I’ll gladly grab my torch and pitchfork. But as an opening gambit, this seems sensible.

The marketplace

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In this week’s Flipped, I try and work out the last of my fixation on the inaugural Great Graphic Novels for Teens list, at least until YALSA starts posting the this year’s nominees. I also kind of shrug over the whole Wal-Mart situation because… well… it’s Wal-Mart.

In these comments at MangaBlog, there’s some interesting discussion about the relative success of manga and other kinds of trade paperbacks both in chain bookstores and local comic shops. The back-and-forth made me think back on what graphic novel shelves looked like before manga started to gain ground — generally a couple of shelves stuffed between the end of the science fiction paperbacks and the beginning of the role-playing game guides.

Maybe non-manga graphic novels actually have it better in bookstores now? In my limited and completely anecdotal experience, they do seem to have more space in better locations, even if they don’t have quite as much as the digests enjoy.

What he said

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John Jakala wrote an excellent post in response to the semi-regular flurries of complaint that “All manga looks the same,” a subset of “All manga is crap.” He notes some of my favorite manga-ka in the process, but I wanted to throw out a few other names of creators whose work strikes me as particularly distinctive:

  • Hiromu Arakawa: Yes, Fullmetal Alchemist is popular shônen adventure, but the look of Arakawa’s work doesn’t remind me of anything else in the category.
  • Junko Mizuno: Mizuno may appropriate most of the elements of the “cutesy manga style,” but she makes such a psychedelic hash of them that her look crosses over into something entirely unique. Just look at Princess Mermaid.
  • Kaoru Mori: Not a flowery or sparkly background in sight, but Mori still manages to pack her panels with emotion, but she does so through understatement and specificity. Mori also delivers the best “chat with the author” pieces in the business.
  • Kiriko Nananan: Nananan’s “Heartless Bitch” and “Painful Love” were some of my favorite pieces in Secret Comics Japan, and while I wasn’t overwhelmed by Blue, I always find her visual style very arresting. If CPM ever actually releases Sweet Cream & Red Strawberries, I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.
  • Kan Takahama: Kinderbook remains one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever read, and I’m sure Awabi won’t disappoint. (The first thing Fanfare/Ponent Mon needs to do is get its distribution sorted out. The second is to revise its web site to make direct links to individual titles possible.)
  • Jiro Taniguchi: Gorgeously precise and detailed and able to put his style into the service of a wide variety of stories, from the everyday (The Walking Man) to the historical (The Times of Botchan) to the violent (Benkei in New York). The Ice Wanderer is due to be released by Fanfare/Ponent Mon sometime soon.
  • Ai Yazawa: One of the most stylish artists in print. Also a wonderful storyteller, as evidenced by Paradise Kiss and Nana.

    • I nag because I love

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    It’s a breezy trip through this week’s ComicList, with only two entries really catching my eye, but what entries they are.

    David Petersen’s surprise hit Mouse Guard (Archaia) concludes with its sixth issue. It’s been a lot of fun watching this beautifully drawn adventure story earn critical praise and go into multiple printings, because it absolutely deserves both. And I notice on the Archaia page that a hardcover collection is in the works, which should be gorgeous and make librarians very, very happy.

    Hiroki Endo has been wowing me with the complex science fiction of Eden: It’s an Endless World! (Dark Horse), so I’m really looking forward to his collection of shorter pieces, Tanpenshu. I’ve heard nothing but good things about this book from people like Christopher Butcher, so even if I wasn’t already Endo-inclined, I would be giving it a serious look.

    Speaking of the Torontonian retailer, Chris does a much better job than I did of highlighting the licensed Japanese goodness on display in this year’s Angoulême short list, including this comment about Daisuke Igarashi’s Sorcières, which I can only second:

    “Absolutely beautiful, and I could totally see Dark Horse picking this up and fitting it seamlessly into their current slate of releases. YOU HEAR ME, CARL?”

    Dark Horse has been doing a great job of delivering manga that I really, really like (Eden, The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Mail). Maybe I should start nagging them about launching a josei line.

    (Edited due to a spelling flame-out.)

    Tezuka on demand

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    There are so many intriguing things about this item at ComiPress that it’s hard to pick where to start.

  • I think on-line, user-compiled anthologies are a great idea. As Chloe noted at Shuchaku East, “Let’s be honest, when was the last time you picked up a copy of Bleach and thought that hey, Bleach was good , so I’ll probably like and subsequently buy the 23 other series in this label too!” Imagine if readers could build their own anthology out of Shonen Jump or Shojo Beat or Shonen Jump Advanced?
  • It’s interesting to see rival publishers collaborating on this kind of initiative, but maybe it’s just the power of Osamu Tezuka. (And by the way, I’d never seen Kodansha’s English site before. It seems to have been designed almost specifically for potential licensing entitites.)
  • It’s nice to see that, even almost 20 years after his death, Tezuka is still driving innovation in the manga industry. (It could be argued that the Netcomics site already essentially offers an on-demand, online anthology.)
  • I’d love to know more about how the serials are packaged and delivered — if there are any bells and whistles or supplementary content that come with the selected serials.
  • I hope this is just the first in a wave and that it becomes popular enough that a U.S. publisher picks up the idea. Somebody pick up the Magnificent ’49ers next! I swear I’ll try and learn Japanese if you do!

    • Fruits nuts

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    I should really just add a Fruits Basket category, shouldn’t I?

    At Coffee & Ink, Mely has named her favorite ongoing manga series for 2006, and Fruits Basket is among them, along with a bunch of other titles I really enjoy and some I’m going to have to try. Mely offers the usual cornucopia of great observations, but this is probably my favorite:

    “You know, every time I read the jacket copy for Fruits Basket I’m amazed at how it manages to sound so bright and cheery and inane, despite being a factually correct description of the plot. And now I see it is just an unavoidable consequence of writing about Fruits Basket.”

    Exactly.

    In other news, the fifteenth volume of Fruits Basket owns the top slot for manga sales in the Direct Market, and comes close to owning the whole graphic novel category, landing in second place on ICv2’s December chart. (Okay, it isn’t exactly a photo finish, with the considerably more expensive Fables trade moving about 3,000 more units.)

    Compare and contrast

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    I’m assuming that this piece at Comic Book Resources refers to “The Year That Was” in the average Direct Market comic shop, right? And that future parts will address developments from 2006 that aren’t quite so focused on spandex? Because, with all due respect to Civil War, if someone doesn’t mention Fun Home or American Born Chinese as significant developments in the comics industry in 2006, I will be considerably chagrined.

    Much more to my liking is John Jakala’s fabulous overview of the year that was over at Sporadic Sequential.

    Eligible (and confirmed) bachelors

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    Loren Javier at One Diverse Comic Book Nation shares the list of eligible comics for this year’s GLAAD award for LGBT portrayals. Obviously, this is a broad overview of all such portrayals, not just the good ones, because if anyone seriously considers giving anything resembling an award for inclusiveness and representation to the sequence described in The Boys, they should have their head examined.

    Dirk Deppey proceeds to recoil in horror (scroll down to the Comics Culture of today’s entry at !Journalista¡), and given GLAAD’s focus in previous years, it’s hard not to sympathize. The “visibility” argument that leans things in favor of publishers like Marvel and DC has always struck me as misguided, patting the perceived mainstream on the back for not getting things egregiously wrong rather than honoring books that could be celebrated without reservation.

    A good slate of nominees could come from this collection, but I’ve given up hoping that one will come from it.

    What he said

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    I don’t really have much to add to Graeme McMillan’s summary of the TightLip situation, except to note that the CBR thread is incredibly depressing, not only for the number of people who have apparently been on the receiving end of TightLip’s bad business practices but for the thread’s degeneration from well-intentioned attempt to secure compensation for the screwed to mortifying spectacle of infantile name-calling. Can someone just sue someone else already so we can get to the point where attorneys will recommend that their clients refrain from public comment?