The Manga Curmudgeon

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

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"K" is for…

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Sometimes a review just grabs me:

“Meet Kino, a free-thinking, pint-size world traveler who cruises the globe on a talking motorcycle, fighting injustice wherever she finds it. She’s a cultural relativist, kinda, but she definitely knows the difference between right and wrong. She’s like Tank Girl meets Kant, only more butch than both. She’s my new personal hero.”

It’s of Kino no Tabi by Keiichi Sigsawa, one of the light novels being published by Tokyopop, and it sounds really intriguing. The question is, am I ready to throw even more money at manga publishers for prose? I’m not inclined to pick up novelizations of manga series, but stuff like this certainly catches my eye. Has anyone read it?

And oh, happy day! A listing for King of Thorn by Iwahara Yuji has shown up on Tokyopop’s web site. Sure, it doesn’t come out until June, but if it’s half as good as Chikyu Misaki (CMX), then I’ll avoid the rush and commence anticipatory hovering now.

Con jobs

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A dust-up seems to be brewing over the inaugural American Anime Awards, to be debuted this year at the New York Comic Con. At MangaCast, Ed Chavez takes a moment from his travels in Japan to look over the ballot, particularly the manga nominees, and he finds it wanting. Anime News Network interrogates ICv2’s Milton Griepp over the conception of the awards program and what could be construed as ADV’s undue influence.

The awards have struck me as a rather odd fit for this particular con since they were announced. Anime isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the NYCC, and the impression was reinforced by the closing remarks from this week’s PWCW interview with con organizer Greg Toplian:

“What I’m told is that we’re the literary show. This is New York City, and it’s about comics and book publishing. Editorial staff or the licensing departments can all stop by the convention for the price of cab fare. The Friday trade day also helps. We’re a more bookish show than others and getting Stephen King to attend as a guest of honor is the perfect illustration of that.”

(Dedicated conspiracy theorists will undoubtedly note that the interview is illustrated with a photo of Toplian and ADV’s Chris Oarr. The snark-centric will undoubtedly note the dangerous proximity of “literary” and “Stephen King.”)

Aside from the overcrowding issue, the general impression that emerged from last year’s NYCC was one of wider publisher interest in the category – book publishers scouring the con floor for talent and contemplating ways to slice off their own piece of the graphic novel pie. And while anime is certainly a driver in graphic novel sales, it doesn’t seem like an intuitive fit. Back at the ANN interview, Griepp provides some background:

“New York Comic Con was actively searching for an awards program from one of its categories to be associated with the convention, so a venue and supporting event became available. The association with New York Comic Con allowed the awards program to take advantage of the location in the media capital of the world, with a very large press corps already attending.”

The PWCW interview had plenty on its plate without delving into the new awards program, and Calvin Reid did address another issue that’s been simmering:

“We’ve heard some complaints about a lack of women creators being invited officially to be a part of the show. When I checked the guest list at the Web site, there was one woman out of about 31 invited guest artists. While I understand there are more women involved in some of the as-yet-unannounced programming, this still seems like an unfortunate message to send out. Particularly since the mainstream New York comics industry has a long history of excluding women.”

One out of 31? That’s an even worse percentage than San Diego.

Good reads

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At MangaBlog, Brigid interviews Kurt Hassler, former most powerful person in manga and current co-exec of Hachette’s upcoming Yen Press line of graphic novels. I like the guiding principle that Yen Press seems to have adopted:

“When we’re dealing with original stuff, maybe we’re developing more of a flavor of our own, but we have a variety of people who are working on the imprint. We want to give everyone a voice. We’re not ruling anything out. The rule is if it’s a good book, we are going to publish it.”

At Comics212.net, Chris Butcher notes that 2006 offered a merry little Christmas for graphic novel retailers:

“Anyway, from my vantage point this was the year that comics may have actually entered the mainstream, at least as far as gift-giving is concerned. It’s been gratifying for me because I’ve really wanted it, but it made for a particularly positive ending to a year during which I invested a lot of myself into the medium.”

And at The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon asks readers to look forward to what they want from 2007.

Still more best

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Time Magazine‘s Andrew Arnold has listed his choices for the ten best comics of 2006:

1. La Perdida by Jessica Abel (Pantheon)
2. The Push Man and Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo by Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Drawn & Quarterly)
3. An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons & True Stories, edited by Ivan Brunetti (Yale University Press)
4. Popeye by E.C. Segar (Fantagraphics)
5. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin)
6. Cancer Vixen by Marissa Acocella Marchetto (Knopf)
7. Curses by Kevin Huizenga (Drawn & Quarterly)
8. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (First Second)
9. Kings in Disguise by James Vance and Dan Burr (W. W. Norton)
10. Absolute Sandman by Neil Gaiman and various (DC/Vertigo)

Posters at The Comics Journal Message Board are offering their choices as well.

And at recent blogroll addition TZG2.0, Myk has listed his choices for Best Manga/Manhwa of 2006 and Best Comics 2006.

Tween scene

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There’s some good reading on comics for tweens floating around this morning. First is an interview at Comic Book Resources with Jim Rugg, who will be providing the art for Cecil Castelluci’s Plain Janes for DC’s Minx line.

Rugg provides an interesting look into his creative process, how his approach to Plain Janes differed from his work on the much-loved Street Angel (Slave Labor Graphics), and the impossibility of pleasing all the people all the time:

“In order to maintain the commitment necessary to produce a comic, I need a high level of enthusiasm for the material. I’m not trying to make work for some future audience, I’m trying to make a page or scene or story that appeals to me. I value clarity when I’m designing a page or sequence but to imagine what other people want is impossible because every single person wants something different.”

I think the please-yourself approach tends to result in the best comics (and any creative work, really). It can also result in some pretty terrible ones, depending on who exactly is at the helm, but even then I’d rather see something awful that comes from a specific, personal place than a comic by committee.

That brings me to the one point of the interview that made me shake my head a bit. I think Rugg has some generally good points about brand names being less meaningful in the long run than the quality of the product they represent, but this argument struck me as kind of circular:

“The only way a name matters is if it’s something atrocious, something hard to remember or pronounce – Minx is fine, and just in case it does matter, DC commissioned focus groups in order to test various names. Minx won. So assuming that the name of an imprint/company does matter, I will defer to the teenage girls in the focus group rather than my opinion or the opinion of other adults.”

Oh, well, if the focus group liked it… It’s probably just a personal aversion, but focus-group endorsement actually makes me less enthusiastic about a marketing choice, even though I know a lot of my beloved manga lives or dies on audience feedback. But I’m a geezer. And probably kind of a hypocrite.

(For supplemental reading, check out Jennifer de Guzman’s inaugural column at Comic World News, where she talks about the migration of talent from smaller publishers like Slave Labor to Minx.)

Elsewhere, conversation continues on the great Archie experiment. Johanna Draper Carlson has been doing a fine job of tracking reaction and developments, and ICv2 has a column from comics retailer Steve Bennett on the subject. Bennett makes the (to me) reasonable argument that presenting different versions of iconic characters for specific audiences is a good thing:

“Meaning, this isn’t an either or situation, you can have classic and post-modern versions of characters existing side by side with each other. DC is already selectively practicing this. To appeal to the mainstream super-hero reader there’s the Trial of Shazam Captain Marvel and for everyone else there’s Jeff Smith’s upcoming rendition of the classic incarnation. It’ll probably come as no surprise that I prefer the utter wish fulfillment of the original, but until a lot more kids start coming into Dark Star I can’t ignore the way copies of Trial of Shazam has been flying off our shelves.”

Gazetteer

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Kids read comics! And they write about them for newspapers! In West Virginia, of all places!

I was happy to see this piece in the Charleston Gazette linked at MangaNews, partly because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a graphic novel mentioned in a West Virginia newspaper, and partly because it’s about one of my favorite books of the year, Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese.

High-school student Lesley Cruickshank reviews the book, interviews the creator, and throws in some recommended titles for good measure.

Here are some of Yang’s favorites:

“For younger teens who enjoy ‘American Born Chinese,’ he recommends ‘Usagi Yojimbo’ by Stan Sakai, ‘Bone’ by Jeff Smith, and ‘anything by Raina Telgemeier.’

“For older teens, he suggests ‘Blankets’ by Craig Thompson, ‘Small Stories’ by Derek Kirk Kim, ‘Persepolis’ by Marjane Satrapi, ‘Missouri Boy’ by Leland Myrick and ‘Maus’ by Art Spiegelman.”

And here are Cruickshank’s picks:

“I would add to the list the ‘Fullmetal Alchemist’ series by Hiromu Arakawa, anything by Neil Gaiman (graphic novel or otherwise), the ‘Fables’ series by Bill Willingham, ‘Transmetropolitan’ by Warren Ellis and, my favorite, the ‘Preacher’ series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, which (supposedly) will be an HBO show soon.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Fullmetal Alchemist and Preacher recommended in the same sentence before.

Wired, indeed

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So I’m doing a quick scan through Yahoo News for anything manga-related, and I find that the folks at Wired are still doing their level best to endear themselves to the comics-reading public. This time around, Eliza Gauger has written a positive review of MBQ (Tokyopop), pausing briefly for some breathtaking displays of cooler-than-though hostility:

“As someone who is entirely sick of anime and the manga style, which come prepackaged with their repugnant followers (white, fat, mousy-haired, wire-framed and lacking in personal hygiene), I was initially iffy on anything that followed the style.”

Don’t worry, though. Someone in the subsequent comments covers it:

“It’s ironic that this is how the non-tech crowd views Wired‘s (and in particular this blog’s) readership.”

Make nouvelle friends, but keep the old

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Spinning off of the praise for The Building Opposite (Fanfare/Ponent Mon), ICv2 takes a flattering introductory look at nouvelle manga. And despite the sometimes frustrating process of actually getting my hands on the stuff, I’m all in favor of these books getting a higher profile than they currently enjoy. ICv2 zeroes in on the retailers who might benefit from keeping them in stock:

“Retailers in urban areas, college towns, specifically those who do well with alternative comics should definitely consider carrying the Fanfare/Ponent Man line of Nouvelle Manga as well as the thematically related gekiga titles of Yoshihiro Tatsumi (The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo) published by Drawn & Quarterly.”

And while you’re at it, order a few copies of Sexy Voice and Robo (Viz). I swear you won’t regret it.

Speaking of slightly overpriced comics with that cosmopolitan savoir-faire, the highlight of Thursday’s ComicList is Glacial Period from NBM. It’s by Nicolas De Crécy, one of the contributors to F/PM’s Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators, and it sounds intriguing, even at roughly $15 for 80 color pages. A post-apocalyptic look at the Louvre? Why not?

Also promising is DC’s Huntress: Dark Knight Daughter collection. I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for the Earth 2 incarnation of the Huntress, daughter of Batman and Catwoman. (I’m extremely protective of the current incarnation of the character as well, mostly because I resent the hypocritical way that Batman treats her like a moral inferior. But that might have changed since the last time I picked up a DC book, so who knows?) Anyway, Helena Wayne always struck me as a potentially great character in her own right, beyond her intriguing heritage, so this will be a good opportunity to read some of her adventures that I missed the first time around. (I’ve also gone from despising Joe Staton’s art as a teen to viewing it with nostalgic fondness in the intervening years. I’ve mellowed with age.)

Project X continues over at Digital Manga, this time probing the origins of 7-Eleven. The fifth volume of Dragon Head is snuggled in the middle of Tokyopop’s long list of offerings.

Long-term horoscopes

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Ed Chavez at MangaCast cast out a net for people’s licensing wish lists. I’m not much of a follower of scanlations, but there are some creators and individual books that drive me to begging.

I loved, loved, loved Sexy Voice and Robo and would buy just about any of Iou Kuroda’s work. Shaenon Garrity feels the same way, judging by the latest installment of her Overlooked Manga Festival:

“Nasu, incidentally, was Kuroda’s previous work, a collection of short stories connected only by the fact that they all involve eggplants. I want Viz to publish it so badly that I hurt all over.”

I’ve wanted to read Marimo Ragawa’s NYNY since I saw a couple of pages from it in Paul Gravett’s Manga book.

Most of the licensed works on the short list of this year’s Angoulême festival look great, but I’d definitely devour Shigeru Mizuki’s Non Non Bâ and Daisuké Igarashi’s Sorcières.

Anything by Moto Hagio would be appreciated, and hey, Otherworld Barbara just wrapped up in 2005.

Paradise Kiss and Nana are on my list of much-loved manga, so I’d be happy to see some of Ai Yazawa’s earlier works in translation, like I’m Not an Angel and Neighborhood Story.

He isn’t Japanese, but I was introduced to his work in Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators, so I’ll take another opportunity to beg for someone to publish some of Fabrice Neaud’s work.

Did anyone ever confirm this license from Iwahara (Chikyu Misaki) Yuji?

Speaking of confirmation, Brigid went right to the source and heard from Fanfare/Ponent Mon that The Building Opposite will be arriving in Spring 2007. F/PM also promises more Jiro Taniguchi (The Ice Wanderer) and Kan Takahama (Awabi) in the near future if I remember my Previews catalogs correctly.

Manga Recon’s Katherine Dacey-Tsuey offers her own lists of exciting titles that are scheduled to arrive, including a lot of books I’m eagerly anticipating. None quite so much as To Terra, especially after seeing Chip Kidd’s cover design, thoughtfully posted by MangaCast’s Jarred Pine.

Of course, more Yotsuba&! would always be gratefully accepted. It’s been so long that it would feel like a new arrival, y’know? And won’t someone rescue poor Bambi from limbo?