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Previews review March 2011

March 6, 2011 by

The March 2011 edition of the Previews catalog is packed with noteworthy items, so let’s get right down to it.

My pick of the month would be Kaoru (Emma, Shirley) Mori’s A Bride’s Story (Yen Press), page 355:

The newest series from the critically acclaimed creator of Emma, A Bride’s Story tells the tale of a beautiful young bride in nineteenth-century Asia. At the age of twenty, Amir is sent to a neighboring town to be wed. But her surprise at learning her new husband, Karluk, is eight years younger than her is quickly replaced by a deep affection for the boy and his family. Though she hails from just beyond the mountains, Amir’s clan had very different customs, foods, and clothes from what Karluk is used to. As the two of them learn more about each other through their day-to-day lives, the bond of respect and love grows stronger.

Yen Press is proudly publishing Kaori Mori’s beautifully-illustrated tale in a deluxe hardcover edition.

If you’re like me, you would have been sold at “Kaoru Mori.” The series is ongoing in Enterbrain’s fellows!

CLAMP fans will be pleased with the arrival of another handsome omnibus treatment of one of their series, Magic Knight Rayearth, from Dark Horse (page 56). It originally ran in Kodansha’s Nakayoshi and was originally published in English by Tokyopop. Dark Horse’s version will be done-in-one, collecting all three volumes.

DC’s Vertigo imprint offers a new paperback printing of Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, a semi-autobiographical tale of a young gay man coming of age in the turbulent American south of the 1960s (page 130). Monkey See’s Glen Weldon provided a lovely overview of the book.

A new release from Fanfare/Ponent Mon is always worth noting, even if you’ve never heard of the book before. This month, they solicit Farm 54, written by Galit Seliktar and illustrated by Gilad Sliktar:

Farm 54 is a collection of semi-autobiographical stories that address three important periods in the life of the protagonist, Naga, growing up in Israel’s rural periphery… While these Israeli childhood stories take place in the shadow of war an occupation, they also reflect universal feelings, passions, and experiences.

Kodansha Comics lists new volumes of several of the series it picked up from Del Rey (pages 296 and 297):

  • Fairy Tail vol. 13, written and illustrated by Hiro Mashima
  • Rave Master volumes 33-35, written and illustrated by Hiro Mashima
  • Shugo Charai vol. 10, written and illustrated by Peach-Pit
  • Arisa vol. 2, written and illustrated by Natsumi Ando
  • Negima! vol. 29, written and illustrated by Ken Akamatsu
  • Ninja Girls vol. 5, written and illustrated by Hosana Tanaka

Speaking of comebacks, if the recent Manga Moveable Feast piqued your interest in Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, Last Gasp rolls out new printings of the first two volumes (page 297).

If you’re interested in seeing people do amazing things with the form of comics (and don’t care much about story or character), Picturebox unleashes more work by Yuichi (Travel, New Engineering) Yokoyama in the form of Garden (page 308). Being of somewhat more conventional tastes, I think I’ll hold off on this one.

Update: Over at Robot 6, Sean T. Collins interviews Yokoyama and shares several preview pages of Garden.

I may not be able to show suck restraint with Gajo Sakamoto’s Tank Tankuro from Presspop, Inc. (page 308):

The roots of Astro Boy – Tank Tankuro pioneered robot manga during the pre-World War II period in Japan. First published in 1934, Tank Tankuro was one of the most famous manga characters of the era. Tankuro is said to be the first robot ever to appear in Japanese comics. He and his villain, Kuro Kabuto, famous among Japanese SF fans for his resemblance to Darth Vader, laid the foundations for such manga greats as Tezuka, Sugiura, and Fujiko.

Christopher (Comics212) Butcher is very excited about this, which is almost always a good sign.

And, because someone who is not me but clearly has every right for their dreams to come true demanded it, Viz releases a new edition of Oh!great’s Tenjo Tenge which, they promise, is “Finally UNCENSORED!” It’s about dorks who like to fight, with plenty of fan service to help keep your interest (page 333). I wish I could find a copy of the cover image, because it positively screams “Not for me.”

 

Filed under: DAILY CHATTER, Dark Horse, Fanfare/Ponent Mon, Kodansha Comics, Last Gasp, Linkblogging, PictureBox, Presspop, Previews, Vertigo, Viz, Yen Press 10 Comments

Mid-week must-reads

March 2, 2011 by

I’ve pretty much given up on manga industry analysis as a pastime. I found it had started to taint the hobby for me. But I always enjoy sinking my teeth into a great piece of writing from this category. Today’s comes from Brigid (MangaBlog) Alverson over at Robot 6, in which she reacts to the recent round of layoffs at Tokyopop:

It’s just sad to see people who took their work seriously being treated so badly by a company that seems to put more value on a direct-to-Hulu reality series than on their core product, a solid line of manga that really did change the graphic novel market and the reading habits of millions of readers—myself included.

I would only add that, in my admittedly limited experience talking to industry figures, I can think of few professionals who were better equipped and more willing to be passionate advocates for good manga than Lillian Diaz-Pryzybl and Asako Suzuki. Any publisher possessing any sense at all would hire them at their absolute earliest convenience.

(Okay, I would also add that, in addition to being a passionate advocate for manga, Brigid is also one of its must astute, clear-eyed observers.)

Moving to a much more benign subject, another astute advocate, Erica (Okazu) Friedman, succumbs to my pestering and writes about what describes as “the fifth genre” of manga magazines in her latest column for The Hooded Utilitarian:

The pressure to conform to the four basic categories is industry-wide. The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association puts out circulation data for top selling manga magazines every year. These ratings are listed by; For girls, For boys, For men and For women. And yet, there is some leaking around the edges, as more alternative magazines seek out both male and female artists,  and male and female readers. These magazines focus less on who is buying and more on telling stories to people who want to read them.

A synonym for “fifth genre” might be “magazines with which David is unhealthily obsessed.”

 

Filed under: Anthologies, DAILY CHATTER, Linkblogging, Tokyopop Leave a Comment

Upcoming 3/2/2011

March 1, 2011 by

This week’s ComicList isn’t as loaded as the Midtown Comics version, the source of my current Pick of the Week. Thankfully, Vertical finds a way to make the trip to the comic shop worthwhile.

Redemption comes in the form of the fifth volume of Konami Kanata’s excellent Chi’s Sweet Home (Vertical). In this volume, Chi discovers that she doesn’t need to leave the house to have an adventure. Along the way, she also grasps the importance of being able to feign innocence. Anyone who’s ever lived with a cat will nod in rueful recognition at this development.

Of course, Chi also manages to spend some time in the great, suburban outdoors, making a new friend and relying on some old ones when she wanders well beyond her familiar boundaries. Fun as Chi’s adventures are, and lovely as it is to think about a protective community keeping her safe, I’m very much a partisan of the indoor-only feline experience. It makes me reflexively uncomfortable to see a kitten given that much liberty, no matter how charming the fictional results. Of course, this is why I would be a terrible parent to a human child; they’d never know a moment’s unsupervised peace.

As is usual, Kanata sneaks in some extremely moving moments where hints of Chi’s past life intrude on the way she lives now. These interludes really balance out the sweet charm of the more antic, observational sequences, and they make the book work better than it might have without them. In slice-of-life storytelling like this, a variety of experiences and emotions are always welcome, even for a kitten.

(Remarks are based on a review copy provided by the publisher.)

What looks good to you?

 

Filed under: ComicList, DAILY CHATTER, Linkblogging, Quick Comic Comments, Vertical 2 Comments

The business end

February 26, 2011 by

Here are some of the week’s links that focus on the business end of manga:

At Robot 6, Brigid (MangaBlog) Alverson speaks to Vertical‘s Ed Chavez about their new investors, Kodansha and Dai Nippon, and Ed reassures Vertical fans that the publisher will be better able to do the things it loves to do:

If there will be any changes, I think it’s that Vertical will hopefully eventually be the Vertical that everybody is familiar with. It wasn’t until last year that Vertical started producing more manga than anything else, and I’d like to bring us back to being the source of Japanese content in English, because as much as you know I obsess over manga, maybe too much sometimes, I enjoy their novels, I enjoy their nonfiction, I’m a huge fan of Kentaro’s cookbooks. I love the versatility, I love being able to present and be a curator to a catalog like that, and I want to get back to that.

At its blog, Tokyopop talks about some of the realities of the market, particularly as they relate to unfinished titles:

This probably comes as a surprise to a lot of manga fans, since you tend to be a very ’net-friendly bunch, but the percentage of our sales that come through Amazon.com and other online retailers is a fraction of that of the brick-and-mortar stores. There are some notable exceptions (BLU titles, mature titles, and some of our back list), but the vast majority of sales come through physical retail stores, and if something disappears from the shelves, it becomes exponentially more difficult to hit our sales targets.

One of those brick-an-mortar retailers, Christopher (Comics212) Butcher, appreciated Tokyopop’s frankness but questioned the tone:

Some of the finer points are disagreeable to me personally (particularly the enthusiasm for print-on-demand, though that at least is somewhat tempered by describing it as an ‘emerging’ technology) but at the core of the article is a very real problem; the combatative attitude between this Tokyopop employee–and really Tokyopop in general–and their fans. You don’t start off an answer to a frequently asked question on your website by complaining about your customers.

Speaking of publisher-consumer interaction, Fantagraphics shared the cover design of the first volume of Shimura Takako’s eagerly anticipated Wandering Son via their Twitter feed and said that their planned release schedule for the series was two volumes a year. This led to some discussion of the format (hardcover) and price ($19.99), which may be a barrier to entry for people used to paying around $10 for an individual volume. I’m irresistibly reminded of the time that Fantagraphics decided to package Love and Rockets reprints like manga (inexpensively and in paperback) to attract its audience to… you know… good comics.

 

Filed under: DAILY CHATTER, Fantagraphics, Linkblogging, Tokyopop, Vertical 2 Comments

License request day: Rough

February 25, 2011 by

Greg (Read About Comics) McElhatton has joined the knot of fervent admirers of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game (Viz). It’s a title that inspires a bit of evangelical fervor among its admirers, or at least I feel like it is, and that enthusiasm must certainly extend to Adachi himself. Whenever the subject of out-of-print manga comes up, his Short Program (Viz) is always among the bemoaned.

There are plenty more volumes of Cross Game still to come (five of the twelve seventeen have been published in Viz’s two volumes so far), but Adachi is so amazing that it’s impossible to resist wondering which treasure from his catalog might be next in line. Many people might vote for Touch, a 26-volume series from Shogakukan’s Shônen Sunday. I would have no objection to this, but it’s another baseball series, and perhaps some variety might be key in building Adachi’s reputation among English-language readers. So, for a change of pace, why not see what he can do with high-school swimmers?

Yes, I’m talking about Rough, a 12-volume series that also ran in Sunday. It’s about a boy who swims and a girl who dives from feuding families that fell out over owl-shaped cookies. Will Yamato and Ninomiya’s shared love of pool-based athletics help them overcome this great cookie schism? I have no idea, and please don’t spoil it for me. I do know that Adachi has demonstrated a real knack for portraying contentious relationships between sporty teens of the opposite sex, and he can draw anything, so I’m not seeing a down side to Rough. It’s even a reasonable length.

Did you even need to ask if Rough is available in French? Of course it is, courtesy of Glénat, who have also published Touch and Niji-Iro Togarashi. (an 11-volume fantasy series that ran in… wait for it… Sunday). The French are basically all over Adachi, and I dream of a day when the audience for manga in English catches up.

But I’m not so selfish that I’ll only accept Rough. I would love to know what tops your Adachi wish list, assuming you have one. And if you haven’t joined the forces of Adachi advancement, well… there’s this little book called Cross Game…

Filed under: License requests, LICENSE REQUESTS, Linkblogging 28 Comments

From the stack: Bakuman vol. 3

February 24, 2011 by

I probably wouldn’t have picked up Bakuman (Viz) on my own. I can’t remember the exact reasons for that decision, but I’m sure they had something to do with the notion of people who make comics making a comic about people who make comics. It’s not a favorite subject unless the people who make those comics happen to be French.  But Viz sent me a review copy of the third volume, so I figured, “Why not?” Now, in spite of the fact that Bakuman has few of the elements I usually look for in a comic I’m likely to enjoy, I have to go find the first two volumes.

So what are those things that I usually like that are absent here? For one, I like engaging protagonists. Writer Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated Takeshi Obata (you may recall them from Death Note, also from Viz) tell the tale of would-be mangaka, writer Akito Takagi and illustrator Moritaka Mashiro as they try and build their careers. They’re in high school, but that’s not improbable on its face, and they seem to be making some traction. Unfortunately, they’re boring people. Neither displays the quirky passion that makes for a great shônen hero with a dream.

For another, I like a story with stakes. While the stakes are enormous for Takagi and Mashiro, I didn’t share their urgency at all. Maybe I’ll be better able to invest in their dreams after reading the first two volumes, but that still leaves the fact that these boys don’t have much going for them. On the subplot front, each has a girlfriend of sorts. Mashiro’s wants to be a voice actress in anime, and Takagi’s is the sporty, outgoing type. If either girl ever went an inch beyond type, I can’t remember it. And I also like interesting female characters, so there’s another strike.

And while I generally have no problem with dialogue-driven storytelling (hi, Fumi Yoshinaga!), Bakuman indulges in this approach to a ridiculous extreme. I remember thinking that the final volume of Death Note was just one big word bubble, and Bakuman shares that tendency to natter. It’s all tell, and virtually no show.

So why do I feel compelled to pick up the previous and future volumes? It’s because I suspect that Bakuman’s failings as shônen are entirely the point. Why else would Ohba and Obata go to such lengths to have their characters articulate what makes great shônen manga, to fully explore its key elements, only to willfully avoid incorporating them into their own actual manga? I’m casting my vote with “intentionally postmodern.”

Ohba an Obata talk a lot about manga, not simply as a creative process but as a profession. They talk about the vagaries of popularity, the self-perpetuating structure of magazines like Shônen Jump, the tyranny of reader polls, the weird formula of creative inspiration and commercial instinct, and so on. It’s not quite cynical, but it’s certainly frank, especially when you consider the fact that it actually runs in Shônen Jump, the very magazine it routinely criticizes. Of course, the criticism is generally reasoned and sounds fair, but still.

Without the almost clinical self-examination of the manga industry, there really wouldn’t be anything to take away from Bakuman. But the examination is there, and it’s undeniably compelling. I don’t really care if Takagi and Mashiro become big successes or fail miserably, but I don’t think I’m supposed to care. I think I’m supposed to enjoy the fact that Ohba and Obata are peeling back the curtain and showing that the creation of thrilling fantasy can be very dull indeed.

Update: Deb (About.Com) Aoki spreads the word about Viz’s Bakuman Fan Art Contest.

Filed under: Contests and giveaways, From the stack, Linkblogging, REVIEWS, Viz 22 Comments

Any excuse

February 20, 2011 by

… to use this panel to illustrate a post. Any excuse at all.

In this case, it’s because Melinda Beasi, Kate Dacey and I have formed our manga blogging battle robot to talk over the 12th and 13th volumes of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack (Vertical) over at Manga Bookshelf.

Filed under: Linkblogging, Vertical Leave a Comment

License request day: Zipang

February 18, 2011 by

From the Manga Moveable Feast to a lively but technologically challenged Manga Out Loud podcast, it’s all about World War II this week. Barefoot Gen (Last Gasp) addresses history directly and brutally, and Ayako (Vertical) invents a tale of history’s victims, so one might be forgiven the impulse to rewrite history. That leads us to this week’s license request.

Kaiji Kawaguchi’s Zipang, which yielded an astonishing 43 volumes in Kodansha’s Morning, sends visitors from the present into the past and explores the potential consequences of that kind of junket. In this case, it’s a contemporary Defense Force vessel, the Mirai, which takes a wrong turn on the way to Hawaii and winds up in the Pacific on the eve of the decisive Battle of Midway.

The crew of the Mirai encompasses a number of different viewpoints on the tricky subject of time travel, from those who yearn to rewrite history whenever the opportunity presents itself to those who don’t so much want to divert a butterfly, lest that butterfly be headed someplace really, really important. I admit that I’m not especially interested in either war stories or treatises on the elasticity of time, but this book is supposed to be really, really good.

It won the Kodansha Manga Award in 2002. It was one of the Official Selections at the 2007 Festival International de la Bande Desinée. Four volumes were apparently published as a part of Kodansha’s Bilingual Comics project back in the day, but I can’t find confirmation of that claim, and I can only imagine what they’d cost, if they do exist. You’re in better shape if you’re able to read French, as Kana is publishing the book in that language, and they’re up to the 29th volume at this point.

Highly regarded as Kawaguchi is, his only work to see complete publication in English was Eagle: The Making of an Asian-American President (Viz, originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Big Comic), which I think is out of print. Its five volumes don’t seem to be fetching the prices that some out-of-print titles do, but I’m not sure how easy it is to find all five volumes. Casterman’s Sakka imprint published it in French in 11 volumes.

The likelihood of this request being fulfilled seems rather slim. It’s long, it’s manly, and I’d wager it displays a shortage of girls in body stockings doing cartwheels. This is the kind of title that makes publishers ask you why you’re wishing bankruptcy on them when you bring it up. But if I could go back in time and rewrite the history of manga in English, I would divert whatever butterfly I could to improve the chances of books like this.

Filed under: License requests, LICENSE REQUESTS, Linkblogging, Manga Moveable Feast 4 Comments

Lean week linkblogging

February 15, 2011 by

The ComicList is sufficiently lean that I don’t really have anything to add beyond what was covered in the Pick of the Week over at Manga Bookshelf. If you’re still hankering for something new to try, why not check out the Manga Monday hashtag over on Twitter?

If you’d like to focus your attention on a single title, keep your eyes on the link archive for the current Manga Moveable Feast, featuring Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Last Gasp). It’s being hosted by Sam (A Life in Panels) Kusek.

And if you feel like throwing your favorite titles some love, you’ve got plenty of time to vote in the 2011 About.com Manga Readers’ Choice Awards. Genial host Deb Aoki provides a breakdown of the nominees.

And if you just feel like reading comics instead of reading about them, there’s always Viz’s SigIKKI site with new chapters of a wide range of titles. The most recent chapter of Seimu Yoshizaki’s Kingyo Used Books is all about a series that also inspired a license request.

Update: Just missed this one, but I always enjoy Erica (Okazu) Friedman’s looks at various Japanese magazines for MangaCast. This time around, she considers Shogakukan’s Big Comic and its confidently mature pursuits.

Filed under: Anthologies, Awards and lists, ComicList, DAILY CHATTER, Digital delivery, Last Gasp, Linkblogging, Manga Moveable Feast, Viz 4 Comments

Democracy in action

February 12, 2011 by

Deb Aoki has launched the 2011 About.com Manga Readers’ Choice Awards:

The nominees were selected by About.com readers in January 2011. The top five nominees in 10 categories were chosen as finalists, and now it’s your turn to vote for the winner. The voting period runs from Friday, February 11 through Tuesday, March 8, 2011.

You can probably guess where my votes went. Go cast yours!

Filed under: Awards and lists, Linkblogging, NEWS 6 Comments
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