A reader e-mailed me with a question:

Happily!

(I probably wouldn’t be either.)

So I wondered: have you, or any of your alert readers, bought anything from Fantagraphics online? Has it been a good experience? Any information *most* gratefully received.

I’ve only ordered directly from Fantagraphics once (the 2005 special edition of The Comics Journal). The book arrived prompty, and I never had any problems with billing. That was a while ago, so I can’t remember if there was some indication of the site’s security status.

Anyone else have any experiences or information to share?

I picked up dog food yesterday, and I noticed that the brand I get has changed their “Senior 7+” to “Mature Adult,” moving the “Senior 7+” tag to a spot that’s discretely lower on the packaging.

Were dogs finding the “Senior” designation insulting? Is this something dogs worry about? Has my older dog been looking at the bag and feeling dispirited and resentful because it suggests she’s past her prime?

Chris Butcher takes another multifaceted look at yaoi, which is just marvelous in general. I’m particularly fond of the bottom line, which Chris appropriately uses to look at the bottom line:

“The queers are coming. First one to cater their gay porn to the gay community goes home with the money. :)”

I’m going to have to keep my eye on The Hating Blog. Anyone who launches their manga content with a glowing, well-written review of Love Roma is someone worth watching.

John Jakala… I don’t even know where to start, but he used my blather from yesterday as a launch pad for something completely brilliant: the Comic Publisher Personality Quiz.

Back when I basically stopped reading superhero comics from Marvel and DC, they were characterized by senselessly shocking death and depression for previously amiable c-list characters, significant revision of a-list characters to serve implausible plots, intermittent lateness of big event comics that threw the schedule (and narrative) off-kilter, editors furiously backfilling on-line, and the handful of interesting, sort-of stand-alone titles living under the constant shadow of cancellation.

The less things change, the more things stay the same.

Why do I take the time to observe this? I’m not really sure. I feel like I’m running the risk of sounding like those people who insist that they don’t watch TV or eat refined sugar. (The TV prohibition isn’t always annoying, provided it’s qualified with “because if I started watching TV, I know I’d never turn it off.”) I don’t really want to suggest that frustrated Marvel and DC fans can find a promised land of good comics in manga or from independent publishers, because the pleasures aren’t necessarily transferable.

But darn it, I make so few healthy life choices that I feel the need to celebrate them when they do occur. (“Healthy” should obviously be considered a relative term under these circumstances.)

When I compare Marvel and DC with manga publishers, one of the big distinctions that strikes me is the lack of an evident corporate personality. Obviously those personalities exist, but they don’t impose themselves on the product.

Clearly I find Tokyopop irritating from a corporate perspective, and the whole Manga Revolution/Lifestyle/Line of Casual Wear thing is completely beyond me (probably because I’m old), but it doesn’t stop me from enjoying Tokyopop’s books. Because nothing DJ Milky says in an interview has any influence on whether Fruits Basket breaks my heart or Sgt. Frog makes me laugh or Kindaichi Case Files feeds my intermittent need for grisly homicide.

In the other direction, I’m always delighted to read what the folks at Go! Comi have to say, like Audry Taylor’s dispatches from Comiket. And it’s always nice to hear from David Wise and Jake Forbes, lovely fellows both. But even if they were all scabrous misanthropes, it wouldn’t make any difference, because Go! Comi’s books are routinely excellent.

I mean, look at that interview with Dan DiDio on 52 # whichever where Booster Gold gets slabbed. (Spoiler text now obscured.) The issue sounds kind of icky just in terms of story, but it sounds so much worse when DiDio explains the rationale behind it. But hey, it came out on time! (And so much for those rumors about the DC spandexverse becoming a more cheerful place after Infinite Crisis, huh?)

So what’s my point? I don’t really think I have one aside from general smugness. There probably isn’t anything DC or Marvel could do to win me back at this point, and there’s no reason they should try. Their business and editorial decisions seem to work for them, and there are plenty of other comics publishers out there whose product and priorities work for me. Maybe I just felt a little nostalgic spleen and had to vent it.

I haven’t made it very far into the latest volume of Monster (Viz – Signature), but I’m already kind of loving it. Saintly Tenma’s former fiancé is swanning around in lingerie, snarling at underlings in a way that would make Donna Mills and Joan Collins weep with pride if they weren’t wearing two pounds of make-up on each eye.

“You watch too many soaps,” she sneers at a man she’s playing. So does Naoki Urasawa, if we’re going to be entirely honest about it. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing by any means, because Monster is good, trashy fun.

I had a little flash of defensiveness when Dave Intermittent described Ian McEwan’s novels as “well-written trash,” but the more I think about it, the more I realize he’s right. Listening to McEwan’s Saturday during recent long drives was the nail in the coffin.

It’s taken me a while to realize that McEwan’s pet theme – punishing well-to-do intellectuals for being too self-absorbed – is one that I find really irritating. The construction of his novels is almost always flawless (though Saturday isn’t), and the characters are unusually sympathetic for this genre. (I hated the characters in The Corrections so much that I abandoned the book about a third of the way in.)

But he is capable of writing really entertaining, artful trash, so I’m sure I’ll read more of his books. I’ll just space them out.

(And speaking of entertaining trash, I really thought Jeffrey should have won the latest challenge on Project Runway. I can’t stand him, but that dress was amazing.)

One of the more unsavory aspects of my job is annual attendance at the state fair to schmooze and (hopefully) recruit students. It’s kind of a long haul, to be honest, sitting in a tent for however many days and trying not to laugh at the mullets, which are on display in shocking number and variety. (I find the she-mullet, or demi-poodle, to be the most disturbing. Your mileage may vary.) You also have to keep yourself from leaping up in outrage when some parent says something along the lines of “You ain’t never goin’ to no college anyways.”

So I always reward myself with a trip to one of the better restaurants in the area and eat lots and drink wine and generally relax with a book, because they know how to deal with single patrons and not make them feel like they’ve got some kind of communicable virus that might infect the other happy diners with despair. The book is key, because it indicates seriousness of purpose, that you don’t feel like being rushed, and that you’re capable of entertaining yourself without a companion.

This year I forgot the book. Never again.

There was another single diner seated near me, and he couldn’t have been nicer, but he obviously had heard the despair virus rumor, so he kept trying to engage me in conversation. And, to be honest, the whole trip down here has been about cheerfully engaging strangers in conversation, which is not my best event under any circumstances, so I wasn’t in a rush to contaminate my reward dinner with more of the same.

But what am I supposed to do? Be some icy bastard with this guy who’s really friendly and has the best of intentions? It’s not like I’m on-line, for pity’s sake.

So chat I did, but he had this weird timing, in that he’d ask a question right when I was biting into something, and he’d be really loud and jovial, and it would startle me, so I bit my tongue about four times. I bit my tongue really, really hard, and it definitely affected the flavor or my dinner choices.

Never forget the book.

I’m really enjoying Kevin Melrose and Stacie Ponder’s delightful web-comic, Fenton and Fenton, Boy Detectives, over at Blog@Newsarama. It’s like a tipsy Encyclopedia Brown story with lots of cute gags. I also really love Ponder’s stick-figure character designs and great facial expressions. And I think “Creepies!” will become the new “Jinkies!”

Since I was a big fan of mystery series as a kid (and still am now), I’m predisposed to like anything that makes an affectionate hash of them. My favorites of this type are by Mabel Maney, who did tone-perfect takes on teen detectives like Cherry Ames, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys, with the slight variation that everyone in the stories is gay.

The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse, The Case of the Good-For-Nothing Girlfriend, and A Ghost in the Closet are all cheerful, revisionist fun. They stick very closely to the structure and style of the originals (as I remember them), taking their subtext to its glorious conclusion.

I should dig them out and re-read them during this week’s travel for work, but I got a big stack of books at the library yesterday. (I’d hoped to have an Amazon order on hand, but I’m too cheap to pass on the super-saver shipping, so they’ll be waiting for me when I get back.)

One of the library choices is a Terry Pratchett (Going Postal), and I hadn’t really noticed that he’s published mostly with HarperCollins. Dorian mentioned that there had been some comics adaptations of Pratchett’s work before, but the HC/Tokyopop deal seems like a perfect opportunity for a new round. (I’ve stuck entirely with his Discworld books, but I should really give his young adult and children’s books a look.)

Pratchett’s books would probably be tough to translate, as they’ve got more jokes per page than most comic novels have per chapter. But even if only a fraction of the comedy made the cut, they’d still be pretty delightful.

And on the subject of library books, does anyone else have a cat who’s obsessed with them? One of mine is, and while she finds pretty much any reading material worthy of examination (including a totally perplexing hatred of bookmarks), nothing draws her attention as much as books from the library. Maybe it’s because they smell like other people?

There’s movement among noted Bleach fans, and I’ve updated the sidebar to reflect it.

Greg McElhatton has started a new site, Read About Comics, which imports a ton of his reviews from iComics. I like the new site’s layout a lot.

John Jakala, creator of the late, great Grotesque Anatomy (still one of the best blog names ever) and contributor at The Low Road, has started another blog, Sporadic Sequential. I believe the appropriate sentiment for this situation is, “Yay!”

I don’t see any indication that Robin Brenner is a Bleach fan, but there are a lot of graphic novels out there, and Brenner does a great job covering the ones that are good reads for teens and kids at the No Flying, No Tights family of sites.

Like David Taylor, I keep hoping for a different manga title to surge to dominance. It’s not that I have anything against Naruto, but it’s not the only game in town. Looking at MangaCast’s latest report of sales rankings in Japan, maybe there’s hope that Bleach can at least join Naruto in the hit parade? (Both David and John Jakala are big Bleach fans, so it’s well past time for me to give the book a look.)

*

Speaking of the hit parade, Brigid finds a Time Magazine interview with Natsuki Takaya, creator of the wonderful Fruits Basket. This article is much more to my liking than Time’s previous foray into manga coverage, but it has a much more specific focus this time around. (Also, I’m a big Fruits Basket junkie.)

“TIME: Fruits Basket has quite a following in the U.S. What do you think are the reasons for its popularity?
“NT: That definitely flatters and pleases me. Thank you very much. As for a reason, I can’t clearly distinguish one, but if people read it and think ‘I like this’ then that alone is enough to bring me joy.”

Yay! I’ve brought Natsuki Takaya joy! It seems only fair, though.

*

The undiscovered gems keep coming at Yet Another Comics Blog. Send in yours, and win comics!

Since I’m in a manga frame of mind today, I would offer Chikyu Misaki and Off*Beat as two delightful but under-the-radar titles.

Of all the happy, smiley childhood illusions that have fallen away over time, I find myself disproportionately distressed by this look into the almost scientific underbelly of Sesame Street in The New York Times. (Free registration required.) I guess I never really thought about how things work at the Children’s Television Workshop, but I never imagined that there were focus groups lurking behind every trash can.

It’s undeniably weird to think of a program as benevolent and inclusive as Sesame Street as struggling with one of the same issues that seems to confound superhero comics publishers – developing a popular marquee character who also happens to be female:

“But it’s not just a high-minded interest in gender equality that drove the search for a strong female character. The success of ‘Dora the Explorer,’ a show built around a strong female lead, has not gone unnoticed by its competitors at ‘Sesame Street.’ ‘ “Sesame Street” is living in an increasingly competitive market,’ Ms. Nealon said. ‘We used to be the only game in town, and now we’re having more conversations about where are all the points of appeal of our cast. We’re trying to be as absolutely broad-based as we can be.’”

Illuminating and strangely depressing reading.