Recommendations are starting to come in via Dave Carter’s 100 Comics Giveaway Contest at Yet Another Comics Blog. I might have to enter just so I can suggest books like the terrific Lackluster World, self-published by Eric Adams, or Nothing Better by Tyler Page. (I hope there’s a print collection of NB soon, as it’s really grown on me over time.)

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Comic Foundry’s Tim Leong not only subjects himself to an issue of Wizard, he does so on camera, which sounds kind of like a Fear Factor stunt. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for Wizard to push the boundaries of bad taste any further, but turning some poor guy’s death into a weak lead for an article on Mighty Avengers makes me think I’ve underestimated the magazine’s editorial ambition.

Seriously, I’ve written some tacky stuff in my time, not even factoring in the first drafts that never see the light of web, but this… I mean, someone wrote it, then someone edited it, then someone at Marvel probably signed off on it, then someone else edited it for layout, and nobody thought it was a bad idea to make fun of a dead person who just happened to have the misfortune of passing away near one of the creators?

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I’m a bit slow to note it, but I’ve really enjoyed Rivkah’s tutorial pieces on paneling, pacing and layout. What I like about them is that they seem like part of a tool box instead of a style sheet, if that makes any sense.

One thing that I’ve noticed as this season of Project Runway progresses is that the designers who have the strongest set of basic design skills – they can sew, they can sketch, they understand color theory and pattern-making, etc. – are best able to articulate a personal aesthetic vision. Even if they’re breaking rules, their cognizance of those rules and the understanding of them as fundamentals lend authority and polish to their work.

I think something of the same thing is going on with Rivkah’s pieces. She’s not really telling anyone how to draw so much as indicating how someone’s choices can lead the eye and to be aware of whether or not they’re heading in the desired direction.

There’s a fascinating piece over at Bill Flanagan’s blog at the Translation Dojo on the rise of the $10, unflipped manga digest:

“From and editorial standpoint, it was a difficult change. Producing pamphlet manga meant that each graphic novel was coming out once every 6 months. A switch to quarterly graphic novels meant that production was doubled.”

Maybe they did teach us how to love. But seriously, go read it. It’s great.

And over at comics.212.net, Chris Butcher brings his inimitable perspective to the yaoi discourse.

One of the side points in all of the recent talk about yaoi was the timidity of the bulk of titles currently in translation. Where’s all the really sexy stuff?

At the recent Otakon, Digital Manga Publishing, often cited as one of the leading purveyors of the starry-eyed and tepid, gave hope to fans itching for something a little more hardcore. Kai-Ming Cha shared some new details on DMP’s 801 Media imprint in this week’s Publishers Weekly Comics Week (in the paragraph next to a picture of the coolest cosplayers I’ve ever seen):

“801 Media titles will be available only at online retailers, independent bookstores and comics shops. ‘You won’t find [801 Media books] in Borders or Barnes & Noble,’ said Rachel Livingston of DMP’s PR department. Livingston explained that while 801 Media is working with distributors, the books will not have a wide level of distribution because of their explicit content. She added that fans will be able to special order the books through Walden or retail chain stores. ‘We’re letting retailers know we’re not giving them inappropriate material while giving readers what they want and supporting online retailers,’ Livingston said.”

That’s a very interesting approach, and it neatly and preemptively skirts some potential problems. It doesn’t sound like anyone’s going to accidentally stumble across an 801 book. And DMP has done surprisingly well in the Direct Market, just judging by sources like the top 50 manga lists from Comic Book Resources. Every time DMP has new Juné books for readers, you can bet they’ll show up in the top 50 or even crack the top 100 graphic novels roster.

I’m also fascinated (and just a little horrified) by DMP’s other initiative:

“DMP also announced a bishonen (boys’ love) tour organized through Pop Japan, a travel agency owned by DMP that does tours to Japan for American otaku. The junket includes a shopping trip to Tokyo’s Otome Road for boys’ love merchandise and paraphernalia, and will feature a female take on maid cafes, which cater to men—there will be afternoon tea at a ‘butler cafe,’ where attractive young men dressed in traditional butler uniforms wait on the patrons.”

Now that, Tokyopop, is a publisher embracing the manga lifestyle, or at least a niche of it. Will DMP end up marketing a “Fangirls Gone Wild” video produced during the tour?

Dave Carter strikes again with another cool contest at Yet Another Comics Blog. It’s multi-level generosity:

“Simply email [Dave] your recommendation of a comic that you think is worthwhile, but that you don’t think that very many people have read. What [Dave would] like to do through this contest is give you all the opportunity to share an undiscovered gem with the rest of the comics Intraweb. Thoughout the next week until the end of the contest on the 15th [he]’ll be posting [t]here on YACB the picks that you send [him].”

Click here for more details.

It’s a bit of a slow week in terms of comic shop arrivals, which is fine. I’ve got a huge list of fantasy titles to track down at the library, and I’m ready for some prose.

The ComicList shows the fifth volume of Girl Genius (Airship) coming out this week in both hard- and soft-cover formats. It came to the local comic shop last week, and I loved it a lot. I’m constantly amazed at the Foglios’ ability to pack their stories with new, distinct, and engaging characters in chapter after chapter. That means my favorite cast members might not get as much focus as I’d like, but it also means new favorites are always on the horizon. The Foglios also have a terrific knack for folding exposition into the story in creative ways that are handy for new readers but still entertaining for long-time fans. It’s just great stuff – funny, vivid, action-packed, and delightful.

CMX rolls out the first volume of Meca Tanaka’s Omukae Desu, a book I liked a lot. Afterlife bureaucracy, part-time teen employees, and bunny suits combine for something funny and weird. (Oh, and speaking of CMX titles I liked in preview form, prepare to become sick to death of me talking about Sakura Tsukuba’s Penguin Revolution. In spite of my disappointment that it featured no actual penguins, it’s a very funny piece of shôjo romantic comedy with some great characters.)

Graphix is rolling out the first of its Goosebumps graphic novels in comic shops, which means they’ve probably been in bookstores for a while now. These tween horror books were well after my time as a young-adult reader (though that didn’t keep me from exploring the shamefully tawdry world of Sweet Valley High as a twenty-something), but it’s interesting to see Graphix further establish itself with adaptations of kids’ classics. (No information is readily available on the Graphix web site. Here’s a preview piece from Publishers Weekly.)

On the self-promotion front, Brian Cronin was kind enough to ask me to do a guest entry at Comics Should Be Good. I immediately abused his hospitality by pimping a bunch of pet manga titles, figuring that I could bore a relatively new audience.

I did roughly the same thing in this week’s Flipped, with a healthy sprinkling of pet Oni books as well.

I’ve been wondering when one of the general interest weekly magazines is going to take a look at manga, so thanks to Blog@Newsarama for pointing out this piece in Time. As Brigid notes, it focuses rather heavily on one segment of the audience.

It’s also very centered on Tokyopop, another success for the publisher’s publicity machine. Reporter Coco Masters focuses almost exclusively on the fomenters of the Manga Revolution, with some assistance from Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly Comics Week:

“‘Tokyopop created what is known as the authentic Japanese manga,’ says Reid. Tokyopop insisted the books read from back to front so as not to compromise the original artwork and spelled Japanese sound effects phonetically. It changed the books’ dimensions to mass-market paperback size (about 200 pages) but stuck to a $10 price—about an hour’s worth of babysitting.”

Tokyopop also taught us how to love, contrary to claims of record producers putting together power ballad collections.

Despite its routine dominance of manga sales in bookstores and high profile courtesy of anime properties, Viz makes somewhat of an “and the rest” appearance to be stern Aunt Gertrude and claim that manga only comes from Japan. I can’t tell whether that bit came from speaking directly to a Viz source or scanning through Liza Coppola’s ICv2 interview from 9 months ago, but at least it creates the appearance of multiple-source journalism.

At the end, Masters wonders, “Anyone for Manga Meets Spider-Man?” Eh, not really. Spawn, on the other hand…

Tokyopop has announced that some titles are becoming “online exclusives,” available for purchase only through the publisher’s web site.

Tokyopop’s publishing partner, HarperCollins, has announced that it will be putting significant preview content on its web site. (Free registration required to read the article.)

“’The younger generations are consuming information in a different way,’ said Brian Murray, group president of HarperCollins. ‘They may not necessarily be going into bookshops. They are spending time on Google, MySpace, Facebook, author Web sites, Yahoo and MSN.’”

Are the two connected? I don’t think so, though it could be synergistic instead of just coincidental. It’s nice to see a prose publisher make some efforts in this direction, as I can’t really think of one of their sites that I’d consider a destination.

“For now HarperCollins does not plan to sell books directly to customers online, but will rather use the ‘Browse Inside’ feature as a way to lure readers to its Web pages, which will also include interviews, tour schedules, reading group guides, photographs and links to author blogs.”

Sound familiar?

Looking at the HarperCollins site as it stands, there’s a lot of potential for sprucing up pages for its various imprints. Sounds like it really might cost a fortune, but once the infrastructure’s in place, it might be really useful for at-home book shoppers.

What’s that you say? I can enjoy another comic about the settlement of North America? Why, thank you! This time around, it’s George O’Connor’s Journey into Mohawk Country from First Second, profiled in the latest Publishers Weekly Comics Week. It sounds like the perfect companion reading for Scott Chantler’s excellent Northwest Passage from Oni. (I wonder if Oni is planning an omnibus edition for after the three-volume series concludes this month? That would be a very library-friendly gesture.)

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Greg McElhatton has a review of Ueda Hajime’s Q-Ko-Chan: The Earth Invader Girl (Del Rey) up at iComics.com. I picked this book up this week and found it to be visually arresting but a little hard to follow. It looks amazing, and the character design is stunning. It’s also only two volumes long, so I’ll definitely give it a closer read after I plow through some of the backlog of books that are sitting there in a pile and judging me.

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I should have learned by now not to assume that even great comic shops will have precisely what I want all the time. I had planned to do a lot of shopping at Alternative Reality during a recent trip to Las Vegas, but all of the books on my list (the first issue of the new Castle Waiting series from Linda Medley and Get a Life from Drawn and Quarterly, among others) were sold out. So I guess I have good taste and bad timing.

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The main reason behind the Vegas jaunt was to see Cirque du Soleil’s KÀ at the MGM Grand. It was amazing, but I was surprised to be bothered by some of the same issues of design versus functionality that I’ve found with some publishers’ web sites. It’s a masterpiece of technical theatre, with this phenomenal turntable that goes in every conceivable direction, but the flourishes eventually overwhelm the narrative completely. It’s too bad, because the story started extremely well. Still, if you’re a fan of “we did that because we could” showmanship, go for it. (After looking through the gift shop and laughing at the prices, we decided that Cirque is probably working on a sequel called CHÏNG.)

But if you’re in Vegas and want to feed a Cirque jones, I’d recommend Mystère at Treasure Island. If you want to feed a Cirque jones and don’t feel like dealing with the Vegas fracas (and who could blame you?), just wait until Quidam comes to a city near you. It’s still my favorite of their productions.

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If you’re in Vegas, are a Top Chef fan, and feel like sampling some of Tom Colicchio’s cooking, I’d recommend stopping by ‘wichcraft at the MGM Grand. The sandwiches are great, and the prices are pretty reasonable for celebrity chef casino food. (I’d love to have the kind of money to be a shameless, fame-whoring foodie in Las Vegas, but who can afford it?)

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My approach to gambling in Las Vegas is to spend as little money as possible for the longest possible period of time. I never assume I’m going to win anything beyond the cost of a cup of coffee. The best spot for that kind of play was Sam’s Town, which is way off the Strip, but that only makes it more appealing to me. If we ever go back, we might just have to stay there, as it’s a lot cheaper, seems friendlier than most of the mid-range Strip options, and has undergone a serious renovation in the last few years.

Whenever I go away for a few days, I’m amazed at how much interesting conversation I’ve missed. Brigid has an interview with Tokyopop’s web community content producer at MangaBlog. David Taylor takes a look at the state of manga in the United Kingdom at Love Manga. Samurai Tusok wades into the topic of authenticity and what makes manga manga at Bento Physics.

But what really catches my eye, partly because it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, is all the recent talk about yaoi. It’s interesting to see a consideration of the formulaic nature of the category, because it seems to suggest that a formula is essentially a negative in a creative endeavor. There was a recent flurry of complaints that a lot of shôjo titles fall into a formulaic trap, but I would suggest that the formula itself isn’t the problem. Any creator can take a fairly rigid narrative framework (say, young-man-with-a-dream shônen or ordinary-girl-discovers-magical-destiny shôjo) and invest it with enough specificity and personality to make the familiarity of its infrastructure entirely irrelevant.

So I think the question is more about how publishers are doing in selecting yaoi and shônen-ai titles to license. Are readers getting a full sense of the category, or are publishers launching their efforts in this area with what might be lowest-common-denominator books that stick to whatever tropes are most defining? Immediately recognizable aualities that make the reader say, “Yes, this is yaoi”?

I’m not really sure what the answer is. I still haven’t waded too far into the world of scanlations, so I don’t have a very clear sense of what’s lurking out there on the horizon and if what we’re getting now is yaoi 1.0 rather than a full sampling of the category. I’ve heard of a handful of titles that sound intriguing (I’ve wanted to get my hands on NYNY since I read about it in Paul Gravett’s Manga), but I’m basically ignorant of how the genre stands in contrast to the body of work that’s available in translation.

Tina Anderson has grown weary of the focus on yaoi’s appeal as opposed to its content:

“I’m tired of being approached by members from the media under the auspices of, ‘let’s talk about yaoi’ only to have it turn into a couch session on why I as a woman, am turned on by homoerotic manga, why I think women like it and Gay men don’t, and what’s this appeal of lovely men in love overall. 0_o. I don’t see articles about the appeal of noir Seinen manga on the fans who read it? I don’t see every new license from Tokyo Pop being discussed by the media asking, Why do they read it? What makes them tick? What is it about Western Fans that makes them want to read Japanese Manga?”

I have to say that virtually every mainstream media article about manga that I’ve read has featured just that focus: why do fans like it? Teen-ages from Orlando to Des Moines to Anchorage have been cornered in bookstores and libraries and junior high schools and quizzed on this subject by reporters, whether they’ve got Fruits Basket or Naruto or any number of other books in their backpacks. It’s an entry point for reporters who don’t necessarily know a lot about the subject, and (more importantly) it’s an essential aspect of the story for readers who are possibly even less familiar with manga.

And when you’re delving into a niche within manga, I think it’s just as logical to take that approach. Sure, there’s a prurient aspect to the questions, but reporters need hooks, for better or worse. I don’t think it’s necessarily disrespectful or dismissive to try and understand a category’s appeal to its audience when you’re writing about it. Tiresome and repetitive for the people who get asked the question over and over again? Sure. Irrelevant? Not in the least.

Honestly, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around yaoi and shônen-ai, at least partly because of the licensing choices I discussed above. It’s hard for me not to be troubled by the number of books that seem to feature coercion as an essential relationship milestone. Looking at the bulk of what’s available, I can see why people who aren’t fans would wonder what the big deal is and eschew questions about character, because a lot of the books aren’t particularly rich in that respect.

But there are several titles that I really like, and a quality that they share is a willingness to expand on the formula or subvert it. Shout Out Loud (Blu) explores a whole range of human relationships – familial, generational, professional, and so on – and does it with a heftier dose of humor than I’ve seen elsewhere. Only the Ring Finger Knows (DMP) was a lovely bit of romance that impressed me because it was driven by character. The events of the story seemed specific to those characters rather than being a case of attractive archetypes being wedged into a familiar series of events.

My current favorite would have to be La Esperanca (DMP), even though it can get a little drippy at times. Chigusa Kawai’s characters don’t exist in some romantic vacuum where they’re influenced only by their feelings for each other. They have family issues, are surrounded by friends and classmates with their own perceptions and agendas, and live in the larger world of the school and the town that surrounds it. Romance is an aspect of their lives, a part of their evolving identities, rather than the only thing that matters.

Kawai also shows a very subversive sense of humor in the back-up stories. In volume two – I think – she frames a story very much along the lines of the “why do you like it” question, introducing a romantic spoiler character who seems based on a stereotypical yaoi fangirl. But since she’s invested in the characters as people instead of observing them in a fictional context, she’s forced to face them as people instead of fantasy objects. It’s a great, risky piece with a lot of layers, and it ends up being both a clear-eyed celebration of the genre and an expansion of its possibilites.

Tired.

Happy to see pets.

Hate airports.

More later.