Dozens of innocent bystanders were stunned into insensibility today by the colossal hugeness of Tokyopop’s latest announcement from the front lines Global Manga Revolution. Victims are being treated at the Hype Recovery Ward at Stan Lee Memorial Hospital.

Citizens as yet unaffected by the hugeness are advised to report to secure locations until this mammoth innovation is no longer blotting out the sun. If citizens cannot avoid the hugeness, they are advised to view it only through a cardboard tube with a piece of wax paper fitted over the end to avoid excessive dazzling.

When questioned about the company’s culpability, a Tokyopop representative appeared unapologetic, even gleeful:

“Less than a decade ago, if you strolled through your local chain bookstore, you wouldn’t be able to find manga anywhere. There was no section, no category, no awareness. But, TOKYOPOP changed all that. We created a category because we saw a need, and we’re doing it again with our kids manga lines, both ideal for reluctant readers and future manga fans.”

Once again, an admirable and intelligent publishing strategy has been positioned as the HUGEST THING IN THE HISTORY OF EVER.

I’ve willfully ignored the spirit of Free Comic Book Day. I could have taken advantage of the opportunity to sample new books, but… but… Amelia Rules! Free Scott Pilgrim! Owly!

The local shop always participates and throws a bunch of extras into the mix, which is nice, but it only orders a limited supply of the FCBD books. As a result, the shop asks visitors to pick just a few of those instead of snatching up everything they can lay their hands on. That seems perfectly fair to me, because it is supplementing the FCBD offerings with other comics, manga, and toys. But it does have the effect of making me limit myself to books I know I’ll like rather than being particularly adventuresome.

I did pick a copy of the Drawn & Quarterly offering, and I’m so glad I did. Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian’s Mr. Jean stories were a really entertaining discovery, and I’ll definitely be looking for Get a Life and Maybe Later. “Women and Children First” and “Cathy (Norvegienne Woude)” were filled with quiet comedy and sharp observations that kept the slice-of-life stories from being at all banal. (I was pretty much smitten by the point where Jean was taunted by his feet in the bathtub, and completely hooked afterwards.)

The sampling of Moomin strips sold me on the upcoming collection as well. These adventures of a family of pampered hippo-esque creatures are delightfully weird.

So, kudos to D&Q for putting together such an effective package. I know my future purchases won’t completely offset the cost of their FCBD product, but hey, they turned at least one browser into a buyer.

As for the other books, they represent everything Jimmy Gownley, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and Andy Runton do so well. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I usually try and avoid running press releases, but Top Shelf’s announcement of the upcoming Lost Girls collection by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie is really interesting. Its efforts at pre-emptive publicity are pretty impressive.

Top Shelf’s Chris Staros begins by talking about production quality and cost:

“This will be the most expensive book Top Shelf has ever published, with the first printing costing us almost $200K. Why so expensive? Because Lost Girls will be published as three, 112-page, super-deluxe, oversized (9″ x 12″) clothbound hardcover volumes, each wrapped in a beautiful dust jacket, with all three volumes sealed and shrink-wrapped in a gorgeous slipcase. The entire epic published — all at once — as an art object for the ages.”

I think it’s smart to address the price point so directly. It won’t stop people’s eyes from goggling at the $75 price tag, but the value-added aspects of the production do seem provide reasonable justification. And how often do publishers bother to address price point at all?

So with cost addressed, Staros moves on to issues of content. Johanna Draper Carlson noted Top Shelf’s avoiding the word “pornography” in its solicitation for the book, though they are fairly clear about the book’s target audience in the press release:

“PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS BOOK CONTAINS EXPLICIT MATERIAL AND IS FOR ADULTS ONLY. AT THE WEBSITE YOU MUST CERTIFY THAT YOU ARE OVER 18 YEARS OF AGE TO PURCHASE A COPY.”

The solicitation at Top Shelf’s site takes a somewhat more subdued approach, putting in a “FOR ADULTS ONLY” tag at the bottom.

Staros tries to put the book in context, which is a bit of a challenge given its rather unusual nature:

“Brett Warnock and I would personally like to thank everyone for helping us get this project off the ground, as this is, without a doubt, the single most important graphic novel we’ve ever published. And with a decade of publishing and 150 literary graphic novels & comix to our credit — including From Hell and Blankets — that’s saying something.”

More important than Blankets? The hell you say! Back that up, Staros!

“Why is this release so important? Because it does something that’s never been done before: reinvent pornography as something literary, thoughtful, exquisite, and human. A singularly unique and layered story, Lost Girls is a commentary on the intimate wonder of human sexuality, the undeniable value of free speech, and the vulgarities of war. In an era and political climate when most would shy away from taking such a stand, this graphic novel champions freedom of expression and puts that ideal to the test.”

I think some people will view “pornography” and “literary” as mutually exclusive terms. I’m not one of them, but the apparent contradiction already cropped up in Publishers Weekly’s piece on the upcoming release:

“Likewise, one owner of a small bookstore in the Bible Belt, who declined to be named, told PWCW that while her store sells both erotica and a growing selection of graphic novels, she won’t carry a book that’s billed and promoted as ‘pornography.’”

That strikes me as a fairly artificial distinction. I’m reminded of a panel at SPX on pornographic comics where the word “joyful” came up roughly 1,000 times during the conversation. It struck me at the time that this was a way of defanging porn, like making a blueberry muffin with whole-wheat flour. If it’s “joyful,” then you can deflect any implications of seediness or lurid intent, because everyone’s just having so much fun. The distinction between pornography and erotica strikes me as similar – erotica is porn, but it has higher fiber content.

Anyway, back to Staros:

“As a tightly knit community of fans, creators, retailers, publishers, distributors, and press we all believe that the pen truly is mightier than the sword, but we also know that the power of the pen lies not in the author so much as the audience. As such, Lost Girls need the support of all of us.

“It has often been said, ‘If it’s worth reacting to, it’s worth overreacting to,’ and you can be sure that this fully-painted epic will get a reaction from everyone who reads it — and more than its share of over-reactors as well. The literary, political, social, and sexual aspects of Lost Girls are going to challenge our system to live up to itself. Get ready.”

I think the removal of Paul Gravett’s Manga from some California libraries indicates that you don’t need to actually read something to overreact to it, and it’s nice to see that Top Shelf seems prepared for that possibility or at least cognizant of it.

At the same time, it’s kind of weird to see this kind of Team Comix mobilization being applied towards a really high-end piece of Dorothy Gale slash. Obviously I realize that’s a hopelessly reductive description, but I think the book might end up being called a lot worse. Pornographic re-imaginings of beloved storybook icons just seem to beg for community standards freak-outs. I’d even hazard a guess that Moore would be disappointed if it didn’t result in any.

(Edited because I apparently thought that Mr. Staros needed an extra “r” in his name when I initially wrote this. Beats me why.)

Yes. Exactly.

ICv2 has upped its estimate of the size of the manga market from last year’s $110 to $140 million to $155 to $180 million. Stupid fad! (Brigid pulls out the highlights and offers insightful commentary over at MangaBlog.)

Those numbers don’t surprise me. Just look at how much I’m shelling out this week.

Dark Horse delivers the third chapter of Eden: It’s an Endless World! (I still think this book has the potential to become this year’s Planetes.)

Del Rey has new volumes of Genshiken and Nodame Cantabile, two quirky books that have really grown on me.

If I had $25 to spare, I’d probably pick up the second volume of Robot from Digital Manga. Stupid gas prices.

Tokyopop hits lucky 13 on Kindaichi Case Files.

Viz rolls out another volume of Death Note. Like Lyle, I’m relieved that a closure point has been announced on this book. It’s delightful, but it’s always on the edge of ridiculous to begin with, and age might not be too kind to it.

Oh, and on the non-manga front, the second issue of the charming Mouse Guard (Archaia Studios) arrives today. If ever a comic deserved to sell out, it’s this one.

Dave Carter at Yet Another Comics Blog is holding his second Free Comic Book Month. What’s it all about, Dave?

“Each day of May I’ll pick someone to receive a free comic, taken from my personal collection: duplicates, things I have in trades, and other stuff. My goal is to match up people with a comic that they haven’t read but that they may like. My tastes are wide and varied, so chances are I’ve got a comic for you.”

Additional details are here.

Comic Book Galaxy has teamed up with :01 Books to give away all six of the new publisher’s inaugural line of books. They’ll be giving away five sets of the book and one grand prize package that also includes a :01 t-shirt, an ink and wash cartoon from Mark Siegel, and a copy of Danica Novgorodoff’s award-winning mini-comic, A Late Freeze. Details are here.

Through a coincidence of release timing, I’ve found myself considering Paris (Slave Labor Graphics) and Polly and the Pirates (Oni) in conjunction. They both deal with young women caught between convention and independence, and they’re some of the stronger mini-series I’ve seen in a while. Each features a combination of winning art and solid story, but they diverge a bit in their latest installments.

Paris concludes with its fourth issue, and it seems like there should be a fifth out there somewhere. Andi Watson’s plot has never been as essential to Paris as Simon Gane’s illustrations, but Watson introduces developments in this final chapter that could have really been fascinating if they’d been explored in more detail. As it stands, they’re interesting grace notes that provide some resonance for the central romance, but I can’t shake the feeling that more space and time might have made the twists really effective.

Gane continues to amaze, though. He’s as adept at rendering small-town America and the English countryside as he is the City of Light. The new settings accentuate the distance between heroines Debs and Juliet and make their reconnection (inevitable as it is) more satisfying. If nothing else has come from the publication of Paris (and it really is very strong on the whole), it’s given Gane a wonderful showcase for his considerable talents.

The fifth issue of Polly stands out from the chapters that preceded it as well. One of the things I’ve really admired about Ted Naifeh’s work so far is how each issue has stood alone as an individual entertainment while managing to build momentum in the overall story. This chapter isn’t quite as successful as the others, but it’s very much a penultimate issue and works wonderfully as such.

Naifeh shows Polly coming into her mother’s legacy from a couple of different directions. As her inherited aptitude for piracy becomes more evident, she gains a fuller understanding of her mother as an individual. Will Polly be able to fully reconcile her expectations (that she’d be the most proper of young ladies) with the adventuresome life of a pirate princess? Chances seem exceptionally good, and it will almost certainly be a delight to watch.

Anime News Network picks up an interesting piece of news from the Kyodo News Service:

“Japan’s foreign minister, Taro Aso, has proposed the creation of a prize akin to the Nobel Prize to be awarded to the best up-and-coming foreign manga artists. Speaking at the University of Digital Content in Akihabara, Aso said that by giving non-Japanese artists such an award would increase their affinity with Japan.”

That sounds like a nice piece of outreach, and it would definitely be interesting to see which titles get recognized.

Speaking of titles being recognized, Bryan Lee O’Malley has won the Shuster Award for Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Cartoonist. There probably won’t be time to note this on the cover of the next volume of Scott Pilgrim (soon! yay!), and I’m certainly not suggesting delaying its release until they can, but I’m thrilled for him all the same.

I was delighted to see Scott (Northwest Passage) Chantler nominated in that category as well, and I’m sure he’ll win one in the future. (I wonder if Hope Larson is Canadian enough for a Shuster nomination? Will we see a husband-and-wife throw-down in this category at some point in the future?) Canadian comic awards are just cooler than American ones, y’know?

ICv2 covers the latest BookScan graphic novel numbers, noting that sales of Tokyopop’s Kingdom Hearts show no sign of waning. (Neither do sales of Naruto or Fruits Basket. Try and contain your shock.)

And, since it’s Monday, there’s a new Flipped up where I look at Tokyopop’s Loveless and Blu’s Shout Out Loud!

So I’m back from visiting my parents in their new house in Columbus. They moved to be closer to the rest of the family, and it’s a nice place. The previous owner obviously loved gardening and didn’t skimp, and the yard is really beautiful. I’m sure I’ll be scavenging bits of plants from their yard during future visits, because that’s just how we do things in the Welsh family.

One of the happy side effects of the move is that I’ll probably never have to see a copy of the Cincinnati Enquirer again. Another is their new proximity to a really great comic shop, the Laughing Ogre.

I’ve been visiting siblings in Columbus for ages, but I’ve never explored the local comic shops. I didn’t see Laughing Ogre at one of its peak moments, as they’re in the middle of a remodeling and have confined themselves to about half of their available space in the interim.

But they still seem to have a great selection, even if it’s temporarily reduced, and the staff couldn’t have been friendlier or more helpful. They were in the midst of some serious inventory activity, but they still made a point of asking me if I needed help finding anything and answering questions. It was the first of many visits, and I can’t wait to see the place after they restore things to normal.

Plus, by some miracle, I actually managed to remember which books I’d been meaning to pick up and actually found them! (I never have a problem finding things to buy. I just get distracted by sparkly, shiny things and any pre-existing shopping list tends to fly out of my skull through one of the many convenient holes.)

So I came back with a copy of Amy Unbounded (which is delightful and certainly deserved Laughing Ogre guy’s very strong recommendation), Skinwalker, and a copy of the first issue of Or Else.

And there’s a Trader Joe’s right near my parents’ house. And a Whole Foods! (I’m distressed to find that the Whole Foods clientele in Ohio has the same problem as the shoppers at every other Whole Foods I’ve ever visited – running into people with their carts and similarly violating personal space as they talk on their cellular phones. Yes, they sell great challah and have an impressive selection of cheeses and organic produce, but what about the human cost?)

Steven Grant has a really interesting installment of Permanent Damage up at Comic Book Resources, where he offers some useful advice to would-be comics publishers. It all comes down to a relatively simple set of instructions:

“Unfortunately in most cases it comes down to starting out with enough capital to support whatever your game plan is. But even if you have the money to run whatever size business you opt for at no return for several months to a couple of years, at this point it’s worth your while to study the market, figure out a potentially profitable niche that no one else is serving, and fill that niche.”

It makes me think of the Publishers Weekly Comics Week piece on Central Park Media’s new efforts in the field of josei manga. Now, CPM is hardly the first manga house to publish josei. Tokyopop has a number of works by josei high priestess Erica Sakurazawa in print, and one could argue that the manga of Ai Yazawa leans more in the josei direction than towards shôjo (even though Nana is serialized in Shojo Beat), not even counting all the examples cited by Ed Chavez at Mangacast (found via Brigid’s MangaBlog). But they do seem to be taking more of an aggressive stance on marketing the category of josei.

I think Chavez makes some excellent points that dovetail nicely with what Grant was saying:

“I guess my point in the end is that while I know some publishers like the idea of just publishing manga without labels, sometimes the labels can work. Look at Shonen Jump or Yaoi Manga (for Viz and DMP respectively). With more exposure to more josei, it might be about time to start specifically targeting that market.”

I’ve been wondering when someone would make a concentrated appeal to the potential audience for josei works. I’m not entirely convinced that Dark Horse’s Harlequin line (even the “racy” Violet category) is the vehicle for it, given how dated some of the material seems. It demands that the audience be invested in graphics novels as a storytelling medium (or at least open to them as a vehicle for stories they like in prose form), fond of the Harlequin style of romance, and, in perhaps the biggest stretch, fond of Harlequin’s house style from something like a decade ago. Niche marketing is one thing, but wow, that seems to narrow things rather excessively.

I’m still disappointed that Tokyopop abandoned its “Manga After Hours” idea. With rights to Sakurazawa’s books, Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss, Yayoi Ogawa’s very popular Tramps Like Us, and a bunch of other works, they could very easily have repackaged books from their existing holdings into a josei line without having to license anything new. It also would have presented them with the option of categorizing future OEL offerings in the josei line, giving them an extra bit of marketing distinction.

In the PWCW article, it’s interesting to see the comparisons between CPM and Fanfare/Ponent Mon. CPM obviously isn’t interested in matching F/PM’s production quality or the resulting price point (which has kept me from buying Blue, one of the few F/PM books I’ve seen at a chain bookstore), and I think that’s entirely sensible. I was flipping through the latest Previews, and noticed that F/PM had re-listed The Building Opposite, which was initially due out some time ago, at $22 for 168 pages. And, given my experience with F/PM books, it’s pretty much a given that it will be exquisite, but it’s still a luxury purchase. (When I was a the comic shop yesterday, I was sorely tempted by the fabulous Sgt. Frog cover on the latest issue of Newtype, but gas prices have reduced my discretionary spending.)

It’s not clear from the article if CPM will be making a concerted effort to open up the josei market; they seem more focused on making their release of Kiriko Nananan’s Cream and Red Strawberries. There’s nothing wrong with that, though I’d love to see a manga publisher make that kind of josei-centric effort, and it could help give CPM a more distinct identity in the market. Still, there’s nothing wrong with approaching something cautiously. Go! Comi has taken a very measured approach with its initial line of shôjo titles, in spite of strong demand for the category, and it’s paid off handsomely for them.

I’m not entirely convinced that there’s a correlation between the audience for yaoi and potential fans of josei. Yaoi is striking me more and more as a genre of male-male Harlequin stories, while josei has more emotional complexity and nuance. But the success of yaoi does indicate that there’s potential in manga niches, even ones that don’t seem intuitively full of potential. (I’m stunned by the ever-increasing volume of yaoi being generated by Digital Manga, but it doesn’t seem to have led to market saturation… yet.)

But I really do want to see a publisher give shôjo fans someplace to go next. If CPM can generate more momentum towards that end, even if it’s just through the publication of one title, more power to them.

Now, when are we going to find out more about new manga player Aurora Publishing?