I know it’s a waste of energy, but I’ve developed a grudge against Greg Rucka’s run on Wonder Woman. It’s my own fault for sticking with the book for as long as I did, but Rucka talked such a good game back in the beginning. He seemed to be bursting with interesting ideas for the character — her beliefs, her various roles as cultural ambassador and adventurer, her inner life, and how people viewed her — that it was particularly disappointing to watch the issues pile up without ever fulfilling the promise of those ideas.

What I got instead were interesting, well-developed bits mixed in with less successful material, none of it ever really blending into anything coherent. None of the various story threads ever gained enough momentum or got enough focus to pay off.

It’s not that there was too much going on; it’s more that it all was inadequately managed or tracked. Diana seemed to be yanked from thread to thread, whether via the machinations of the pantheon, the badly motivated schemes of would-be arch-nemesis Veronica Cale (who seems to have mercifully vanished), or a variety of other influences.

All of these external forces seemed to care intensely about what Wonder Woman stood for without ever actually articulating what that was or why it was so important to them. There was a sort of assumed Amazonian philosophy that never really reached the page. (Early on, Diana wrote a book that articulated her positions, but readers never really saw much of it… only the subsequent uproar.) It had the effect of making the title character fairly irrelevant to her own adventures, and that’s never a good thing.

And now, she’s become something of a utility player for Infinite Crisis and its various feeder plots. I don’t find any of the recent portrayals of the character to be inconsistent or unbelievable. They fit well enough with previous portrayals. But the OMAC-related events don’t really have anything to do with the dozens of issues that have gone before. Diana’s actions and subsequent behavior are plausible, but they’re jarring at the same time, because they were dropped into the book from out of nowhere (at least for people who aren’t following a variety of unrelated mini-series, but I guess nothing is really unrelated at this point).

But really, the neck-snapping and Rift in the Trinity stuff are really just a convenient last straw. It’s been evident for a while that the book was never going to live up to its early promise and Rucka’s interesting ideas for the character. So, more money for manga.

On a somewhat related note, I’m really disappointed to see that Gail Simone’s run on Action Comics will be so short. She’s done nice work with the characters and had pulled off some of the more graceful tie-in issues in the Countdown flurry. I guess it’s a relief that she didn’t have much time to lay down any significant subplots, as it won’t be too difficult to wrap them up, but I’ll miss her take on Metropolis.

It’s just more evidence that there’s no profit for me in investing anything in Superman titles, no matter how much I admire the creators. Since it’s really only creators who draw me to the franchise, I’m inevitably disappointed when their momentum gets derailed by crossovers, editorial mandates, and musical chairs.

The discussion over Tokyopop’s contracts for OEL creators is barreling along. It’s still going at The Engine, where it all started, with some speculation on the potential consequences of partial creator ownership that would keep me awake at night if I were a creator. As a follow-up of sorts, Warren Ellis starts a thread on the Creator’s Bill of Rights. In it, Neil Kleid brings up an interesting possibility:

“Some folks at SPX were talking about illustrating this as a minicomic (apparently they’ve already done the Comics Code).”

I’d love to see this, at least partly because I’m fascinated with the idea of educational and public-service manga (comics about the economy, public health, and other issues that have been published in Japan). I’m not really holding my breath for translated versions to show up, though.

At Comics.212.net, Christopher Butcher reports that Dirk Deppey is turning the considerable journalistic intelligence of The Comics Journal on the issue.

In his latest column for Komikwerks, Jog takes an allegorical approach to the whole issue. It’s kind of like if Planetes were about creators’ rights instead of orbital garbage collectors, and it’s incredible.

Tony Salvaggio looks at one of the creative outcomes of OEL in his latest installment of Calling Manga Island, interviewing Ben Roman, illustrator for I Luv Halloween (working with writer Keith Giffen), then reviewing the book.

The result of all this is to leave me wondering what the hell I’m going to write about for next week. “I feel like I should say something about… oh, wait… Jog just did it better than I ever could. Well, I’ve been meaning to review… damnit, Salvaggio!” At the moment, I’m seriously considering a “Who’d win?” throwdown between Tohru Honda and Hatsumi Narita.

Be afraid.

No, come to think of it, don’t. Hoke would never let me get away with it.

Yay! A reasonably inexpensive week of new comics arrivals! (For me, at least.) More money for manga! I can finally catch up on the most recent volumes of Fruits Basket and weep openly! (I browsed through the eleventh at Target the other day, and I’m fairly sure a full reading will kill me.)

Gail Simone will only be making me sacrifice my principles once this week, with a new issue of Villains United. (Action Comics is being written by Abnett and Lanning, and I still haven’t quite gotten over their Legion of Super-Heroes run. Plus, the issue seems to be a Day of Vengeance tie-in. Pass.) A new story arc starts in Fables, blissfully unencumbered by anything but its own back story.

A new issue of The Comics Journal (#271) hits the stands.

Over at Marvel, the very pleasant Gravity mini-series concludes. Looking back, I probably could have waited for the collection and enjoyed it a bit more, because the individual issues can seem a bit thin. I’m glad I didn’t wait for the trade of Livewires (which arrives in digest form tomorrow), because the thought of that tiny print reproduced at an even smaller size is enough to make my eyes cross permanently. If you aren’t given to spontaneous retinal detachment, you might give it a look. And since it’s relatively cheap, you can use the savings on a jeweler’s loupe.

The most recent issue of Amelia Rules (#14) seemed to veer into After-School Special territory. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because Jimmy Gownley has a really versatile handle on different tones. Still, it will be interesting to see how things proceed in #15.

It might be time for a little on-line shopping. I’m unlikely ever to see a copy of The Push Man and Other Stories (Drawn and Quarterly) on a shelf here in town, and I still haven’t been able to find a copy of Death Note. That’s bizarre to me, because it’s been published by Shonen Jump Advanced. If there’s one thing I can usually count on, it’s the ready availability of SJ titles in local bookstores.

Last week, David Taylor assembled a list of OEL titles over at Love Manga. This led Warren Ellis to ask for a roll call of OEL creators over at The Engine. This has led to a spirited discussion of the nature of contracts for said creators and whether Tokyopop is taking more than its fair share. Leading the charge is Lea “I’m Hurting Comics” Hernandez:

“I hate that good creators think not-so-equitable contracts are the best they can get because they’re new. Oni doesn’t take ownership from new creators. Dark Horse doesn’t. TPop is not publishing you out of the goodness of their hearts. Their risk is not huge—it’s calculated. Publishers (not shrewd ones, anyway) don’t take on projects that aren’t going to sell.”

It should be fun to watch that one develop.

In other points of art-commerce intersection, Paul O’Brien of the X-Axis finds the advertisements in last week’s comics so intrusive that he can barely manage to review them:

“Seriously, Marvel. Don’t you have any pride? Don’t you have any self-respect? Don’t you care about putting out a quality product? Don’t you even care about your reputation for quality? And if you do, why are there 22 pages of adverts cluttering up the 24 page story that I have paid my hard-earned money to read?”

O’Brien also looks at Diamond’s new policies over in his Ninth Art column and mentions Carla Speed McNeill’s move from monthlies to web-to-trade distribution with Finder. I keep wishing people would mention the fact that the Foglios did this with Girl Genius months ago. In his Things to Come column, Greg McElhatton sings the praises of the Foglios’ funny, quirky comic, among other worthy December offerings.

I was talking to John Jakala recently about his Two-Volume Theory of Manga. Basically, John’s position is that you can’t always determine a title’s quality from a single digest.

I’ve had some reading experiences that back that up. Fruits Basket didn’t really kick in until the second installment. Eerie Queerie seemed sensitive and intelligent in the first volume, then went hideously off the rails in the second.

This weekend’s reading stack has offered some interesting variations on the Two-Volume Theory. Take the second volume of Wataru Yoshizumi’s Ultra Maniac. I liked the first one a lot for its magical slapstick and the Lucy-and-Ethel dynamic of its leads, Ayu and Nina. I like the second, too, though for very different reasons.

Yoshizumi downplays the supernatural antics, focusing instead on the characters’ relationships. Ayu and Nina’s suitors, including a new arrival from Nina’s magical dimension, get some interesting layers. Yoshizumi also deepens the friendship of the two leads. When they realize they have a crush on the same boy, the stage is set for some predictable rivalry and antagonism, but Yoshizumi has the girls pick friendship over romance. It’s a refreshing development, and it’s executed well.

Funny farce in the first, effective interpersonal stuff in the second. Who knows where the third volume will go?

I picked up the first volume of Del Rey’s Ghost Hunt pretty much on a whim. With Halloween around the corner, I was looking for supernatural titles for a possible Flipped column, and it’s an adaptation of a series of young-adult novels, which follows up on last week’s installment.

Honestly, Ghost Hunt didn’t do very much for me. Shiho Inada has done some nice work in adapting Fuyumi Ono’s novel, but not quite enough. The manga follows a group of spiritualists as they investigate a potential haunting on a high school campus. Leading the pack is Kazuya, a teen-aged ghost hunter who uses science to investigate spiritual phenomena. He’s joined by a sarcastic hipster monk, a sexy temple priestess, a boyish Australian priest, a psychic schoolgirl (you can tell because she has thick glasses and lank, dark hair), and a popular TV fortune teller. They’re an interesting bunch, and it’s kind of fun to watch them squabble over whose approach is best.

Kazuya also conscripts ghost-story-loving schoolgirl Mai into the investigation when she accidentally damages some equipment (and Kazuya’s usual assistant). Mai is the gateway character, the pair of fresh eyes providing untrained, down-to-earth perspective on the case. Unfortunately, she’s also an exposition generator, asking question after question so the experts can explain what’s going on. It wears thin, as does Kazuya’s Henry Higgins treatment of Mai. He’s incredibly condescending to her, to the point that she nicknames him “Naru-kun” (short for narcissist). She crushes on him of course, though I’m not quite convinced his dreaminess outweighs his obnoxiousness.

The story itself isn’t very scary and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Lots of things happen, but very few of them turn out to be relevant in the end. Inada also tends to draw big red circles around the few useful clues, which undermines suspense.

That said, I’m still curious about where the series will go. I’m not sure if all of Ono’s novels follow the same character set or if it varies from book to book. And then there’s the estimable Mr. Jakala’s theory, which always leaves open the possibility for improvement. We’ll see.

There’s a nice, meaty interview with Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley over at ICv2 with lots of interesting nuggets on original graphic novels, Tokyopop’s balance between licensed and original material, and cautious speculation on what might be the next big thing. Some of my favorite bits:

“It comes down to whether the books suck or not. I confess to a little anxiety over what the hardcore otaku community might think of books that look a little different, or that told stories slightly different. At the end of the day it’s a very sophisticated readership. If the books are good, if they look good, if the story’s are compelling, if they’re told in a manga-fied way people buy them. Those books have the potential to be extremely successful in terms of raw numbers when measured against some of the more classic licensed books, in my opinion.”

Not sucking is a really excellent baseline goal for any publisher. It was interesting to read that the mid-list for OGNs actually moves higher numbers than the mid-list for licensed stuff. (That might be a function of the licensed stuff forming a much larger pool, and it might also have to do with the vigorous promotion Tokyopop has given its OGNs.)

What is manga, though, Mr. Kiley?

“Defining all of it as having something manga-like about it is sometimes a challenge. And that’s why some of our original books will be easily identifiable as manga and will be directly embraced by the current manga readership. Other books that we publish, people are going to sit on the floor in the manga section and open them up and really be confused, ‘What is this?’ That’s okay. That’s part of the process of all of us trying to figure out what manga really means to the consumers of manga in the United States.”

I must confess that I’ve never seen the legendary gaggle of children sitting on a bookstore floor. I have seen male twenty-somethings reading Marvel and DC trades in the café, then putting the copies back on the shelves before they leave the store.

Back on the subject of Tokyopop’s OGN creators, Svetlana Chmakova, creator of Dramacon, will be taking part in a special event in Toronto called “TRIPLE THREAT: A Manga, Superhero, Videogame extravaganza!”

I saw Dramacon on a recent new releases list, but I haven’t seen a copy of it in a bookstore yet. Has it actually been distributed, or was this another case of a manga publisher front-loading its listings at the beginning of the month, regardless of when the titles actually come out?

Did anyone else who uses Blogger experience a flurry of comment spam over the weekend? I wonder if it has anything to do with the new blog search functions. Hopefully, the word recognition feature will clear away some of the junk. It’s more a nuisance than anything, as most of them appear on entries from as long as a year ago.

I’m convinced this bug is never going to go away, but it did let me plow through a lot of the reading stack, both SPX stuff and the week’s ridiculously large manga haul.

The highlight of the SPX reading was the rest of Jessica Abel’s La Perdida (Fantagraphics). I’m glad I didn’t wait for the Pantheon collection. I also really enjoyed Josh Neufeld’s A Few Perfect Hours (and Other Stories from Southeast Asia and Central Europe) (Alternative). While La Perdida isn’t a travel comic, it relies so strongly on sense of place that it filled that function for me. Beyond their armchair traveler value, both focused on a kind of immersive, seat-of-your-pants brand of travel that I never practice, so there was an extra level of escapism. (I’m very big on set itineraries, confirmation numbers, and guaranteed comfort and safety when I hit the road.)

It seems like I’ve been waiting forever for another book by John Berendt, whose Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story is one of my favorites. (It spent forever on the best-seller list, and it was made into a truly appalling movie by Clint Eastwood.) His follow-up is finally out, The City of Falling Angels. This time, Berendt looks at culture, class, and crime in Venice. I’d forgotten that I’d pre-ordered it, so its arrival was a pleasant surprise.

I read a lot of the same manga volumes as Johanna Draper Carlson (what a surprise!). She updates several entries at Comics Worth Reading. But, here are some of my quick reactions:

• Othello Vol. 5: It’s nice to see Yaya starting to question the lapses in her memory, even as she seems to gain some confidence. The story is moving along nicely.
• Hikaru No Go Vol. 5: It surprised me to notice how much Hikaru has grown as a character over the course of this series. I can’t imagine the Hikaru from the first volume having the kind of emotional conflict he faces here (having to choose between ambition and loyalty).
• Yotsuba&! Vol. 3: Still delightful, and excellent bathtub reading, just in case anyone out there partakes of that particular pleasure. And plenty of Jumbo!

A new Flipped is up today, where I yammer about novels, graphic and otherwise, and the increasing intersection between the two. As case studies go, I probably could have done better than Socrates in Love.

Oh, Comic Book Resources, you’re almost as comforting as all of the over-the-counter medications I’ve been consuming.

The preview of Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness makes me feel better. Envy Adams looks delightfully awful. And yes, everybody in the world has already linked to it. I don’t care.

I haven’t seen much mention of another preview further down, but it does just as much to alleviate congestion and chills. It’s five pages of She-Hulk 2 #1, and it comes out Oct. 19. And I love Dan Slott soundbytes:

“Buy this monthly comic, and we’ll give you a month’s worth of entertainment!”

Enthusiastic, yet tastefully understated.

There’s an absolutely ludicrous quantity of manga coming out this week. Worse still, much of it is manga I either really like or am curious about. (It would be absurd even if I hadn’t barely made a dent in my SPX haul.)

ADV rushes out with the third volume of Yotsuba&! They can’t come fast enough, in my opinion. I’ll never understand why ADV still hasn’t uploaded any information on the book to its web site, though.

Del Rey provides the fifth volume of Othello (and please go over to Scoffing at Gravity to read Mely’s thoughts on that and a number of other titles, because they’re fascinating).

Tokyopop debuts both Dramacon and Steady Beat. Gump has an early review of SB over at Keromaru. Some sample pages of Dramacon were included in Bizenghast, and it looks very promising.

Viz has the fifth volume of Hikaru No Go, the second volume of Tokyo Boys and Girls, and something called Socrates in Love, a manga adaptation of a best-selling novel that has me morbidly curious. It seems like a long time since a new volume of HNG came out.

And that’s just the manga. DC has… well… pretty much nothing for me, but Evil Twin has Action Philosophers: Self Help for Ugly Losers, Marvel has Defenders 3 and Young Avengers 7, and Oni has the first issue of Polly and the Pirates.

I went to Small Press Expo and had a wonderful time, in spite of the fact that I think I have really poor comics convention skills. I’m generally bad at initiating conversation with people I don’t know, and I came to the realization that saying the name of my blog aloud is kind of mortifying. I’m not quite sure why, but it is, and I can’t seem to do it without stumbling over the words. (It didn’t come up very often, but every now and then someone would recognize my name, ask me where they’d seen it before, and embarrassment would ensue.)

So if I ran into you at the show and your impression was, “Wow, he’s a big dork,” don’t feel badly. You’re correct.

I did have great fun volunteering at the registration table and got to meet lots of interesting people and see how hard the SPX organizers work. By the end of my shift on Saturday morning, I knew the giddy thrill of being able to pretend I knew what I was talking about. If you’ve never put in a shift at SPX, I’d really recommend it.

In spite of the fact that I went in with no organized list of what I was looking for, I think I came away with lots of great stuff. I bought tons of mini-comics, some graphic novels and single issues, and, best of all, one of the awesome Owly t-shirts. I haven’t had time to read through a lot of my haul yet, but I think Raina Telgemeier’s mini-comics are really delightful, and while I’m not the target audience for The Baby-Sitters Club, I’ll probably have to pick it up to enjoy her illustrations.

Joanna Estep had some unlettered preview pages of her upcoming book for Tokyopop, Roadsong, and they looked really terrific. She was sharing a booth with Eric Adams, so I could pick up the third issue of Lackluster World. (Issue one, Pittsburgh. Issue two, Las Vegas. Issue three, Bethesda. Where will I buy issue four? Where?!)

Travel comics were a recurring theme in my purchases. I briefly considered waiting for the trade on La Perdida by Jessica Abel, but she was there, and the covers were beautiful, and if I hadn’t bought the singles, I wouldn’t have gotten the cool sketch she drew when she signed them. I got a couple of mini-comics from Justin Hall, who witnessed my con-related disabilities first hand when I left what I’d bought at his table. Yes, I’m just that addled, but he was very nice about it.

It’s not exactly an exotic locale (for me), but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far of Elk’s Run, a series set in a mysterious mining town in West Virginia. And the creators were offering a great deal on the first three issues. I don’t know if Joshua Neufeld was there, so I didn’t get the chance to embarrass myself when I purchased his A Few Perfect Hours at the Alternative table.

I should note at this point that one of my Bad Idea Bears from a previous con was unable to attend SPX, which was disappointing for all concerned. He shouldn’t worry that no one was there urging me to spend, spend, spend, because Johanna Draper Carlson had an uncanny ability to appear at my shoulder and encourage me to buy things. Admittedly, most of them were things I was on the verge of buying to begin with.

Speaking of Johanna, she’s a great con buddy. She also was an excellent tour guide to the world of sushi, one of those culinary experiences I’d been avoiding but ended up really enjoying. (That almost always happens, and then I wonder why I waited so long.) She was also very tolerant with my almost complete lack of con survival skills.

I would certainly go again, if only for the shopping, though the show certainly had a lot more in its favor. Everyone seemed to be happy to be there, which is unusual in my admittedly limited con-going experience. In spite of the odd micro-climates of the venue (one could go from rain forest to tundra simply by turning a corner), there was plenty of enthusiasm and an enjoyably relaxed vibe to the whole weekend.

I heard that they’ll probably have to change venues for next year’s show. I certainly hope they’ll factor in the availability of good gelato when they pick a new site, because nothing gets you over the 4 p.m. crash like a scoop of espresso gelato, let me tell you.