In the latest Flipped, I talk with Bryce Coleman about Tokyopop’s upcoming line of full-color graphic novels.

I missed out on Free Comic Book Day yesterday. My partner bought this big piece of folk art off of EBay, and we had to drive to Delaware to pick it up. So it was a long day in his car exploring the mysteries of XM Radio.

Does anyone know how to turn off the “Possibly Related Posts” function on WordPress? I kind of like to have a say in what’s linked from my blog, and this surprising feature makes me a little uncomfortable.

Updated: Found it. It’s under the “Extras” link in the “Design” category of the dashboard.

Every time I go to Comic Book Resources, the floating head of Stan Lee stalks me as I try to scroll down the page.

I hate pushy web advertisements.

… our hardwood floors shall glow with renewed finish. In the interim, my brain will be addled with the residual rattling of the sander and the polyurethane fumes.

So what were the big manga news stories of 2007? I’m not talking about announcements of things to come so much as things that actually happened. (For example, I’m very happy about the prospect of an international anthology from Yen Press, but it’s not here yet. It’s very likely to be one of the stories of the year in which it does drop.)

Here are some possibilities:

Naruto Nation: I know, colossal “duh,” huh? Beyond being incredibly nervy of Viz to unload that much product from a single franchise in a relatively short time span is the shocking fact that it actually worked. Obviously, the popularity of that franchise was essential to the initiative’s success, and I don’t know that it could be replicated with just about any other property, but damn, they sold a lot of Naruto in the last three months of 2007.

The Age of the Omnibus: Maybe I’m overstating the importance of this because I like the idea so much, but this is another somewhat unexpected idea that seemed to gain a lot of traction in 2007 and actually work, leading me to suspect that the trend will expand in 2008. I mean, there’s already a mix of high-end, collector’s collections and value-for-volume versions, which has to tell us something.

The Autism Comic: As I indicated above, Yen Press has announced a number of nervy moves in 2007 – the promised anthology, acquiring ICE Kunion’s catalog, announcing a boys’-love line, etc. But in terms of actual, existing product, and ignoring their fairly generic-looking first wave of licensed shônen, the newcomer’s publication of Keiko Tobe’s With the Light, a meticulously researched comic about a family dealing with autism, is most noteworthy. And it’s apparently selling extremely well to demographics outside the norm for manga. (Of course, that demographic could possibly have just been terribly underserved in terms of intelligent fictional portrayals.) All the same, I find the publication of this book and its apparent commercial success terribly encouraging. (Soon, the way will be paved for agri-manga. Soon!)

Manga: The Complete Guide: Nothing confirms the official arrival of an entertainment category like a comprehensive (at the time), general-audience guide to the available offerings, and this is a very good example of the form. There’s already some very good popular scholarship available about manga from the likes of Frederik Schodt and Paul Gravett, but a user-friendly guide like this seems particularly noteworthy. (I’m not about to call Jason Thompson the Roger Ebert of manga, because Ebert bugs me.)

Tempted as I am to include that near-miss from Seven Seas just so I could use “No, no, Nympet” as a bullet tag, it doesn’t seem to quite make the cut. Neither do any of the “I’m shocked that my child could find this smut in a public library/chain bookstore and hence I must call the local newspaper/television station” dust-ups, not because there weren’t any but because they seemed so routine. New BL and yaoi imprints seem more like an expansion of big news from last year (or even 2005) than something specific to 2007, and yuri and josei still don’t have the kind of foothold they’d need to meet my admittedly undefined standard.

So which manga happenings from the last year stick in your mind?

Okay, so I forgot to mention that I was going away for a week. Apologies all around.

Oh, and if you posted a comment and didn’t see it appear and suspected it got caught in the spam filter, apologies again, but I just dumped the whole filter without sifting through like I usually do, ’cause DAMN, go away for a week and that stuff piles up.

Also, airports are the most horrible places on the face of the Earth and I hate them so much.

Okay, so the thing about this week’s Flipped is that… there isn’t one. Circumstances intervened, all of them my own fault, so apologies to anyone who’s particularly devastated by this. I’ll try and make the next few installments extra thrilling to compensate, maybe throwing in some sword fights.

We just got back from a trip to Kentucky. (No particular reason other than it wasn’t here. You know how it goes.) In Lexington, there’s a Barnes and Noble that has quite a fine selection of manga, including my first bookstore sightings of Eden: It’s an Endless World and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. They had near-full runs of both, which was nice to see. I hope it’s a trend.

I don’t think Lexington will ever become a destination of choice, but any city with a chain of stores called “Liquor Barn” is all right by me.

It looks like Go! Comi and Tokyopop aren’t the only publishers sprucing up their web presences. I gave the Ice Kunion link a click and found this.

I wonder what’s going on over there?