Spending too much on comics, then talking too much about them
… to use this panel to illustrate a post. Any excuse at all.
In this case, it’s because Melinda Beasi, Kate Dacey and I have formed our manga blogging battle robot to talk over the 12th and 13th volumes of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack (Vertical) over at Manga Bookshelf.
We adopted a dog not too long ago. Her previous owner had passed away, and she was being fostered by a kind family in a neighboring town. She’s about two years old and small, apparently some kind of hybrid of Chihuahua and Dachshund, and yes, she looks as odd as that combination suggests. (We’ve unofficially labeled the hybrid “Gummi Weasel,” but we have yet to hear back from the AKC.)
She’s adorable and quirky and we love her very much. Of course, introducing an animal into a new house never goes flawlessly, at least in my experience, but we’re doing our best to convince her that our home is her home and that we’ll always have her best interests at heart, while reassuring our preexisting brood that they’re loved every bit as much as they were before this little alien moved in.
During this gradual and pleasurable process, I’m reminded of the many things Kanata Konami gets exactly right in creating Chi’s Sweet Home (Vertical). I say “reminded,” because I’m sure we relearned all this the last time we welcomed a new animal, but I guess it’s a much milder version of what some people say about childbirth: you forget the negatives, and you just remember the outcome.
The beauty of Chi’s Sweet Home isn’t in its narrative sweep but in the way that Konami captures specific beats in the process of being a pet owner. Yes, there are plenty of kittenish antics from the titular feline, but the spine of the series is her human family adapting to their shared responsibility for this furry little creature. They shift things around in their household to make sure Chi is both safer and less prone to mischief. They take her to the veterinarian. They figure out what kind of food she likes. They trim her nails. They make choices and sacrifices that responsible people make when they add an animal to their family.
If the book was simply about a cute kitten doing cute things, I don’t believe it would be nearly as successful as it is. Powerful a force as cuteness is, care-giving isn’t all romping with plush toys and blissful naps. It’s sometimes messy, sometimes expensive, and sometimes inconvenient. The cuteness is the reward, as is the affection and the gradually strengthening bond between pet and owner. (This is one of the reasons that I think Chi’s Sweet Home would be a great comic for a kid, since the work end of the equation isn’t neglected.)
Over at Comics Alliance, David Brothers gives a persuasive summary of the book’s strong points, noting that Konami has a good grasp of feline behavior. This is absolutely true, and she doesn’t over-anthropomorphize Chi’s antics. She doesn’t need to, because she finds all of these telling moments in the warmly everyday relationship between humans and pet.
Brothers also notes Konami’s willingness to fold sadness into the narrative, which is also entirely correct. I knew it was dramatically successful when I originally read the sequences Brothers describes. But I know it’s accurate from watching our new dog have moments when she seems to remember that our house hasn’t always been her house, that she’s had other, meaningful people in her life, and that something inside her amounts to unfinished business. And if you ignore those moments or reject them, you miss the fullness of the experience that Konami is describing. I never thought I’d use the phrase “mono no aware” to describe a manga about a kitten, but I guess that’s what you get when it’s a seinen manga about a kitten.
So, as we continue to welcome our new little citizen to the household, I’ll certainly keep up with Chi’s immersion in her new home. And I’ll probably have a Gummi Weasel on my lap as I do so.
(This review is based on complimentary copies provided by the publisher.)
The findings from the current issue of Previews aren’t as extensive as they sometimes are, though there are new volumes of plenty of appealing series. And there are two exciting debuts on the artier end of the spectrum.
First up is Shigeru Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths from Drawn and Quarterly (page 281). Here’s the rundown:
A landmark publishing event by one of Japan’s most famous cartoonists. Shigeru Mizuki is the preeminent figure of Gekiga manga and one of the most famous working cartoonists in Japan today. Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths is his first book to be translated into English and is a semi-autobiographical account of the desperate final weeks of a Japanese infantry unit at the end of World War II. The soldiers are told that they must go into battle and die for the honor of their country, with certain execution facing them if they return alive. Mizuki was a soldier himself, and he uses his experiences to convey the devastating consequences and moral depravity of the war.
It was originally serialized in Kodansha’s Gekiga Gendai in 1973. You may recognize Mizuki as the creator of GeGeGe no Kitaro. Drawn and Quarterly also plans to publish Mizuki’s Non Non Bâ, which earned top honors at Angoulême in 2007. A large quantity of his work has already been published in French.
Next is Usumaru Furuya’s Lychee Light Club from Vertical (page 316):
The Lychee Light Club is considered Usamaru Furuya’s breakthrough work. Originally designed as an experiemental project Lychee’s themes of youthful rebellion and deus ex machina destruction, and attractive designs eventually won over a new generation of readers and critics, leading the way for Furuya to take on his many recent high profile properties.
A surreal yet touching horror comedy Furuya’s Lychee Light Club that mixes elements of French Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol and with modern day pop culture tropes and is set in modern day Tokyo. Shocking, sexy and innovative, the Lychee Light Club is at the pinnacle of modern day Japanese seinen manga (young adult comics).
It was originally published in Ohta Shuppan’s fascinatingly rangy Manga Erotics F.
So those are the highlights. Tomorrow, I’ll give readers another opportunity to pick a title for me that could be either intriguing or awful.
I’ve already pointed out my Pick of the Week, but I would feel incomplete if I didn’t look through the rest of this week’s ComicList.
I think this shipped through other venues, but Diamond is finally delivering the first volume of Nicolas De Crecy’s Salvatore: Transports of Love. This has the dual attractions of being by De Crecy, whose Glacial Period remains one of my favorite graphic novels of all time, and of being a fulfilled license request. Salvatore is about a gifted auto mechanic who also happens to be an antisocial dog (an oxymoron, but I’ll suspend disbelief) who goes off in search of true love while dealing with a variety of odd customers. I’m stupidly excited to have this in my hands.
The rest of the week is devoted to new volumes of lovely manga titles.
There’s the fifth volume of Kou Yaginuma’s Twin Spica (Vertical), which has rightly been showing up on Best of 2010 lists all over the place.
From Viz, there’s the tenth (and final) volume of Hinako Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles, which explores the stories of supporting characters and fills in back story. Continuing the glorious shôjo trend is the fifth volume of Yuki Midorikawa’s Natsume’s Book of Friends, which focuses on cram sessions and mermaid blood, which is exactly what one should expect from this supernatural series.
What sounds good to you?
It’s a jam-packed ComicList this week, so much so that I must engage in speculation: if I could only pick one of the thumping stack of Viz Signature titles that are arriving this week, which would it be? Keep in mind that I’ll buy all of them at some point, but that’s a lot of books, you know?
So, to start, I would theoretically postpone purchase of the SigIkki titles on the assumption that I’m up to date on having read them online and thinking that a little more distance between reading them on the web and in a physical book would improve the experience. That’s three out of the mix, and they’re really good, so ouch. And there are still three left.
There’s no shame in losing to Fumi Yoshinaga and Naoki Urasawa, so I’m afraid that Natsume Ono’s charming Gente would have to wait. Much as 20th Century Boys is my favorite Urasawa series, I’m not quite as starved for a new volume of it as I am for the next installment of the final contender…
… the fifth volume of Yoshinaga’s Ôoku: The Inner Chambers. Yes, it’s got some adaptation issues, but I find that it takes fewer and fewer pages for me to adapt myself to them and throw myself into the very beguiling story.
And, just for clarity, here’s the order of choice for all of Signature’s avalanche:
1. Ôoku: The Inner Chambers vol. 5, Fumi Yoshinaga
2. 20th Century Boys vol. 12, Naoki Urasawa
3. Gente vol. 2, Natsume Ono
4. House of Five Leaves vol. 2, Natsume Ono
5. Children of the Sea vol. 4, Daisuke Igarashi
6. I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow vol. 2, Shunji Aono
Vertical isn’t making things any cheaper.
I think the fourth volume of Kanata Konami’s Chi’s Sweet Home is the best yet. Konami really seems to have found a rhythm by this point and a solid handle on the comic potential of human-feline interaction. And I’m really looking forward to how Felipe Smith wraps things up in the third and final volume of the deranged cross-cultural theater-of-cruelty comedy, Peepo Choo.
And if you’ve never much cared for Marvel’s comics, I don’t know how meaningful this will be for you, but I’m really, really enjoying Secret Avengers. Last issue, Valkyrie, the Asgardian chooser of the slain, kicked the asses of a whole bunch of ninjas. That will either light a spark in your soul or not. The eighth issue comes out Wednesday, written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Mike Deodato.
What looks good to you?
Update: Major omission alert!
Drawn & Quarterly gets its gekiga on with Oji Suzuki’s A Single Match, a “collection of hauntingly elliptical short stories.”
I’m not going to claim that I’ve loved everything of Osamu Tezuka’s that I’ve read. Pinocchio remodels are right after Peter Pan tales in the list of things that make me lose patience, so I’ve only sampled Astro Boy (Dark Horse). Swallowing the Earth (DMP) had a crazy verve that couldn’t quite compensate for its ultimate clumsiness.
Ayako (Vertical) adds another to the roster of Tezuka works that I just can’t fully endorse, and I’m still figuring out why that is. It’s a sprawling, serious-minded saga of familial disintegration, which can promise all kinds of good times, but those fail to materialize in this case. Tezuka is on his almost-best behavior here, and while it makes me feel rather shallow for saying so, I wish he’d worn the lampshade a bit more often.
The weird and marvelous thing about Tezuka is that the puckish quality of his storytelling – the human tempura, the pansexual masters of disguise, the just-a-trunk warriors – doesn’t diminish its force. He can still make moving and persuasive arguments about morality, family and leadership without resorting to austerity. It seems that, without those flights of fancy, his gruesome assessment of selfishness and cruelty becomes almost exhausting, even rote.
The title character is the illegitimate daughter of the patriarch of a family of landed gentry trying to hold onto their property after the end of World War II. Ayako is the fulcrum of all of the family’s greedy, sexy secrets, and she suffers accordingly as her extended clan vent their frustrations, ambitions and shame on her. Given the structure of her life, it’s hard to imagine how she could emerge as a proper character, and she really doesn’t. She’s an acre of family land where the bodies are buried.
With her rendered somewhat useless in terms of specific reader empathy, who’s left? Ayako’s half-siblings seem united only in their willingness to abdicate anything like responsibility or conscience. Her prisoner-of-war older brother is spying for the occupying forces. Her sister is dabbling with the socialists, politically and emotionally. Even her amateur sleuth youngest brother is unwilling to translate his curiosity and surprisingly developed sense of justice into sustained action.
But that’s the point, I think – that moral compromise is kind of an incurable cancer, and that people, no matter what they were like at the beginning, are doomed once they take that wrong step. A tale like that can have compelling moments, but I think that progressive decay as a narrative structure becomes exhausting after a while. It certainly does here. It’s a harangue at the characters and the culture they inhabit, not an argument in which the audience can engage, which is usually the nature of Tezuka’s morality plays.
Since I’m (obviously) still working out my thoughts on this piece, I’ll point you to a couple of better-argued pieces on Ayako (which I didn’t let myself read until after writing the above). First up is Kate (The Manga Critic) Dacey, whose evaluation tracks with my own. Then, there’s Alexander (Manga Widget) Hoffman, who finds a lot to admire in the work.
(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)
Submissions are being accepted for the 2011 Eisner Awards! I enjoyed cobbling a list of suggested manga nominations last year, so I thought I’d try again.
There could be a number of Japanese works that make it into the Best Short Story category, as both Fantagraphics and Top Shelf published highly regarded collections of short manga. If forced to pick just one story from Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, I think it would have to be “Hanshin/Half-God.” There’s a lot of terrific work in Top Shelf’s AX anthology, but the one that keeps coming to mind would have to be Akino Kondo’s “The Rainy Day Blouse & the First Umbrella.”
Whether or not any Japanese titles show up in the Best Continuing Comic Book Series category is always kind of a crap shoot. If one shows up, there’s a good chance it’s probably by Naoki Urasawa, so I wouldn’t be surprised or at all displeased if we saw 20th Century Boys or Pluto (Viz) in this roster. I would be surprised and delighted if we saw that stalwart, The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Dark Horse), written by Eiji Otsuka and illustrated by Housui Yamazaki, take a slot. The same goes for Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (Viz), which experienced a big push this year and put Oda’s multifaceted gifts on flattering display.
The Best New Series category is tricky for similar reasons. You never know how they’ll define the category, and, hey, it’s not like the rest of the comics industry is hurting for good new titles. But if they want to mix it up with some newly launched (here, at least) manga series, here are four they might consider:
Technically speaking, neither of the following titles was originally conceived of for kids, but I have no problem putting them forward as likely candidates for the Best Publication for Kids category. Konami Kanata’s Chi’s Sweet Home (Vertical) is charming and funny, and it offers a point-by-point run-through of the responsibilities of pet ownership, which is a great thing to hand a kid. Very few people don’t like Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! (Yen Press) for the simple reasons that it’s hysterically funny and wide open to just about anyone who cares to read it. It’s the kind of book that I think people want to read with the kids in their lives, which is certainly an enticement for voters.
If there’s a category that’s hard to pin down, it would probably be Best Publication for Teens, partly because I don’t think teens really like being told “We know you’ll like this.” So I’ll go with two that are rated “Teen,” because I’m lazy like that. Cross Game has pretty much everything you could ask for from a coming-of-age novel: joy, sorry, confusion, comedy, great characters, and completely recognizable slices of life. Yuki Midorikawa slices up a more supernatural life with Natsume’s Book of Friends (Viz), but it has hearts and smarts in common with Adachi’s baseball comic.
Not much has changed as far as my Best Humor Publication recommendations go, at least in relation to Koji Kumeta’s Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei (Del Rey). The aforementioned Yotsuba&! is routinely one of the funniest comics I read, and Kiminori Wakasugi’s Detroit Metal City (Viz) has a lot of vulgar high points.
Unless there’s some utterly arcane bit of rules of which I’m unaware, there’s no reason on Earth for AX not to snag a Best Anthology nomination. It’s everything an anthology or collection is supposed to be, isn’t it? Purposeful, varied, significant, with bonus points for being frequently entertaining and nicely produced.
Nominees in the Best Archival Collection apparently need to focus on work that’s at least 20 years old, so I suspect that might disqualify A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, but there’s plenty of material to choose from. Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako (Vertical) is perhaps not my favorite of his works, but there’s always Black Jack from the same publisher. There’s also Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Black Blizzard (Drawn & Quarterly), which offers a worthwhile glimpse into his earlier, long-form works.
Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material — Asia opens its own can of worms for me in terms of recommendation, because what I’d suggest would depend on what’s nominated elsewhere. I’m always for spreading the wealth, if possible. Assuming there’s an absence of comics from Japan in the other categories, I’d say these five are essential, though: A Drunken Dream an Other Stories (Fantgraphics), AX (Top Shelf), Bunny Drop (Yen Press), Twin Spica (Vertical), and Cross Game (Viz).
It’s unfortunate that the Best Writer/Artist categories are divided into Humor and Drama, because the greats balance both. I would love to see Fumi Yoshinaga nominated, possibly in the humor side of the equation. Still, her year included All My Darling Daughters (Viz), new volumes of Ôoku: The Inner Chambers (Viz), and Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy (Yen Press), which seems like a perfectly reasonable excuse to nominate her for an award she’s deserved for years. I’d feel fairly secure in placing Moto Hagio in the Drama category, since that is the essential nature of the short stories collected in A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. They aren’t entirely void of humor, but…
Chi’s Sweet Home’s qualifications for Best Publication Design may not be immediately obvious, but the care with which its reading orientation was flipped and color was added to each page are worth noting, especially in the ways that they opened the book up to a larger audience. There seem to be a lot of gorgeous, immense package jobs this year, slip-cased volumes that you could use as an ottoman, and there’s some snazzy design for books that doesn’t really enhance the actual comic in question, but the design for Chi’s Sweet Home served the product and was subtly beautiful at the same time. [Update: I’m reliably informed that the book was in color before it was flipped and translated.] The cover designs for 7 Billion Needles were perhaps less cumulative work, but their style and texture are real winners.
What did I miss? What books and creators would you recommend for Eisner consideration?
Here are a couple of articles to enjoy on what I hope is a relaxing Saturday morning for you:
Over at The Comics Journal, Roland Kelts finds a new way to look at an old, old topic, “Manga versus Comics.” Kelts talks to Felipe (Peepo Choo) Smith, agent Yukari Shiina, and Tokyopop’s Stu Levy. (That last source is especially interesting, because I can’t be the only person who assumed the creepy, opportunistic North American publisher in the first volume of Peepo Choo had to be based at least a little on DJ Milky, right?)
“Smith’s is an exceptional story, to be sure, as is the story of Peepo Choo itself—a US-Japan culture clash comedy that both mocks and celebrates fans of comics and manga, illustrated in riveting and sometimes surrealistically violent detail. His achievement would seem many a foreign manga fan’s dream. But the artist remains frustrated by the us-vs-them mentality pervading the manga industry in Japan and overseas.”
It’s a solid article, not least for whatever subtext you may be inclined to add to the formal narrative. (Peepo Choo ran in Kodansha’s Morning Two, a seinen anthology spun off from, yes, Morning.)
So that breaks down some of the stumbling blocks for comics moving westward across the Pacific Ocean. What about in the other direction? At The Hooded Utilitarian, Sean Michael Robinson ponders the difficulties comics about sports have when trying to gain traction with North American audiences, as viewed through the prism of Mitsuru Adachi’s glorious Cross Game (Viz).
“With the exception of some very popular young adult sports fiction in the fifties and sixties, there’s not a very long tradition of sports fiction in America, and certainly little to no tradition of sports comics. In the eyes of many marketing strategists, a general audience uses a genre label as an aid to enter the story, a convenient short hand that serves as a hook on which to hang the other elements of the story. How do you sell a piece of fiction that most easily fits into a genre that doesn’t exist for its target audience?”
Purely based on my own experience, comic books were something you were interested in instead of sports, not in addition to sports. Being a gifted jock isn’t routinely an aspirational thing for comics fans here, I don’t think. Since comics reach a less specific audience in Japan, there’s more crossover between the kids who read them and the kids who admire sports stars or want to be them, possibly since comics are significantly less uncool among kids in Japan and (I suspect) professional jocks aren’t quite as glorified there. Just a theory. And Cross Game is great, and you should buy it.
Oh, and if you’re in the Manhattan area tomorrow (12/12/2010) and want to hear about Kodansha’s plans to release comics in English, swing by the Kinokuniya Bookstore at 2 p.m.
Daniella (All About Manga) Orihuela-Gruber is picking up the baton of the Great Manga Gift Guide, and I thought I’d take the opportunity of the One Piece Manga Moveable Feast to offer a shônen-flavored version that takes One Piece’s tone and content and creator Eiichiro Oda’s career arc into account. Now, many shônen series are great, but they’re just plain long, so it’s with some reluctance that I would suggest them as a gift when, if the gift is received well, it would require the recipient to spend a ton of money completing a series. That’s very “first hit’s free,” don’t you think? But sometimes that kind of recommendation is unavoidable, and since this list is conceived at least partly with the One Piece admirer in mind, I’m not going to be too rigid about it.
I will be rigid about one thing: use what you know about the recipient to guide your choice of gifts. If you know they like comics, great. If you know you want them to like comics, tread carefully, and pair the comic gift with something you know they actually like. Holidays are always creepy when they’re tinged with evangelism, I think.
It’s widely known that Oda took great inspiration from Akira Toriyama, so it seems reasonable to recommend Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, which is available in bulky, gift-worthy VizBig editions. It offers “a wry update on the Chinese ‘Monkey King’ myth, introduces us to Son Goku, a young monkey-tailed boy whose quiet life is turned upside-down when he meets Bulma, a girl determined to collect the seven ‘Dragon Balls.’ If she gathers them all, an incredibly powerful dragon will appear and grant her one wish. But the precious orbs are scattered all over the world, and to get them she needs the help of a certain super-strong boy…” Less adventure and more jokes can be found in Toriyama’s Dr. Slump (Viz). Toriyama and Oda have collaborated on a Dragon Ball/One Piece crossover called Cross Epoch.
Oda began his career as an assistant to Nobuhiro Watsuki, who was working on Rurouni Kenshin (Viz) at the time. Viz declares, “Packed with action, romance and historical intrigue, Rurouni Kenshin is one of the most beloved and popular manga series worldwide. Set against the backdrop of the Meiji Restoration, it tells the saga of Himura Kenshin, once an assassin of ferocious power, now a humble rurouni, a wandering swordsman fighting to protect the honor of those in need.” It’s also available in VizBig format.
Another of Watsuki’s assistants at the time was Hiroyuki (Shaman King) Takei, who’s currently at work on Ultimo (Viz) with Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee. I found the first volume of Ultimo unsatisfyingly creepy, but Erica (Okazu) Friedman liked it when she reviewed it for About.Com, finding that the series “provides a solid reading experience with characters you want to know more about, in a situation you want to see resolved well.”
If you liked the whole “travel by water” notion and were particularly taken with the aesthetic of Water Seven, I would strongly suggest you take a look at Kozue Amano’s Aria (Tokyopop), which follows gondoliers on Mars. It’s the absolute tonal opposite of One Piece, but manga fans cannot live on crazy hyperactivity alone, and Aria and its prequel, Aqua, are really beautiful.
If the goofy humor and occasional satirical bent of One Piece are to your liking and you’d like a slightly more mature (sometimes just coarser) take on them, I’d recommend Hideaki Sorachi’s Gin Tama (Viz). It’s about a swordsman-for-hire living in a world that’s been handed over to greedy, corrupt aliens. Like One Piece, it veers from flat-out goofy to surprisingly serious, and Sorachi does some entertaining world building.
If you like Oda’s distinct, detail-packed artwork, give Yuji Iwahara’s Cat Paradise (Yen Press) a look. It’s your basic Hellmouth story – plucky young people must fend off demon invasion while keeping up with Algebra – with the bonus of helpful, heroic felines. It’s not Iwahara’s best work, but his pages are always easy on the eye.
And now we start with shônen I’d recommend under any circumstances, first being Osamu Tezuka’s three-volume Dororo (Vertical). It’s disappointingly short, as Tezuka abandoned it much earlier than he had intended, but it’s creepy, funny, sad and wonderful. The lead character’s father sold his son to demons, part by part, and the kid has to kill all of the demons to get his body back. He hooks up with a young thief along the way.
Far and away the best new shônen I read this year and one of the best sports manga I’ve ever read is Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game (Viz), which I reviewed here. Beyond being really good in every way, it’s a big, fat package that makes it very gift-worthy.
What if you just like stories about pirates? Well, you can’t go wrong with Ted Naifeh’s Polly and the Pirates (Oni). A proper schoolgirl is shocked to discover that she’s got a pirate-queen legacy to live up to in this completely charming, hilarious comic.
Chris Schweizer’s Crogan’s Vengeance (Oni) takes a more scholarly approach to how pirates actually plied their trade, but it doesn’t downplay the adventure in the process. It’s a smart romp, which I reviewed here.
Upcoming 2/2/2011
No one should be surprised by my Pick of the Week, should they? With that out of the way, I thought I’d take a look at two of the titles on this week’s crowded ComicList. (Okay, they aren’t confirmed on the list, but they’re probably already available through sources other than Diamond.)
Rikuo wants to emphasize his human heritage rather than his yokai legacy. He objects to the anti-human meanness of his prospective subjects, and he struggles to conceal his weird home life when he’s at school. Dangerous circumstances occasionally draw the yokai part of Rikuo to the forefront, and he becomes an assertive butt-kicker who bears at least a passing resemblance to InuYasha. This only serves to remind you that there’s better folklore-based manga out there for your perusal.
Even with a sprawling cast of frequently charming monsters at his disposal, Shiibashi can’t seem to devote much attention to them. He’s more interested in Rikuo’s secret-identity shenanigans, his generically flinty female friend, and the idiot rival who develops a boy-crush on Rikuo’s forceful alter ego. They’re a predictable group, as are their escapades. I’d much rather see what was happening at Rikuo’s yokai-packed family manse than follow this shônen-ready Marilyn Munster around.
For those who have forgotten, it’s about a traveling group of magicians who battle the zombies that have overrun their sort-of period, kind-of European country. Their leader and vocalist, a guy named Lucille, has dark secrets and likes to dress in drag. Their pianist, a girl named Eles, has a tragic past and disguises herself as a boy. Their companions are seedy, and the government line on their efforts is ambivalent on the best days.
In the second volume, Yuki seems to find both a more assured narrative rhythm and more underlying heft to her story. The back story she reveals about Lucille adds necessary layers to the character without undermining his essential ridiculousness. It also provides a strong, underlying subplot to fuel future stories.
Yuki’s penchant for the absurd and just slightly perverse is still on unapologetic display. Our protagonists go undercover in a convent, looking for a sacred relic and investigating the grisly murders of young nuns. This mini-arc is shaping up to be both creepy and very funny, provided you find secretive nuns committing and subjected to unexpected violence funny, which, I assure you, I do.
Grand Guignol Orchestra is still a bit on the bubble for me, but it’s sliding off of it and onto firmer ground. It’s not a singular kind of story, but Yuki’s work is as coherent as I’ve seen it while still displaying the quirkiness that’s made her a sort of superstar.
(Comments are based on review copies provided by the publisher. Nura is currently running in Shueisha’s Weekly Shônen Jump, and it’s up to about 14 volumes, so maybe it gets better. Grand Guignol Orchestra ran for five volumes in Hakusensha’s Bessatsu Hana to Yume.)
As for books that will be available through Diamond, the highlight has to be the 13th volume of Osamu Tezuka’s medical melodrama, Black Jack (Vertical). In the perfectly understandable excitement over Vertical’s announcement of the licensing of Tezuka’s Princess Knight, we shouldn’t forget this often gruesome, frequently moving, creepily funny classic.
Another excellent arrival is the 22nd volume of Hikaru no Go (Viz), written by Yumi Hotta and illustrated by Takeshi (Death Note, Bakuman) Obata. This marvelous series about a young man who dreams of becoming a great Go player ends with volume 23, I think, but it’s worth starting from the beginning if you haven’t yet done so.
I haven’t read the first volume yet, but various enthusiastic reviews have persuaded me that I need to catch up with Yuuki Fujimoto’s The Stellar Six of Gingacho (Tokyopop), second volume due Wednesday, about a group of kids, all children of local shopkeepers, who try and reestablish their waning friendship. In my defense, Tokyopop’s marketing is often confusing to me, and I’m never sure if I’m going to get The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko or KimiKiss.