The Manga Curmudgeon

Spending too much on comics, then talking too much about them

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Upcoming 4/21/2010

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This is one of those weeks where all of the ComicList heavy lifting is done by Viz Signature, whose offerings include two titles that would make any Wednesday an exciting one all by themselves.

It seems like it’s been ages since we got a volume of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ôoku: The Inner Chambers, but the wait is over. (Well, the wait is over for those of who you aren’t subject to that weird one-week delay that Diamond sometimes inflicts on Viz fans in the northeastern United States.) Ôoku recently won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award “for science fiction and fantasy that expands our understanding of gender.”

I simply do not understand why more people aren’t reading and raving about Takehiko Inoue’s glorious drama about wheelchair basketball players, Real. It’s beautifully drawn and brilliantly written, and while I know that’s never a guarantor of commercial success, it would be nice if this title got some of the level of buzz it richly deserves. The eighth volume is due Wednesday. And if you want to double your Inoue pleasure, you can pick up the seventh VizBig collection of Vagabond. I’m so behind on that one. Oh, god, I’m part of the problem, aren’t I?

I love it when I can be lazy and pull a “What she said,” and I do that a lot with Kate (The Manga Critic) Dacey. I share her sentiments about Seimu Yoshizaki’s Kingyo Used Books, which debuts this week but has been running on Viz’s SigIKKI site since its launch. Take it away, Ms. Dacey:

“The series’ episodic structure cuts both ways, see-sawing between being a fun exercise in formula — which manga will feature prominently in this story? who will be drawn into the store? — and a frustratingly obvious collection of beats culminating in a character’s decision to make a change in her life.”

What looks good to you?

Second looks

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I thought I’d kick the week off with quick looks at a couple of second volumes of series that made promising first impressions. One is a shôjo title that’s off the beaten track (a male protagonist, no romantic plot elements, and a supernatural, episodic vibe), and the other is a josei series that plays around with that old shôjo spirit.

The second volume Yuki Midorikawa’s Natsume’s Book of Friends (Viz) has all of the charms and strengths of the first. All of the four stories are solid, and the art is still lovely and delicate, but there’s one chapter that really resonated with me.

In it, protagonist Natsume has an entirely unexpected experience. He meets an adult who can do the same things he does, namely see and communicate with supernatural creatures known as yôkai. Natsume has been steadfast, even a little paranoid, about keeping his abilities a secret. Experience has taught him that he’ll be ostracized if he reveals them, so finding another person like him is jolting. Natsume moves through phases of suspicion, curiosity, hope, disillusionment, and eventually acceptance and relief.

As a gay kid entering college, I felt something very similar to Natsume’s sense of isolation and strangeness. Mercifully, even in a small-town college in the Midwest, I managed to meet gay grown-ups who were living the kind of productive, happy lives I had only cautiously imagined. They had good jobs, and some of them had partners, and the fact that they were gay wasn’t a hindrance to any of that. Even if I didn’t end up liking all of them or finding them entirely admirable, the examples they provided were a tremendous comfort to me. Midorikawa captures that process and those feelings with accuracy and sensitivity. I have no idea what her intent or inspiration for the story were, but the argument she makes for the power of an adult role model is persuasive and moving, so much so that I think I’ll nominate it for the Great Graphic Novels for Teens list.

Another nice element of this series is the added value of the creator’s notes. These sidebars often run to the drippy and chatty, but Midorikawa makes good use of them. She talks about her process, the challenges of trying to craft stand-alone stories with recurring themes, and the hooks that she finds for herself that help characters and stories fall into place. She also explains her resistance to larger panels, and while I get it and think her compositions are often lovely, it would be nice to see the occasional blown-up spread.

The second volume of Yuki Yoshihara’s Butterflies, Flowers (Viz) settles into a pattern of mildly smutty silliness that I very much enjoyed. In the first volume, we met former rich girl Choko Kuze, whose family’s financial decline led her to the life of an office worker. She quickly discovered that her borderline-insane boss, Masayuki Domoto, used to be one of her family’s servants, and that his boyhood devotion still lurks within her demonic supervisor.

With the set-up out of the way, Yoshihara can really dive into the R-rated shôjo goofiness. Buttterflies, Flowers runs in a josei magazine (Shogakukan’s Petit Comic), but it has all of the mechanics of a high-school romance. The antics just have a slightly more adult flavor. Instead of a school festival, Choko must participate in a company competition for office newbies. Instead of a Domoto fan club full of sempai, there are senior office ladies to seethe with jealousy. And the question of sex is addressed a lot more frankly, though not with anything resembling seriousness.

There are some great bits amidst the generally okay bits, and it’s undeniably good natured. It’s not josei in the way that books like Bunny Drop or Suppli are, but it’s fun and does its best to make sex silly. There’s nothing wrong with that.

They presumably would know

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I hereby declare it Press Release Thursday. There are a few interesting ones in my mailbox, and there’s nothing wrong with a little low-impact content generation.

We’ll start with Viz, who has formerly announced the drop date for Bakuman, written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. You may recognize them as the creative team that brought us Death Note (also from Viz), and I hope you recognize Obata as the illustrator for Hikaru No Go (wonderfully written by Yumi Hotta, and also published by Viz). I’m somewhat less concerned that you recognize Obata as the artist behind Ral Ω Grad (written by Tsuneo Takano, also from Viz), which is a little fan-service-y for my tastes. You may also recognize Bakuman as one of the nominees for the most recent round of Manga Taisho Awards.

While I’ve covered the nominees rather exhaustively in various license requests, I’ve purposely neglected Bakuman, as I knew it had been licensed and assumed we would be getting a press release eventually. And voila! Details after the jump.

FIND OUT WHAT IT TAKES TO MAKE IT TO THE TOP AS A MANGA CREATOR IN THE NEW SHONEN JUMP SERIES BAKUMAN。

Two Students Must Have Perseverance, Innovation And An Uncompromising Will To Succeed In The New Series From The Creators Of DEATH NOTE

San Francisco, CA, April 14, 2010 – VIZ Media, LLC (VIZ Media), one of the entertainment industry’s most innovative and comprehensive publishing, animation and licensing companies, has announced the upcoming release of the manga series BAKUMAN。. The series, rated ‘T’ for Teens, will be released on August 3rd under VIZ Media’s popular Shonen Jump imprint and will carry a MSRP of $9.99 U.S. / $12.99 CAN. Previews for the series will start to run in the May 2010 issue of VIZ Media’s popular monthly manga anthology – SHONEN JUMP magazine which is on stands now.

BAKUMAN。is written by the author of DEATH NOTE, Tsugumi Ohba, and the artwork is by Takeshi Obata, the artist known for series such as DEATH NOTE, HIKARU NO GO and RALΩGRAD. The story follows average student Moritaka Mashiro, who enjoys drawing for fun, but when his classmate and aspiring writer Akito Takagi discovers his talent, he begs Moritaka to team up with him as a manga-creating duo. But what exactly does it take to make it in the manga-publishing world?

In the opening volume, Moritaka is hesitant to seriously consider Akito’s proposal because he knows how difficult it can be to reach the professional level. Still, encouragement from persistent Akito and the motivation from a girl he has a crush on help push Moritaka to test his limits!

“BAKUMAN。is an outstanding, behind-the-scenes manga about manga, and the artists who create it, written and drawn by the creative team that produced the DEATH NOTE series,” says Elizabeth Kawasaki, Senior Editorial Director at VIZ Media. “The series is a great read for all manga fans, and especially fun for aspiring artists.”

Born in Tokyo, Tsugumi Ohba is the author of the hit series DEATH NOTE. The writer’s current series BAKUMAN。is serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump in Japan.

Takeshi Obata was born in 1969 in Niigata, Japan, and is the artist of the wildly popular SHONEN JUMP title HIKARU NO GO, which won the 2003 Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize: Shinsei “New Hope” award and the 2000 Shogakukan Manga award. Obata is also the artist of Arabian Majin Bokentan Lamp Lamp, Ayatsuri Sakon, Cyborg Jichan G, and the smash hit manga DEATH NOTE.

For more information on this title, and other Shonen Jump titles, please visit http://shonenjump.viz.com.

In the near future

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I’m never entirely sure what the right window is to review a book before it comes out. Write about it too far in advance, and people who might want to try the book could be frustrated by the fact that they can’t immediately act on that impulse. But I’ll run the risk with a couple of titles, as they’re both a little off the beaten track, both very good, and may well benefit from all the mentions they can get. Let me explain.

One of the first manga I ever read was Makoto Yukimura’s Planetes (Tokyopop). I was never a huge fan of science fiction, and I’m still not, but this one really had the right kind of narrative voice for me. It’s a character-driven story about orbital garbage haulers, the men and women that clear debris out of space to keep people from dying, basically. It’s very low-key and introspective, and it really struck a chord with me, even though I felt it had some imperfections.

It didn’t sell very well, which rankled me. (It’s always rankled me when books I really like don’t sell very well.) Planetes was among the licenses that Kodansha reclaimed from Tokyopop, so it’s effectively out of print. That’s very unfortunate. With two other low-key, character driven space dramas in the pipeline, I feel a possibly unwarranted, pre-emptive protective urge.

The first volume of Kou Yaginuma’s Twin Spica (Vertical) comes out May 4, 2010. It’s about a 14-year-old girl who dreams of becoming an astronaut, of coming closer to the stars she’s always loved. Asumi must overcome her father’s resistance, a rigorous entrance exam, and personal tragedies to enter a training academy.

Yaginuma renders all of Asumi’s difficulties with admirably straightforward delicacy and attention to detail. There’s plausibility to the process Asumi pursues and the examination system itself. There’s also a wonderful earnestness to Asumi’s dreams and her desire to reach out to the people who share them. Factor in the aching sadness that provides underpinnings for Asumi’s quest and you have a moving, unusual finished product.

The illustrations have just the right fragility for the material. They have a simple, sketchy charm that helps you focus on the characters. There’s a similar quality to the look of the second book on my mind, Hisae Iwaoka’s Saturn Apartments (Viz), which ships on May 18, 2010. (It’s one of the titles in rotation on Viz’s SigIKKI site.)

Iwaoka’s work has the same tenderness towards her characters, but she lavishes more detail on their environments. This is all to the good, because that environment is fascinating. The titular apartments are floating in orbit above a largely uninhabitable Earth. The story’s protagonists are window washers for those apartments, which is as perilous as you might suspect. As is too often the case, the danger and drudgery of their work doesn’t come with an appropriately high salary. They live on the grungy levels, even as they clean the windows of the elite.

Young Mitsu has just taken up the work of a window washer, following in the footsteps of his dead father. We watch his evolution as a worker, and we also see the lives of his co-workers and clients. Iwaoka does a lovely job finding the possibilities in her scenario as she inches forward with Mitsu’s growth as a person.

Both of these titles succeed in finding the specific human drama in space opera. They’re graceful, wistful, and gently funny at the right moments. They don’t have the raucous bombast that can often make a book a best-seller, but they’re well worth your attention if you like interesting, sympathetic characters in fascinating situations.

(The review of Twin Spica is based on a preview copy provided by the publisher. You can read Saturn Apartments online at the SigIKKI link above.)

Free to a good home: two by Ono

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When a creative type is sufficiently prolific, he or she is bound to have highs and lows in his or her body of work. Heck, sometimes results can vary wildly when a creative type just has two major credits in his or her portfolio. Sometimes you may get Leave it to Chance and then Justice League: Cry for Justice, or Imadoki! may sit on the same resume as Absolute Boyfriend.

We ponder this uncomfortable juxtaposition of credits in this installment of “Free to a Good Home,” my intermittent manga give-away contest. Our specific subject is the prolific Natsume Ono, who currently has two works available in print and translation. And let’s just say that opinion has been divided on one of them.

That would be her family melodrama not simple (Viz). Now, I liked this book quite a bit, and so did some other folks, but critical responses have been undeniably mixed:

Leroy Derousseaux at Comic Book Bin:

“It is unfortunate that much of not simple reads like one of those somnambulant alt-comix dramas (like Alex Robinson’s Tricked).”

Kate (The Manga Critic) Dacey:

“As a result, not simple reads like a medieval martyr play, a grim catalog of one saintly individual’s bodily and emotional suffering. In a phrase: not recommended.”

Tucker (The Factual Opinion) Stone:

“While it ultimately achieves a bunch of specific objectives—most of them manipulative family horror tricks—it mixes those with a terrible framing story, an unwillingness to portray its main character as anything more than a brainless victim, and a nice chunk of ineptitude when it comes to dealing with its gaping plot holes.”

On the bright side, Ono’s Ristorante Paradiso (Viz) (which I also liked) has received a somewhat gentler reception:

Deb (About.Com) Aoki:

“Ristorante Paradiso has a simple story that provides a basic framework for Ono to showcase her memorable characters and allow them to interact in a way that feels natural and unhurried.”

Kate (The Manga Critic) Dacey:

“Put simply, Ms. Ono, you won my heart back. I found Ristorante Paradiso an engaging story filled with complicated, true-to-life characters who I enjoyed getting to know.”

Sean (A Case Suitable for Treatment) Gaffney:

“This is nothing at all like what’s coming out in the Jump or Beat lines, and pretty much exactly what I want to see from Viz’s Signature line. Manga I had no idea I wanted, but now suddenly want to see more of.”

So here’s the drill: to enter, simply send me an e-mail mentioning two works by the same creative type, one that you liked a lot, one that disappointed you to some significant degree. You don’t need to limit yourself to the comics medium. Novels, movies, plays, TV series, songs, paintings, poems, whatever… if they hinge on the same artistic soul (say, Meryl Streep) and had decidedly mixed outcomes (say, Sophie’s Choice and She-Devil), they are fair game.

You must be 18 or older to enter. I’m perfectly willing to ship internationally, though it will be cheap and it will be slow, so I’m just warning you right now. Deadline for entries is 12 noon Eastern Standard Time Sunday, April 11, 2010, and entries should be sent to DavidPWelsh at Yahoo dot Com. The winner will be chosen at random and receive copies of not simple and Ristorante Paradiso.

Also, if you’re among the Ono early adopters and have a moment and an opinion, please cast your vote in the poll below!

Upcoming 4/7/2010

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Perhaps looking through this week’s ComicList will distract me from the fact that I have a perfectly miserable cold. Perhaps not, but I should at least write this up before I start self-medicating.

Fanfare/Ponent Mon releases the fourth volume of The Times of Botchan, written by Natsuo Sekikawa and illustrated by Jiro Taniguchi. Here’s what the publisher has to say about the series:

“The Meija Era (1868-1912) was probably the most defining period in Japanese history. It was a time of massive change from the more traditional; Takugawa era to a positioning of Japan in the modern world. Contemporary writer, Soseki Natsume, suffered due to all the social and cultural changes and expressed his feelings through his character Botchan, a classic in the vein of Mark Twain or Charles Dickens.”

I believe the seventh issue of Brandon Graham’s King City (Image) marks the start of material that hasn’t been previously published by Tokyopop, so if you were waiting for the new stuff, tomorrow is the day. Of course, if you’ve been waiting, you’ve missed the handsome pamphlet packaging. I won’t judge either way.

And, since it’s the first week of the month, Viz will try to crush us all with new arrivals.

New on the shôjo front is Rinko (Tail of the Moon) Ueda’s Stepping on Roses, which is being serialized in Shueisha’s Margaret magazine. It’s about a desperately poor young women who agrees to marry a snotty aristocrat so that he can snag an inheritance. Viz sent me a review copy, and, while it’s got aggressively attractive art, it’s one of those stories about a powerless girl who gets yanked around by a jerky guy. It’s not as distasteful as Black Bird, but my attention quickly drifts from punching-bag romances unless the creator does something really interesting and self-aware.

Much more to my liking, at least based on the first volume, is the second installment of Yuki Midorikawa’s Natsume’s Book of Friends, which is currently being serialized in Hakusensha’s LaLa magazine. Generally speaking, I prefer Hakusensha’s shôjo to almost anyone else’s. For bonus points, this one’s about a kid who can see supernatural creatures. It’s executed very well, which makes up for the fact that none of the stories are particularly groundbreaking. (For example, a group of kids sneak into a haunted school in this volume, which has been done a million times. That doesn’t mean no one should ever do it again, of course.)

Last, and certainly not least, is the latest wave of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, volumes 39 to 43. These have been out in bookstores for a while, so I already own them and have read them, because I’m addicted. Sean (A Case Suitable for Treatment) Gaffney tweeted that “if you could only save 5 One Piece volumes from a fire, these would be [his] choice.” I haven’t read all of the available volumes yet, so I don’t know if I’d agree, but I can say that these volumes represent Oda in very fine form – big, crazy action, surprisingly wrenching, character-driven drama, and lots of laughs.

Previews review April 2010

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The first thing I’d like to note about the current edition of Diamond’s Previews catalog is that the addition of new “premier publishers” to the front makes the midsection look even sadder and slimmer. That said, there are still many promising items contained there.

CMX offers a one-shot, The Phantom Guesthouse, written and illustrated by Nari Kusakawa, creator of the well-liked Recipe for Gertrude, Palette of Twelve Secret Colors, and Two Flowers for the Dragon. It’s a supernatural mystery that was originally published by that stalwart purveyor of quality shôjo, Hakusensha, though I can’t tell which magazine serialized it. (Page 127.)

It’s been some time since the last collection of Tyler Page’s Nothing Better (Dementian Comics), the story of college roommates with very different backgrounds and personal philosophies. I’m glad to see more of the web-serialized comic see print. (Page 279.)

It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that we got the fourth volume of Drawn & Quarterly’s lovely collection of Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, but here comes the fifth. According to the blurb, “this volume features the final strips drawn by Tove Jansson and written by her brother Lars for the London Evening News.” It’s utterly charming stuff. (Page 280.)

Speaking of utterly charming stuff, how can you possibly resist a book subtitled The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans? Well, okay, knowing nothing else, that’s pretty resistible. But what if I told you it was the new installment of Rick Geary’s outstanding A Treasury of XXth Century Murder? Singing a different tune, aren’t you? (Page 298.)

Netcomics busts out what seems to be the manhwa equivalent of josei with the first volume of Youngran Lee’s There’s Something About Sunyool. It’s about a pastry chef who gets dumped just after her trip to the altar and, rebuilds her life, and then is faced with her “lawyer ex-husband and her gay would-be lover.” I hate when that happens. (Page 299.)

In other josei news, Tokyopop spreads joy throughout the land (or at least the corner of it that I occupy) by listing the fourth volume of Mari Okazaki’s glorious office-lady drama Suppli. (Page 317.)

Vertical really brings the joy, though, offering not only the first volume of Kanata Konami’s eagerly anticipated Chi’s Sweet Home but also the second of Kou Yaginuma’s Twin Spica. I’ve already discussed Chi’s Sweet Home at perhaps monotonous length, but you should really consider this the eye of the storm, because I’m sure I’ll natter even more as we approach its summer release. I read the first volume of Twin Spica and liked it very, very much. It’s the kind of low-key, serious, slice-of-life science fiction that will probably appeal to fans of Planetes and Saturn Apartments. (Page 324.)

Did you enjoy Natsume Ono’s Ristorante Paradiso (Viz)? I did. If you did, you can learn more about the mysteriously handsome, bespectacled restaurant staff in Ono’s Gente and “follow these dashing men home and witness their romances, heartaches, hopes and dreams.” (Page 325.)

That’s a good month right there.

Upcoming 3/31/2010

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I’m on the road, so here’s a bare-bones look at this week’s ComicList:

Vertical feeds your need for Osamu Tezuka with a new paperback edition of Ode to Kirihito (I revisited the series yesterday) and the tenth volume of crazy, awesome Black Jack.

Naoki Urasawa’s take on Tezuka’s hero-robot with a heart concludes with the eighth volume of Pluto (Viz).

And Viz’s soft launch with josei continues with the second volume of Yuki Yoshihara’s Butterflies, Flowers. I was intrigued and often amused by the first.

This will end in tears

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Not Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (Viz). That’s more likely to end in elation, if it ever actually ends. I’m talking about this process of writing about it all the time. I just know that these intermittent blog posts about the series will end up reading like those chapter breaks from Genshiken. They won’t make any sense to anyone who isn’t as hooked as I am, and I’ll start using some ridiculous numerical code to discuss character awesomeness.

We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, we’ll talk a bit about Nami.

She’s the navigator of the Merry Go, the ship of Luffy’s Straw Hats pirate crew. When we first meet her, she’s a thief who specifically targets pirates, presumably because she doesn’t think very much of them as a group. (Contempt for pirates isn’t a barrier to joining Luffy’s crew. Swordsman Zolo was a bounty hunter who specifically targeted pirates before he signed on with the Straw Hats.)

Nami initially strikes the reader as your typical shônen girl. She’s cute, but she doesn’t smolder. She’s keenly aware of her compatriots’ intellectual shortcomings, but she’s a good sport at the end of the day. She pitches in when things get rough, and she provides some eye candy for the girl-crazy characters (and the fanboys). She seems destined to settle into life as a Straw Hat, dutifully serving as the big sister.

Then she robs them and takes off in a boat while the Straw Hats are getting their asses handed to them.

In the third omnibus edition, collecting the seventh, eighth and ninth volumes, we find out about Nami’s association with a considerably more traditional group of pirates who rely on Nami’s navigational skills and aptitude for deception.

Then we find out why Nami is working with Arlong’s brutish, greedy crew, and we see the lengths she’ll go to in service of her goal.

And by the time all of these things have happened, the reader realizes just how formidable Nami is. She’s playing a very dangerous game, and she’s playing it as well as a person of her age and experience can, but it’s evident that this will end in tears.

But there’s also Luffy, and while Nami is providing the best example yet of Oda’s facility for genuinely moving drama in the midst of wacky mayhem, Luffy is proving that there’s more to the dim rubber kid than there seems. He’s already demonstrated his ridiculous confidence and his ability to clobber much more formidable opponents. With Nami, he displays another essential aspect of his nature, that being his excellent ability to judge the character of others. As Nami’s mystery unfolds and his crewmates are flailing around trying to solve it, Luffy is mysteriously at his ease. He’s waiting, but for what? That’s after the jump.

Luffy is an idiot in a lot of ways, but he knows how to be a friend, and he knows when to be a friend. These pages kill me. If this sequence was just about the bossy girl admitting that she needs the tough boys to save her, it would suck. But it’s about Nami, the character, finally and fully accepting the friendship of Luffy and recognizing the depths of that friendship.