The Manga Curmudgeon

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

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Coming up

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Some highlights from this week’s ComicList:

If zombies were the new pirates, and princesses were the new zombies, are vampires the new princesses? Or do vampires have sufficient cultural currency that they’re exempt from the fad cycle? I have no idea, but CMX is headed to the blood bank with the release of Chika Shiomi’s Canon, the tale of a heroic teen bloodsucker looking to avenge her entire high-school class. I think it gets off to a solid start.

Readers who loved Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery (DMP) might want to take a look at The Flower of Life (Juné). Once again, Yoshinaga looks at a satisfying array of interpersonal relationships with warmth, intelligence, humor and her trademark quirkiness. The second volume ships Wednesday. I reviewed the first volume here.

I mention the comic-shop arrival of Avril Lavigne’s Make 5 Wishes (Del Rey) only because it came up in this conversation at Comics Worth Reading, and I can use it as an opportunity to mention Nicolas De Crécy’s superb Glacial Period (NBM) again. I generally agree that sell-out announcements aren’t really news, but I’m going to side with commenter Joe Williams in this instance:

“The fact that NBM will sell out of a 4000 print run for a foreign release where the author, as far as I know, has yet to be published in America and a book that deals with a French cultural institution is pretty impressive in my book.”

Mine, too.

Speaking of shouting from the rooftops (or any available setting, really), it’s time for the fifth volume of Kazuo Umezu’s The Drifting Classroom (Viz Signature). As always, things get worse for the stranded elementary school students. You wouldn’t think it would be possible, but they do.

Addictive properties

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I spent most of Sunday tidying up my completely disordered stacks of comics, which actually required the purchase and assembly of cheap shelving units. Sensible people would use this experience as an incentive to dedicate themselves to moderation, and it might ultimately have that effect. But in the short-term, it only prompted me to bask in the crack.

Death Note Vol. 11: Maybe it’s the release frequency that causes this, but I always feel a little weary when I hand a new volume over to the cashier, as if I expect that this will be the installment where the series wears out its welcome. That weariness persists until I actually read it and become immersed in Tsugumi Ohba’s microscopically detailed plotting and Takeshi Obata’s amazing illustrations. Oddly enough, the weariness resumes shortly after I finish reading the most recent volume, and its sources are a mystery to me. Plot twist overdose, maybe?

Fruits Basket Vol. 16: I find that I’m becoming increasingly impatient with the fluffy comedy sequences in this title, and I wonder what that says about me, because my impatience is driven by a thorough addiction to Natsuki Takaya’s transcendent ability to heap misery upon her cast. I don’t care about the stupid student council and their quirky high jinks. They get in the way of the profound emotional suffering! (When I was in middle school, my class did a big project on illegal drugs, and I really didn’t understand the appeal of depressants. I do now.)

Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 12: Last week, I was griping about the somewhat baffling, excessively enunciated mythology of Shakugan no Shana. Reading this volume of FMA reminded me that Hiromu Arakawa as achieved a kind of Platonic ideal of mapping out a fantasy landscape without derailing plot momentum or character development. She’s got a remarkably steady and generous hand with the elements essential to fantasy adventures, blending drama, comedy, suspense, horror and richly imaginative ideas as she propels things forward.

March manga sales

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Here are the top-selling manga in the Direct Market, pulled out of the top 100 graphic novels, via Newsarama.

1 (2) NARUTO VOL 13 (Viz)
2 (7) DEATH NOTE VOL 10 (Viz)
3 (10) WARCRAFT VOL 3 (Tokyopop)
4 (17) BERSERK VOL 16 (Dark Horse)
5 (50) BATTLE CLUB VOL 4 (Tokyopop)
6 (51) TRINITY BLOOD VOL 2 (Tokyopop)
7 (53) FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST VOL 12 (Viz)
8 (62) GUNSMITH CATS OMNIBUS VOL 1 (Dark Horse)
9 (68) CRYING FREEMAN VOL 5 (Dark Horse)
10 (69) ALCOHOL SHIRT & KISS VOL 1 (Digital Manga)
11 (71) DAY WHICH I BECAME BUTTERFLY (Digital Manga)
12 (73) SOLFEGE (Digital Manga)
13 (74) BLACK CAT VOL 7 (Viz)
14 (79) PRIEST VOL 16 (Tokyopop)
15 (86) INNOCENT BIRD VOL 1 (Tokyopop – Blu)
16 (88) IS VOL 12 (Viz)
17 (91) KASHIMASHI MANGA VOL 2 (Seven Seas)
18 (93) TSUKUYOMI MOON PHASE VOL 6 (Tokyopop)
19 (95) ROSE HIP ZERO VOL 2 (Tokyopop)
20 (96) READ OR DREAM VOL 3 (Viz)
21 (97) MABURAHO MANGA VOL 2 (ADV)
22 (100) KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE VOL 3 (Dark Horse)

Nothing tremendously surprising here, with the sprinking of perennial sellers up top, a healthy handful of boys’ love and yaoi, and a strong performance for Dark Horse, which always seems to earn solid numbers in comic shops. Most of the manga action is confined to the bottom half of the top 100, but three books cracked the top 10. That’s an unusually weak performance for Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 12, but it did ship towards the end of the month.

Dark Horse had a terrific month overall, taking the top graphic novel spot with the hardcover of 300 and solid showings for books like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Empowered. The first issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 cracked the top ten in floppies, which is quite an accomplishment for a publisher that isn’t Marvel or DC. And while coming in at the very bottom of the graphic novel list might not seem like a huge accomplishment, I’ll trumpet any traction gained by The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.

Three go in…

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This week’s edition of ComicList is like the poster for some ultimate fighter title bout. With the exception of a certain bewhiskered trainee ninja, all of the heavy hitters will be arriving simultaneously, sizing each other up for a sales cage match.

In this corner, plucky orphan Tohru Honda! She’s taking on an ancient family curse, but can heartfelt pluck stand up to the one-two punch of…

The Elric Brothers? They’re looking for the secret to eternal life, but will it be enough to fend off the deadly, note-taking onslaught of…

Light Yagami? The sleuthing sociopath is taking names in this battle of the commercial juggernauts! Who will win?!

Well, comics retailers with even a rudimentary manga selection, for one. (To be fair, none of the above will probably come within spitting distance of this release from Marvel in terms of sales in the Direct Market.)

If none of the above interest you in the slightest, not to worry, because both Tokyopop and Viz are unleashing an absolutely insane number of titles. Tokyopop is rolling out 18, and Viz is offering 37. Thirty-seven.

One of those 55 titles is the sixth volume of Minetaro Mochizuki’s Dragon Head (Tokyopop), much loved by bloggers like me, but disappointingly ignored by the average bookstore browser. Seriously, there aren’t that many volumes out, and new ones don’t come out that often. You have plenty of time to catch up with this tense, apocalyptic suspense story.

Sick of hearing about comics from Japan? No problem. There are also comics from France, most notably a prestige edition of Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert’s The Professor’s Daughter from First Second. I’m going to hold out for the $16.95 paperback instead of the $29.95 collector’s edition that’s coming out tomorrow, but I strongly suspect it will be lovely and delightful either way.

And wow, how long as it been since a new issue of Jimmy Gownley’s wonderful Amelia Rules! (Renaissance Press) came out? Too long, almost certainly, but these fun stories are always worth the wait.

From the in-box

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The list of comics bestsellers for March in the current Publishers Weekly Comics Week shocks me by actually having something to say about one of the manga titles that made the top ten. Of course, it’s in reference to the 13th volume of Naruto (Viz – Shonen Jump), which is handy, because nobody’s really pondered that sales phenomenon yet. The other seven ranking manga titles, five of which have no anime or game tie-in to bolster sales, go without narrative. I’m too beset by the vapors to fill in the blanks myself.

300 (Dark Horse) showed up somewhere on the list, though an apparent coding problem keeps readers from knowing precisely where. It didn’t make the top 10, though. I’m not saying that it means anything, because 300 is currently ranked first in graphic novels and 39th in books overall at Amazon, and the first manga title to land is an as-yet-unpublished volume of Fruits Basket which doesn’t show up on graphic novels until 12th place and is at #1,067 in books overall. I’m just saying.

There’s also a nice, long interview with Alvin Lu, vice president of publishing at Viz. It’s a solid, informative piece about a company that doesn’t come under a lot of scrutiny, perhaps because they have such a consistent approach to publishing. They do their thing – licensed manga from Japan – without going out on too many limbs in the process. So it’s good to see a substantive discussion with Lu about what Viz tries to do and why. This quote pretty much sums it up:

“Although Viz has changed over the years, the focus hasn’t. Even when we were a much smaller company, the goal was always to bring manga to a mass audience as much as possible, replicating the readership in Japan with the one in America. I don’t know if that differentiates us from the other [manga publishers], but we have not wavered in our core mission. It’s made our business strategy straightforward. We want to bring to the U.S. a library of manga that is created for every walk of life.”

They still have a ways to go, what with the heavy focus on shônen and shôjo, but it’s nice to see that they have ambitions beyond that. It would make me happy if they accelerated up the timeline, but if they did, they probably wouldn’t be Viz.

Also, those preview pages from Christian Slade’s Korgi (Top Shelf) are absolutely breathtaking.

Delayed gratification

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Before I delve too far into this week’s ComicList, I have a self-serving question. Has the third volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Dark Horse) shown up at anyone’s comic shop? I think it was due out a couple of weeks ago, and I know I have it on reserve, but there’s still no sign of it here in the mountains. I’m wondering if I should start nagging.

While the list offers plenty of great stuff, the common trait seems to be that none of them are showing up here. I’m going to attribute this to the vagaries of regional shipping instead of a conspiracy to deny me the comics I want. For now.

Del Rey offers the eighth volume of Kio Shimoku’s hilarious, sharply-observed, yet still emotionally generous Genshiken.

DramaQueen delivers the first volume of Kye Young Chong’s Audition, which is pleasant enough reading about the search for the ultimate boy band, though I prefer the creator’s other DQ license, the funny, touching, odd DVD.

The fourth volume of Satosumi Takaguchi’s Shout Out Loud! (Blu) promises more romantic and familial complications, and unless things have changed drastically, they’ll be executed with wit, intelligence and warmth.

Viz is unloading a vast quantity of Shonen Jump books, and if I had to choose only one, it would be the ninth volume of Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obata’s Hikaru No Go.

And Self Made Hero gets its Bard on with the release of two Manga Shakespeare books: Hamlet, adapted by Emma Vieceli, and Romeo and Juliet, adapted by Sonia Leong. Spoiler warning: In these issues, just about everyone dies!

Steals, sales and solicitations

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So the big story of the day is unquestionably the… what should I call it? … apparent difference of opinion between Central Park Media and Japanese boys’-love publisher Libre, uncovered by the watchful folks of MangaCast. MangaCast Master of Ceremonies Ed Chavez and Dirk Deppey are on the trail, and unless I miss my guess, Simon Jones will have interesting things to say on the subject sooner or later. (No pressure, though.) (Update: Ask and you shall receive, though as always, the blog is probably not safe for work.)

On a less controversial front, MangaBlog’s Brigid looks through the Diamond graphic novel bestsellers for February and pulls out the top ten manga placers. Further down the list, I’m delighted to see the second volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Dark Horse) crack the top 100.

At Sporadic Sequential, John Jakala digs up an interview with the gifted, under-licensed Usamaru Furuya on the intersection of art, commerce and editorial influence.

Moving back into the present, it’s a pretty solid week at ComicList, including the third volume of Diamond bestseller Kurosagi. (I love typing that!) Also from Dark Horse is It Rhymes With Lust, one of the earliest graphic novels. Written by Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller and drawn by Matt Baker, the book was printed in a fairly recent issue of The Comics Journal, and fans of sexy pulp and noir would be doing themselves a favor in picking it up. If you’ve ever thrilled to Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck stringing small-town suckers along for their own merciless gain, you’ll probably enjoy Rust’s amoral antics as well.

It seems like each week brings another volume of the works of Fumi Yoshinaga to the shelves, and this is all to the good. This time around, it’s Solfege from Juné. For those unfamiliar with Yoshinaga who might wonder what all the love is about, check out these overviews at Yaoi Suki and Guns, Guys and Yaoi.

Seven Seas was kind enough to send me a complimentary copy of the second volume of Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl, though I would have bought it anyways, because this series is such a pleasant surprise – funny, thoughtful, romantic, and often surprising.

And if you’re wondering what next month’s best-selling manga title might be, Viz rolls out the 12th volume of Fullmetal Alchemist, which makes for one of those happy intersections of quality entertainment and commercial success.

Manga bestsellers

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Once again, Publishers Weekly Comics Week hasn’t come up with anything to say about the manga entries on its monthly Comics Bestsellers list, and since I don’t have anything better to do…

1. Bleach, Volume 17. Tite Kubo. Viz Media, $7.99 ISBN 978-1421510415. The “Cartoon Network Effect” reasserts itself, placing this supernatural adventure series at the top of the list. Bleach was well into its run and had built a solid audience by the time its anime adaptation debuted on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block, but the extra exposure has given it an extra bump.

2. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Volume 2. Shiro Amano. Tokyopop, $9.99 ISBN 978-1598166385. With tie-ins to both Disney characters and a popular video game franchise on its side, it’s not surprising to see Kingdom Hearts properties moving extremely well.

3. Absolute Boyfriend, vol. 3. Yuu Watase. Viz Media, $8.99 ISBN 978-1421510033. Watase has earned reader (and retailer) loyalty with hits like Ceres: Celestial Legend and Fushigi Yûgi. While she hasn’t scaled the sales heights of Natsuki (Fruits Basket) Takaya, Watase is right near the top of the list of commercially successful shôjo manga-ka.

4. Tsubasa, Volume 12. CLAMP. Del Rey, $10.95 ISBN 978-0345485328. Along the same lines, there’s generally little risk in licensing a CLAMP title, particularly when it’s a sequel to a perennially popular work like Cardcaptor Sakura.

6. Loveless, Volume 4. Yun Kouga. Tokyopop, $9.99 ISBN 978-1598162240. The highest-ranked boys’ love title for March is also one of the bestselling boys’ love titles period. While the branding a boys’-love or yaoi imprint generally results in strong comic-shop sales, Loveless has succeeded without any marker, both in comic shops and bookstores.

8. Buso Renkin!, Volume 4. Nobuhiro Watsuki. Viz Media, $7.99 ISBN 978-1421508405. The recent conclusion of Watsuki’s Rurouni Kenshin apparently hasn’t quelled appetites for Watsuki’s work.

9. Full Metal Alchemist, Volume 11. Hiromu Arakawa. Viz Media, $9.99 978-1421508382. The placement of this mega-hit manga initially seems surprisingly low until you realize that it ranked second among last month’s bestsellers. The sales powerhouse is cited as one of the chief agents in the demise of Monthly Shonen Jump, having driven sales of Square Enix’s rival anthology, and it promises to be an evergreen seller here.

The shipping news

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It promises to be another crowded Wednesday of comics arrivals.

The second issue of Jeff Smith’s Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil arrives from DC, as does the fifth issue of the second volume of Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting from Fantagraphics. Part of me feels like both of these would read better in collection, but that part is shouted down by the heftier portion that doesn’t want to wait.

I enjoyed reading the back and forth between comics retailer Alex Cox and Tom Spurgeon over at The Comics Reporter on the Shazam book’s appeal to young attendees of the New York Comic Con, and young readers in general, as it touches on a lot of questions that have been floating through my head. The first involved whether or not the per-issue cost of the series would be prohibitive for younger readers. The second centered on what quantity of casual readers made it into NYCC given the fact that tickets for some days sold out before the event began. (It’s probably incorrect, but I tend to place kids in the category of casual readers, in spite of how obsessed I was with comics from about age six and up. Maybe I just hope I was abnormal at that age and that other people have a healthier range of interests.)

Anyway, back to the ComicList.

The second-to-last volume of Chigusa Kawai’s subtle and surprising La Esperança ships via Juné. Maybe someone will hold hands with someone else in a non-platonic fashion this time around? It probably won’t matter to me if they don’t.

Viz has tons of stuff set to arrive. The battle of the stylists continues in the third volume of Beauty Pop. Suspense among obsessive sales figure watchers mounts as both vol. 10 of Death Note and vol. 13 of Naruto arrive on the same day. Which will emerge victorious in Diamond’s graphic novel sales for March? The first volume of The Gentlemen’s Alliance ┼ brings one of the weirdest casts I’ve ever seen in a shôjo manga set in a high school, which I find to be an unquestionably good thing.

Last and perhaps least from Viz is the fourth volume of Yakitate!! Japan. Don’t get me wrong. I like it in the way I like most quirky, young-men-with-a-dream shônen that has perhaps a bit more fan service than I like. But I’m starting to wonder if the bread-baking is making me overlook the fact that it’s… kind of average. (For those of you who’d like a shot at securing all four volumes in one easy shot, ChunHyang has thrown them all into an auction lot, along with some other tempting combinations.)

Mark your calendars

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It’s Manga Month again in Diamond’s Previews, and while that’s not all the volume has to offer, there’s plenty of noteworthy new stuff from all over.

Del Rey debuts the first volume of Ai Morinaga’s My Heavenly Hockey Club. I keep hoping someone will pick up the rest of Your and My Secret, which vanished after one volume from ADV. Maybe this will provide a satisfying, substitute Morinaga fix. (Page 269.)

None of this month’s listings jump out at me, but it’s really nice to see Drama Queen’s offerings on the pages of Previews. (Page 288.)

The Comics Journal #284 (Fantagraphics) will include an interview with Gene (American Born Chinese) Yang, and interviews with Yang are always worth reading. (Page 292.)

:01 First Second unveils their spring season highlight (for me, at least): Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert’s The Professor’s Daughter, a Victorian romance between a young lady and a mummy. (Page 294.)

I know printing money actually involves specialized plates and paper with cloth fiber and patent-protected inks, but it seems like there could be a variation involving delicately handsome priests at war with an army of zombies. Go! Comi will find out (as will we all) when they release the first volume of Toma Maeda’s Black Sun, Silver Moon. (Page 298.)

Last Gasp promises “catfights, alien safari adventures, evil experiments, and a girl who dreams of becoming a pop idol singer” in its re-release of Junko Mizuno’s Pure Trance. Since its Mizuno, I’m sure that description doesn’t even begin to describe the adorable, revolting weirdness. (Page 313.)

Mike Carey’s work as a comics writer is hit and miss for me. I’ve loved some of it, and found other stories to be pretty tedious. One of my favorite examples is My Faith in Frankie (Vertigo), illustrated by Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel. So I’m inclined to give the creative team’s Re-Gifters (Minx) a try. (Page 109.)

Pantheon releases a soft-cover version of Joann Sfar’s sublime The Rabbi’s Cat. This was my first exposure to Sfar’s work, and I’ve loved it ever since. And in some cultures, the release of a soft-cover means a hard-cover volume of new material might be on the way, which would make me deliriously happy. (Page 324.)

The Tokyopop-HarperCollins collaboration bears fruit with the release of Meg Cabot’s Avalon High: Coronation Vol. 1: The Merlin Prophecy. The solicitation doesn’t include an illustrator credit, which is an unfortunate slip, and neither does the publisher’s web site. Maybe Cabot drew it herself? (Page 333.)

I’ve been hoping to see more work from Yuji Iwahara since CMX published Chikyu Misaki. Tokyopop comes through with Iwahara’s King of Thorn. (Page 335.)

Top Shelf offered some all-ages delights last month, which made me happy, and presents a new (I think?) volume of work from Renée (The Ticking) French. Micrographica is a collection of French’s online strip of the same name and offers “pure weirdness.” I don’t doubt it will deliver in a lovely, haunting way. (Page 352.)

Vertical rolls out another classic from Osamu Tezuka, Apollo’s Song, displaying the God of Manga’s “more literate and adult side.” For readers wanting something a little more contemporary, there’s Aranzi Aronzo’s Aranzi Machine Gun, featuring plush mascots on a tear. How can I choose? Why should I? (Page 355.)

I can’t read every series about people who see dead people. I just can’t. I wouldn’t have any money left for food. But Viz ignores my attempts at restraint by offering Chika Shiomi’s Yurarara in its Shojo Beat line. Shiomi is enjoying quite the day in the licensed sun, with Night of the Beasts (Go! Comi) and Canon (CMX) in circulation. (Page 372.)

And here’s an oddity, but an intriguing one: edu-manga from Singapore. YoungJin Singapore PTE LTD (you’ll forgive me if I hold off on adding a category) releases manga biographies of Einstein and Gandhi and adaptations of Little Women and Treasure Island. (Page 375.)