The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Upcoming 1/21/2009

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Many fine books are coming out tomorrow, according to this week’s ComicList, but you must forgive me if I fixate on one to the neglect of the others.

After School Nightmare Vol. 10

"After School Nightmare" Vol. 10

Setona Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare (Go! Comi) concludes with its tenth volume, and it’s easily one of the best shôjo manga ever to be published in English and probably one of the best manga to be published in English, period. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the series, it’s about an intersex high-school student; Ichijo has been raised as a boy, but he has female genitalia. He’s enrolled in a “special class” where sleeping students, every one of them as conflicted as Ichijo, struggle against one another to find a “key” that will allow them to “graduate.”

That’s a lot of quote marks, but they’re intended to represent the story’s absorbing ambiguity instead of sarcasm. I thought Mizushiro’s X-Day (Tokyopop) was primarily noteworthy for its unfulfilled promise. Her talents were evident, but she kept the gloves on as she executed an intriguingly volatile premise. The gloves are off with After School Nightmare, and Mizushiro’s portrayals of adolescent uncertainty are scathing as often as they are sentimental.

The series centers on one of the most credibly constructed love triangles I’ve ever seen in fiction. Ichijo is torn between a deceptively fragile girl named Kureha and a deceptively aggressive boy named Sou. Romantic indecision often annoys me, especially when the fulcrum of the triangle is merely forestalling a difficult but inevitable choice. Mizhushiro develops each character so well and cuts Ichijo so little slack (seriously, the creator is brutal to her protagonist) that the triangle ends up mesmerizing instead of irritating.

Seriously, if you like shôjo manga and haven’t read it, now is your chance to wallow in it from beginning to end. If you don’t like shôjo manga but enjoy elegant, emotionally volatile storytelling about characters that resonate, do yourself a favor and make an exception.

And now for a few more highlights from the week:

  • Black Jack vol. 3 (Vertical): Classic Tezuka craziness. You can’t go wrong.
  • Gantz vol. 3 (Dark Horse): I think I must not have made myself clear the last time I wrote about this series. What I meant to say was that I find the series entertaining in a sick, voyeuristic way, though I refuse to acknowledge that it’s in anyway mature in its sensibility. It’s shônen with viscera and nipples, but it’s certainly a kick.
  • Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine (Viz): A culinary sampler from the long-running food manga. The next Flipped column looks at in more depth.
  • Real Vol. 3 (Viz): Takehiko Inoue’s genius series about wheelchair basketball. Easily one of the best debuts of 2008.

    • Of magazines and men

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    Deb Aoki has two more polls up at About.Com. First is Best Manga Magazine, and I’m going to have to go with Otaku USA. I can take or leave the non-manga content, but the comics coverage is top notch.

    For me, the Best New Yaoi/Shonen-Ai Manga is a serious Sophie’s choice between est em’s artful, ambitious Seduce Me After the Show and Saika Kunieda’s funny, nuanced Future Lovers. I’m going to have to let sentiment prevail and cast my lot with Future Lovers.

    Diamond makes it rough

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    Diamond Comics Distributors is apparently raising its minimums and discontinuing the print version of its Preview Adult catalog supplement, switching over to a PDF. While the development is worrying on a number of levels, especially for smaller publishers, I find myself fixated on the Previews Adult issue. I’m all in favor of minimizing pulp in the waste stream, and going electronic seems like a reasonable way for Diamond to cut expenses. BUT…

    Simon Jones indicates that his understanding is that “retailer would have access to the PDF, which Diamond expects retailers to PRINT OUT themselves.”

    There’s just so much that seems wrong with that system, given what I perceive to be the realities of that sector of comics publishing. Here are my concerns:

  • It’s a bad idea to put the onus on retailers, who have their own concerns. Printing out paper copies of the catalog PDF for interested customers takes time and costs money, and many retailers might end up doing a perfectly sensible cost-benefits analysis that tells them that their profits from the comics listed in Previews Adult aren’t sufficient compensation for the inconveniences and expenses of the new system.
  • It potentially inconveniences consumers in any number of ways. Comics consumers are creatures of habit to begin with, so limiting access to the catalog is already a hurdle. (I’m not saying it’s a huge hurdle, but given the general shrinking of disposable income, you never know what hurdle is going to be huge enough to convince people to change their buying habits.)
  • The percentage of comics shops stocking shelf copies of adult material already seems small, and I swear I remember Simon telling me that individual customer pre-orders were a key part of any adult comics publisher’s sales. Hindering a consumer’s ability to pre-order comics promises to compromise the publisher’s most reliable revenue stream. And with higher benchmarks coming into play at the same time as new barriers to consumers, publishers of adult comics seem to be facing a double bind.

    • If Diamond wants to switch over to an electronic version of the Previews Adult catalog, they should really make it more accessible than the print version, rather than less available. And they should educate their consumers about the change well in advance of the change-over, so they know where to go to get the information. Buying any kind of niche comic can be challenging, and buying adult comics can be awkward. The retailer-PDF strategy seems designed to exacerbate the hassles that publishers, retailers and consumers already face. The plan seems like it would inconvenience everyone but Diamond.

    Here are some other links on the development:

  • Two pieces from Simon Jones of Icarus
  • Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter
  • Johanna Draper Carlson at Comics Worth Reading

    • Housekeeping

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    Fumi Yoshinaga's "Antique Bakery" Vol. 2

    I don’t know what the trigger was, but I finally reached the point where I couldn’t stand staring at all of this unrelieved text, so welcome to the glorious new era of the occasional cover image or scan. I begin with attractive men contemplating pastries. Now if I could just figure out how to wrap text around an image, I’d be golden. Oh, and if there were any other WordPress themes that I could stand, I’d probably change that too, but that will have to wait. And I don’t really mind the mighty red pen.

    In other navel-gazing, I’m thinking it’s time to change the blog’s name. At over 40 years of age, it’s impossible to be precocious about anything but decline, so that’s a problem. It’s also awkward to say out loud on the rare occasions that require me to do so. (Maybe that’s why I don’t go to many conventions… fear of speaking my blog’s name aloud, like it’s “Candyman” or something.) But I don’t really have any alternatives in mind at the moment, and I wouldn’t change the address or anything. Still, I’ll always jump at an excuse to post a poll:

    Standing alone

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    And I thought the seinen category was tough. That was before I saw the Best New One-Shot Manga poll over at About.Com. Looking at the list, I’m reminded that there might not be tremendous volume in off-brand, non-genre manga, Hideo Azuma's "Disappearance Diary"but there’s significant variety and serious ambition on display, and publishers (from ultra-mainstream Viz to boutique operations like Last Gasp and Fanfare) are to be applauded for pushing the boundaries of what’s available. 2008 may not have been the year that manga grew up, and 2009 and 2010 might not either, but I think the fact that Deb Aoki can assemble such strong slates in these potentially marginal categories indicates that the foundation for that maturation is solid and getting more solid all the time.

    Of course, a crappy economy may suspend the maturation for a while, but I’ll go with optimism at the moment.

    Upcoming 1/14/2009

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    I’ve gotten the year right three weeks in a row. Go, me!

    Time again for a quick look at this week’s ComicList:

    Okay, now how exactly did this title slide under my radar? Ghost Talker’s Daydream (Dark Horse), written by Saki Okuse and drawn by Sankichi Meguro, triggers both my “not for me” alarm and my “this is too bizarre to not at least sample, even if I’ll never feel clean again” alarm. An albino virgin dominatrix who sees dead people? It’s like Lady Heather from CSI crossed with The Ghost Whisperer. Reviews have been mixed, but morbid curiosity threatens to overpower good sense on this one. The third volume is due out this week.

    In much more familiar territory, Viz unleashes a hailstorm of some of its best shôjo titles, from Nana (volume 14) to High School Debut (volume 7) to Sand Chronicles (volume 4) to a bunch of others that are regarded very warmly by fans and critics but that I have yet to sample in depth because there are only so many hours in a day.

    Globalization, mobilization

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    Deb Aoki has another poll out, this one focused on 2008’s Best New Original English Language Manga. I voted for Nina Matsumoto’s funny, polished Yokaiden (Del Rey), but I suspect all will be crushed in the wave of support for Anima (Yaoi Press), by Dany and Dany. In the handful of hours since the poll was posted, Anima has already received more votes than the two front-runners in the shojo poll have in a week.