The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Upcoming 10/15/2008 Part Two

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Returning to the ComicList, there are a few new volumes of ongoing series I wanted to point out:

First is the second volume of Rei Hiroe’s Black Lagoon (Viz), which I point out not really because I recommend it but because I finally got around to reading the first volume. It’s one of those books that depend on the reader finding the characters more engaging than the reader finds their vocation repellent, and I found myself just about even in terms of reaction. It focuses on a ragtag group of pirates sailing around on the titular PT boat, abetting corporate espionage and gang wars. They’re studiously neutral about the morality of their actions, though that doesn’t mean you have to be. While their “nothing personal, just earning a paycheck” attitude has its amusing moments, some of the aforementioned actions stretch things to the snapping point. (Selling a kid into slavery springs to mind, even if they did treat him to a soda.) On the bright side, the fan service, both weapon- and hot-chick-based, stays on the cheerfully cheesy side of the equation, and if you like watching a woman in a pair of Daisy Dukes and a tube top lock and load, it will probably be money well spent.

Fortunately, Viz offers a couple of action titles that are more to my taste. There’s Hiromu Arakawa’s perennial hit Fullmetal Alchemist, now up to its 17th volume and still improbably fresh and entertaining. And Naoki Urasawa’s Monster reaches the same milestone, which also happens to be its penultimate volume. It’s quite thrilling to watch Urasawa weave all of his threads together as the climax approaches.

In a more shamelessly sentimental vein is the eighth volume of Kitchen Princess (Del Rey), by Natsumi Ando and Miyuki Kobayashi. It promises a “High Tea cook-off,” which further makes me wish that American school systems were more imaginative in their competitive events, because I could have lettered in that, I swear to you.

Upcoming 10/15/2008

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This week’s ComicList has me wondering if there’s a comics equivalent of the movie industry’s Oscar Bait Season. Maybe a Ten Best List Season? Because there are a lot of potentially intriguing books coming out tomorrow.

Rutu Mordan’s Exit Wounds (Drawn & Quarterly) was easily one of the most warmly received books of 2007. I thought that book was really solid, though I wasn’t transported by it to the degree that a lot of other readers were. Anyway, Mordan’s follow-up, Jamilti and Other Stories, arrives tomorrow via D&Q.

I like Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods a lot, but I tend to be generally fond of reconfigured fairy tales. (Though oddly enough, the very idea of a musical version of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked makes me cringe, Kristin Chenoweth or no Kristin Chenoweth.) So I’m inclined to take a look at There’s a Wolf at the Door (First Second) written by Zoey Alley and beautifully illustrated by R.W. Alley. You know all those wolves in popular fairy tales? This book posits that all those stories happened to the same wolf.

NBM has become one of those publishers where I’m automatically inclined to pay attention to their releases, what with Rick Geary’s books and Glacial Period and Run, Bong-Gu, Run! This week’s eye-catcher is Dirk Schwieger’s Moresukine, which is based on Schwieger’s blog. “Assignment: Pod Hotel” is probably enough to get me to track it down, because the prospect of sleeping in a tube triggers all of my claustrophobic nightmares.

I was e-mailing back and forth with an editor at Viz about something entirely unrelated, and he made a point of talking up Asano Inio’s Solanin. It features a recent college graduate who “struggles with the feeling that she’s just not cut out to be a part of the real world.” (I hate to break it to her, but that feeling doesn’t go away with time.) A done-in-one josei series in a big fat package? Why yes, thank you, I’d love one.

Last-minute shopping

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I’m never going to catch up with anything, obviously, and we’ve already passed the published deadline for Previews orders through Diamond, but if your shop allows any flexibility in this sort of thing, I wanted to point to two items that are well worth your consideration:

The Quest for the Missing Girl by Jiro Taniguchi (Fanfare/Ponent Mon): If you’ve never treated yourself to any of Taniguchi’s work, you’re being needlessly stingy. The Walking Man (also from Fanfare) is always hovering near the top of my re-read list, and Benkei in New York (written by Jinpachi Mori, published by Viz, and apparently out of print) is good, pulpy fun and a fine precursor to The Quest.

Details aren’t available at Viz’s site yet, but they’ve solicited the first volume of Oishinbo, a cooking manga from Kariya Tetsu and Hanasaki Akira. Ed Chavez, of MangaCast and Otaku USA fame, is very exited, as all sensible people should be.

The scholarly approach

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I got an e-mail about a yaoi survey:

“My name is Mara Blair and I am a graduate student in Japanese Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I am currently conducting a research study for my Master’s thesis. This research study is about reading habits and personal reactions to characters in manga, books and fanfiction by readers of yaoi/BL/boy’s love/shounen ai manga.

“The results of this study will be published in my Master’s Thesis for the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations. In addition, it is possible that a paper based on this research will be published in Girls Doing Boys Doing Boys: Japanese Boys’ Love Anime and Manga in a Globalized World, edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, & Dru Pagliassotti, to be published by McFarland & Co. in 2009.

“Should you wish to participate in this survey it is located at http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=puoorQo7sbuuy0cZYtOcnGg&hl=en “

When you’ve got a little time, go take a look.

They should be dancin', yeah

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Because the alternative is listening to my retirement plan gurgle feebly, and because I can watch anything on television for five minutes, I offer the following: my dream cast for Dancing With the Manga Stars!

  • Bambi from Bambi and Her Pink Gun!
  • FBI Agent Diana from Fake!
  • Dorian Red Gloria from From Eroica With Love!
  • Ginko from Mushishi!
  • Sho’s Mom from The Drifting Classroom!
  • Hyakkimaru from Dororo!
  • Mrs. Ichinose from Maison Ikkoku!
  • Jumbo from Yotsuba&!
  • Lucrezia Borgia from Cantarella!
  • Private Second Class Tamama from Sgt. Frog!
  • Nakaya from Shout Out Loud!
  • Nobara from Crimson Hero!
  • Yuji Yata from The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service!

    • It seems to me that there are certain types that must be included in every season of Dancing With the Stars: the athlete, the contestant with a potentially dramatic physical disability, the codger of either gender, at least one tertiary celebrity from a popular property, one hunky boy, and several air-quote stars, whose celebrity was either long in the past or of questionable provenance even at its peak. There must also be contestants who are engaging in career rehabilitation, and perhaps one that makes you think, “Surely he/she has better things to do with his/her time.”

    Recon recon

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    Since I’m too lazy to develop interesting content of my own, I’ll point you towards two really solid pieces over at the recently renovated Manga Recon:

    First up is a round-table on MR contributors’ favorite CMX titles. (Note to self: try once again to convince people that Monster Collection: The Girl Who Can Deal With Magical Monsters is, in spite of its dubious provenance and cumbersome title, surprisingly awesome. Also: poach idea for future blog post or column.)

    Second is a report on Yaoi-Con 2008 from Isaac Hale, “a real living and breathing gay male.” It’s well worth reading:

    “There were definitely some nice aspects of the Con: I wasn’t assumed to be heterosexual (as I am everywhere else) and I was definitely welcomed by all the panelists and industry staff with great warmth. Furthermore, it was just relaxing to be in a place where male x male romance was desirable as opposed to being stigmatized. Generally though, that’s where my warm fuzzies ended.”

    I’m sure he’ll get crap for it from people who think Yaoi Con is just fine the way it is, “Bishonen Spanking Inferno” and all, but I’m grateful for his frankness and perspective.

    Upcoming 10/8/2008

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    Quick, general observation about this week’s ComicList: if I was a retailer and had to deal with the unholy crap-load of variant covers and repeat printings from Marvel, I think I’d just bag it all and convert my space into a Tim Hortons franchise.

    I may have mentioned, just casually, in passing, that I’m kind of fond of Setona Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare (Go! Comi). Or I may have mentioned it so often that your temples throb at the repetition. I’ll just note that the ninth volume arrives tomorrow, which leaves just one more, and the withdrawal process is going to be very ugly indeed. Gird yourselves.

    But there’s always new crack arriving, and it’s always better when it’s classic Tezuka crack. I swear that the first volume of Black Jack (Vertical) has been on the ComicList three times now, but I don’t really care. Some things bear repeating, like the phrase “a genius surgeon who never acquired his license due to his clashes with the medical establishment.”

    In composing the last two Flipped columns, I think I should be complimented for my restraint in highlighting only one goofy series about a school club and the surly girl who doesn’t really want to be a member. Of course, nothing’s to stop me from pointing towards Kiyoko Arai’s very funny Beauty Pop (Viz) in the confines of my own blog. The ninth volume of this makeover comedy arrives Wednesday.

    And if I haven’t mentioned it lately, Hikaru No Go (Viz), written by Yumi Hotta and drawn by Takeshi Obata, is one of my very favorite shônen series, partly because it’s about a board game and is still riveting, partly because I love Obata’s illustrations, and partly because the characters are great. The thirteenth volume arrives Wednesday. (Is it weird or just coincidental that two of my favorite shônen series – Hikaru and Fullmetal Alchemist – are both written by women?)

    I also watch too much television

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    I was watching the DVD of the first season of Dexter over the weekend, and I enjoyed it for the most part. I like the way the writers and producers have opened the story up for serialization, and I like some of the character work. I think TV Lt. LaGuerta is interesting in a different way. Her perniciously incompetent persona of the book was amusing but not sustainable, and the learning curve the TV writers have given her works better in the long run.

    I’m now fully convinced that I’m supposed to hate Dexter’s sister, Debra, though I hate her TV incarnation for different reasons than I did book Debra. In the book, she’s whiny and entitled and selfish. In the TV series, she’s whiny and lethally stupid and the actress reminds me of Lori Petty, and I thought we flushed that thespian trend out of the entertainment industry in the early 1990s, because Lori Petty was so damned irritating. Michael C. Hall is just right as Dexter, as I expected, though there really isn’t anything he can do to patch over the holes in the character’s conception aside from be creepily charming. TV Doakes talks too much, and he ends up reminding me of about 275 other hard-assed cops.

    Julie Benz is fine as Rita. I think I was in the minority in liking her work on Buffy, and I think her undercurrent of crazy really works for this particular character. Unfortunately, the scenes with Rita play out like mid-level Lifetime movies about single moms coming off of an abusive marriage and/or being deceived by the new men in their lives, and there’s a weird contrast between those scenes and the show’s crime content. I’m sure there’s supposed to be, but it’s contrast instead of counterpoint. The violence and the domesticity don’t interact so much as they just sort of sit side by side.

    And I noticed something about the set design that’s probably too nitpicky to even mention, but that’s never stopped me before. There’s always a design sensibility in evidence in every set the show employs. Instead of looking like Rita’s house, Rita’s house looks like a designer’s idea of what the home of a single mother coming off an abusive marriage would look like, if that makes any sense. At one point, a character says about a set that “You can tell a bachelor lived here.” And no, not really, but you can tell that a designer wanted very badly for you to think that a bachelor lived here and strenuously employed an aesthetic towards selling that, which isn’t the same as evoking a space that makes you think a bachelor lived there.

    I’m not quite sure how a designer could subtract that sensibility from his or her work, to be honest, but I’ve seen it happen enough. It was a weird thing to notice, to be honest. It wasn’t too distracting, but it stuck with me.

    Filed Under: TV