The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Note to self (6/20/2008)

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It’s entirely possible that Hinako Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles (Viz) is less a great graphic novel for teens than a great graphic novel for former teens who remember the pointed moments of awkwardness and uncertainty of that time of life. Actual teens might look at it and think, “Yeah, I’m there now, so thanks for the reminder.” Either way, I think it’s a great graphic novel, so I’m going to nominate it.

In the second volume, Ann finds her life disrupted again by the return of her absentee father. She’s built a life for herself in the country, finding solace in friends and family after a dramatic loss in the first installment. Now she’s got to decide whose needs come first – her own for comfort and happiness, or her father’s.

Ashihara is so deft at balancing big drama with small moments. Ann’s woes never feel out of scale, heightened as they are. The difficult choices she faces are presented with nuance and surprisingly effective balance; there aren’t any villains here, just people whose priorities clash. Ashihara’s delicate illustrations and quirky sense of humor round things out beautifully.

Pardon my dwelling

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So today I woke up in a world where Tove Jansson’s timeless gem Moomin (Drawn & Quarterly) can be nominated in the same award category as the Witchblade Manga (Top Cow). I’m not comfortable with this, obviously, and I’m even less comfortable with the possibility that I live in a world where the Witchblade Manga could possibly beat Moomin for that award. Because the pool of people eligible to nominate works for the awards is identical to the pool of people who decide which of those nominees will receive Harveys:

“Nominations for the Harvey Awards are selected exclusively by creators – those who write, draw, ink, letter, color, design, edit or are otherwise involved in a creative capacity in the comics field. The Harvey Awards are the only industry awards both nominated and selected by the full body of comic book professionals.”

Greg McElhatton notes that the Harvey nominations are “SO easy to stack,” and if anyone was on the fence about that, well… Witchblade Manga. The prosecution rests.

This is a problem. It’s not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things, obviously, but it’s a problem for the Harvey Awards, because the possibility of shoving a piece of crap into the field of nominees unfairly casts the worthiness of everything on the slate into question. If I can conclude, not unreasonably, that a bunch of people who work for Company A sat around the break room and decided to force a piece of crap onto the ballot, then I can conclude just as reasonably that a bunch of people who work for Company B sat around the break room and decided to force something brilliant onto the ballot. A desirable outcome doesn’t make a leaky process any more ethical.

Of course, it’s a universal problem for awards programs of any sort. All of them have to decide where they want to land on the continuum between potentially out-of-touch gatekeepers and a democratic process that leaves itself open to abuse. I think the simplest solution would be to use precisely the same pool of potential nominators but to prohibit them from nominating any work published by the company that employs them. (That’s how nominations work in the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens program.) That would still leave open the possibility of collusion among publishers, obviously, but that seems less likely than self-promoting ballot-box stuffing.

There is the remote possibility that what one might consider counter-intuitive nominees (some listed here by Dirk Deppey) wound up there as the result of an entirely democratic groundswell of support, heretofore unexpected by the casual observer. I’m cynical, so unless I get a bunch of e-mails or comments that support that optimistic possibility, I’m going to suggest that the Harvey Awards nomination process is broken and needs to be fixed if the sponsors want to cultivate a reputation for promoting meritorious work. Because there’s plenty of meritorious work nominated, and it’s not fair that it stands a real chance of losing to something awful because the system can be massaged.

For further reading, please see Brigid Alverson’s noble attempt to list more award-worthy works. I thought about doing that, but then I decided that the bar was set so low that I’d never stop.

Upcoming 6/18/2008

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What evil lurks in the heart of this week’s ComicList? Plenty, thanks to Kazuo Umezu, but it’s the good kind of evil.

Viz drops two handsomely produced volumes of Umezu’s Cat-Eyed Boy. Fans of Umezu’s deadly roller-coaster ride, The Drifting Classroom, might be surprised at the almost leisurely way the horror unfolds in this series. (I know I was.) But it’s not an unpleasant surprise, and there’s some wonderful material in the first volume, which I received courtesy of Viz. I’ll definitely be seeking out the second. (I’d still heartily recommend The Drifting Classroom, if you haven’t read it yet.)

I’m such a fan of Yuu Asami’s A.I. Revolution (Go! Comi). I love the beautiful, old-fashioned art, the mix of character-driven stories and high-tech espionage, and the way that Asami’s yaoi donjishi roots show more and more with each successive volume. The hunky boy robots never quite make out with each other, but they always look like they’re on the verge, which makes me giggle. The fourth volume arrives today.

A new comic by Hope Larson? Yes, please, thank you. The creator of Salamander Dream (AdHouse) and Gray Horses (Oni) delivers Chiggers, via Simon and Schuster. It’s about shifting friendships at summer camp.

Bumper crop

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Enough with the shadowy portents for a bit. Let’s see what lurks in the current Diamond Previews catalog, shall we?

Dark Horse offers the fourth volume of Adam Warren’s brilliant Empowered about the ups and downs of a good-hearted super-heroine with a singularly unreliable costume and a loyal band of friends. The third volume got a little dark for my tastes, but it was hardly enough to keep me from reading more. (Page 30 and 31.)

Do I owe it to myself to see if any of the plot points so irritatingly left dangling in The Plain Janes (Minx) are addressed in the sequel, Janes in Love? Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg revisit their group of art guerillas and promise that the teens “discover that in art and love, the normal rules don’t always apply.” I thought they already knew that. (Page 113.)

Someday I’ll get around to writing about Rutu Mordan’s Exit Wounds (Drawn & Quarterly), which I thought was very good. (I don’t know if I would have put it on my “Best of 2007” list, whatever that might have looked like, but I’d certainly recommend it.) D&Q is following up with a collection of Mordan’s short works, Jamilti and Other Stories, and I’m looking forward to it. I love short stories, and I’m eager to see what Mordan does with that kind of flexibility. (Page 288.)

Many people, myself included, have written nice things about Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary, due from Fanfare. Anything from this publisher is worth a look, and this book offers an intriguing if slippery look at the low points in the life of the manga-ka. (Page 297.)

I’ve been having a hard time finding a copy of Jason Shiga’s widely acclaimed Bookhunter (Sparkplug Comic Books) in my retail wanderings, so I’m glad to see it being offered again. (Page 349.)

Weirdness alert: people are tracking the fates of Tokyopop’s various global titles, and here’s one more to add to the tally. The publisher is offering a prestige collection of one, Boys of Summer: The Complete Season. The solicitation of the Chuck Austen/Hiroki Otsuka baseball comic indicates that the unpublished third volume will appear for the first time here, along with the first two. I’m not recommending, because I’ve read too many comics by Austen as it is, but I thought it was interesting to note. (Page 353.)

I thought Top Shelf had already solicited Ulf K.’s Heironymus B, but maybe it got delayed. I’ve heard good things about it, so I’ll just gently remind the local shop owner that I’d like a copy. (Page 362.)

Takehiko Inoue’s much-loved basketball manga Slam Dunk gets another bite at the apple courtesy of Viz in its $7.99 Shonen Jump line. (Page 384.) The publisher is maximizing its Death Note profits with a new series of collector’s editions that offer “color art… premium packaging… new cover art on the dust jacket” and other bonuses. (Page 386.) I’m not quite certain about the plot of Ayumi Komura’s Mixed Vegetables, which seems to be about using marriage to further professional ambitions, but I can’t turn my back on shôjo cooking manga. (Page 387.)

I swear this had a cooler name when it was first announced, but the first issue of Yen’s anthology magazine, Yen Plus, arrives in August. It features a mix of original and licensed work, and if you ever wondered what hack thriller author James Patterson would do with sequential art, this is your moment. It’s also got Svetlana Chmakova’s follow-up to Dramacon (Tokyopop), Nightschool, so that’s certainly a point in its favor. (Page 390.)

Mongering

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There’s a new Flipped up over at The Comics Reporter, and it’s dedicated to rumor and misfortune.

One thing that seemed to tangential to bring up in the column came from the historical analysis of Tokyopop over at The Anime Almanac. It’s a really solid piece, but I did find myself disagreeing with one section:

“Earlier this year, Tokyopop released an completely unique Japanese title called Manga Sutra. This ‘guide to getting it on,’ as the company puts it, has been a huge hit in Japan for many years and is completely unlike anything out right now in the American market. As I wrote in a piece earlier this year, the title has the potential to make it big in America because of its novelty. However, Tokyopop squashed all hope for it reaching a wide audience by not selling the book at national book chains and hiding it from the general consumer. If you wanted to get the book, you would have to activity look for it online and have it mailed to you.”

I actually did purchase this at a Borders store. It wasn’t in the graphic novel section, but was shelved with the human sexuality books. That struck me as sensible at the time, because one of the things you hear pitched by various folks is the shelving graphic novels by category (mystery, science fiction, romance, and so on) where people uninitiated with the medium would find them next to stuff they’re already reading. (And frankly, no good could come from shelving Futari H right next to Fruits Basket.)

Just from a personal perspective, I thought the novelty of the book only went so far. Aside from the amusing weirdness of its premise and the odd contrast it provided to most of the licensed titles that are readily available, I found the book pretty boring, which doesn’t seem like a good thing to say about a sex guide. Again, that’s just my reaction, and aside from liking weird, off-brand manga, I’m not really the target audience.

I would be an outlaw in Japan

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It would be unhealthy if not physiologically impossible for me to comply with this law:

“But because the new state-prescribed limit for male waistlines is a strict 33.5 inches, he had anxiously measured himself at home a couple of days earlier. ‘I’m on the border,’ he said.”

At the very least, I’d be a tax burden on my employer.

Pat the bunny

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The other day, I expressed the suspicion that Simone Lia’s Fluffy (Dark Horse) would be “super, super cute.” It didn’t turn out that way, but it’s a very successful book for the qualities it does have.

On the surface, it’s about a single man and his talking baby bunny. Underneath, it’s about denial and avoidance. That kind of counterpoint could invite flagrant metaphor abuse, but Lia tends to skate past the obvious. (I strongly suspect that Fluffy is a bunny to avoid tricky questions about a bachelor raising a human toddler, beyond the cute diversions a bunny provides. Whatever the reason, Fluffy simply is what he is, and he doesn’t distract.)

Michael is bored with his job and a little alarmed at the attentions of Fluffy’s nursery school teacher, whose devotion is entirely out of proportion with any encouragement Michael has offered. He and Fluffy head off to Sicily to visit his parents and sister only to find that avoiding one set of difficulties sometimes places you right in the middle of new ones.

Michael’s sister is bored with her marriage and irritated with their mother, who is spending her golden years as a reinvigorated Catholic. (Where better to pursue that hobby than Italy?) Fluffy refuses to accept that he’s a bunny, and Michael’s father spends most of his time in a slightly baffled haze, absorbing and amplifying the anxieties of his family.

Despite the weight of these issues – unrequited love, familial conflict, marital ennui, crises of identity – Lia manages to be both lighthearted and respectful in her handling of them. She’s too smart to offer clear closure to these messy lives, and she’s too sharp a comedienne to squander the possibilities of overlapping, interlocking tensions. But she’s generous enough to offer some happy moments, while withholding happy endings, and clever and restrained enough to get away with it.

There are amusing flights of fancy (exposition provided by a dust mote being one of my favorites), but they don’t pull the story away from its emotional core. The book has a very serendipitous feel to it, like all of its elements kind of blithely fell into place in the right way. I’ve always admired the ability to create that appearance of effortlessness, and Lia manages it while actually having something interesting and engaging to say. The book may have confounded my superficial expectations, but it was surprisingly satisfying.