The Manga Curmudgeon

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

The first hit's free

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I missed Free Comic Book Day, but I managed to get my hands on a copy of Thomas F. Zahler’s Love and Capes #7 (Maerkle Press). As I understand it, one of the missions of Free Comic Book Day is to introduce people to comics they haven’t tried previously in the hopes of convincing them to purchase said comics in the future. Mission accomplished, Free Comic Book Day.

My favorite parts of super-hero comics have always been the in-between moments, the interpersonal soap opera that fills the gaps between big battles. Love and Capes is nothing but those in-between moments, following the developing relationship between a Superman type and a bookstore owner. In this issue, Mark (also known as the Crusader) is trying to figure out the right way to propose to Abby. He seeks advice from his parents, his colleagues, and Abby’s younger sister, Charlotte.

The first thing that struck me about the book is that it reads less like a comic book than a collection of individual strips. Just about each page is a romantic-comedy beat with its own punch line, moving the story forward but standing on its own. (It’s kind of like For Better or Worse without the icky gender and relationship dynamics.) The characters are sturdy and likeable enough to keep the rhythms from becoming repetitive.

I also found the book admirable in the way that it sticks to its mission. Some revisionist genre parodies can’t seem to resist becoming exactly the kind of story they’re tweaking, and that strikes me as defeating the purpose of providing an alternative. Love and Capes maintains its tone throughout, sort of a fusion of Mad About You and Astro City. (There’s one sequence where Abby keeps Mark company during monitor duty, which created a singularly unpleasant callback to another comic, but that’s hardly Zahler’s fault.)

Mark and Abby may not be the most sharply etched of characters, but I like them. They’re functional adults in a believable relationship, and their individual qualities fuel the observational humor nicely. They’re also on equal footing; each has a life and work that they value, and they support and respect one another. Zahler’s cartoon-y illustrating style suits the material well, providing open, funny visuals.

What else can I say? It’s a charming, easygoing book about sympathetic people in weird circumstances. It uses those circumstances for comedy and contrast, but it doesn’t let them overwhelm the core charms of the story.

(A collection of the first six issues of the series is due out in November, and Zahler has put a large number of preview pages online.)

The Speed-Elvis connection

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There was a nice piece on the origins of Speed Racer on NPR’s Morning Edition.

I don’t really have any interest in seeing the movie. I’ve never been able to stay awake through any more than ten minutes of any of the Matrix movies, and the advertisements for the Speed Racer movie make me feel like a seizure is imminent. But the radio piece offers an interesting look at the property and its cross-cultural appeal.

Upcoming 5/7/2008

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Record gas prices? Check! Skyrocketing food costs? Double-check! Humongous list of new comic book releases for the week? Triple-check!

Some of these series have been running for some time now, so it might be useful to provide some introductions. Also, I really like Manga Recon’s new Weekly Recon format, so I’m going to swipe it.

Crayon Shinchan Vol. 2, by Yoshito Usui, CMX: I can’t really put it any better than Matthew Brady: “Also: kids are horrible, awful creatures. Good times!” Exactly. If I’m going to be completely truthful, I’ll admit that I prefer the anime to the manga, but the second half of the first volume of the manga, when the setting shifted from home to school, was laugh-out-loud funny. Great. Now the infectious theme song is running through my head again.

Eden: It’s an Endless World! Vol. 10, by Hiroki Endo, Dark Horse: A bizarre virus has decimated the population, leaving all kinds of power struggles in play. Corporate moguls, political bigwigs, and terrorists fight for the future of a world that may not be worth the trouble. It’s beautifully drawn and often quite gripping as it combines the personal with the political.

King of Thorn Vol. 4, by Yuji Iwahara, Tokyopop: Another post-viral-apocalypse comic that’s much more conventional in its structure. Think The Poseidon Adventure set in a cryogenic research facility. A group of disease carriers wake up to find themselves abandoned in said facility, which is overrun with bizarre monsters. The demographically familiar band struggles to find a way out and, honesty compels me to admit, to display distinct personalities beyond their character types. But Iwahara’s art is a treat.

Kitchen Princess Vol. 6, by Natsumi Ando and Miyuki Kobayashi, Del Rey: The orphan child of two gifted pastry chefs bakes her way into a snooty private school to track down the boy of her dreams. That sounds awfully saccharine and formulaic, and the series started off in that vein, but the creators have taken off the oven mitts and started delivering some serious emotional punches as the series has progressed. The previous volume ended on a cliffhanger rather more perilous than is usual for school-romance manga, and I’m eager to see what happens next.

High School Debut Vol. 3, by Kazune Kawahara, Viz – Shojo Beat: This imprint has three crack-tastic releases this week. The premise of this series – a sporty girl enters high school and decides she wants a boyfriend, securing a hunky male mentor to advise her on issues of dateability – is extremely formulaic and blissfully irrelevant in light of its other charms. Those include terrific characters and emotionally specific writing that can really make you catch your breath. I’m perfectly happy to see a familiar formula executed with panache, but I think I’m even happier to see one subverted so feelingly.

Hikaru No Go Vol. 12, by Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obata, Viz – Shonen Jump: I went on about this title at some length in yesterday’s Flipped column, so I’ll just summarize its selling points: likeable characters, terrific art, and a surprisingly intriguing and flexible premise about a board game.

Nana Vol. 10, by Ai Yazawa, Viz – Shojo Beat: Two young women named Nana meet on a train to Tokyo and strike up an unlikely but enduring friendship. The series consistently provides sexy urban soap opera, and it’s currently in the midst of a perfect storm of personal and professional conflicts.

Salt Water Taffy Vol. 1, by Matthew Loux, Oni Press: This is delightful, as I mentioned in a review last week. Loux introduces his protagonist brothers to the weird and wonderful charms of a coastal town in Maine.

Sand Chronicles Vol. 2, by Hinako Ashihara, Viz – Shojo Beat: Ashihara doesn’t ask for much; she merely wants to rip your heart out with her pitch-perfect episodes from a girl’s coming of age. Like High School Debut, there’s a shocking quantity of recognizable human behavior here. Unlike that worthy book, Sand Chronicles doesn’t even pretend to follow a formula as it cherry-picks key moments from the adolescence of its engaging heroine, Ann Uekusa. Extremely absorbing, grounded storytelling, and beautiful art.

Where's Waldo?

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Looking through the May Comics Bestsellers at Publishers Weekly, I’m kind of surprised to see that Marvel’s Secret Invasion #1 didn’t even make the honorable mentions that follow the list proper. A look back at the lists for the year so far reveals that only one pamphlet has even gotten the “Take Note” mention, an issue of the Buffy comic.

I’m sure the comic will rank highly on ICv2’s comics list for the month when it comes out, and the eventual collection will fare at least as well as those for Marvel’s Civil War event did. And really, since there are no concrete details on what kind of and how many retail outlets are sampled to compile the list, it’s just a curiosity.

Arm fall off boy

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One of the perils of reading classic comics is what I’d term the Grandpa Love Factor. By that I mean that everyone loves Grandpa because he’s Grandpa. We wouldn’t be where we are without him, and he was in The War, and he made sure his five children all went to college, and if he smells a little funny and repeats the same stories over and over again and accuses you of “backsass” when you ask him if he knows not to put a metal pie plate in the microwave, even when he’s about to do exactly that, well, he’s Grandpa, and by all that’s good and true, you will love him, because there is a special place in hell for the kind of ingrate that doesn’t.

I’m not saying that there are legions of creators who are viewed primarily through the prism of the Grandpa Love Factor, but I do wonder sometimes. Because when reading a classic comic by a creator widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the medium, the merest hint that I’m appreciating the context of the comic more than the comic itself makes me feel horribly guilty. (“Oh, no! I don’t love Grandpa, and I’m going to hell for it!”)

So I would once again like to express my appreciation for Osamu Tezuka, because I love reading his comics even more than I love the context of those comics. Because in addition to having been created by an undisputed master and trailblazer, I find them uncategorically, un-ironically entertaining.

I’m not going to say Dororo, recently released by Vertical, is the best example of Tezuka’s work available in English, and who knows where it ranks in his complete body of work, but it’s certainly a page-turner. It’s about a young man, Hyakkimaru, on a quest to get his body back. His power-hungry father sold the boy to demons before Hyakkimaru was even born, and only the intervention of a kindly doctor keeps the creepy, shapeless infant from death.

The doctor helps Hyakkimaru compensate for his shortcomings, and the lad sets off in search of his missing parts. Along the way, he meets a thieving urchin named Dororo who sets his sights on the valuable sword Hyakkimaru conceals under his prosthetic arm. Dororo is an imp and a brat, but he and Hyakkimaru form one of those oddball partnerships that crop up so often in fiction of every variety. This one stems at least partly from the fact that both have unbearably painful personal histories, so it’s a bit more persuasive than the average.

But Tezuka’s work is always more persuasive than average. His protagonists fall into a standard shônen quest rhythm, protecting the innocent from demonic machinations as they further their own goals, squabbling and bonding along the way. The landscape they inhabit has been ravaged by war, which heightens the suspicions of the people they encounter. The architecture may be familiar – varied perils result in incremental victories – but the tone is decidedly on the grim side. This isn’t the kind of bloodless action romp you might expect; the body count is shockingly high, and Tezuka doesn’t flinch from showing you what happens when someone swings a blade around. The heroes’ beneficiaries are more likely to respond with anxiety and ingratitude than a hot meal and a place to recover after their trials.

If that sounds like Tezuka’s abandoned his humanistic bent here, don’t worry. It’s hard to blame his townspeople for their failings of hospitality, given the deprivations they’ve endured. Hunger, violence, uncertainty, and a bunch of other war-driven ills have left them in survival mode, and neither Hyakkimaru nor Dororo inspire confidence or comfort.

Diverting as the big, bombastic moments are, they aren’t the be-all and end-all of Dororo. There are bits of low comedy that provide respite from the literal and figurative bloodletting. They’re in scale, generally driven by Dororo’s utter unwillingness to back down from any opposition. At the same time, that quality puts Dororo in genuine peril; scary, bad things aren’t just a feature of his past. One of the most striking things about the book is that no one feels safe, in spite of the familiarity of the plot mechanics. It’s that uncertainty – not entirely knowing how something’s going to turn out – that makes Tezuka’s work so readable and alive for me.

Grandpa Tezuka smells like lemon basil and tells embarrassing (but not creepy) stories about your Mom and always gives me five dollars and tells me to spend it on something useless. I love Grandpa Tezuka.

(Review based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

Radio waves

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I missed out on Free Comic Book Day yesterday. My partner bought this big piece of folk art off of EBay, and we had to drive to Delaware to pick it up. So it was a long day in his car exploring the mysteries of XM Radio.

  • Dear On Broadway: I beg you to spend more time and effort on your programming. Half of the time your selections sound like a coded mix tape I would have assembled in college (while drunk) for a boy I liked. But even I wouldn’t have added those dumb songs that were obviously shoved into a show to cover the scene changes.
  • For the second year in a row, an innocent animal has been desperately injured in the running of the Kentucky Derby. This one was euthanized on the track. The glamour! The tradition!
  • When I want to stay awake through the rolling hills of western Maryland, there’s nothing like ignorant callers on talk radio to keep me alert. One person actually suggested that the crisis of rising food prices might actually put a dent in our nation’s obesity problem, which struck me as a kind of draconian optimism. That said, I couldn’t help but notice that the price of the dog food we buy went up about 30% since the last time I bought a bag.
  • Public Radio International giveth; Public Radio International taketh away. On one hand, I caught an episode of This American Life that included pieces from Sarah Vowell and Dan Savage. (And there’s a new book by Vowell on the way, so SQUEE!) On the other hand, Studio 360 is kind of painful. I’m the first to agree that Ira Glass is ripe for spoofing, but imitating isn’t spoofing.
  • This is how my self-esteem operates: The other day, I got an e-mail from an editor at Print letting me know that the magazine had won for General Excellence at the National Magazine Awards, and that one of the issues in their submission was the one that included the article I wrote my manhwa. My immediate thought: “Yay, my article wasn’t enough to lower the standard of the magazine into runner-up status!” Of course, now I’m all, “Suck it, Aperture!”

    • Librarians rule

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    If you can’t make it to your local comic shop for Free Comic Book Day, you can catch the spirit all month long over at Dave Carter’s Yet Another Comic Blog. He’s sponsoring his fourth annual Free Comic Book Month:

    “That’s right, free comics! Each day of May I’ll pick someone to receive a free comic, taken from my personal collection: duplicates, things I have in trades, and other stuff. My goal is to match up people with a comic that they haven’t read but that they may like. My tastes are wide and varied, so chances are I’ve got a comic for you.”

    Go take a look!

    Tangled webs

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    At Manga Xanadu, Lori Henderson looks at some of the ways manga publishers can use online resources to promote their material, and she makes a number of good points. The piece is framed at least partly around a certain kind of title that needs the help:

    “Even if most of the sales of titles come from brick and mortar retail, getting the word out about titles shouldn’t be such an issue in the internet age. If manga publishers would make better use of their online resources, C list titles would have a better chance.”

    Coincidentally, Viz has redesigned its online store, and it does seem like an improvement. Viz’s press release promises easier navigability and better search functionality, and a couple of quick tests seem to confirm those claims. Viz’s manga titles are listed by imprint on the store’s front page, which is handy, and there are some web-only discounts running down the sidebar.

    There are a few odd things going on. Clicking randomly through series, it seems like some volumes from some series aren’t available. (Just at a glance, some with only partial runs available are Kekkashi, Aishiteruze Baby, and Maison Ikkoku. Poor Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs and Yakitate!! Japan aren’t there at all yet.) Maybe Viz is still finishing up its listings, but that seems like something that should be corrected as quickly as possible. If a publisher is going to have an online store, which is never a bad idea if it isn’t going to be too burdensome to manage, then the publisher should have its entire catalogue available for purchase.

    That seems particularly important for the C list titles. If a book is having trouble finding space on bookstore shelves, then it’s not unreasonable for a customer to seek it out online. The publisher’s online store might not be the first place they look, but a certain percentage of them will wind up there sooner or later, and it would be best not to discourage them in their inquiries.

    And speaking C list titles and the Viz store, there seem to be some missed opportunities to give those books a push. Viz’s best-selling properties (Naruto, Death Note, Bleach, and the like) tend to eat up most of the front page’s visible real estate. I’m guessing you would have to work pretty hard to find retail markets where books and DVDs from these properties aren’t available. It’s not a bad idea for a publisher to brand itself with its successes, but why not use their rising tides to lift a few dinghies in the process?

    I’m thinking about something along the lines of Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” widget, but with a more activist bent. I’m not all that crazy about suggestive selling, but I’m less bothered by it when it’s in service of underperforming but worthy books. Offering discounts on those C list books with purchase of an A list property might be a good idea as well.

    Unrelated

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    Does anyone know how to turn off the “Possibly Related Posts” function on WordPress? I kind of like to have a say in what’s linked from my blog, and this surprising feature makes me a little uncomfortable.

    Updated: Found it. It’s under the “Extras” link in the “Design” category of the dashboard.