The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Phone rings, door chimes…

by

They don’t do it as often as I’d like, but I do appreciate how PBS tries to keep me in productions of Stephen Sondheim musicals. Thanks to them, I’ve seen Sweeney Todd with Angela Lansbury, Sunday in the Park with George with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, Into the Woods with Peters and Joanna Gleason, a lovely production of A Little Night Music by the New York City Opera (which doesn’t seem to be available on DVD, unfortunately), and Passion, which I only made it through part of but appreciated the opportunity to decide I didn’t care for it all the same.

Tomorrow, they’re airing a filming of the recent revival of Company, staged by the brilliant John Doyle. I had the good fortune to see Doyle’s Broadway revival of Sweeney, starring Patti Lupone and Michael Cerveris, and aside from being knocked to the street in crosswalk in front of Rockefeller Center by stroller people on the way back to the hotel, it was one of the finest evenings of theatre I’ve ever enjoyed. (I think Doyle should do Night Music next. A character already plays the cello on stage, and those lieder singers can certainly double up as a mini-orchestra.)

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a professional staging of Company, so I’m really looking forward to it. In fact, I think I’ve only ever seen a college production with a cast culled mostly from the opera program, which is… not how I would have gone. In my opinion, you can get away with not being able to sing or dance in a Sondheim musical, but an inability to act is absolutely fatal.

And there’s a new staging of Sunday coming to Broadway. The director is profiled in this piece in The New York Times. Since Peters and Patankin are such distinct performers, I’ll be interested to see the response to Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell, as it will say something about how dependent the piece is on star charisma.

Upcoming 2/20/2008

by

Some picks from the ComicList for Wednesday, Feb. 20:

Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s very entertaining mini-series, The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite (Dark Horse), concludes with its sixth issue. If you’re coming in late and are curious, the trade paperback is available for pre-order.

A new volume of Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki’s The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Dark Horse) is always cause for celebration. The sixth tankoubon arrives tomorrow, promising new business rivals for the afterlife entrepreneurs.

I really need to catch up on Tomomi Yamashita’s Apothecarius Argentum (CMX), which is already up to its fourth volume. It’s very attractive, features appealing leads, and offers fun bits of trivia about medicinal and/or lethal substances.

After four volumes of dealing with the somewhat generic machinations of snotty classmates, the orphan heroine of Natsumi Ando and Miyuki Kobayashi’s Kitchen Princess (Del Rey) gets slapped right in the face with actual adult duplicity in the fifth installment, and holy crap, is it good.

If you’re craving tales of weird, malevolent, otherworldly organisms turning humans into death machines but find Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte (Del Rey) a little too old-school, the publisher also offers a more modern take on the same subject matter with Tadashi Kawashima and Adachitoka’s Alive. I like both, but Alive is the one with a new volume arriving tomorrow.

It’s Signature week from Viz, which is always exciting, but I find myself distracted by the latest issue of Shojo Beat, infused as it is with lots of Bryan Lee O’Malley.

Still, it’s hard to get too distracted to note that Naoki Urasawa’s Monster, now in its thirteenth volume, has become a really spectacular thriller. Watching Urasawa keep his multiple narrative threads from becoming a hopeless tangle is quite breathtaking.

Set in stone

by

Am I the only one who found the animated version of Tekkonkinkreet too boring to sit through? I loved the manga, but I thought the film’s pace was plodding.

The Treasure Town backgrounds were gorgeous, and some sequences had the energy I wanted, but the adaptation as a whole seemed to suffer from an excess of reverence. It was like watching a production of a Chekov play helmed by a director who couldn’t accept that it was supposed to be a comedy. (I’ve actually seen very few productions of Chekov plays that were as funny as I thought they should be, come to think of it.) I’m not saying a dearth of humor was the film’s primary failing, but it lacked the kind of messy liveliness I found in the comic.

Or maybe it’s just my ingrained preference for reading comics over watching animated adaptations of them. In comics, I can at least partly set the pace of the experience and fill in the blanks between panels and scenes. At about the 45-minute point, I was desperate for something that didn’t seem meticulously staged, and I started fast-forwarding.

Grading on a curve

by

Having read the third volume of Yuji Iwahara’s King of Thorn (Tokyopop), I find myself wondering when optimism reaches its expiration date. I’ll be the first to admit that Iwahara’s Chikyu Misaki (CMX) left me with absurdly high expectations for the creator’s work because of his ability to enliven familiar genre elements with terrific characterization and clever plotting. At the halfway point, King of Thorn is still a collection of set pieces.

For those of you just tuning in, the story follows a small group of people afflicted with a deadly virus. They were placed in suspended animation until a cure could be found, but they woke to find themselves abandoned in a dilapidated facility overrun with monsters. They try to survive the perils of their former sanctuary and figure out what happened while they were asleep.

This kind of stuff can work brilliantly. Take Mochizuki Minetaro’s Dragon Head, also from Tokyopop. Minetaro uses roughly the same recipe of survival set pieces and unanswered questions, but the essential difference is characterization. I care what happens to the characters in Dragon Head, as they’re rendered with layers and quirks. Their actions have the capacity to surprise and move me. I don’t feel like I’ve even met the ragtag group from King of Thorn, aside from their familiarity as archetypes.

In the third volume, the Tough and Secretive Loner urges the Meek Girl Who Becomes More Resourceful to trust him. It’s configured to be one of those turning-point moments where readers care whether the heroine chooses between sense and faith, by Iwahara hasn’t earned that level of investment yet. Neither has inner life enough for her choice to matter; the decision is going to seem under-informed either way.

The view from the plateau

by

Brian Hibbs covers the 2007 BookScan graphic totals in the latest Tilting at Windmills column at Newsarama. The figures provide an interesting snapshot of the mainstream retail market (chain and independent bookstores, online vendors and some other outlets like Target) for graphic novels, and instinct tells me that they’re as good an overview as one can reasonably expect.

Some immediate questions and reactions:

  • It would be interesting to get a sense of the volume of graphic novels returned by outlets reporting to BookScan. That might provide a useful factor in measuring the overall health of the bookstore market. I have no idea how those numbers might be assessed, but returnability is always cited as a key difference between the general market and the Direct Market.
  • I agree with Hibbs that it would also be valuable to see who’s reporting now, and if the pool has grown since it was first identified. What kind of impact would WalMart have on the final numbers, if it isn’t already there?
  • I wonder if inflation in other areas (fuel prices, food, and so on) has caused a general hit in entertainment/recreation purchases that might account for the slower growth Hibbs notes. Or has the mainstream retail market established itself sufficiently that it’s reached a plateau? And what, if anything, can publishers of graphic novels do to reignite that sector?

    • Hibbs, a Direct Market retailer himself, emphasizes the apparent disparity in graphic novel sales growth in comic shops versus mainstream outlets:

    “What’s most curious about this to me is that the Direct Market is said to have had an 18% growth in 2007 in GN/TP sales – and the DM is a mature and very established marketplace, while the Bookstores really should still be in their ‘honeymoon’ phase with comics material, and should, in my opinion, be seeing greater growth. Obviously, I have no real information of the overall levels of growth in bookstores in general (doing a GN-driven report is difficult enough, thanks), so the book market may still be looking at this as excellent growth, but in relationship against the Direct Market, they’re growing at a significantly slower rate.”

    I’m deeply suspicious about the comparisons here, which seem less like apples and oranges than maybe grapes and beef. For one, I wonder about the plateau question earlier, and an associated question is whether the Direct Market is just investing more in graphic novels and trade paperbacks to compete with the bookstore market. One person’s “mature and very established marketplace” could easily be perceived as another person’s ocean liner… steady and seaworthy but incredibly slow to change direction. From my anecdotal observation, there do seem to be more specialty comic shops investing in the trade end of the market, but is that a response to their wider availability in other outlets or just a reflection of the fact that there’s much more of this kind of product than there used to be? Again, I don’t know, but I don’t think the 18% growth in the DM compares quite as simply to the 5.27% growth in the bookstore arena. (There are also questions of volume, selection, casual-versus-dedicated consumers, and tons of others that I haven’t thought of yet. And according to this source, graphic novel sales in the Direct Market where fairly static when comparing 2005 — $45.84 million – and 2006 — $48.45 million.)

    Manga numbers are intriguing. The number of placing volumes in the top 750 are identical for 2006 and 2007, and while nobody could complain about owning abut 77% of those slots, the relatively stagnant numbers of units sold, dollars earned, and properties represented is maybe troubling when you consider the volume of new titles that came out in 2007. (I wish I could find a source, but I swear I saw one that compared the number of volumes shipped between the two years.)

    It’s not surprising to me that Marvel and DC’s best-selling books in the mainstream retail market aren’t based on any of their super-hero properties, or that the best-selling book in the Direct Market was from that niche. As much as I might wish I could find every comic I wanted in every DM shop, specialization is an advantage when you’re competing with generalists.

    And really, Hibbs can’t be blamed for crowing about the apparent strength of GN sales in the DM:

    “And, as noted above, we’re virtually always selling more copies of ‘Western’ comics, often by factors of 3 to 5 times larger, with well below half of the number of venues that report to BookScan.”

    Still, I would find this argument more persuasive if there were better numbers from all quarters. The Direct Market sold $57.15 million worth of the top 100 graphic novels and trade paperbacks in 2007 (about a 15% growth from 2006), compared to $95.17 million worth of the top 750 graphic novels in venues that report to BookScan. I’d be very interested to see the numbers for the top 750 graphic novels distributed to comic shops via Diamond, because it would probably close the gap even more.

    Sipping

    by

    I’m not going to lie. My usual standards for buying liquor involve price per ounce. (That’s a driving factor in wine purchases too, with the added factor of attractive labels. Hm… that’s kind of like how I buy manga.) But this year, my partner got me a bottle of Hendrick’s Gin for Valentine’s Day, and while I’ll have no problem going back to the rotgut when this bottle is empty, man, is it tasty.

    I think I’d heard about it before in some article about awesome gins, but my partner picked it because the bottle is really cool and distinct. It looks like something you’d find in a Victorian apothecary’s shop. Reading the label, I was a little concerned by the sheer number of botanicals in play. (This was problematic in Tanqueray Malacca, which is delicious on its own but doesn’t mix with anything, even tonic. I think there’s something seedy about drinking gin straight, though that might just be me.)

    But somehow, cucumber and rose petals and all the other things that go into Hendrick’s make for really delicious gin, and it makes a wonderful martini. The taste of the gin definitely changes with the addition of vermouth, but the two don’t clash, becoming something uniquely tasty. (With the rotgut I usually favor, vermouth is a necessary edge-softener as opposed to a useful flavor note.) I haven’t tried Hendrick’s with tonic yet, but I suspect that will work nicely too.

    I keep thinking about coming up with a comics-beverage pairing list, though I can’t think right off hand what reading material would best compliment a Hendrick’s martini. (Maybe Suppli?) I find that bathtub manga (generally classified as beautifully illustrated stuff on or near the shôjo-josei border, or anything by Fumi Yoshinaga) goes best with a red that’s on the dry side, but I haven’t done much experimentation beyond that. And I don’t drink much beer, so I have no idea what a good beer manga would be.

    Schadenfreude

    by

    Now that I’ve got the sentimentality out of my system, it’s time to address the flip side of the Valentine’s Day equation. Some (and trust me, I’m sometimes among them) find the whole concept kind of nauseating. So if you’d really like to rip Cupid’s bow out of his hands and do some real damage, here are some comics that allow you to bask in the misery and misfortune of others.

    Bambi and Her Pink Gun, by Kaneko Atsushi (DMP): Dystopia populated by creepy, violent societal parasites? Check. Unsympathetic protagonist who cuts a giddy swath through their ranks? Double check. DMP dropped this delightfully nasty series after only two volumes, but oh, those two volumes are filled with cheerful misanthropy. I miss Bambi.

    Dragon Head, by Minetaro Mochizuki (Tokyopop): You’ve probably said it to yourself: “If I see one more school trip in a manga series, it had better end really badly.” This is the manga for you. In ten volumes of pretty much relentless terror, with occasional side trips to mere creepiness, a handful of survivors try and figure out what the heck happened to Japan while their train was passing through a tunnel.

    The Drifting Classroom, by Kazuou Umezi (Viz): If you could harvest the terrified screams of children and use them as an alternative fuel source, you could probably use this book to power the Mid-Atlantic Region for a few months, at least. I know I shouldn’t admit that watching elementary school children meet grisly and varied ends is a real hoot for me, but it is.

    MW, by Osamu Tezuka (Vertical): Tezuka is generally an optimist, but that doesn’t mean he’s naïve, or that he can’t be downright depraved when the situation calls for it. MW calls for it over and over, and Tezuka doesn’t shrink from any of the lurid possibilities of kidnapping, mass murder, blackmail, illicit sex, and so on.

    Uzumaki, by Junji Ito (Viz): “Uzumaki” means “spiral,” as in “downward.” The third volume of Viz’s re-release of this grimly imaginative horror series is probably already available in bookstores, or you can wait until next week when it’s due to show up at the comic shops.

    Rom com

    by

    One of the things that was confirmed for me when I started reading manga in earnest was that I’m a big sucker for romance in the comic form. I’d always been more inclined to the soap operatic elements of super-hero comics than the adventure end of things, and many manga series allowed me to forego the flying fists entirely. With the imminent arrival of Valentine’s Day, here are some of my favorites:

    Antique Bakery, by Fumi Yoshinaga (DMP): Okay, it’s more about coping with the challenges of adulthood in general than romance in particular, but I think Yoshinaga is at her funniest, sharpest, and most generous when she examines the bittersweet qualities of interpersonal relationships. It’s almost all sighs instead of swoons, but a story doesn’t have to offer anything resembling “happily ever after” to be romantic in its own way. All four volumes are available.

    Emma, by Kaoru Mori (CMX): On the other hand, this one is all swoons, all the time, and it is glorious. It follows the fraught-with-obstacles romance of a housemaid and a member of the upper class (though tellingly, not the aristocracy), rendered with breathtaking emotional precision and lush, detailed illustrations. Only one more volume is due from this series.

    Fake, by Sanami Matoh (Tokyopop): You’ve got to either embrace or ignore the wooly-headed stupidity of the police procedural aspects of this tale of detectives in lust, but it’s worth it. It’s a seven-volume pas de deux between bisexual Dee and undecided Ryo, fighting (snicker) crime and finding their way towards each other. Don’t think; just read.

    Genshiken, by Kio Shimoku (Del Rey): Like Antique Bakery, this one isn’t a romance, per se, but some of the undercurrents kill me. Shimoku plays me like a fiddle with a will-they-won’t-they-probably-not subplot that runs throughout the nine volumes of the series.

    Love Roma, by Minoru Toyoda (Del Rey): This one presents high-school romance in all of its goofy glory. This review at Sleep is for the Weak tells you everything you need to know about the book’s considerable virtues. All five volumes of its run are available.

    Maison Ikkoku, by Rumiko Takahashi (Viz): Fifteen (thanks, Jun) volumes of romantic misunderstandings and near-misses should be exhausting, but it isn’t. Takahashi keeps her options open and populates her fictional boarding house with a likeable (and likeably awful) cast of characters that keeps things hopping. It’s heartfelt and funny in equal measure, a real classic.

    Paradise Kiss, by Ai Yazawa (Tokyopop): Creative passion and young lust clash in this sexy soap about student designers and their muse, a gawky grind who discovers her inner supermodel (and lots of other stuff). If you’ve been enjoying Yazawa’s Nana (Viz), you owe it to yourself to give this one a look. (And if there was ever a series that begged for a glamorous, done-in-one omnibus treatment, it’s this one. Or maybe Antique Bakery. Or both.)

    So what are your swoon-worthy choices?

    Edited to add one more, because I can’t believe I forgot it:

    Rica ‘tte Kanji!?, by Rica Takashima (ALC): This is perhaps the most adorable backlash comic ever. After growing seriously weary of the often tragic outcomes of most manga tales of lesbian love, Takashima decided to take a more lighthearted, positive approach. The result is this charming story of the budding romance between a young innocent and the not-much-older-but-certainly-wiser woman she meets in Tokyo’s gay district.

    Upcoming 2/13/2008

    by

    I need to just abandon introductory paragraphs on these things and come up with some lazy boilerplate, because they’re becoming increasingly feeble. Something like…

    Some picks from the ComicList for Wednesday, Feb. 13:

    Dark Horse offers the third volume of Kazuhiro Okamoto’s Translucent, a coming-of-age comedy about a girl you can see right through. I know, it sounds like it will pound your skull to jelly with the metaphor hammer even if you manage to find protective headgear, but it’s really sweet, often very funny and populated by charming, quirky characters.

    I was instantly smitten with the first volume of Yuki Nakaji’s Venus in Love (CMX), a slice-of-life college comedy about a girl and a guy in love… with the same guy. The second volume arrives Wednesday, and I’m really looking forward to it.

    I’m not entirely sold on Lewis Trondheim’s Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella (NBM), but I’m willing to be convinced. The pages posted at the blog NBM has erected are absolutely gorgeous, though it’s hard to get a handle on the general subject matter and tone. I guess what I’m asking is if it’s good mundane or bad mundane?

    More free dairy products

    by

    It’s not a direct follow-up to yesterday’s piece in The New York Times, but it’s interesting to see how many groups are dealing with the possibilities of distributing content free on the web in addition to or instead of through traditional print models. This time, it’s the faculty of Harvard:

    “‘In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,’ said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. ‘It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.’”

    This all sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

    “The publishing industry, as well as some scholarly groups, have opposed some forms of open access, contending that free distribution of scholarly articles would ultimately eat away at journals’ value and wreck the existing business model. Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo. It would also cut into subsidies that some journals provide for educational training and professional meetings, they say.”

    The interesting difference is that nobody seems to think there’s a reasonable argument that free content will support those traditional models. In fact, aside from the gatekeepers of those traditional models, nobody seems to care much whether it does or not.