The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Yes and no

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The Food Network giveth, the Food Network taketh away.

I love risotto and enjoy making it, but I usually don’t add things to it. I just like it so much in its basic state that I’m not motivated to branch out. But this Ina Garten recipe sounded really good, and I love roasted squash, so I decided to give it a try. It seems like the only thing required to make me like risotto even more was roasted squash. I cooked the squash in the morning and let it cool, then tossed it in with the last addition of stock, and I think that worked really well. It let the juices from the squash mix in with the stock, then into the rice, but the squash stayed nice and firm. I also passed on the pancetta and the saffron, but I’m sure it would be really good with them.

I don’t know why I thought I’d want dessert after a meal like that, but I was very taken with this recipe from Nigella Lawson. I think I made it correctly, and it looked beautiful, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a distasteful combination of flavors in my life. The texture was really mushy and generally unfortunate as well. I’m thinking the caramel with the bourbon would make a nice sauce for something – ice cream or cake. But the addition of eggs to turn it into custard results in something really, really off.

I love A.O. Scott

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I just do. Here’s his take on the sorry state of the romantic comedy:

“Our parents and grandparents had Rock Hudson and Doris Days — such delicious subtext! such amazing office furniture! — or Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Or Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Or Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Or even, in ‘That Touch of Mink,’ Cary Grant and Doris Day. But you get the point. We have Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey.

“Who are perfectly charming. Don’t get me wrong. You remember them in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” don’t you? Neither do I, even if a search of this newspaper’s archives indicates that I saw it.”

It’s funny because it’s true. It’s also sad because it’s true.

Bait and switch

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I think this is one of those cases where the person who wrote the headline had a slightly different agenda than the person who wrote the column, because the article itself scarcely mentions comics at all. Hilariously, the one comic it does bring up is The Plain Janes from Minx, and when you think about how much effort they’ve expended trying to put daylight between their books and manga…

Hell is for children!

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It’s a rather slim week in the comic shops, so I thought I’d cast an eye on one release in particular that seems to be racking up some fairly divergent reactions, as Katherine Dacey notes in the latest Weekly Recon. Here are a couple of other opinions on Miyuki Eto’s Hell Girl, in addition to the ones Dacey cited:

Blog@Newsarama’s Chris Mautner is unequivocal in his dislike:

“Here it is, not even the end of January, and what will surely be regarded as one of the worst manga series of the year (at least in my house) comes tromping through the gates.”

Johanna (Comics Worth Reading) Draper Carlson suspects the story might work better in a different medium:

“This was an anime series before it was a manga, and I think it probably works better that way. By the end of the book, I found the stories getting shorter and more repetitive, which would be less of a problem if they were stand-alone episodes.”

Julie at the Manga Maniac Café gave it a B:

“There were five chapters in this first volume, and they were different enough to hold my attention. Though the outcomes were predictable and the characters were two-dimensional, the cutesy, detailed art helped to keep events moving along.”

At ComicMix, Andrew Wheeler wonders if it’s being pitched to the right age group:

“Hell Girl thus gets quite repetitive, and I have to admit that I was losing interest as I went along. The art style is full-blown shoujo, with immense eyes devouring entire faces with their dozens of points of light and welling tears. This is very much not for me, but – since it’s rated for teens 16 and up – it also seems aimed away from its natural audience, the overly dramatic young teen girl. There are still some of them at ages 16, 17, and 18, but they’re much more common at 13 and 14.”

I’m kind of indifferent to the charms of Hell Girl, so I will veer in an entirely different direction with a recommendation for the week: if you’re determined to spend money on manga but find the new releases uninspiring, go score yourself a copy of Osamu Tezuka’s totally insane, pansexual thriller MW (Vertical). It’s by no means perfect, but I can swear to you that you will not be bored for a single moment while reading it. How much more crazy-ass Tezuka gekiga is out there waiting to be licensed? I want more, because watching the God of Manga get his freak on is always worth every penny I pay. Both MW and Ode to Kirihito have been revelations, like finding out your kindly uncle was a cross-dressing jewel thief who dabbled in fomenting political unrest.

Language linkblogging

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I got an e-mail from a retired educator named Thomas Hanson pointing me to three blog posts about comics as teaching tools over at Open Education.Net.

The first entry is an overview of the mediums potential, particularly for teaching reading and writing. (I hadn’t given much thought to the latter, but it makes sense.) The second offers an interview with Chris (The Graphic Classroom) Wilson, covering the subject in more detail. The third lists “The Twelve Best Comic Books for the Classroom,” which include some challenging, sometimes controversial books.

The subject of manga in the classroom doesn’t come up, and I was kind of surprised that a web search of the phrase didn’t yield many results. There are lots of sites that include Japanese comics on their lists of recommendations for younger readers, but there isn’t a whole lot that specifically addresses the category as a teaching tool. It’s not a criticism, just something that struck me as curious.

(My teacher education ended during my first year of college after a classroom observation course that convinced me that I would be eaten alive daily if I continued down that particular path.)

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At Shuchaku East, Chloe takes a fascinating look at the comparative qualities of language as they relate to manga in and out of translation.

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And speaking of translation (well, in a tangential way), Mely responds to the final volume of Kaori Yuki’s Godchild (Viz) in a hilarious, spoiler-filled essay. If you’re like me, you’ll happily read Television Without Pity recaps of shows you’d never actually watch because of the wit and enthusiasm of the writers. Even if Godchild doesn’t interest you in the slightest, go read.

(Prior to its actual publication, Godchild did interest me a great deal, but the script was so dire that I couldn’t actually read much of it without grinding my teeth to stumps.)

Wild adapters

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I was reading Yuu Asami’s A.I. Revolution (Go! Comi) yesterday, and it’s a very nice book. I’ll probably write about it in more detail later, but one of the things that really struck me was the sense that the translation and adaptation made for a very fluid, appropriate reading experience. Some scripts come off as inadvertently clunky from beginning to end, but translator Christine Schilling and adapter Brynne Chandler actually employ clunkiness in ways that serve the story. (Several of the characters are humanoid robots, so it makes sense that their evolving use of language would be stiff or inelegant, and Schilling and Chandler seem to consciously play with the counterpoint between robot and human speech.)

Anyway, that’s a long, inelegant introduction to a question: has anyone put together a web-based resource that lists translator/adapter credits? I think it would be useful. Maybe I should do it if there isn’t one already out there.

Window shopping

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I don’t know why this is on my mind. Maybe it’s all the recent talk about comics retailing. But what’s the most attractive exterior you’ve seen for a comic shop?

It’s got to be tough on the shops that have a great big window display to deal with. If you put merchandise in it, you probably have to rotate it fairly regularly so it doesn’t bleach in the sun, or call the window-display merchandise a loss from the outset. (And even then you probably need to rotate it, because nothing says “Come, spend” like bleached-out paperbacks in the window.) I can understand the desire to block out all of the light to protect stock, but making the glass opaque (particularly black) makes the place look like another kind of periodical vendor entirely, and I’m not sure that’s the ideal solution.

Packing the window space with posters seems like a good idea, because you can fill it with colorful, varied images. Unfortunately, most of those posters seem to fade and yellow even faster than a display of books would, almost before you’ve got the fourth piece of tape up. I’ve seen this solution applied at a few different shops, and you can tell who doesn’t bother to rotate their posters. (Seriously, if you thought some of those ‘90s Image posters were ugly in full color, take a look at them in sepia.)

The worst solution I’ve ever seen was to have someone paint various super-heroes in front of a neutral background to provide the desired opacity while keeping it from looking like an adult bookstore. And wow, those were some ugly, B-list X-Men in that window. Terrible anatomy (though not cheesecake-y, so points for that), just plain weird faces, and odd choices that I doubt any average person off the street would recognize (like Psylocke version 3.7, or something).