The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Tip sheet

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So you want to write about comics for and by women. Or your editor has told you to write about comics by and for women. Before you get started, there are two recent examples you might want to peruse. This one is awful. This one is much better. Yours can be even better than the piece in The Guardian, if you remember some basic points.

Don’t conflate “comics” with “super-hero comics.” The latter is a subset of arguable size of the former, and you’ll open yourself up to all kinds of nitpicking from people like me if you fall back on that kind of shorthand.

Don’t wait too long to bring up manga. As Tom Spurgeon noted yesterday, “it’s weird reading an article about female comics readership where manga is the 11th graph below Wonder Woman, Minx and the Smurfs.” It could successfully be argued that the ascendance of comics for girls and women in the United States is significantly dependent on the popularity of manga.

Expand on manga and its various demographics. For a lot of people, the appeal of the category is its variety, and that variety extends to sub-categories. Saying that shôjo is a category of comics targeted primarily at girls is fine, but you’ll look smarter if you note that the category contains not only stories about fantasy and romance but science fiction, adventure, comedy, sports, horror, slice-of-life, and so on.

Don’t make the mistake that shôjo is exclusively the domain of a female audience, or that it’s the only kind of manga that girls and women read. Naruto and Bleach wouldn’t be bestsellers without a healthy female audience, and Fruits Basket wouldn’t achieve its numbers without some y chromosomes in the audience. (Books like Naruto, Bleach and Fullmetal Alchemist also give you the chance to note that girls already like super-heroes, though perhaps not the ones that immediately come to mind.)

Name names. If you’re writing about manga, you’ll sound more informed if you throw out a few titles that provide examples of the subject. If you want to write about manga targeted primarily at girls, pick up a copy of Shojo Beat. If you want to write about manga targeted primarily at boys, pick up a copy of Shonen Jump. Both are available at just about any bookstore, if not the supermarket. Both of these magazines feature several series with varied subjects and artistic styles, the better to help you avoid stupid reductions about subject matter or visual style.

Do some independent research. There are excellent resources available on manga, including Paul Gravett’s Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics and Jason Thompson’s Manga: The Complete Guide. You might not be able to work in everything you learn about the art form, but hey, they’re great reads, and they’ll help you frame your questions and make sensible comparisons. (For bonus points, and if you’re looking for a slightly rounder survey of what the contemporary comics industry looks like, you might also check out Gravett’s Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know, which combines introductory pieces and samples from various categories.)

Don’t make Gail Simone do all of the heavy lifting. Even if you’re focusing primarily on super-hero comics (which you should specifically note as often as is practical), you’ll end up with a more interesting piece if you cast a wider net for sources. There are plenty of interesting women making comics and coming at it from different perspectives who would probably be happy to talk to you.

If Simone is one of your primary sources, try not to forget that she’s an excellent writer of super-hero comics. She’s not just a rabble-rouser who identified an unfortunate trend in super-hero comics. She’s also one of the better practitioners of the genre, blending action, character development, and humor into her stories.

Don’t believe everything a publisher tells you. Yes, DC is to be congratulated for developing the Minx imprint, but they’re hardly the first publisher to target an audience of teen-aged women with original material. Tokyopop’s been doing it for years, to name only one, and they’ve gathered a roster of creators that’s packed with talented women.

Don’t think that a woman finally serving as the regular writer for Wonder Woman is the beginning of the trend you’re covering. If anything, it’s a rather belated example of a trend that’s been healthily underway for some time. Super-hero comics are sort of the last guests to arrive at this particular party, and some could argue that they just found their invitations, so you have to decide whether you want to flatter your sources or examine their efforts in a larger context.

Upcoming 1/23/2008

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Okay, I just have to say this. There’s no grief quite as unsettling and, frankly, often distasteful as nerd grief. To me, at least.

Now, on to this week’s comics releases.

AdHouse delivers the third issue of Fred Chao’s delightful Johnny Hiro, featuring a night at the opera and 47 Ronin Businessmen.

I don’t know how I’d feel if the protagonist of Masashi Tanaka’s Gon (CMX) actually ate baby penguins. He hasn’t (yet), so I’m looking forward to the third volume of this beautifully drawn manga. It promises vengeful baby wolf cubs, hungry piranha, and possibly psychedelic mushrooms.

Wow, two pamphlet comics in one week! The second comes from Fantagraphics in the form of the 10th issue of Linda Medley’s enchanting Castle Waiting. And hey, the revised Fantagraphics site has reasonably useful permalinks!

Wait, make that three floppies, all of which I love! The 19th issue of Jimmy Gownley’s funny, observant Amelia Rules! arrives via Renaissance Press.

Tuesday linkblogging

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Lots of people have posted really interesting pieces lately. I wish I could say I was one of them, but at least I can point in their direction.

Paul (Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics) Gravett contributes an appreciation of Tove (Moomin) Jansson, also reprinting a heartfelt introduction to a 1957 collection of Jansson’s comic strips from novelist Margery Allingham:

“On the Moomins themselves I find myself uncharacteristically reticent. Their appeal is so personal and so intricate that I feel chatter about them is like gossip in public about friends.”

At About.com, Deb Aoki conducts a lovely interview with Keiko (To Terra…, Andromeda Stories) Takemiya, covering her early days as a manga-ka and her views on how the industry has changed since she and her pioneering peers were turning everything on its head:

“Manga has become too much of a big business, which perhaps means that artists get pushed out into the public eye before they’ve achieved artistic maturity.”

Chloe (Shuchaku East) Ferguson launches a new column at ComiPress with a look at cover design and manga packaging:

“Part marketing compass, part demographic indicator; how manga is packaged can often tell you more than any press release ever will.”

Jason (Manga: The Complete Guide) Thompson launches a new column at Comixology with a look at manga of an historical bent.

And happily, The Overlooked Manga Festival hasn’t gone on hiatus just yet. Shaenon K. Garrity offers up The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Dark Horse) for your consideration, and offers the following pearl of all-purpose wisdom:

“I’m not the kind of reader who’s impressed by gimmicky characters. I get enough of that in webcomics, where people are constantly pushing me to read some unfunny thing that ‘you HAVE to love, because one of the characters is an ANGRY ZUCCHINI who works as a HITMAN and likes PLAYSTATION, and isn’t that ORIGINAL and BRILLIANT?’ No, it’s not original and brilliant. A regular old human being with an interesting, well-written personality would be original and brilliant. Wacky gimmicks are easy.”

Literacy and calluses

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I’m still one of those strange geezers who relegate cell phone use to emergency road service and ordering pizzas, so I’m always a little puzzled by new and exciting uses for these items. The latest I’ve seen is covered in this piece from The New York Times on the increasing popularity of novels written specifically to be read on a cell phone. These digital, on-the-fly novels are apparently making the transition to print in Japan, and they’re making lots and lots of money in the process.

“Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.

“‘Will cellphone novels kill “the author”?’ a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.”

I mean, I can’t even add spaces and punctuation when I try to compose a text message.

The suspense!

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I should have asked this earlier, but I just took a batch of miniature carrot cakes out of the oven, but I made them with whole wheat flour, because one of my only resolution equivalents is to put more fiber in my diet. Have I made a horrible mistake? Will they taste like horse chow?

Late breaking news: They turned out fine, if a little less moist than usual. Extra frosting compensated for that.

Big in France

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There are lots of familiar titles and creators among the award nominees at this year’s Angoulême International Comics Festival. Here are the nominees of the manga variety:

Sélection Officielle:

  • Amer Beton – Integrale (Tekkonkinkreet), by Taiyo Matsumoto, published by Tonkam
  • Death Note, by Takeshi Obata and Tsugumi Ohba, published by Kana
  • Helter Skelter, by Kyôko Okazaki, published by Sakka/Casterman

    • Prix du Patrimoine:

  • Un Gentil Garҫon, by Shinichi Abe, published by Cornélius

    • Sélection Jeunesse:

  • Chocola & Vanilla (Sugar Sugar Rune), by Moyocco Anno, published by Kurokawa
  • Doraemon, by Fujiko F. Fujio, published by Dargaud, Kana
  • Ippo: La Rage de Vaincre, by George Morikawa, published by Kurokawa
  • Kitaro le Repoussant, by Shigeru Mizuki, published by Cornélius
  • Yakitate Ja-Pan – Un Pain C’est Tout!, by Takashi Hashiguchi, Delcourt – Akata

    • Here’s what’s scheduled for the festival’s manga building.

    (Edited to add a title I’d missed. Thanks, Huff!)

    -ish

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    Just a quick request to comic shop owners: if your hours are posted on the internet, and they match the hours posted on the door of your shop, you might do your best to be open during those hours. Because someone might have taken a half-hour subway ride to try and spend money at your shop, been disappointed and annoyed at his inability to do so, and ended up spending that money at a big chain bookstore instead.

    I mean, that can’t be the preferred outcome for you, can it?

    Honorable mentions

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    Okay, back on the subject of the Young Adult Library Services Association’s 2008 choices of Great Graphic Novels for Teens: It’s been too long since I was a part of the teen demographic for me to pretend to know what they might like, but I think it’s a really good list of recommended reading for adults, so it makes me happy.

    Instead of picking through the list of selections, I thought I would look back at the nominations and see what didn’t make the cut. I was kind of startled to find some of my very favorite books in that category (because I’m egotistical), so I thought I’d put together a runners-up list of books that I think are well worth a read:

  • Abouet, Marguerite, Clement Oubrerie. Aya. Drawn and Quarterly. My review here.
  • Chantler, Scott. The Annotated Northwest Passage. Oni Press. My reviews of the paperback installments of the series here, here and here.
  • Morinaga, Ai. My Heavenly Hockey Club. Del Rey. My review of the first volume here.
  • Sfar, Joann. The Professor’s Daughter. Roaring Brook Press / First Second. My short review of the book here.
  • Tanaka, Masashi. Gon. DC Comics, CMX. My review here, and a much more persuasive critique here.
  • Vining, James. First in Space. Oni Press. My review here. (Honestly, I can see how there was only room for one “innocent animal shot into space” story on the list, and I’m sure Laika is brilliant, but it looks like the kind of book that would depress me for weeks.)

    • And a couple of books that I haven’t read yet, but really should:

  • Lat. Town Boy. Roaring Brook Press / First Second.
  • Shiga, Jason. Bookhunter. Sparkplug Comics.

    • I think I’m taking the Lat books for granted, knowing that I can almost always swing by a Barnes & Noble and pick one up. As for Bookhunter, I’m hoping an upcoming trip to a city with a good comics shop will allow me to correct that particular lapse. I’m sure I’ll be able to snag a copy of Sidescrollers, too, which did make the 2008 cut.

    YALSA dancing

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    Via Tom Spurgeon, the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association has posted its 2008 list of 43 Great Graphic Novels for Teens, including stand-alone books and ongoing series, along with a top 10 drawn from those.

    I’ll probably compose a longer reaction later, but my first impression is that a lot of the entries could compose a good chunk of the list of my favorite ongoing manga series.