The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Upcoming 1/16/2008

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Before I get started with this week’s comic releases, I just wanted to note that it’s Jakala Family for the Win Week over at Sporadic Sequential. (“But they don’t think that Spider-Man making a deal with the devil looks bad?”)

Gerard Way and Gabrial Bá’s The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite (Dark Horse) nears its conclusion with the fifth issue. I’ve really been enjoying this series in single issues, which is kind of rare given my general opinions on what constitutes a satisfying chunk of comics. I still think the collection is going to sell like crazy, and I can’t imagine Dark Horse will wait too long to release it, because they seem to have missed few opportunities to wring every dollar possible out of the new franchise.

Of all the titles coming out from Juné today, the one that interests me most is Tatsumi Kaiya’s Party, as it seems to start where many boys’-love titles end: with the relationship established and the protagonists dealing with life as a couple.

I can’t believe I forgot to put Yu Yagami’s Hikkatsu! Strike a Blow to Vivify (Go! Comi) on my “Year in Fun” list. It’s the moving story of a young man who practices appliance repair via the martial arts and the raised-by-pigeons girl who has decided she loves him.

It’s already the best-selling book of all time, but perhaps a manga version will help The Bible hold the top spot. Random House releases The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation, adapted by Siku. I made a point of reading as little of The Bible as a Catholic upbringing would allow, so I’ll point you towards Katherine Dacey’s thoughtful review at Manga Recon.

Do weaponized dead fish count as some kind of Biblical plague? If so, you can supplement your Manga Bible reading with the second volume of Junji Ito’s Gyo. Tremble before their smelly, skittering onslaught! (Silly as almost all of this book is, I think things are always creepier when they skitter.)

Just curious

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On the list of things I’d love to read: DC’s cease-and-desist letters to Playboy, if they actually exist. Comment makers over at The Beat suggested, probably quite correctly, that Playboy has been down this particular road often enough that it’s expert at just avoiding actionable copyright infringement.

I mean, looking back on the vigor DC demonstrated with that Batman-and-Robin slash art exhibition from a couple of years ago, I can’t imagine there isn’t some amusingly forceful legalese floating around out there somewhere. Right?

Filed Under: DC

Flipping out

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Because it’s never too early to start thinking about next year’s “Best of…” list, I devote this week’s Flipped to two serious contenders from Viz’s Shojo Beat imprint: Hinaka Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles and Chica Umino’s Honey and Clover.

Yes, I’ve written about them before in serialization. And yes, I’ll probably write about them again.

(And yes, it probably is too early to be thinking about the best of 2008.)

Thumbs

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We saw The Orphanage on Saturday, which was watchable enough up to a certain point, if totally familiar. What I really liked about it was that every actor in the movie, in addition to being very talented, looked like someone you might actually see in the grocery store or sit next to on the bus. It was a refreshing change. So basically it was kind of like The Others mixed with Dark Water.

(It doesn’t do me any credit, but one of the high points of the movie was when the obnoxious group of audience members fled at the first hint of a subtitle. I’d been dreading them as they complained about all those stairs you had to climb to get to their preferred seats, screamed at each other for Raisinettes, and laughed raucously at and quoted dialogue from the Meet the Spartans trailer. As soon as they realized they’d have to read the movie, they took off for another theatre, and everyone was happier.)

That night, we watched Knocked Up, and I can’t tell you how pleasantly surprised I was by it. I’m not even sure why I rented it in the first place, because I learned from bitter experience (Sideways) that unanimous critical praise for a movie dedicated to developmentally arrested heterosexual males doesn’t mean I’ll enjoy a single minute of it, but this was a treat. Now I’m going to have to put more Judd Apatow stuff in the queue.

I’d also developed a weird resistance to Katherine Heigl, mostly because she’s the designated It Girl of the moment, and bitter experience (Kate Hudson) has led me to distrust such coronations. But she’s really good, combining the qualities I find charming in Gwynneth Paltrow and Lisa Kudrow without either’s pitfalls. Leslie Mann was a total revelation, combining qualities I enjoy in several actresses who have no pitfalls (Madeline Kahn, Deborah Rush, and Rachael Harris) but bringing her own distinctive style to the mix. It seemed to take Seth Rogan a bit to find his footing, but I ended up liking him a lot too.

But what I particularly liked about the movie was that it dealt with character rather than tired gender constructs. It used some of those constructs but mostly just to undermine them, which was nice. Everyone got to be right about something, and their moments of wrongness weren’t inexcusably obnoxious. I’m not articulating this very well, so I’ll just quote A.O. Scott from The New York Times:

“‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin’ and ‘Knocked Up’ are, primarily, movies about men, but Mr. Apatow is too smart, and too curious, to imprison the women in these films in the usual static roles of shrew, sexpot or sensible surrogate mom. Alison is not just Ben’s foil, and Mr. Apatow recognizes that her confusion and anxiety are, ultimately, far more acute and consequential than Ben’s. It’s her body and her future on the line, after all.”

The last movie we watched part of was The Invisible, which was crap. It’s about some obnoxious high-school kid who has to solve his own murder. It’s like a really long episode of The Ghost Whisperer but without any sympathetic characters, snappy dialogue, or endearing cheese. The movie did seem to have a big crush on Donnie Darko, though it didn’t result in anything worth watching.

Glossies

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I really enjoyed Tom Spurgeon’s piece on comics coverage from mainstream news outlets. I thought this sentence from the concluding paragraph really hit the nail on the head:

“At some point, however, comics needs to stop being flattered and start being covered, pulled apart, questioned, challenged and dissected.”

It’s weird to see excitement about an outlet like The New York Times covering comics terribly, just because it’s the Times doing it. And while it does get kind of irritating to see reporters swap “manga” and “anime” in those smaller-market papers that write stories about clubs at libraries and high schools, I would rather read a hundred of those articles than some strangely condescending piece on comics growing up and getting serious that uses Marvel’s Civil War as an example.

It seems like the larger and better resourced the outlet is, the more likely they are to swallow a publisher’s agenda whole, which is precisely the opposite of how it should be. To keep harping on the Times, it’s exceedingly strange to me that there’s such a disconnect between their critical standards (publishing comics from interesting talents and reviewing books by Adrian Tomine) and their willingness to commit accessory to hype when Marvel or DC has a story of questionable merit to flog.

Maybe it’s because I spend so much time reading the comics blogoshere where these spandex event comics are routinely recognized as ghoulish, franchise-prolonging stunts even by people who like them. Maybe I’ve bought too much into the concept of high-profile journalistic prestige and recoil when I see the Times or Newsweek looking dumb in easily avoidable ways. I’m not really sure, nor do I really have many ideas as to how to ameliorate the state of affairs. Cordial, constructively critical letters to reporters and arts editors? Consistent use of the “super-hero” modifier before “comics” when it’s appropriate?

I think I must be one of six or seven people who actually read Entertainment Weekly, because I don’t remember seeing anyone mention a piece by Jeff Jensen in the January 11 issue about how much he’s always loved Marvel comics. Seriously, that’s the beginning, middle and end of it for five heavily illustrated pages. With everything that’s happening in comics as a medium, EW’s big comics think piece comes down to how Jean Grey made some guy feel squishy when he was 10 years old?

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Updated to note: Kate Dacey-Tsuei has posted an excellent comic wish list for the new year, including some helpful suggestions for print outlets trying to cover the subject.

Random Thursday thoughts

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I’m in one of those phases where reading comics and writing about them seem to have overtaken me a bit. There are three or four reviews I’ve got drafted in my head, two or three column ideas bouncing around up there, and feedback overload from all of the good “best of 2007” lists floating around. The best thing to do would be to just sit down with these various books and get to writing (after I read Rutu Mordan’s Exit Wounds again, because critical consensus has me feeling like I’m missing brilliance and just seeing general excellence), but I keep getting distracted by new comics that show up.

As expected, Nextwave: I Kick Your Face (Marvel) was very, very funny, and I’d love to see more of it (collected in paperback). There was one sequence that was kind of jarring, featuring some perhaps-too-astute parodies of the kinds of spandex stylings that normally exhaust me. I recovered, obviously.

I’m still not quite sure what to think of the preview copy of Hell Girl that Del Rey sent me. It’s shôjo comeuppance theater by Miyuki Eto where terrible things happen to horrible people after good people prone to immediate gratification consign their tormentors to hell with the help of an urban legend with a web site. I think I need to read more of this before I render any kind of verdict, but there are some really discordant things going on here.

And a whole bunch of Viz books I really like have come out lately. I like Naoki Urasawa’s Monster so much better when it doesn’t focus on plaster saint Tenma, and I’m constantly and pleasantly surprised by Urasawa’s ability to structure a thriller in surprising but entirely coherent ways. I sense a whole lot of Tenma on the immediate horizon, but the book’s pleasures will definitely outweigh the dullness of its protagonist. More Nana more often makes me happy, even when the story itself makes me very, very sad. I love how Ai Yazawa is playing with and rebalancing the naïve/worldly dynamic between her two leads. And the handy thing about having the kind of large, well-crafted cast that has assembled in Fullmetal Alchemist is that you can do an entire volume where one lead barely appears and the other doesn’t show up at all and it will still be riveting.

And now, some links:

  • Christopher Butcher takes a very thoughtful, well-informed, in-depth look at some of the items from my 2007 manga news round-up.
  • Johanna Draper Carlson rounds up some recent manga news items and offers her own thoughts. (Pop quiz: Does Dark Horse actually publish any shôjo, or just manga titles from other categories that people who like shôjo might enjoy?)
  • The Occasional Superheroine looks at Newsweek’s discovery of women who write comics and finds it wanting. (When I read the piece at Newsweek’s site, there was this horrible sidebar ad about some wrinkle cream showing a woman who had been retouched to look like something just this side of moldering, because physical representations of life experience are apparently to be fought with all the vigor science can muster. It seems to have been taken out of the page’s ad rotation, and while the replacements are surprisingly low-rent for an outfit like Newsweek, none seem to be actively thematically opposed to the page’s main content. Yay?)

    • Upcoming 1/9/2008

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    Now this is a light week in the comic shops. Really. It is. There are a few items of note, though.

    Whenever I see people who don’t normally read super-hero comics recommend something from that category, it tends to go on my mental checklist. Combine that with people who don’t normally seek out comics by Warren Ellis recommending something from that category, and I’ve got a double, counter-intuitive recommendation on my hands. That kind of critical math worked out well with the first volume of Ellis and Stuart Immonen’s Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (Marvel), so I’m looking forward to the second collection, I Kick Your Face.

    Hey, is this the paperback debut of Black Hole (Pantheon) by Charles Burns? Maybe I’ll finally get around to reading it.

    And while I don’t see it on the ComicList, consensus indicates that the first volume of Katsu Aki’s Manga Sutra: Futari H is due out from Tokyopop. White-hot edu-manga for newlyweds? Too weird to pass up. And I’ve been looking for something to pair with The Manga Bible for an upcoming Flipped column.

    Tuesday linkblogging

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    Just because I feel like it, and because there are tons of good things to read at the moment, here are some of my favorite links of the past few days:

  • Dirk Deppey makes me feel extremely lazy and under-read with his thorough list of his selection of 52 excellent comics from 2007.
  • Del Rey’s Dallas Middaugh offers his choices for the ten best manga of 2007 and asks the age-old question:

    “And there’s Publisher’s Weekly. PW has done a great job covering manga the past several years, and I know for a fact that several of their writers are big manga readers. So what in the world is going on with their ‘Top 10 Manga for 2007’?”

  • Schuchaku East’s Chloe F. is giving away a copy of Fumiyo Kouno’s sublime Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. (Found via Kate no Komento.)
  • Tom Spurgeon’s holiday interviews have been a real treat, and it’s strangely reassuring that, no matter how many times it’s explained, I still don’t quite get who the target audience is for Minx:

    “[Karen Berger:] So why don’t we come out with a line, really an alternate to manga, that deals with real girls in the real world, real stories, real situations. Give it that human touch with very strong protagonists and independent thinkers.”

  • I’ve really been enjoying Deb Aoki’s end-of-the-year pieces over at About.Com’s manga blog.
  • There are nuggets aplenty in this press release from Viz, including a new release from Takeshi (Death Note, Hikaru no Go) Obata and this bit of joyful news for librarians who have developed a situational allergy to rubber cement and are sick to death of taping the spines of certain books:

    “In January, the company will also publish new hardcover Library Editions of the first volumes of several popular manga series including BLEACH, DEATH NOTE, FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST, INUYASHA, NARUTO and RANMA ½. The content of these editions will match their original manga counterparts but now packaged with a rugged hardcover to make the volumes viable for years of library use.”

    • Previews review – Jan. 2009

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    It’s Diamond Previews time again. Let’s dispense with the formalities and get right to it.

    There’s a clear and present Pick of the Month (that I probably won’t pick up at the comic shop because it will be widely available at a better price elsewhere). Pantheon is releasing the second volume of Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat, which is certainly cause for raucous celebration, at least in my house. The debut volume was my first exposure to Sfar’s work, and I’ve been watching like a hawk for more of this intriguing story. (Page 327.)

    I’m not familiar with the work of Ulf K., but Top Shelf’s solicitation for the Hieronymus B. graphic novel is intriguing. The book is being simultaneously released by five international publishers, and the preview pages at the publisher’s site are appealing. (Page 354.)

    I was thinking yesterday that people using “with Oscar-winner so-and-so” to entice viewers to watch a given movie should only be able to use the phrase when the cited individual actually won and Oscar for the movie in question. I’m thinking along the same lines when I see a publisher say a book is like Scott Pilgrim, even when the book is being released by the publisher of Scott Pilgrim. Maybe they could give Bryan Lee O’Malley some kind of signet ring, and he could grant approval for use of the comparison, but he’s probably too self-effacing to go along with something like that.

    Anyway, Oni is pitching Lars Brown’s North World to fans of not only Scott Pilgrim, but Gross Point Blank, Lord of the Rings, and Buffy, which is some kind of ultimate ven diagram of geekery. There’s no information up on Oni’s site yet, but you can check out the webcomic here. It looks like fun in a game-logic sort of way, with Brown blending role-playing game elements with comedic slacker angst. So… yeah… like Scott Pilgrim. (Page 326.)

    If Tom Spurgeon’s holiday interview with Simon Gane made you want to read something Gane has drawn, you really couldn’t do better than Paris, written by Andi Watson. It’s a gorgeous, romantic mini-series that seemed to have been conceived with the sole purpose of letting Gane draw the hell out of it, which is all the purpose it really needs. SLG offers the collected version again in case you missed it. (Page 213.)

    DC releases a full-color omnibus collection of the first sixteen issues of one of the best super-hero comics of the last fifteen years, James Robinson’s Starman. It’s got gorgeous Tony Harris art, a terrific cast, and a really nice generational-hero set-up without ever seeming like an airless exercise in continuity flogging. It’s kind of pricey at $49.99, so I would probably be inclined to wait for a paperback version if I didn’t already own the collected issues in one form or another. (Page 92.)

    And last but not least, one of my favorite manga series comes to an end. Tokyopop releases the final volume of Minetaro Mochizuki’s Dragon Head. Mochizuki has served up some incredible thrills and chills in ten volumes of character-driven survival drama. I still can’t understand why this series wasn’t a big hit. (Page 351.)