The Manga Curmudgeon

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

From the stack: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together

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At this point, I’m pretty sure you either like Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series (Oni Press) or you don’t. There’s nothing in the fourth volume, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, that’s likely to change your opinion either way. For me, that means another delightful installment of comedy, action, romance and cheerful absurdity in a wonderfully cohesive package.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t surprises in the new chapter. As the title suggests, the titular twenty-something is brought up short by some shocking new developments – the specter of gainful employment, shelter, and emotional maturity. O’Malley manages this without shifting the tone at all, keeping things antic and sweet. He juggles his large cast with skill, mixing and matching in sneaky, amusing ways and introducing appealing new characters.

This series is just pure pleasure for me. It makes me giddy-happy in the same ways as Love Roma, Yotsuba&! and Empowered, with a gifted creator picking from a grab-bag of narrative elements and making them all work together beautifully. I just love this book.

(This review is based on a preview proof provided by the publisher, though I’m totally buying it when it comes out on Wednesday, Nov. 15.)

Daisies chain

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Eee! The awesome and delightful Pushing Daisies has an on-line comic written by series creator Bryan Fuller and drawn by CAMERON STEWART. LOVE! (Okay, it’s not all drawn by Stewart, and the interface is kind of awful, but still…)

Quick comic comments: Road reading

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There’s always plenty to do in Las Vegas, not least of which is compensating for the feeling of complicity in propping up a fundamentally unsustainable and wasteful human settlement. But a trip to Alternate Reality Comics always helps me forget the guilt, at least briefly, because it’s an awesome shop. It has a really great selection, and the staff is always helpful. And since it’s located between the airport and our hotel of choice, I was totally justified in stopping there before we checked in.

I haven’t read all of my haul yet, and I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with what I’ve read so far.

First were two second volumes of Fumi Yoshinaga series: Ichigenme… The First Class Is Civil Law (801) and The Moon and the Sandals (Juné). It’s Yoshinaga, so neither is anywhere close to bad, but it seems like she concentrated all of the heavy lifting in terms of character and nuance in the first volumes so she could concentrate on the hot couple action in the second rounds. And hey, at least she did that initial heavy lifting at all, which gives the action some welcome depth.

Then there was Girl Genius: Agatha Heterodyne and the Golden Trilobite (Airship). Don’t get me wrong: I really enjoy this series and would strongly recommend it. It’s just that this volume focused more on the narrative spine of the series than its heart. In other words, Agatha got pushed to the sidelines, which served to escalate the tension in the story but left me disappointed. I like the supporting cast, many of whom were pressed into service to rescue Agatha, and it was nice to believe that a bunch of people would run around risking their lives for the lead. A lot of times, creators will try and pass their lead off as beloved without doing any of the set-up needed to make it credible. Phil and Kaja Foglio have earned this kind of development, though.

Of course, it just reminds you that Agatha is terrific and plucky and smart and that you aren’t seeing very much of her in action. Which was a downer.

Upcoming 11/7/2007

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It’s nice when there’s a clear and present Pick of the Week to be found on the shipping list. This time around, it’s the Azumanga Daioh Omnibus from ADV. (I know!) It’s like ADV is trying to balance its karma by keeping a steady stream of Kiyohiko Azuma manga. And it’s working. Anyway, much as I love Azuma’s Yotsuba&! (also from ADV… see? See?), I’ve yet to sample this gag-strip series. It’s like I was waiting for just the right opportunity.

There was a lot to like in the first Mammoth Book of Best New Manga (Carroll & Graf), and I’m sure I’ll find the same to be true the second volume. Even though it doesn’t seem to have a new chapter of Andi Watson’s “Princess at Midnight.” Which is just wrong. Though I did pick up Glister in Vegas, and that should prove an adequate substitute when I get around to reading it.

On the “new volumes of ongoing series” front, we have Eden: It’s an Endless World! Vol. 9 from Dark Horse, Kindaichi Case Files Vol. 16 from Tokyopop, and Gin Tama Vol. 3 from Viz. Goodness aplenty, and I’m particularly pleased with the preview blurb for Eden, which doesn’t even mention drug kingpins or crack whores.

In other news, Maintenance (Oni Press) takes on Starbucks. That should be fun.

The Beat goes on

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I thought I’d get around to putting a column together on Sunday, but roughly 13 hours in airports or on planes left me incapable of coherent thought. Things will be back on schedule next week.

To ease myself back into society, I turned to shôjo, catching up with some reading that I didn’t have time to get to before I left (and didn’t think to pack).

I strongly suspected I’d like Chica Umino’s Honey and Clover before I ever picked up an issue of Shojo Beat, and I do, but the real surprise is always Hinako Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles. It’s really so lovely and perfectly pitched, and I hope it doesn’t get lost in the wave of titles from this imprint. It’s equally effective in its portrayal of big, life-changing moments and small-but-telling ones. I hope lots of people give it a look when it comes out in digest form.

The seventh volume of Ai Yazawa’s Nana arrived somewhat belatedly at the local comic shop, and it comes as a surprise to me that something was actually missing from the previous six: Jun and her boyfriend sitting in bed and talking trash about the main characters. I didn’t realize this before, but I could read three or four volumes that consisted of nothing but snarky pillow talk between these two. Don’t get me wrong – I love the Nanas and the bands and their respective hangers-on, but it was lovely and funny to see people look at them with something resembling perspective.

Dead trees

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I spend a lot of time staring at screens, so I’m always a little nervous when we head off on a vacation with limited internet connectivity and no television. In a place as beautiful as Zion National Park, it’s hard to care, and I always get a lot of reading done.

Best of the pile of prose was Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Penguin Group). It’s all sloppy and raucous on the surface, but mythic and almost perfectly constructed underneath, and it’s got incredibly memorable characters. For a novel that’s ostensibly about a fat geek who wishes he could get laid, that’s saying something. But Diaz has apparently never met a digression that he couldn’t tweak into something intelligent and thrilling, and his protagonist’s nerdish obsessions are just part of the tapestry. I haven’t had much success with geek tragedy, but this book is an absolute thrill.

Not in the same league as Diaz’s book but wonderfully readable and smart, Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher (St. Martin’s Press) humanizes those irritating culture wars that make us all froth. In it, a sex education teacher pays for a moment of frankness by having an abstinence-only curriculum forced upon her by an activist congregation and a craven school board. Then she finds out that a member of the congregation is the coach of her daughter’s soccer team. Freedom, faith and sex mash together in appealingly messy ways, and the characters are uniformly well-rounded and endearing. It’s nice to see an author strike a balance between “flawed” and “intolerable,” which Perrotta manages quite neatly. There are some easy marks in the cast, and the book is much funnier for it, but there’s an overall generosity to Perrotta’s approach that’s really rewarding. If it sounds like an HBO original picture, it probably will be at some point. Fans of the novels of Stephen McCauley will feel right at home.

And because you have to read some laughably improbable crap while on vacation, I was really happy that my partner had brought a couple of books by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child along, The Book of the Dead and The Wheel of Darkness. They both star that most ridiculous of Mary Sues, Special Agent Pendergast, and they’re complete hogwash, but they’re amusing all the same. As in all Preston-Child novels, vague supernatural menaces and staggering authoritarian incompetence conspire to put hundreds of indifferently characterized extras at risk, and only Special Agent Contrivance can save them. How these two authors have managed to avoid being burned in effigy by whatever professional organization exists for museum curators I don’t know, not to mention any secret society that exists for the defense of narrative plausibility. But when your plane has been delayed for two hours and your mind is already running to thoughts of homicide and widespread mayhem, it’s good to have one of their books handy.

I read some comics too, but I’ll get to them later.

Back

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Okay, so I forgot to mention that I was going away for a week. Apologies all around.

Oh, and if you posted a comment and didn’t see it appear and suspected it got caught in the spam filter, apologies again, but I just dumped the whole filter without sifting through like I usually do, ’cause DAMN, go away for a week and that stuff piles up.

Also, airports are the most horrible places on the face of the Earth and I hate them so much.

Death, pie and divas

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I’m a lazy TV viewer. I don’t really have much in the way of appointment programming, and why should I when I can turn on the TV at any hour of the day and find an episode from the Law and Order franchise? But I have fallen hard for Pushing Daisies (ABC). Given that it’s like a live-action fusion of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service and Antique Bakery, how could I not? Here are ten reasons I love it:

1. The structure. Like many of my favorite manga series, the show has a strong premise (a guy can raise the dead briefly without consequence, or permanently if he’s willing to allow something else to die in the resurrected creature’s stead), a predominantly episodic format, and enough strong subplots to round out the hour.

2. The dialogue. “Just because I keep a bottle of vodka in my freezer doesn’t mean I have to drink it. Oh, wait… Yes, it does.”

3. The setting. There should be more entertainments set in pie shops. When things like pears in a gruyere crust can come up organically in conversation, I am happy.

4. The premise. They deal with dead people. I have no resistance to this.

5. The ensemble. Not only is each member of the cast solid in his or her own right, they have terrific chemistry, no matter how you mix and match them. The writers manage to juggle everyone’s subplots well too, so you get a good dose of everyone in each episode.

6. The look. Everything is as color-saturated and artificial as a splashy movie musical from back in the day, and it’s really comforting to me. Also, I feel strangely flattered that they spent so much money on design instead of just taking a camcorder into some PA’s aunt’s apartment.

7. The narration. Oh, Jim Dale… I thought I would be reduced to obsessively replaying my Harry Potter audio books if I wanted to enjoy your gentle, witty readings. I’ll still do that anyways, but you’re pitch-perfect once again.

8. The tone. There’s an overall sunniness to things that’s appealing, but it might become too much if there weren’t darker undercurrents. There’s balance, which is always appreciated.

9. It feels like a musical. Beyond having major Broadway talent like Kristin Chenoweth and Ellen (Little Shop of Horrors) Greene, the show feels like it could burst into song at any moment. I’m glad it doesn’t, but I love that vibe. (And I really love that it had a quick scene of Chenoweth and Greene belting out “Birdhouse in Your Soul” as they drove along in a paneled station wagon. Get out of my head, show!)

10. Chenoweth: I know I sound like the most stereotypical Broadway-loving homosexual in the world, but she is just peerlessly fabulous, partly because I find her a little frightening. Her performances always combine manic energy and unpredictable comedy with this kind of spooky precision that gives everything more force without making it seem artificial. She’s impossible, in other words, and I’m so glad she finally has a TV role that’s worthy of her.

Parallel universe

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I like to follow the ongoing discussions about the evolution of bookstores and comic shops (or Big Boxes versus specialists, if you like), so I thought this article in The New York Times was fascinating. It looks at the existing state of Germany’s book market – where small shops and big chains coexist peacefully and seem to thrive in each other’s company:

“Germany’s book culture is sustained by an age-old practice requiring all bookstores, including German online booksellers, to sell books at fixed prices. Save for old, used or damaged books, discounting in Germany is illegal. All books must cost the same whether they’re sold over the Internet or at Steinmetz, a shop in Offenbach that opened its doors in Goethe’s day, or at a Hugendubel or a Thalia, the two big chains.

“What results has helped small, quality publishers like Berenberg. But it has also — American consumers should take note — caused book prices to drop. Last year, on average, book prices fell 0.5 percent.”

Alas, that delicate, consumer-friendly balance might be threatened by recent developments in neighboring Switzerland:

“Just across the border, the Swiss lately decided to permit the discounting of German books — a move that some in the book trade here fear will eventually force Germany itself to follow suit, transforming a diverse and book-rich culture into an echo of big-chain America.”

While I enjoy bargain-hunting as much as anyone, I do find the description of Germany’s book market kind of utopian. I’m still bitter about the closing of a mystery book shop in Dupont Circle, and few things make me depressed in quite the same way as those intermittent articles about independently owned, sometimes specialty book shops shuttering because they can’t compete with the seven or eight Barnes and Noble and Borders stores that have opened up.

Of course, I’m a total hypocrite, ignoring these socialist leanings whenever a coupon shows up in the mail. And general principle couldn’t keep me from laughing and laughing at Meg Ryan’s misfortunes in You’ve Got Mail, but I don’t think that had anything to do with her character’s profession.

Still, the article is well worth a read for a glimpse at another market approach to book sales, the competing interests of culture and economics, and lots of other related issues.

Upcoming 10/24/2007

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It isn’t a huge week in terms of new comics arrivals, but there are some choice items.

The one I’m anticipating most eagerly is probably Mi-Kyung Yun’s Bride of the Water God from Dark Horse. It looks gorgeous, its folklore-rich premise sounds intriguing, and any series that starts with attempted human sacrifice is worth at least a look. Manga Recon’s Katherine Dacey-Tsuei thinks very highly of it, which is always a good sign.

Del Rey, Tokyopop and Viz are taking the week off, for the most part, but Go! Comi leaps into the breach with new volumes of four ongoing series. Of them, I’d definitely recommend Setona Mizushiro’s Afterschool Nightmare, which hits the five-volume mark. It’s still providing unsettling, emotionally complex new developments for its cast of identity-challenged teens. Then there’s Hideyuki Kurata’s Train + Train, which has been steadily improving since a rather lackluster first volume. The third ended in a surprising cliffhanger, with the Special Train students visiting a city beset by terrorists. I’m looking forward to seeing how things play out.

Next week, I’ll be in range of one of the best comic shops I’ve ever visited, so I’m sure I’ll be able to browse the four new releases from PictureBox. I’m especially curious about Yuichi Yokoyama’s New Engineering, though I suspect I’ll be more interested in “Public Works” than “Combat.” Chris Mautner picked it as his “book of the show” from SPX, a show that always seems to yield a number of amazing books.