The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Amazon attacks!

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It’s bound to happen from time to time. This week’s ComicList just doesn’t inspire me. I’m not too worried, as I’ve got a big shipment coming from Amazon, which happens to be having one of its four-for-the-price-of-three sales underway.

So to fill in for the usually pre-Wednesday, ramblings, here are some possible combinations you might consider if you’re looking through those Amazon listings.

  • The Popularity Contest: Have you fallen behind on (or never savored) some of the best-selling series out there? Now is your chance to atone.
  • I Missed the Omnibus! Maybe you just weren’t able to commit to that big, one-volume edition of Jeff Smith’s delightful Bone. You can sample it in smaller doses.
  • Fashion Forward: It’s not really open for debate that Ai Yazawa creates some of the most stylish manga out there, between Paradise Kiss and Nana.
  • The Anime’s Coming! The Anime’s Coming! As if the manga wasn’t popular enough, live-action and animated versions of Death Note will be arriving soon. See what all of the fuss is about.
  • Boys, Boys, Boys: Fans of yaoi would do well to give this list a careful scan, as there are treasures within.
  • She’s Back: After too long of an absence, ADV has resumed releases of Yotsuba&! And Amazon has her.
  • Four Minxes: Were you reluctant to pick up DC’s Minx books until you heard some critical feedback? You can pick them all up and get one for free. (To be honest, the only one I’d recommend without reservation is Re-Gifters.)
  • The Godfather: No, not the Corleone version — Tezuka. There’s a nice sampling of his work sprinkled among the offerings.

    • I had other categories in mind, but if I cut and paste one more hyperlink, I’ll lose my mind. Or what’s left of it.

    Okay, I can manage one more. Buy this book.

    While they're at it…

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    The New Haven Register provides an introduction to the graphic novel in light of last week’s coverage of the Guilford High School dispute. Rachael Scarborough King talks about the range of content, growing popularity, occasional controversy, and so on.

    Great quote from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s Charles Brownstein:

    “‘The content of a graphic novel is limited only by the author’s imagination, and so there’s content that skews towards readers of all ages,’ Brownstein said. ‘Just like somebody wouldn’t necessarily write off film because they happened to see a sophomoric comedy the first time they saw a movie, somebody shouldn’t write off graphic novels either because they’re coming in with a preconception.’”

    Neglect, correct

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    In this week’s Flipped, I call for back-up in the person of noted manga blogger CLAMP maniac Katherine Dacey-Tsuei to discuss the hit-making quartet’s work.

    I realize that my tastes can be relatively narrow, and this leads me to neglect big chunks of the licensed manga catalog, so I hope to do more of these in the future. Got a favorite creator, category or genre and want to sing its praises? Drop me a line.

    The blood-soaked trousseau

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    I was checking out that “Wedding Special” thing via Occasional Superheroine, and the ending definitely sounds icky and dumb and sensationalistic, but I will admit that some atrophied fanboy reflex kicked in when I saw that last panel.

    I just don’t believe for a moment that Ollie would wear boxers. He must be a clone.

    When we assume…

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    The mother of the now-14-year-old girl at the center of the situation in the Connecticut high school visits The Beat to present her side of the story, which is really, really welcome, given some of the assumptions that were flying around.

    If I had a teenaged daughter…

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    … I’d greet each new day with a handful of Valium washed down with a brimming tumbler of vodka. That’s all I can say with any certainty.

    I wonder if anyone’s using this Connecticut business to put a Minx pitch together. There’s certainly enough hot-button material there.

    The best defense?

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    New York Magazine’s Vulture column picks up on the Eightball kerfuffle:

    “Having read the comic, which was later included in Clowes’s Pantheon-published graphic novel, Ice Haven, we can say that calling this comic book ‘borderline pornography’ is hilarious. Dude, Gossip Girl is borderline pornography. This is an extremely non-salacious art comic by a guy whose work is so tame these days he’s currently the Times magazine’s cartoonist of choice.”

    Was there a compliment in there?

    The rest of the story

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    More details on the Eightball #22 controversy are available in the New Haven Register. Most interesting to me is the reaction of the father of the unnamed student, who chafes at being viewed as a reactionary censor:

    “‘I’m extremely upset with the administration for not following through with their word of contacting the parents,’ the father said. ‘It looks like we got some teacher fired (over) a Harry Potter novel or Catcher in the Rye.’

    …

    “His wife said she became especially concerned when her daughter told her Fisher asked her ‘how the book made her feel,’ although the mother added that she has no idea ‘what his intention was.’

    “‘She was victimized by him to begin with and over and over again for 2½ weeks now,’ she said. ‘We just feel like if people understand what he had given her, then they would understand that it’s not our daughter’s fault.’”

    It’s an extremely thorough and nuanced report from Rachael Scarborough King, delving into aspects that normally aren’t considered in stories like these. The piece also gives a lot more detail than the badly written fear-news sound bytes at WTNH.

    By way of example, one of Scarborough King’s sources is Charles Brownstein of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:

    “‘Somebody could do a superficial glance of the material and not put the contextual pieces together, thereby perhaps seeing a panel with violence, perhaps seeing a panel with nudity and taking the image out of context as something that it’s not,’ he said. ‘The more people are educated about the category, the less those sorts of misunderstandings occur.’”

    Conn jobless

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    So what’s the graphic novel that’s started a flap in a Connecticut high school, as noted by The Beat yesterday? Nobody’s saying, but the teacher has resigned, according to this report in the New Haven Register.

    “Superintendent of Schools Thomas Forcella said Fisher gave the freshman girl an ‘inappropriate’ graphic novel as part of an outside reading assignment. Forcella would not name the book or describe the objectionable elements.

    “‘All I can say is it was, in my estimation, inappropriate for the grade level due to the content and the nature of the material,’ he said.”

    Since all anyone can do at this point is throw out unflattering speculation, I’ll guess that

    a) the book was something obviously literary (like Fun Home or Blankets) but featuring adult content, and the district is familiar with similar controversies that didn’t make the censoring agent look good, or

    b) the district is reluctant to trigger a rush on the graphic novel among its freshman students by naming it.