The Manga Curmudgeon

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

The fairness doctrine

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So I’m reading Greg Rucka’s take on the whole “Characters from Underrepresented Groups Are Tragedy Magnets” discussion, and looking at the “Bad things happen to straight white men, too” argument. And that’s fair enough. I mean, you only have to look through just about any given run of Spider-Man or Daredevil to see a rich tapestry of misery and misfortune, and it’s by design. They’re underdogs, and part of the pitch is that their lives suck but they keep trying.

On the other hand, this argument jumped out at me, and not in a good way:

“We live in a world where women are treated worse than men — where they are abused and attacked and degraded on the basis of their gender alone. It’s wrong, and it’s vile, and it’s evil, but it’s the truth, and refusing to recognize the same in fiction leads to dishonest fiction, and that’s bad writing.”

I think I prefer the “I’m ladling out abuse with a blindfold on” position to the “Not reflecting grim societal realities in my escapist power fantasies is irresponsible” gambit. Super-heroic fantasy is at least partly about portraying a better world than the one we live in. There are lots of societal trends, positive and negative, that aren’t proportionately represented in comics, and arguing that you’re just being honest by folding in some of the fouler ones strikes me as specious.

And this:

“It’s the same thing here again — this double-standard that says female characters should be allowed only highs, and not lows; that they should be spared harm, and treated with kid gloves.”

Okay, this might carry some weight if there was a litany of highs in the canon that someone could point to – moments of triumph or achievement for women and gays and characters of color. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I read super-hero comics with any regularity, so I might not be cognizant of a recent spate of success stories for characters in this category, but I’m guessing that trend hasn’t exactly blossomed during my period of inattentiveness. (Maybe I should count Black Canary’s “Wedding Planner”? It’s every woman’s dream, isn’t it, to marry the old man who cheated on you over and over again? You’ve come a long way, baby!)

A few legitimate success stories for these characters might not be such a bad idea. The grim bits might be less glaring if they were balanced by some victories that the minority characters owned. People might not care so much that Northstar dies over and over again and gets brainwashed by villains if he affected his own escape from those grim circumstances. If, instead of being a sexual help-maiden allowing a straight, white male super-hero to overcome his bitterness, the Scarlet Witch got her act together and reclaimed her heroic nature. If, instead of being supporting character cannon fodder or prisoners of misfortune, these characters got to save the day and feel good about it.

There’s a difference between survival and triumph, and it seems to me like the two things are being disproportionately portioned out to a certain class of character. Part of that is the difference between an A-list character and those who are further down the alphabet, obviously, but the A-list might become larger and more diverse and more interesting if everyone else got a chance to be victorious.

Upcoming 9/6

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Why am I more lethargic after a three-day weekend than I was before? I have only a vague grasp of what day it currently is and whether I need to put the trash out, but I know that comics will be arriving at some point, because the ComicList tells me so.

The local comic shop has stopped ordering shelf copies of almost every manga series and unloaded its back stock. Plenty of people still pre-order, though I think the chain bookstores in the area have presented more competition than the management wants to wrangle. So it’s one of those comic shops, pretty much, though it’s still useful as an order point for things that won’t readily show up in bookstores.

One of the few series that get shelf copies is MPD Psycho by Eiji Otsuka and Sho-U Tajima (Dark Horse). This is handy, because I’m not quite ready to commit to putting the series on my reserve list. The first volume neared my upper limit of lurid violence, but it was intriguing enough to keep me reading for another volume.

I managed to enjoy First in Space (Oni), even though animals in peril make me even more uncomfortable than dismembered humans. I’m not sure I’ll have the emotional fortitude for Laika by Nick Abadzis (First Second). It looks terrific, and I’ll definitely keep it in mind for one of those days when I’m in the mood for a good cry, but the current emotional barometer readings suggest that now isn’t the time.

It had to happen sometime. After a long string of good choices, Go! Comi has finally picked a couple of licenses that really don’t work for me. This week sees the launch of Takeru Kirishima’s Kanna and Ryo Takagi’s The Devil Within. Kanna has some gripping scenes, but it doesn’t hang together as well as I’d like. (And twenty-something men reacting with varying degrees of inappropriateness to an eight-year-old girl will never sit well with me. Sorry.) As for The Devil Within, you know how super-deformed art sequences can sometimes be a happy break from pages of rich visual detail and emotional nuance, and can sometimes look like the manga-ka was just trying to turn his or her pages in on time? I strongly suspect the latter in this case, and the story and characters just aren’t engaging enough for me to overlook the inconsistent, rather ugly art.

(On the other hand, Hideyuki Kurata’s Train + Train just gets better and better. The series still isn’t taking advantage of the visual possibilities of its premise, but the characters and scenarios are gaining considerable emotional weight as things progress. It doesn’t come out this week, but the experience of saying negative things about Go! Comi’s catalog was odd enough that I had to compensate somehow.)

No-ruto

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Feast your eyes on the latest bestseller list at Publishers Weekly Comics Week, because I’m guessing it’s going to get a little monotonous in the coming months.

There are some interesting entries on the roster. I’m a little surprised that Absolute Boyfriend 4 beat Fullmetal Alchemist 14, given the anime support for the latter. The former did come out earlier in the month, so maybe that was a factor. We’ll see if either of them show up next month as well. It’s happened with Fullmetal before.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid shows up for the second month running in the same slot (third place), which makes me think I should read it. Have I missed a bunch of glowing reviews?

In spite of a lengthy span with no new volumes, Hellsing apparently hasn’t lost its audience. I’m not sure if that’s a good message for publishers.

This month’s consolation prize goes to the second volume of DC’s 52. It came in second for the month in the Direct Market, where “such characters as Booster Gold, Inifinity Inc and Black Adam that have since spun off their own series or miniseries” hold more coin.

Off Broadway

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My partner has XM Radio in his car, and it generally makes for amusing channel surfing. There are black clouds on the satellite radio horizon, though. The darkest is the On Broadway channel.

I’m a big musical geek, but man, is the On Broadway programming bad. With decades of likable music to add to the rotation, the On Broadway sadists seem focused entirely on the deservedly obscure, shows that bombed for reasons that become intuitively obvious when you hear parts of their score.

Equally irritating is their tendency to pick flop songs from good shows, numbers that you skip over while listening to the CD either because they aren’t up to the rest of the score’s standard or because they don’t really work in recorded form, relying on stage business. Middling orchestrations that serve well enough when a bunch of people are dancing don’t really make the cut for listeners who just want to stay awake while driving through southwestern Pennsylvania. But On Broadway loves them and plays them all the time.

Then there are the revival recordings of shows made famous by the original cast. Like Mandy Patankin and Bernadette Peters in Sunday in the Park with George? Hold on to those fond memories and change the channel quickly before you hear any of the version On Broadway is playing.

I really don’t know what their standards are. I suspect that they sit with a stack of CDs and try and find the numbers that would make you decide to sneak out to the bathroom if you were seeing the show live.

What sells, and where?

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It’s a couple of days old, but I found this comment at Journalista to be really interesting. It’s a very well-informed compare-and-contrast between what sells in comic shops and what sells in bookstores:

“I have a comic book shop, my girlfriend owns a bookstore. Here’s a quick list of what we’ve found:

“Naruto sells well everywhere.”

Okay, there’s a lot more, but given the big news of the day, I couldn’t resist. Anyway, go read, especially if you’re geek-ishly interested in the different audiences between the two kinds of retail outlets.

(Also, it’s kind of gruesomely fun to imagine creators rolling out comic-shop friendlier versions of work like Fun Home. I’m easily amused.)

I'm sure this won't become tiresome at all

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Well, that’s cutting it close. With only eight months to go, Publishers Weekly Comics Week is finally getting around to previewing the next New York Comic-Con. Which is in April.

I do think it’s a nice idea to make attendance easier for small-press operations, though I tend to agree with Chris Mautner that an example or success story would have been nice. Then again, with two-thirds of a year before the event, perhaps organizers will have time to execute the plan.

I kind of wonder why the story couldn’t wait until they could name-check an indie house or two, because… well… eight months is a long time. I’m sure it’s not Reed Exhibition’s strategy to use PWCW to alert indie houses to the opportunity when they could just e-mail them. Hell, I can e-mail them, and I use a Yahoo account.

Upcoming 8/29

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What evil lurks in the heart of the current ComicList? Well, none to speak of. I’m just trying to keep things fresh.

Aurora releases the first volume of Chihiro Tamaki’s Walkin’ Butterfly. In it, a girl confronts her body image issues by trying to become a model. (I thought models caused body image issues. Help me out here.)

There’s a lot of Del Rey product shipping this week. Depending on my mood, I’d peg either the sixth volume of Fuyumi Soryo’s ES or the second of Ai Morinaga’s My Heavenly Hockey Club as the highlight. I’ve already read this installment of MHHC, and it’s as delightful as the first. There are fewer deranged encounters with wildlife, but there’s a chapter where the elite titular team meats a plucky group of paupers out in the sticks that’s just a riot, even by this book’s standards.

On the down side, I found the first volume of Shiki Tsukai just too packed with inscrutable rules to be very engaging, kind of like Shakugan no Shana (Viz). As Katherine Dacey-Tsuei puts it:

“Even with the generous assortment of charts, appendices, and sidebars clarifying the nuances of its underlying “power to control the seasons” premise, however, I found this book fiendishly hard to follow, thanks to the characters’ jargon-heavy dialogue.”

A new release from Fanfare/Ponent Mon is always worth a look. This time around, it’s Tokyo is My Garden, by Frédéric Boilet and Benoît Peeters, with back-up from demi-god of manga Jiro Taniguchi. It’s about a cognac salesman living large in the title city. Having just read Ed Chavez’s enticing Otaku USA column on booze manga, this is a timely arrival.

As others have noticed, Viz begins its Naruto onslaught this week. Stock in dry goods and bottled water and pre-order those poor books that might get buried in the ninjalanche.

Two that shouldn’t be overlooked, also from Viz, are Kiyoko Arai’s pricelessly silly Beauty Pop (now in its fifth volume) and the second volume of Hideaki Sorachi’s quirky, action-packed Gin Tama (discussed here already). I wouldn’t go so far as to say all of the same people would like both, but they share an off-kilter sense of humor that serves each really well.

Fullmetal

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Part of my weekend reading included the 14th volume of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist (Viz). It’s a really entertaining series, and if you’ve avoided it because it’s really popular, you might reconsider, because it’s also very, very good.

That said, the latest installment left me feeling a little at odds.

(Spoilers after the cut.)

So pretty much everyone knows everything about the big government conspiracy, largely because the big government conspiracy basically decided to tell them. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. It doesn’t precisely raise the threat level, which was always fairly high, but it transforms it into something rather different.

It seems like Arakawa was ready to shake up her toy box and fuel the next big chunk of narrative. In fact, it kind of reminds me of the big mid-series development in Death Note (Shonen Jump Advanced), and while it opens up all kinds of new plot twists, there’s also the vague sense of the air being let out. On one hand, the good guys were too bright and tenacious to be in the dark forever; on the other, it’s going to take some doing to reposition all of the major players in their new, murkier moral landscape.

The series is up to its 17th volume in Japan, though I have no idea if Arakawa has set an end point on it as yet. This does seem like the beginning of an endgame to me. That doesn’t mean it won’t be protracted, obviously. Does the news of a new series from Arakawa indicate impending closure on Fullmetal? I don’t know.

I have to note that Arakawa does some of the funniest extras in manga. They’re like excellent petit fours after a really good meal.