The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Quote of the day

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In preparation for Free Comic Book Day, George Gene Gustines introduces New York Times readers to some of the finer comic shops in Manhattan and environs. It’s particularly noteworthy for this awesome passage:

“Chuck McKinney, 41, a voice-over actor and Web cartoonist, loves Midtown Comics. ‘The store is big, clean, well stocked and organized; and everyone gets a discount,’ he wrote in an e-mail message. ‘And best of all there are lots of hot, ethnic straight guys to check out while I’m buying my comics.’”

While I love Midtown’s Pottery Barn aesthetic and fine selection, I must confess that I’ve never noticed the eye candy during the few visits I’ve made.

From the stack: Flower of Life Vol. 2

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In a comment, Danielle Leigh said the following about Fumi Yoshinaga’s Flower of Life:

“(which I think is even better than Antique Bakery by some act of god or Yoshinaga)”

It sounds kind of like madness or blasphemy, but after reading the first two volumes of Flower of Life over and over and giggling like a fool, I think I would go so far as to say the series is as good as Antique Bakery, though in different ways.

Flower is certainly funnier. The comedy might lack the degree of nuance of Yoshinaga’s work in Antique, but jokes come thick and fast and are entirely successful. I don’t think I’ve ever been as tempted to scan and post sequences from a book, and the only thing stopping me is the fear that I would spoil Yoshinaga’s carefully constructed punch lines. I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed out loud reading a comic as often as I have with Flower, particularly throughout the second volume. The jokes don’t just work – they work over and over.

Flower doesn’t quite have the emotional weight of Antique. That makes sense, as the characters are younger and have accumulated fewer scars. Their feelings are much closer to the surface, sweetly and hilariously so, which makes for a comparatively raucous affair. Their enthusiasms are so numerous and so fluid that the book moves along at an amazing clip.

The lack of accumulated emotional baggage also makes Flower less structurally complex than Antique, with its carefully placed callbacks to earlier moments that gain depth and resonance as the characters reveal themselves. But the clearer canvas also allows Yoshinaga to play with youthful emotional extremes, and the characters ping off of each other in surprising, endlessly appealing ways.

And Flower’s teen-comedy trappings really bring out Yoshinaga’s gifts as a parodist. Much of the second volume is devoted to that classic scenario, the school cultural festival, but Yoshinaga layers it with so many overturned expectations that it might very well feel like the first time you’ve ever seen one in a manga. But if Yoshinaga’s instincts for comedy have never been on better display, she’s just as generous with character development as ever.

While Antique Bakery offers deep, often unexpected pleasures that reveal themselves over time, Flower of Life piles almost everything right on the surface, and it’s an absolute joy. They’re different animals, but they’re equally, distinctly delightful.

From the stack: Maggie the Mechanic

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One of the first things that struck me about Jaime Hernandez’s Maggie the Mechanic: A Love and Rockets Book (Fantagraphics) is how many qualities the title character shares with the stereotype of a shôjo heroine.

She’s clumsy, spacey and boy-crazy. Her romantic notions and general haplessness lead her into absurd situations, and while she’s prodigiously gifted in a particular field (mechanics, in this case), her lack of confidence keeps her from excelling. She even gets her own variations on the upskirt phenomenon.

Another thing that struck me early was how little the fantastic genre elements in these early stories bring to the party. How, I asked myself, can stories with dinosaurs, rocket ships, super-heroes, evil billionaires, lady wrestlers, and civil wars be so boring?

Take the first long-form story in the collection, “Mechanics.” Maggie has joined her crew (including dreamy celebrity wrench-wrangler Rand Race), and Hernandez heaps the trip with genre elements – mysterious industrialists, tribal legend, tropical disease, political unrest, lady adventurers, you name it. It’s told in a series of letters home to Maggie’s friends, which mostly serve to demonstrate how ill-suited she is to serve as the center of this kind of story. She spends most of her time waiting for things to happen. Maybe that was the point, but I felt like it took ages to make it, and I ended up excessively eager to see brief interludes with the recipients of Maggie’s letters.

A second, similar adventure, “Las Mujeres Perdidas,” is much more effective. The genre elements are scaled back, and Maggie takes a much more active role. Hernandez strips her of some of her illusions of high adventure and romance, but he does so without cruelty or condescension. It’s not that Maggie can’t survive this kind of madness, but the experiences fail to satisfy. Instead of reducing the friends back home to a bemused audience, Hernandez illustrates how much they care about Maggie. There’s an emotional core and a seriousness of potential consequence that “Mechanics” lacked, and it indicates a transition from genre mash-ups to emotionally driven narrative.

And god, the transition is welcome, because I never like Maggie as much as when she’s interacting with the folks back home. Not to mention the fact that I absolutely love the folks back home.

There’s Maggie’s best friend, Hopey, a feisty punk-rocker with a complex emotional core that pings nicely off of Maggie’s own. Underneath the goth-supernatural trappings, Izzy is a genuinely haunted soul, though often funny and generous. Penny Century is a hoot – a sexpot would-be superhero with a playful spirit and a rapacious hunger for life. Pretty much everyone in Maggie’s everyday life makes a vivid, specific impression, putting them miles ahead of the outsized figures of her adventures as a mechanic.

By the end of the volume, Hernandez seems to have settled his focus on this rowdy, emotionally layered crowd. If he sticks with them and keeps the wackiness on the margins, I’ll be with them for the long haul.

Royal treatment

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Tom Spurgeon pointed to this piece at Forbidden Planet International about French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal’s dim view of comics from Japan, providing an overview and some additional context:

“However, when Royal met Fukushima Muziho, president of the Japanese Social-Democrat party, in December 2006, the Japanese press recalled this vehement attack. While talking about women’s rights in Japan, Royal asked Fukushima if the problems in that domain didn’t stem from ‘the manga’.”

Here’s a Google translation of the ActuaBD article that sparked the FPI entry. And here’s an older article from The Japan Times on Japanese Foreign Minister and manga fan Taro Aso’s view of Royal’s… views.

Wednesday morning links

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There are some interesting articles in the latest Publishers Weekly Comics Week, including Kai-Ming Cha’s report on the China International Cartoon and Animation Festival in Hangzhou, Brigid Alverson’s interview with Viz’s Cammie Allen on the upcoming Naruto push, and an byline-less article on the first Kids Comic-Con, memorable mostly for this… memorable quote:

“Speaking about comics as educational tools, Scholastic executive editor Sheila Keenan said, ‘For more literate people, when you read a novel you kind of see the movie in your head. But for others, it’s like reading music note for note—you don’t see the bigger picture. Comics can be a way to present that bigger picture.’”

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MangaCast runs through the nominees for the 11th annual Tezuka Awards, with images, commentary and other useful information:

“Is it too early for to ask Viz, Vertical and FanFare to pick up these titles fast? Death Note is already here and I am sure the only thing holding Ohoku back is how to market Yoshinaga as seinen/josei (I am sure that is why her other cooking manga haven’t been announced yet).”

Wait… there’s another Fumi Yoshinaga cooking manga out there, waiting to be licensed? Haven’t we reached the point when the only thing you need to do to market a Yoshinaga series is to put Yoshinaga’s name on it? (Okay, maybe that wouldn’t work with everyone, but it does with me.)

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ICv2 has details on some upcoming shôjo series from Viz scheduled for September 2007 and January 2008, including Kawahara Kazune’s Koukou Debut:

“The first new Shojo Beat release of 2008 will be High School Debut (Koukou Debut) a slice-of-life high school comedy romance about a tomboy who, when she gets to high school decides that she wants to get a boyfriend — the only problem is that she doesn’t know how, so she asks a popular guy to show her the way — his only condition, that she doesn’t fall in love with him. High School Debut appeared in the Japanese shojo anthology Margaret, where the stories tend to be a little more mature than those in other popular shojo magazines such as Ribbon and Hana to Yume.”

MangaCast has an in-depth preview of another of the titles on the slate, Maki Minami’s Special A.

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At Crocodile Caucus, Lyle continues his “Shojo Peek” series with a look at the recently-published preview of increasingly ubiquitous Chika Shiomi’s Yurara, contemplating some of shôjo heroine tropes in the process.

Something for almost everyone

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Time for the weekly stroll through the ComicList. It’s a big ‘un.

Dark Horse rolls out the seventh volume of Hiroki Endo’s Eden: It’s an Endless World! It’s an intriguing and solidly executed series, but I’m starting to wonder how long we’re going to spend with the gangsters and prostitutes. It makes a certain amount of sense that the drug and sex trades would survive near-apocalypse relatively unscathed, but I’d rather the focus turned back on things that have changed.

I can say with little fear of contradiction that there will probably be no prostitutes and that any gangsters who do appear will be unlikely to be the type to mutilate in the third issue of Jeff Smith’s Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil. The presence of either mutilating gangsters or sex workers would indicate a rather drastic change in the thus-far delightful series.

It seems inevitable that episodic series will lose some of their charm as ongoing subplots start to take prominence, but I’m not finding that to be the case with Meca Tanaka’s Omukae Desu (CMX). I’ve already read a preview proof of the fourth volume, which comes out this week, and the evolving romantic entanglements are balanced nicely with the restless ghosts who keep the cast gainfully employed.

Del Rey is moving an unusually high volume of manga this week. You already know what I think of the first volumes of Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte and Yasunori Mitsunaga’s Princess Resurrection, and I’d also recommend the ninth volume of Tomoko Ninomiya’s charming musical josei, Nodame Cantabile, and the second volume of Yuki Urushibara’s moody, quirky supernatural series, Mushishi. Yes, I like Del Rey’s manga catalog a lot. Why do you ask?

I found an awful lot to like in James Vining’s First in Space, which arrives this week from Oni. It’s a fact-based portrayal of Ham, the chimpanzee who paved the way for human space exploration in the U.S.

Sure, Kindaichi Case Files (Tokyopop), by Kanari Yozaburo and Satoh Fumiya, is formulaic, but it comes out so infrequently that it does really matter to me. The fifteenth volume promises another cleverly constructed, gruesome, locked-room murderer solved by a smart-mouthed young sleuth.

Being a sucker for cute dogs and having seen some of the early reviews, there’s little chance that I’ll be able to resist Christian Slade’s Korgi (Top Shelf).

For other takes on tomorrow’s arrivals, check out this run-down by Chris Mautner and Kevin Melrose at Blog@Newsarama and the extremely-generous-with-free-comics Dave Carter’s assessment.

Botchan schedule clarified

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Jog looks at the upcoming offerings from Fanfare/Ponent Mon and wonders if the publisher is really going to release seven volumes of The Times of Botchan during the remainder of 2007, as could be construed from this piece at Anime News Network.

I checked in with Fanfare’s Stephen Robson, who said that volumes four through ten are in the making but not on the 2007 calendar:

“I expect to get two more volumes out this year to bring us to the half way point then let’s see what pans out next year. But I do expect a quicker pace (but not too quick).”

Even without the five additional Botchans, 2007 does seem to promise a comparatively heavy line-up for Fanfare. That’s a good thing, obviously.

You can't please everyone… EVER

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It seems that not everybody’s happy with the proposed resolution to the complaints over graphic novels in the Davis Library in the Wanganui, New Zealand (which was to move the teen section away from the holdings for children). Guess who?

Yup, concerned mother and part-time teacher Julie Gordon has expressed her discontent to the Wanganui Chronicle:

“‘I’m not happy with this outcome. If library staff want to supply that sort of book for their children then let them go and it buy it at a book store. But I don’t see why we have to have it in our library,’ she said.”

Quotes from local officials suggest that Mrs. Gordon isn’t much for process. After being told the appropriate method for questioning library holdings, she… went to the newspaper instead. As one does.

Head count

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In this week’s Flipped, I take a look at one new series I liked primarily because of the art, and one that I liked kind of in spite of the art. Both series are from Del Rey, both have titles that start with the letter “p”, and both feature a strangely satisfyingly high body count.

Because a day just isn't long enough

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Dave Carter has kicked off his third annual Free Comic Book Month at Yet Another Comics Blog:

“That’s right, free comics! Each day of May I’ll pick someone to receive a free comic, taken from my personal collection: duplicates, things I have in trades, and other stuff. My goal is to match up people with a comic that they haven’t read but that they may like. My tastes are wide and varied, so chances are I’ve got a comic for you.”

It’s easy to enter and fun to read Dave’s announcements of who’s receiving what and why.