I didn’t realize that WordPress had made Snap previews available to all of its users until after it had already installed itself on the pages. I’m not particularly fond of it, to be honest, so I disabled it.
Violence! Violence!
Just got back from a trip to Washington, DC, where we saw two very different pieces about unsavory educators.
The first was the filmed version of The History Boys, an adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Tony-winning play about ambitious students trying to get into Oxford or Cambridge and the teachers who guide them. It’s packed with witty dialogue (which sometimes seems a lot like dialogue), and the acting is consistently good and sometimes superb (like Samuel Barnett and Frances de la Tour, who have the wittiest dialogue and make it seem the most real without sacrificing any of its bite). But Bennett seems to have been operating from the central thesis that no gay man can go into teaching without a crippling temptation to get into his students’ pants, which rendered the rest of the film’s appeal kind of moot.
Later, we went to see the revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Kennedy Center. The initial appeal of seeing it was to watch Kathleen Turner suck all of the oxygen out of the room as roaring Martha, but the show belongs to Bill Irwin as George. As many times as I’ve seen the play, I’ve never seen an actor make George so essential to the proceedings. Irwin is absolutely stunning, finally creating a George who makes complete dramatic sense, embracing unimagined qualities that leave the audience not only believing that he’d marry and stay with Martha, but that he loves her in his own way. Where there’s previously just been a shouting match, albeit a gripping one, Irwin and Turner create a dynamic that’s both deeper and scarier. Someone really should capture this performance on film.
Compare and contrast
I’m assuming that this piece at Comic Book Resources refers to “The Year That Was” in the average Direct Market comic shop, right? And that future parts will address developments from 2006 that aren’t quite so focused on spandex? Because, with all due respect to Civil War, if someone doesn’t mention Fun Home or American Born Chinese as significant developments in the comics industry in 2006, I will be considerably chagrined.
Much more to my liking is John Jakala’s fabulous overview of the year that was over at Sporadic Sequential.
Shop talk
Johanna Draper Carlson mentioned the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailer Award the other day, so I swung by the San Diego Comic-Con site to see which shops had won previously. Two of my favorites have never won, so I might have to gather sufficient motivation to nominate them.
The first is Alternative Reality Comics in Las Vegas, which has apparently been nominated twice. For a relatively small space, it’s got a great selection of books and even shelves some titles by genre, which is a nice touch. Its manga selection isn’t as large as some other shops I’ve visited, but it’s one the most interesting I’ve seen with lots of books I don’t usually find on the shelves. The staff has also been friendly and helpful every time I’ve visited. The shop doesn’t seem to have a web site, but here’s an interview with owner Ralph Mathieu at Sequential Tart. I’m not much of a gambler, so I always try and minimize my losses when I go to Vegas, as it’s the best outcome I can hope for. It’s nice to have Alternative Reality as a reason to hold some cash in reserve that might otherwise be lost forever to a slot machine.
The second is The Laughing Ogre in Columbus, Ohio. On my first trip to the store, it was in the middle of a renovation, and it was still one of the best comic shops I’ve ever visited. Now that the renovation is complete, it’s a clean, well-organized, attractive space with a great selection. Their manga section is easily as large as any of the chain bookstores, and the selection is more diverse. The staff is helpful as well. They were in the middle of inventory the first time I stopped by, and they still made time to check in and see if I needed anything, helped me find books, and offered to special-order stuff that wasn’t in stock (or was packed away during the remodel). It wasn’t really practical, since I don’t live in Columbus, but the gesture was appreciated. Plus, Amy Unbounded is a staff favorite, which is probably an excellent litmus test for whether or not I’ll enjoy a comic shopping experience.
Eligible (and confirmed) bachelors
Loren Javier at One Diverse Comic Book Nation shares the list of eligible comics for this year’s GLAAD award for LGBT portrayals. Obviously, this is a broad overview of all such portrayals, not just the good ones, because if anyone seriously considers giving anything resembling an award for inclusiveness and representation to the sequence described in The Boys, they should have their head examined.
Dirk Deppey proceeds to recoil in horror (scroll down to the Comics Culture of today’s entry at !Journalista¡), and given GLAAD’s focus in previous years, it’s hard not to sympathize. The “visibility” argument that leans things in favor of publishers like Marvel and DC has always struck me as misguided, patting the perceived mainstream on the back for not getting things egregiously wrong rather than honoring books that could be celebrated without reservation.
A good slate of nominees could come from this collection, but I’ve given up hoping that one will come from it.
Notebooks
Another interesting press release, this time from Viz:
“VIZ Media, LLC (VIZ Media), one of the entertainment industry’s most innovative and comprehensive publishing, animation and licensing companies, has announced that it has licensed from Nippon Television Network Corporation (NTV) the Download to Own (DTO) and Download to Rent (DTR) rights for the United States for the smash hit DEATH NOTE anime series, currently airing in Japan.”
I posted the full release over at the Flipped Forum.
Edited to note: After posting in haste, I checked with a Viz spokesperson, and the anime episodes will be subtitled for their downloadable release.
The wayback machine
A discussion over at MangaBlog about racial stereotypes in a recent volume of Eyeshield 21 (originally highlighted at Digital Femme) reminded me of how another publisher handled similar material. Here’s an introductory piece in the second volume of Dark Horse’s printing of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, published in 2002:
“Many non-Japanese, including people from Africa and Southeast Asia, appear in Osamu Tezuka’s works. Sometimes these people are depicted very differently from the way they actually are today, in a manner that exaggerates a time long past, or shows them to be from extremely undeveloped lands. Some feel that such images contribute to racial discrimination, especially against people of African descent. This was never Osamu Tezuka’s intent, but we believe that as long as there are people who feel insulted or demeaned by these depictions, we must not ignore their feelings.
“We are against discrimination, in all its forms, and intend to continue to work for its elimination. Nonetheless, we do not believe it would be proper to revise these works. Tezuka is no longer with us, and we cannot erase what he has done, and to alter his work would only violate his rights as a creator. More importantly, stopping publication or changing the content of his work would do little to solve the problems of discrimination that exist in the world.
“We are presenting Osamu Tezuka’s work as it was originally created, without any changes. We do this because we believe it is also important to promote the underlying themes in his work, such as love for mankind and the sanctity of life. We hope that when you, the reader, encounter this work, you will keep in mind the differences in attitudes, then and now, toward discrimination, and that this will contribute to an even greater awareness of such problems.
“—Tezuka Productions and Dark Horse Comics”
The cases are obviously very different. Tezuka is an undisputed manga master, and republication of his work for wider audiences has archival significance. Also, Astro Boy was originally published in the 1950s, where as Eyeshield 21 launched in 2002, like the Dark Horse reprint quoted above.
But I do admire Dark Horse’s straightforward approach to questionable material. It seems like a frank and sensible way to respect both the creator’s rights and the sensitivities of the audience.
What he said
I don’t really have much to add to Graeme McMillan’s summary of the TightLip situation, except to note that the CBR thread is incredibly depressing, not only for the number of people who have apparently been on the receiving end of TightLip’s bad business practices but for the thread’s degeneration from well-intentioned attempt to secure compensation for the screwed to mortifying spectacle of infantile name-calling. Can someone just sue someone else already so we can get to the point where attorneys will recommend that their clients refrain from public comment?
Seinen sign-in
This week’s Flipped is up with reviews of Housui Yamazaki’s Mail (Dark Horse) and Kashimashi ~ Girl Meets Girl (Seven Seas).
While looking stuff up for the column, I was interested to see the titles that have been serialized in seinen anthology Dengeki Daioh, mostly because many of them don’t fit with my conventional (and probably too narrow) definition of seinen.
I mean… Yotsuba&! is seinen? Who knew?
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are chibi
Some press releases are just more fun than others. One landed in my in-box via SelfMadeHero, who will be publishing those manga adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays (starting with Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet in March).
“Emma Hayley, director of SelfMadeHero, says: ‘We are creating visually dynamic versions of the classics to make the books accessible, cool and understandable to new readers.’ Inspired by Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo and Juliet, in the Manga Shakespeare series she decided to retain the original language and use the visual impact of manga to help re-tell the stories in an abridged version.”
Having a theatre background, I’ve seen what feels like more than my share of modernized Shakespeare, including a deeply ghastly Richard III, where the title monarch wandered through a field of dead bodies humming “Over the Rainbow”, and a Comedy of Errors where everyone wore casual cruise togs and some of the female characters kept striking Charlie’s Angels poses. But it doesn’t sound like SelfMadeHero is going to be taking quite those kinds of liberties.
Sonia Leong and Emma Vieceli, the creators working on the books, have been keeping a LiveJournal and sharing page scans (found via the Sweatdrop Forums).