The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Truth, justice, etc.

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Mely relates an irritating instance of customer service and the depressing issues that swirl around such encounters with surgical precision:

“The thing is—I know the people who most need to hear this probably aren’t going to listen anyway, but I was trained early in childhood to argue with brick walls—the thing is, when someone insults my taste or my intelligence or my entertainment, when someone dismisses something I like as commercial or trashy or dumb or unworthy of attention, when someone announces that my interest in manga is only important as a stepping stone to the holy grails of alt comics or the pockets of DC and Marvel—strangely, this does not make me rethink my tastes.”

There’s fabulous stuff in the comments as well.

Lyle wonders if Chuck Dixon is the right writer for a Midnighter series, given the character’s sexual orientation and what one might charitably call the creator’s ambivalence towards it. Loren at One Diverse Comic Book Nation and Johanna at Comics Worth Reading weigh in as well.

And at Yet Another Comics Blog, Dave Carter is sponsoring his annual Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Fund Drive.

Conspicuous consumption

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The past few weeks have obviously lulled me into a false sense of security, because a look at the ComicList for Wednesday… well… it’s like Manga DEF CON 5. Pawn some heirlooms, clear space on your shelves, do what you have to do.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ll just go with a list of what I would like to buy, were money no object:

  • Anne Freaks Vol. 4, ADV
  • Mail Vol. 1, Dark Horse (written and drawn by Housui Yamazaki, artist on The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service)
  • Emma Vol. 2, CMX
  • After School Nightmare Vol. 2, Go! Comi (first volume recently reviewed by Brigid here)
  • Train + Train Vol. 1, Go! Comi
  • Fruits Basket Vol. 15, Tokyopop
  • Sgt. Frog Vol. 12, Tokyopop
  • Shout Out Loud Vol. 3, Blu
  • Beauty Pop Vol. 2, Viz – Shojo Beat
  • The Drifting Classroom Vol. 3, Viz – Signature

    • And that doesn’t even count series like Aishiteruze Baby, Bleach and Phoenix where I need to catch up on previous volumes. Other corners of the shipping list seem a bit more forgiving to me, but overall, it looks like employees of manga-friendly comic shops are going to be swamped this week.

    Oh, and until teen girls can be liberated from comics poverty when Minx comes riding over the hill, they’ll just have to settle for stuff like this.

    Wooly Mammoth

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    There’s a new Flipped up. This week, I take a look at The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, which is indeed mammoth and features a lot of interesting work. Some stories are great, some are good, and all of them make me want to see what the featured creators do next, even if their offerings didn’t exactly sing for me this time around.

    In the kitchen: Ina Garten

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    Ina Garten is an odd sort of food celebrity. Her on-camera career began with some very endearing guest appearances on Martha Stewart Living. During these visits, Garten came off as funny, easygoing, and enthusiastic. (Of course, just about anyone standing next to pre-incarceration Stewart would seem comparatively ebullient.) I’m guessing that many people, myself included, watched Garten liven things up and said, “She should have her own show.”

    Now she does. It’s called Barefoot Contessa after the Hamptons specialty food store she used to own. And I don’t like it very much.

    Garten is much better as a foil for another personality than standing alone in front of a camera. She’s better now than she was in the early days of her show, when her unease was just palpable, but she still doesn’t seem to have fully mastered the art of treating a camera as a conversational partner. She’s more fun when people stop by to kibitz.

    Pros:

  • Her menus almost always sound comforting. I particularly like her preparations for vegetable sides and salad combinations.
  • She really relaxes when other people are around, whether they’re dinner guests or her adorable homunculus of a husband, Jeffrey.
  • She’s a strong advocate of mixing a little coffee in when you cook with chocolate, which really does heighten and deepen the flavor.

    • Cons:

  • I don’t think that a television cook has to underline or over-articulate safe food handling, but I do think they should at least model it, and I really wonder about Garten. I’m sure lots of home cooks level off dry ingredients with their fingers and use the same measuring spoon in both dry and wet ingredients, but it bothers me to see a food authority do it. Nothing can match the horror of watching her prepare an entire meal, from aromatics to vegetables to loin of pork, on the same wooden cutting board.
  • I’ve never seen anyone so stingy with pepper. Seriously, she makes Betty Crocker look like Emeril Lagasse.
  • She prepares a lot of big slabs of meat, fish, and poultry, which isn’t so bad in and of itself, but her preparations fall into the “intuitively obvious” camp.
  • She advocates white chocolate, which I despise. It’s like solid sun screen.
  • She really isn’t that comfortable when it’s just her and a camera but seems to insist on trying to appear breezy, which can compound the unease.
  • She often ignores the fact that not everyone lives in a well-to-do enclave packed with specialty food stores, fresh seafood, and organic farms specializing in heirloom fruits and vegetables and organic poultry. I’m all for promoting those products, and I’m glad that access to them is getting easier, but it never hurts to suggest alternatives.

    • Summary:

    Maybe Garten shouldn’t have her own show. I think a “Cooking with Ina” program would take better advantage of her on-camera strengths, and that a roster of guest chefs might help widen the scope of her fairly routine menus. And one of them is bound to tell her to use a damned butter knife when measuring cake flour.

    Filed Under: TV

    Settling in

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    Welcome to the “new” Precocious Curmudgeon, which will differ from the old version only in the fact that I have different opportunities to fiddle with things. (Categories!) I’m liking WordPress so far, though I’m still figuring out some of the features and tidying stuff in the sidebar.

    How sad is it that I still have boxes I haven’t looked at (much less unpacked) from the last time I moved, and yet I feel compelled to trawl through over two years worth of content to put it into categories, even for posts that were barely worth the time I spent writing them initially?

    In the kitchen: Giada De Laurentis

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    In addition to comics, one of my pop-culture obsessions is cooking programming, good and bad. The Food Network pulls out all the stops during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so I thought I’d take a look at some of their celebrity cooks.

    First up is Giada De Laurentis, a California-based personal chef and caterer and host of Everyday Italian. As the show title implies, De Laurentis specializes in casual Italian fare.

    Pros:

    • The flavor combinations of her recipes generally sound very appealing, and they run a nice gamut from hearty and comforting to light and refreshing.
    • While none of her recipes demand complicated techniques, they don’t fall into the trap of the intuitively obvious, either. She generally offers interesting twists on familiar favorites.
    • She favors fresh ingredients but isn’t intractable about their superiority. It makes her arguments in favor of them more persuasive because she resists the urge to make you feel like a terrible person for not having an herb garden in your back yard.

    Cons:

    • While her shows tend to focus on meal menus, her preparation sequence doesn’t always make sense. She’ll sometimes present meal components in the order in which they’re eaten as opposed to the order they’re most sensibly prepared.
    • I will never understand the Italian fondness for the combination of chocolate and citrus, particularly orange. To my palate, it starts as an unpleasant aftertaste and goes downhill from there.
    • She seems to be sliding into the Rachael Ray slot of “hopelessly overexposed Food Network ingénue.” In addition to Everyday Italian, she hosts Behind the Bash and has a new travel program on the horizon. Given that Ray’s career trajectory has led me to start hating Triscuits, I would rather Food Network put the brakes on the gathering Giada-thon.
    • De Laurentis is an appealing, easygoing presence when she isn’t looking into the camera. When she does go eye-to-eye with it, she bares a terrifying, over-whitened pageant smile that is more menacing than endearing. It may well be genuine, but I find it disconcerting all the same.

    Summary:

    Of all of the Food Network chefs I follow, De Laurentis offers the largest number of recipes that I actually use. I like her flavor profiles and find the recipes to be clear and usable; they’re also flexible enough to allow for modification and experimentation. Her cuisine isn’t earth-shatteringly innovative, but it isn’t banal either. Just sheathe those choppers.

    Filed Under: TV

    Quick comic comments

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    Welcome to Tranquility #1 (DC – Wildstorm): The premise for this series sounds a bit like an arc from Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, which is never a bad starting point for a look at the margins of a super-hero culture. Writer Gail Simone has set a murder mystery in a retirement community for “maxis,” powerful heroes and villains living together in relative peace during their twilight years.

    Being a person of intelligence and sensitivity, Simone largely resists the urge to ridicule the citizenry’s mental and physical decline. Being a writer who thoroughly explores the scenario at hand, she can hardly ignore it. It’s a tricky balance to strike, but I think she does a nice job. Not everyone ages into an AARP commercial, and when people start with the kind of faculties possessed by the citizens of Tranquility, the results can be kind of frightening when they start to lose them.

    Simone tells the story through the eyes of someone in her prime, Tranquility Sheriff Lindo. The character has her own tricky balancing act to pull off. She’s protective of the citizenry in several ways – she’s responsible for safety and order, which can require taking a hard line, but she’s also sensitive to their dignity and respectful of their accomplishments. It’s the sandwich generation conundrum through the eyes of law enforcement, and her handling of the conflicting demands makes Lindo immediately sympathetic.

    The down side of having such a well-developed protagonist is that there perhaps isn’t enough time to take full advantage of the setting. As Lindo grudgingly baby-sits some visiting reporters, readers get glimpses of Tranquility and some of the people who live there, but the supporting cast can pass by in a bit of a blur. Introducing marginal characters in strong, specific ways is generally one of Simone’s strengths as a writer, and she succeeds more often than she fails, but the crowd can get a bit daunting.

    It seems to overwhelm artist Neil Googe as well. Tranquility itself looks appealingly Rockwellian, but character design can be iffy. Googe is better at rendering action and motion than acting and emotion, so Simone’s script isn’t served as thoroughly as it could be.

    But the book has definite potential. I like the underlying premise, and I’m a sucker for a murder mystery, so I’ll stick around and see where it leads.

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    Crossing Midnight #1 (DC – Vertigo): This is another series off to an intriguing if not completely satisfying start. Writer Mike Carey introduces readers to twins Toshi and Kai, born and raised in contemporary Nagasaki. Their thoroughly modern parents indulge their paternal grandmother, a survivor of the atomic bomb who insists they offer a prayer to the family shrine during the pregnancy. What harm could it do?

    Mom and Dad would have been better off sticking to their principles, as the act of appeasement has unexpected, decidedly unpleasant consequences. Toshi, the younger of the twins, evaded the eye of the sonogram and surprised her parents with her arrival. The surprises continue as she finds she’s immune to physical injury. Carey takes an interesting direction with Toshi’s emotional reaction to her “gift” and does a nice job illustrating its impact on the family dynamic.

    The story is nicely structured, but there’s an underlying detachment to Carey’s writing. The events of Crossing Midnight are never quite as urgent or intense as I think they should be. The book feels at times more like an artfully rendered case study than an organic story, more impersonally observational than visceral. (As an example, I generally hate the device Carey uses to establish the extremity of the menace Toshi and Kai face, but it just kind of rolls past here.)

    I do like Jim Fern’s pencils, which are detailed and precise. It’s clean, clear rendering with some nice flourishes of imagination, and Fern’s work gets solid support from inker Rob Hunter and colorist José Villarrubia.

    In the end, though, Crossing Midnight is kind of chilly, which keeps it from being very chilling.

    (This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

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    Hero Squared #4 (Boom! Studios): I’m starting to wonder if Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis aren’t intentionally embodying the indie-spandex divide in their appealing super-hero parody. Sure, Captain Valor is a morally monochromatic Superman archetype, but I’m finally picking up that Milo is just as much of a pastiche of the common stereotype of the artcomix protagonist, so neatly summarized by Shaenon Garrity.

    It’s probably taken me much longer to realize this than it should have, but it tickles me to think that Hero Squared is offering equal-opportunity mockery.

    Art and commerce

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    At his (probably not work-safe) blog, Simon Jones pointed to this thread at The Comics Journal message board. As usual, Jones insists on making sense:

    “Art comics, by their nature, holds art/self above all else, while the priority for most manga published here is the audience… it’s a very commercial product. Manga is going to be no more, and no less, relevant to the alt comix crowd as superhero comics.”

    The TCJ thread is covers familiar, stereotypical territory from those who adopt the “All manga is cookie-cutter girly crap” position. (Would they quail if they knew their critical assessment of manga is identical to some spandex aficionados on other, undoubtedly lesser message boards?) On the bright side, Shaenon Gaerrity is around to provide a slightly different perspective.