The Manga Curmudgeon

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

Shhhhh…

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The hubbub in Marshall, MO, over Fun Home and Blankets made me think it was time to talk a walk down memory lane of other controversies that have flared up over graphic novels in libraries.

  • High-school columnist objects to inclusion of “written garbage” like Mew Mew in school libraries in Maine. (Link)
  • Shonen Jump pulled from Scholastic Book Fairs because “who knows what ‘teen’ means?” (Link)
  • Florida parent shocked at content of Peach Girl. (Link)
  • California library removes Paul Gravett’s Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics. (Link)

For anyone needing a palate cleanser, there’s always the American Library Association’s nominations for Great Graphic Novels for Teens, which includes recent additions like La Perdida, Pyonyang, Mom’s Cancer, American Born Chinese, and Life.

Dirty pictures, lazy snark

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Isn’t it thrilling to see civic engagement in action?

“’We may as well purchase the porn shop down at the junction and move it to Eastwood. Some day this library will be drawing the same clientele,’ [concerned citizen Louise] Mills said.”

In my mind, I picture several of the citizens attending the meeting uncomfortably adjusting their collars and praying they had the presence of mind to shred or burn their porn shop receipts. Honestly, can the two audiences really be entirely mutually exclusive? Are people using the library’s internet terminals just to look up recipes?

“’I don’t want seedy people coming into the library and moving into our community,’ [Sarah] Aulgur said.”

Because nothing… nothing… gives a community the wrong kind of reputation like the knowledge that their libraries make room on the shelves for graphic-novel autobiographies. Aulgur’s comment also suggests that the Marshall library has some kind of Studio 54 velvet rope thing going on, and only the pure of heart, the non-seedy, are granted admission. Perhaps Aulgur doesn’t fully understand the library’s function as a resource for the entire populace, even if they’re seedy.

“’It’s not a matter of censorship,’ John Raines of Marshall said, ‘but a matter of looking out for our kids.’”

Hey, now! It can be about both. Because really, looking out for kids can and has been used to justify attempts to restrict, isolate, or condemn virtually every type of human behavior. It almost leads one to believe that the logical continuation of Raines’s statement would be, “Censorship is just a happy fringe benefit.”

“’If it shouldn’t be on a billboard on I-70, it shouldn’t be in a public library,’ Mark Lockhart said.”

Now, see, I drive I-70 a few times a year, and there are billboards for gambling, guns, gentlemen’s clubs (featuring conveniently placed poles), and reputable purveyors of adult novelties.

I have to say that I’m impressed with how resolute the Marshall library staff is being, especially when you compare it to their colleagues to the west.

Thursday manga linkblogging

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Conspiracy theorists rejoice! Calvin Reid drops by Love Manga to offer some details on the PWCW Comics Bestseller List. Just to clarify, I don’t think the list is inaccurate. I just think it would be more meaningful if I had some sense of how it was assembled. Over at Comics Worth Reading, commenter Ali T. Kokmen notes that the level of available background is just about equivalent to every other bestseller list out there, and elaborates further in an e-mail to Dirk Deppey.

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Pata’s quest for lists got me wondering: what’s already lurking among the manga reading lists at Amazon?

And roughly 2,070 more.

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A Kentucky library is grooming the next generation of graphic novelists. (Thanks, Rose.)

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John Jakala notes that Viz isn’t taking any chances on reaping the potential bump from the debut of the Bleach anime.

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MangaNEXT isn’t until this weekend, but the Frankfurt Book Fair is underway, and the event’s web site has coverage of its manga conference. Lots of interesting nuggets of information about manga around the world (is it the rising tide that lifts all ships?), and this wrap-up paragraph:

“While Chuck Rozanski opined that ‘anything that’s not superheroes in America is a hard sell,’ the Europeans reported an increase in locally-created manga in their markets, illustrating Chigusa Ogino’s remark that, in today’s manga world, ‘you don’t have to have a Japanese passport to do manga.’”

A hard sell? Really?

Listing

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Ah, the ComicList… some weeks are famine, others are feast. Guess which kind we have this week?

  • CMX releases the eagerly anticipated Emma, which I had reviewed in proof form a while back. The finished cover is quite lovely with an appealingly antique-y paper stock.
  • Pantheon brings the new Marjane Satrapi book, Chicken with Plums. The book made Entertainment Weekly’s Must List without any mention of it being a graphic novel.
  • Tokyopop offers the fourth volume of the little book that might, Dragon Head.
  • Viz has the fourth volume of Ai Yazawa’s Nana, which gets better with every installment. And it started really well.

Okay, that isn’t quite as burdensome as it seemed at first glance, but there’s still lots of nice stuff. The MangaCast of characters hit the highlights of the week’s manga releases. And folks like Jog and Daves Carter and Ferraro take the week’s shipping list out for a spin.

If you’re still looking for reasons to part with your hard-earned cash, there are lots of well-written reviews floating about the blogosphere:

  • Johanna Draper Carlson covers two of my favorite books (Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators and Girl Genius) in her latest column for Comics Unlimited.
  • Dirk Deppey thoughtfully examines the excellent American Born Chinese and continues his scanlation tour.
  • Lyle keeps watch on Shojo Beat previews with a look at Tail of the Moon.
  • Updated to add: Steven Grant reviews two Del Rey books, Ghost Hunt and Q-Ko-Chan, in the latest installment of Permanent Damage. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the first volume of Ghost Hunt, but it sounds like it may be worth another look.

And we will all travel in flying cars

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There’s interesting stuff in this week’s Publishers Weekly Comics Week.

Calvin Reid covers Rich Johnson’s move from DC to Hachette and the publisher’s contemplation of a possible graphic novel imprint. Most interesting is the snapshot the piece provides of where publishers are now in terms of adding graphic novels to their output. This snippet really caught my eye:

“Over at Random House, comics seem to be everywhere, including the flagship graphic novel line at Pantheon and a burgeoning Del Rey manga line. Del Rey is also planning for more titles, more genres and original comics publishing.”

Original comics publishing? Tell me more!

I’m not a gadget geek at all, but I did enjoy Reid’s piece on Sony’s E-Reader. Prose and graphic novel publishers are apparently staring hungrily at the new gizmo, and some (Tokyopop and Harlequin, most notably) have already taken the plunge:

“Mary Abthorpe, Harlequin’s v-p of new business development, says a selection of its Harlequin Pink shojo romance line, No Competition, Jinxed and A Prince Needs a Princess, are available for download to the Sony Reader.”

It’s interesting that they’re starting off with the books that are targeted at a younger audience. I’m sure the undoubtedly sizzling Violet titles won’t be too far behind.

I’m the type that usually waits until for the second or third iteration of some new technology, partly because I always assume there will be bugs to work out, and also because I’m cheap. My partner is a gadget geek (and much less of a pack rat) and stares at my groaning shelves of manga with increasing concern, so he might be more of an early adopter than I am. Still, I’d rather wait until more publishers get on board and there’s a wider range of material available.

Another point of concern for me is what this will mean for the bathtub reader. I’m not about to take a $300 E-Reader near a tub of standing water, much less one altered with circuit-damaging bath salts, so I’d never be able to abandon paper completely.

Last but not least, PWCW takes a stab at a combined monthly best-seller list. I wish they’d offered more information on their methodology and sources in the debut installment. Looking at the list, it seems like the Direct Market contributes a drop in the bucket, as the entries line up pretty closely with BookScan numbers. I could be wrong, obviously.

Food stuff

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Much as I love The Food Network, they do seem to have a mission to gather anecdotal evidence proving the argument that familiarity breeds contempt.

Paula Deen has gone from being a bracingly unhealthy guilty pleasure to showing up everywhere, inviting viewers to her wedding and first trip to Europe, and she has a new live-audience show. Rachael Ray has reached such a saturation point that she actually had to move to other networks to find room for more programming.

Even my beloved Alton Brown (so informative and entertaining on Good Eats and Iron Chef America) managed to reach the too-much point with Feasting on Asphalt, where he dished out more culinary reverse snobbery in a half an hour than I would have thought possible. (Dude, it’s a corndog.)

So I’m delighted to see them add Nigella Lawson to their line-up, because I can’t imagine ever getting tired of her. Some of her BBC programs aired on either O or We a few years ago, and it was love at first sight. She tends to be marketed for her sexiness, but the real draw is her intelligence, her caustic humor, and her uncanny ability to evocatively describe the sensory experience of eating really good food.

Her cookbooks are a joy to read, because her broadcast voice translates brilliantly to prose, and she always provides wonderful personal context for her recipes. She also wrote a column for The New York Times for a while that was equally engaging. And I would cook virtually anything she prepares; she’s convincingly passionate about cooking without being fussy or gushy.

Speaking of fussy and gushy, I’m in a recorded-book shame spiral, because I’m going through a phase where I can’t stop myself from picking up mysteries by Diane Mott Davidson from the library. (I’ll clearly listen to things I’d never actually read.) Her books star caterer Goldy Schulz, who can’t seem to lay out a tray of pastries for a book club without tripping over a dead body or three.

The idea of combining food writing with sleuthing intrigues me, because I love both. But I do wish there was someone better than Davidson doing it. The culinary bits err towards the rhapsodic, and the mysteries are hampered by Goldy’s singular failings as an investigator.

The pattern seems to be that prim, moralistic Goldy never makes any progress in an case, though she asks a million questions. Ultimately, the culprit either mistakenly believes Goldy is about to expose their crimes, or they reach the conclusion that she’s too stupid to live. Thus, they end up revealing their own guilt by unsuccessfully trying to kill Goldy, and it’s hard to fault them.

But there seems to be plenty of good food writing out there at the moment, and I really need to catch up with it. I still haven’t picked up a copy of Jane and Michael Stern’s Two for the Road, where they take roughly the same approach as Brown did with Feasting. The difference (I hope) is that they won’t make it seem like quite so much of a holy pilgrimage. (The Sterns are my favorite elements of The Splendid Table, which is a great listen all the way around.)

The Times has also made me want a copy of The United States of Arugula, a new bit of culinary anthropology from David Kamp. (This might partly be due to the fact that the review is written by A.O. Scott.) Food culture is one of my favorite subjects for non-fiction (or fiction, for that matter), and this looks like an excellent entry in that category.

Something for everyone

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At ¡Journalista!, Dirk Deppy wants to introduce you to the best in scanlations:

“It occurs to me that there are any number of Japanese comics floating around in scanlated form that might not appeal to the average manga teenybopper, but might well be appreciated by indy-comics fans.”

Deppey, who wrote an excellent article on scanlations for The Comics Journal, starts off with the likes of Naoki (Monster) Urasawa and Iou (Sexy Voice and Robo) Kuroda.

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At Love Manga, David Taylor delivers an excellent interview with Simon Jones of Icarus Publishing, leading purveyor of ero-manga in translation. Jones offers, among other things, his view on fan-created translations:

“I certainly believe that the benefits of scanlations have been overstated, and most general arguments for them have been little more than rationalizations. But one thing I don’t question is their passion… they truly love the manga they work on.”

And just because I love it, this quote:

“There will always be a stigma around porn, because porn is supposed to push the boundaries of mainstream taste. As the boundary widens, porn will push even harder against it. In other words, our books will always be the kind you hide under your bed.”

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MangaNEXT is coming up this weekend, and MangaCast has details on panels. It looks like an interesting mix of publishers, from biggies like Dark Horse and Del Rey to more targeted houses like ALC and DramaQueen. (Somebody ask Vertical if they’ve ever considered doing a high-end treatment of Rose of Versailles.)

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At Comics-and-More, Dave Ferraro devotes Manga Monday to Hikaru No Go and Hideshi Hino’s The Red Snake.

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Seeing dead people makes me smile in this week’s Flipped, with reviews of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service and Dokebi Bride.

I want a bean feast

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The latest Previews catalog has me in a Veruca Salt kind of head space.

David Petersen’s splendid Mouse Guard (Archaia) concludes with issue #6, but the solicitation text describes it as “the first Mouse Guard series,” all but promising there will be more.

I hadn’t noticed that Housui Yamazaki, who provides illustrations for the excellent Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, has his own book, Mail, also coming out from Dark Horse. This demands further investigation, particularly since the protagonist from Mail will apparently cross over into KCDS. (I don’t like typing “cross over” when discussing manga, but I’ll reserve judgment.)

As I like Hiroki Endo’s Eden: It’s an Endless World!, and I’m also a fan of collections of shorts, chances seem good I’ll also like Endo’s Tanpeshu, also from Dark Horse.

DC – Wildstorm gives me the opportunity to enjoy a comic written by Gail Simone without having to try and wade through seventy-three different crossovers with the debut of Tranquility.

DC – Vertigo revives a book I enjoyed a lot, Sandman Mystery Theatre, with a five-issue mini-series, Sleep of Reason. Based on the pages shown in Previews, I’m not entirely sold on the art by Eric Nguyen, but I love the protagonists in this series.

Do you like Masaki Segawa’s Basilisk? Del Rey gives you the opportunity to read the novel that inspired it, The Kouga Ninja Scrolls.

Evil Twin Comics unleases another Giant-Sized Thing on the comics-reading public with the second collection of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s excellent Action Philosophers!

Dave Carter notes that the singles of the second volume of Linda Medley’s marvelous Castle Waiting (Fantagraphics) series aren’t doing that well, despite strong sales of the beautiful collection of the first. Fantagraphics gives you the opportunity to correct this sorry state of affairs with the December release of the fourth issue.

Go! Comi rolls out its seventh title, Train + Train by Hideyuki Kurata and Tomomasa Takuma. (In the future, all manga publishers will have a book with “train” in the title.)

I’ve heard a lot of good things about SoHee Park’s Goong (Ice Kunion), a look at what Korea would be like if the monarchy was still in place.

Last Gasp, publisher of Barefoot Gen, offers another look at life in Hiroshima after the bomb with Fumiyo Kouno’s Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms.

If Marvel’s current efforts at politically observant super-heroics make you roll your eyes, you might find respite in Essential Defenders Vol. 2, which includes mosst of Steve Gerber’s mind-bending Headmen arc. It strikes me as idiotic not to include the entire arc in one place, which this book just misses. It has Defenders 15-39 and Giant-Size Defenders 1-5, but not #40 and Annual #1, the conclusion of Steve Gerber’s deranged masterpiece of deformed craniums, clown cults, and women in prison.

NBM offers two books that go onto my must-buy list. The first is the paperback edition of the eighth installment of Rick Geary’s superb Treasury of Victorian Murder series, Madeleine Smith. The second is Nicolas De Crécy’s Glacial Period. De Crécy contributed a marvelous short to Fanfare/Ponent Mon’s Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators, and I’ve been hoping to see more of his work in English.

Oni Press rolls out Maintenance, a new ongoing series from Jim Massey and Robbi Rodriguez. I reviewed a preview copy earlier this week; the book looks like it will be a lot of fun.

Seven Seas unveils another licensed title, Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl, a gender-bending comedy by Satoru Akahori and Yukimaru Katsura. If you’ve been waiting for some shôjo-ai to come your way, now’s your chance.

Tokyopop – Blu promises that Tarako Kotobuki’s Love Pistols is “too crazy to be believed.” Human evolution isn’t just for monkeys any more, people.

Kiss her now

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Dirk Deppey takes a look at Nodame Cantabile 6 (Del Rey) in today’s review. While I agree with him generally about the book’s merits, reading the review made me realize that the potential for romance between Chiaki and Nodame was maybe the least compelling aspect of the book for me. As Deppey puts it:

“Its two ostensible romantic leads are so wrapped up in their own little worlds that they themselves become the obstacles. It’s a wonderful display of delayed expectations, as situation after situation that a lesser writer might have played for sentiment instead becomes another lost chance, advancing the story but not necessarily the leads’ would-be relationship.”

In other words, it’s the just-kiss-already complex, but handled much more deftly by Tomoko Ninomiya than is the norm. It isn’t that I have any objections to a love match between the two, which would be pointless anyways, given its inevitability. It’s just that other elements of the book are more engaging to me. Deppey succinctly identifies these as well:

“With the conclusion of exams and subsequent graduation, the students find themselves wondering what their next step will be. There’s a wistfulness in the presentation in these sequences, perfectly capturing the sense of a tight-knit group of students facing the end of an idyllic period in their lives.”

It’s the vibe of the school and the ability of the setting to believably accommodate such an appealing group of eccentrics that draws me back volume after volume. And maybe it’s the very inevitability of the Chiaki-Nodame relationship that makes me discount it as a draw. It’s such a given part of the landscape that my attention wanders to the parts that are unexpected.

And it isn’t as though I’m immune to the just-kiss-already. I’m an unrepentant ‘shipper when it comes to Kasukabe and Madarame in Genshiken (Del Rey). They’re opposites in obvious ways, but they click for me because of their similarities. Each has an ingrained prejudice against the other’s type, but they’re prejudiced in exactly the same way.

It isn’t a case of wanting them to see past their respective surfaces and find the wonderful person underneath, because I’m not convinced either of them is a wonderful person. I think they’re both hostile narcissists, prone to disappointment in the people around them but pleased that it presents them with the opportunity to be critical. They’re united in their virtually identical contempt. Swoon!

Genshiken also offers an element of suspense. It isn’t the kind of book that seems inclined to focus on anything as direct as will-they-won’t-they, so the Kasukabe-Madarame relationship could exist entirely in my head. That seems like the perfect side-effect for a book about obsessive, overly analytical fandom.

Manga U

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In my occasional wanderings through the wonders of Lexis-Nexis, I’ve found an article on Kyoto Seika University’s six-year-old manga program. It’s appeared in both The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Mad About Manga,” July 28, 2006) and the South China Morning Post (“Magic Manga Mania,” Sept. 23, 2006). Neither version is available for free on line, so let’s hope I don’t violate the Fair Use principle too badly in quoting from Alan Brender’s work.

Several universities in Japan have started similar programs since, but KSU was the first, graduating its first class in 2004 (and granting someone a doctorate in manga this spring):

“About 10 percent of them now work as professional manga artists, while others hold jobs in related fields such as illustration and advertising. [Manga artist and KSU instructor] Ms. [Keiko] Takemiya says the fact that some graduates were able to immediately find work bodes well in a low-paying field that still relies heavily on proven talent and graduates of technical schools.”

One thing every manga program seems to need is a name: a professional manga artist to lend credibility to the institution’s academic offerings. The manga-ka-in-residence also influences student demographics:

“About 80 percent of the students in Seika’s program, for example, are women, to whom Ms. Takemiya’s work seems to appeal the most. The majority of students at Takarazuka [University of Art and Design] are men, drawn to Mr. [Reiji] Matsumoto’s macho characters [from works such as Galaxy Express 999].”

Despite somewhat limited job prospects, enrollments tend to be high, and new programs are popping up all the time. And they’re drawing significant interest from international students:

“About 10 percent of the students at Seika’s manga school are international students, mainly from South Korea and China. There are no Americans in the program, but Manabu Kitawaki, director of the international office, says he receives several serious inquiries every week from the United States.”

This is all fascinating to me as someone who works in higher education marketing. It can be worrying when a discipline becomes a bandwagon program (it’s hot, and everyone has to have one, even if the graduate placement rates aren’t great). But arts education isn’t known for the vast majority of its graduates working in their field of study (as my dust-covered theatre diploma will attest).

But the selfish part of me hopes that someone from the United States does enroll in Seika’s program. And then starts keeping a blog.