It’s a bit of a slow week in terms of comic shop arrivals, which is fine. I’ve got a huge list of fantasy titles to track down at the library, and I’m ready for some prose.

The ComicList shows the fifth volume of Girl Genius (Airship) coming out this week in both hard- and soft-cover formats. It came to the local comic shop last week, and I loved it a lot. I’m constantly amazed at the Foglios’ ability to pack their stories with new, distinct, and engaging characters in chapter after chapter. That means my favorite cast members might not get as much focus as I’d like, but it also means new favorites are always on the horizon. The Foglios also have a terrific knack for folding exposition into the story in creative ways that are handy for new readers but still entertaining for long-time fans. It’s just great stuff – funny, vivid, action-packed, and delightful.

CMX rolls out the first volume of Meca Tanaka’s Omukae Desu, a book I liked a lot. Afterlife bureaucracy, part-time teen employees, and bunny suits combine for something funny and weird. (Oh, and speaking of CMX titles I liked in preview form, prepare to become sick to death of me talking about Sakura Tsukuba’s Penguin Revolution. In spite of my disappointment that it featured no actual penguins, it’s a very funny piece of shôjo romantic comedy with some great characters.)

Graphix is rolling out the first of its Goosebumps graphic novels in comic shops, which means they’ve probably been in bookstores for a while now. These tween horror books were well after my time as a young-adult reader (though that didn’t keep me from exploring the shamefully tawdry world of Sweet Valley High as a twenty-something), but it’s interesting to see Graphix further establish itself with adaptations of kids’ classics. (No information is readily available on the Graphix web site. Here’s a preview piece from Publishers Weekly.)

On the self-promotion front, Brian Cronin was kind enough to ask me to do a guest entry at Comics Should Be Good. I immediately abused his hospitality by pimping a bunch of pet manga titles, figuring that I could bore a relatively new audience.

I did roughly the same thing in this week’s Flipped, with a healthy sprinkling of pet Oni books as well.

I’ve been wondering when one of the general interest weekly magazines is going to take a look at manga, so thanks to Blog@Newsarama for pointing out this piece in Time. As Brigid notes, it focuses rather heavily on one segment of the audience.

It’s also very centered on Tokyopop, another success for the publisher’s publicity machine. Reporter Coco Masters focuses almost exclusively on the fomenters of the Manga Revolution, with some assistance from Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly Comics Week:

“‘Tokyopop created what is known as the authentic Japanese manga,’ says Reid. Tokyopop insisted the books read from back to front so as not to compromise the original artwork and spelled Japanese sound effects phonetically. It changed the books’ dimensions to mass-market paperback size (about 200 pages) but stuck to a $10 price—about an hour’s worth of babysitting.”

Tokyopop also taught us how to love, contrary to claims of record producers putting together power ballad collections.

Despite its routine dominance of manga sales in bookstores and high profile courtesy of anime properties, Viz makes somewhat of an “and the rest” appearance to be stern Aunt Gertrude and claim that manga only comes from Japan. I can’t tell whether that bit came from speaking directly to a Viz source or scanning through Liza Coppola’s ICv2 interview from 9 months ago, but at least it creates the appearance of multiple-source journalism.

At the end, Masters wonders, “Anyone for Manga Meets Spider-Man?” Eh, not really. Spawn, on the other hand…

Tokyopop has announced that some titles are becoming “online exclusives,” available for purchase only through the publisher’s web site.

Tokyopop’s publishing partner, HarperCollins, has announced that it will be putting significant preview content on its web site. (Free registration required to read the article.)

“’The younger generations are consuming information in a different way,’ said Brian Murray, group president of HarperCollins. ‘They may not necessarily be going into bookshops. They are spending time on Google, MySpace, Facebook, author Web sites, Yahoo and MSN.’”

Are the two connected? I don’t think so, though it could be synergistic instead of just coincidental. It’s nice to see a prose publisher make some efforts in this direction, as I can’t really think of one of their sites that I’d consider a destination.

“For now HarperCollins does not plan to sell books directly to customers online, but will rather use the ‘Browse Inside’ feature as a way to lure readers to its Web pages, which will also include interviews, tour schedules, reading group guides, photographs and links to author blogs.”

Sound familiar?

Looking at the HarperCollins site as it stands, there’s a lot of potential for sprucing up pages for its various imprints. Sounds like it really might cost a fortune, but once the infrastructure’s in place, it might be really useful for at-home book shoppers.

What’s that you say? I can enjoy another comic about the settlement of North America? Why, thank you! This time around, it’s George O’Connor’s Journey into Mohawk Country from First Second, profiled in the latest Publishers Weekly Comics Week. It sounds like the perfect companion reading for Scott Chantler’s excellent Northwest Passage from Oni. (I wonder if Oni is planning an omnibus edition for after the three-volume series concludes this month? That would be a very library-friendly gesture.)

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Greg McElhatton has a review of Ueda Hajime’s Q-Ko-Chan: The Earth Invader Girl (Del Rey) up at iComics.com. I picked this book up this week and found it to be visually arresting but a little hard to follow. It looks amazing, and the character design is stunning. It’s also only two volumes long, so I’ll definitely give it a closer read after I plow through some of the backlog of books that are sitting there in a pile and judging me.

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I should have learned by now not to assume that even great comic shops will have precisely what I want all the time. I had planned to do a lot of shopping at Alternative Reality during a recent trip to Las Vegas, but all of the books on my list (the first issue of the new Castle Waiting series from Linda Medley and Get a Life from Drawn and Quarterly, among others) were sold out. So I guess I have good taste and bad timing.

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The main reason behind the Vegas jaunt was to see Cirque du Soleil’s KÀ at the MGM Grand. It was amazing, but I was surprised to be bothered by some of the same issues of design versus functionality that I’ve found with some publishers’ web sites. It’s a masterpiece of technical theatre, with this phenomenal turntable that goes in every conceivable direction, but the flourishes eventually overwhelm the narrative completely. It’s too bad, because the story started extremely well. Still, if you’re a fan of “we did that because we could” showmanship, go for it. (After looking through the gift shop and laughing at the prices, we decided that Cirque is probably working on a sequel called CHÏNG.)

But if you’re in Vegas and want to feed a Cirque jones, I’d recommend Mystère at Treasure Island. If you want to feed a Cirque jones and don’t feel like dealing with the Vegas fracas (and who could blame you?), just wait until Quidam comes to a city near you. It’s still my favorite of their productions.

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If you’re in Vegas, are a Top Chef fan, and feel like sampling some of Tom Colicchio’s cooking, I’d recommend stopping by ‘wichcraft at the MGM Grand. The sandwiches are great, and the prices are pretty reasonable for celebrity chef casino food. (I’d love to have the kind of money to be a shameless, fame-whoring foodie in Las Vegas, but who can afford it?)

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My approach to gambling in Las Vegas is to spend as little money as possible for the longest possible period of time. I never assume I’m going to win anything beyond the cost of a cup of coffee. The best spot for that kind of play was Sam’s Town, which is way off the Strip, but that only makes it more appealing to me. If we ever go back, we might just have to stay there, as it’s a lot cheaper, seems friendlier than most of the mid-range Strip options, and has undergone a serious renovation in the last few years.

Whenever I go away for a few days, I’m amazed at how much interesting conversation I’ve missed. Brigid has an interview with Tokyopop’s web community content producer at MangaBlog. David Taylor takes a look at the state of manga in the United Kingdom at Love Manga. Samurai Tusok wades into the topic of authenticity and what makes manga manga at Bento Physics.

But what really catches my eye, partly because it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, is all the recent talk about yaoi. It’s interesting to see a consideration of the formulaic nature of the category, because it seems to suggest that a formula is essentially a negative in a creative endeavor. There was a recent flurry of complaints that a lot of shôjo titles fall into a formulaic trap, but I would suggest that the formula itself isn’t the problem. Any creator can take a fairly rigid narrative framework (say, young-man-with-a-dream shônen or ordinary-girl-discovers-magical-destiny shôjo) and invest it with enough specificity and personality to make the familiarity of its infrastructure entirely irrelevant.

So I think the question is more about how publishers are doing in selecting yaoi and shônen-ai titles to license. Are readers getting a full sense of the category, or are publishers launching their efforts in this area with what might be lowest-common-denominator books that stick to whatever tropes are most defining? Immediately recognizable aualities that make the reader say, “Yes, this is yaoi”?

I’m not really sure what the answer is. I still haven’t waded too far into the world of scanlations, so I don’t have a very clear sense of what’s lurking out there on the horizon and if what we’re getting now is yaoi 1.0 rather than a full sampling of the category. I’ve heard of a handful of titles that sound intriguing (I’ve wanted to get my hands on NYNY since I read about it in Paul Gravett’s Manga), but I’m basically ignorant of how the genre stands in contrast to the body of work that’s available in translation.

Tina Anderson has grown weary of the focus on yaoi’s appeal as opposed to its content:

“I’m tired of being approached by members from the media under the auspices of, ‘let’s talk about yaoi’ only to have it turn into a couch session on why I as a woman, am turned on by homoerotic manga, why I think women like it and Gay men don’t, and what’s this appeal of lovely men in love overall. 0_o. I don’t see articles about the appeal of noir Seinen manga on the fans who read it? I don’t see every new license from Tokyo Pop being discussed by the media asking, Why do they read it? What makes them tick? What is it about Western Fans that makes them want to read Japanese Manga?”

I have to say that virtually every mainstream media article about manga that I’ve read has featured just that focus: why do fans like it? Teen-ages from Orlando to Des Moines to Anchorage have been cornered in bookstores and libraries and junior high schools and quizzed on this subject by reporters, whether they’ve got Fruits Basket or Naruto or any number of other books in their backpacks. It’s an entry point for reporters who don’t necessarily know a lot about the subject, and (more importantly) it’s an essential aspect of the story for readers who are possibly even less familiar with manga.

And when you’re delving into a niche within manga, I think it’s just as logical to take that approach. Sure, there’s a prurient aspect to the questions, but reporters need hooks, for better or worse. I don’t think it’s necessarily disrespectful or dismissive to try and understand a category’s appeal to its audience when you’re writing about it. Tiresome and repetitive for the people who get asked the question over and over again? Sure. Irrelevant? Not in the least.

Honestly, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around yaoi and shônen-ai, at least partly because of the licensing choices I discussed above. It’s hard for me not to be troubled by the number of books that seem to feature coercion as an essential relationship milestone. Looking at the bulk of what’s available, I can see why people who aren’t fans would wonder what the big deal is and eschew questions about character, because a lot of the books aren’t particularly rich in that respect.

But there are several titles that I really like, and a quality that they share is a willingness to expand on the formula or subvert it. Shout Out Loud (Blu) explores a whole range of human relationships – familial, generational, professional, and so on – and does it with a heftier dose of humor than I’ve seen elsewhere. Only the Ring Finger Knows (DMP) was a lovely bit of romance that impressed me because it was driven by character. The events of the story seemed specific to those characters rather than being a case of attractive archetypes being wedged into a familiar series of events.

My current favorite would have to be La Esperanca (DMP), even though it can get a little drippy at times. Chigusa Kawai’s characters don’t exist in some romantic vacuum where they’re influenced only by their feelings for each other. They have family issues, are surrounded by friends and classmates with their own perceptions and agendas, and live in the larger world of the school and the town that surrounds it. Romance is an aspect of their lives, a part of their evolving identities, rather than the only thing that matters.

Kawai also shows a very subversive sense of humor in the back-up stories. In volume two – I think – she frames a story very much along the lines of the “why do you like it” question, introducing a romantic spoiler character who seems based on a stereotypical yaoi fangirl. But since she’s invested in the characters as people instead of observing them in a fictional context, she’s forced to face them as people instead of fantasy objects. It’s a great, risky piece with a lot of layers, and it ends up being both a clear-eyed celebration of the genre and an expansion of its possibilites.

Tired.

Happy to see pets.

Hate airports.

More later.

I’m going to be off-line for a few days. A new installment of Flipped will be up tomorrow at Comic World News.

Have a good week!

So I believe the technical term for the quantity of interesting comics on offer in the latest Previews would be “honking butt-load.”

I’m very taken with the idea of Project: Romantic from AdHouse books. The participation of Debbie Huey, Hope Larson, and Jim Rugg is probably enough to sell me on it. I’m hoping for a wide variety of stories and styles, and the blurb promises “a cornucopia.” Tom Spurgeon has a preview over at Comics Reporter. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to be another collection of stories about 20-something nebbishes obsessively checking their voice mail to see if their hot ex-girlfriend called, even though she moved on to date someone emotionally stable with a job that offers health insurance. (If anyone’s seen a copy and can confirm or deny that impression, please, e-mail me.)

I like Anne Freaks. I like Yua Kotegawa. It stands to reason I’ll also like Kotegawa’s Line from ADV.

How did I miss the news that Josh (A Few Perfect Hours) Neufeld has a new series, Vagabonds, coming out from Alternative Comics? At least I can order both of the issues that are out so far to ease my shame.

I’ve had a really good track record with titles from Amaze Ink/Slave Labor Graphics, and Agnes Quill: An Anthology of Mystery sounds right up my alley. I can’t find any information on it on the publisher’s web site, but it’s about a teenage detective who solves spooky mysteries. Written by Dave Roman, it’s illustrated by various artists, including the wonderful Raina Telgemeier.

I missed this in the manga debut trawl yesterday, but Archie will be releasing a collection of the first batch of issues from Tania del Rio’s “manga makeover” of Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Del Rey offers the fourth volume of Love Roma and the seventh of Genshiken. Chris Butcher listed Love Roma as one of the best books of 2005, and Genshiken just gets better and better. There’s a sequence in volume six that’s as funny and sad and pitch-perfect as just about any comic I’ve read this year.

Between the preview on Free Comic Books Day and Rose Curtin, I’m officially obsessed with Moomin (Drawn & Quarterly). They’re hippo-esque and kind of freaky! Sold!

Fanfare/Ponent Mon offers more work from Jiro Taniguchi, The Ice Wanderer. The more, the better. And my money’s on the moose. I’ve heard stories.

Telgemeier also has the second volume of her wonderful Baby-Sitters Club adaptations on offer from Graphix. This one’s called The Truth About Stacy. (Okay, the title sounds a little like it should be a Lifetime movie starring one of the girls from Popular who’s struggling with an unplanned pregnancy, eating disorder, drug problem, peer harassment, or has killed her boyfriend under controversial circumstances. I know the book won’t be anything like that though.)

Okay, Legion of Evil Press has the best solicitation ever for Chip Zdarsky’s Monster Cops #1:

“CIVIL WAR FINALE! It all ends here! With the South on the run, can the North finally claim victory?”

The imminent arrival of a new volume of Jen Lee Quick’s Off*Beat (Tokyopop) is very happy news indeed. This is a really intriguing and entirely underrated book. It’s quirky and moving, and it seems like it’s been forever since the first volume came out, which is always a good indicator of enthusiasm.

I am too old to buy the Owly plush toy. I am too old to buy the Owly plush toy. I am too old to buy the Owly plush toy. (If I keep repeating it often enough, maybe I’ll believe it by October.)

There was some interesting back and forth about the content of Fumi (Antique Bakery) Yoshinaga’s Gerard and Jacques, which prompted a great e-mail from Kate De Groot. Kate was kind enough to allow me to post it here, as I’m always interested in multiple perspectives. (Kate’s e-mail contains some general spoilers for G&J and some slightly more specific ones for Kizuna.)

Anyway, take it away, Kate:

Hi David—

I have been reading your blog for a few weeks and really enjoying it. I wanted to send you a comment on the recent “Gerard & Jacques” discussion, but I’m too lazy to set up an account to do it. 😎

I reread the books last night because I like Fumi Yoshinaga’s work and was a little bothered by what some others were saying on your comments page. Disclaimer: I don’t read Japanese well. But I think I read it well enough to say that there is no non-consensual sex involving the younger partner (Jacques) in this story. One can certainly (if one is being *very* serious about the social impact of yaoi) debate the validity of consent in a situation that is so imbalanced from a power perspective. There is without question an unequal relationship between these two in many respects. But in this story that doesn’t bother me such a lot because—after the initial encounter—the majority of the plot (a bittersweet comedy, like much of Yoshinaga’s work) revolves around the older man, Gerard, refusing to sleep with Jacques again, and Jacques’ frustration and pursuit of Gerard. And Jacques doesn’t start doing the pursuing until he is truly an adult, several years after the initial scene.

In short, this is not a “Kizuna” type situation where the seme throws down the uke and flat-out rapes him, and afterwards the uke says, “I love you” while the reader is thinking “Is that position even possible?” and “Oh my GOD, that’s gotta hurt.” (Much as I love “Kizuna,” that opening story…well.)

You may have set your e-mail to block attachments, but in the event you can view it, I have attached a .jpg of the cover of volume 2 (from the jpqueen website) to illustrate how Jacques matures into his early twenties as the story progresses.

My apologies for butting in, but I thought that if you were going to skip this one because it featured a “rapist master,” then maybe another perspective might be worthwhile…

Best,Kate