Oh, the ebb and flow of Wednesdays. It’s another hefty one, but it’s filled with all kinds of comic-y goodness.

The third issue of Andi Watson and Simon Gane’s gorgeous Paris arrives, courtesy of Slave Labor Graphics.

I’ve heard nothing but nice things about David Petersen’s Mouse Guard from Archaia Studios, and the preview images I’ve seen look really beautiful.

I’m looking forward to Put the Book Back on the Shelf: A Belle and Sebastian Anthology from Image (scroll down – quickly), even though I can’t remember ever actually listening to any of Belle and Sebastian’s music. Is that odd? (And yes, this could be construed as an invitation to make CD recommendations.)

Any week that includes a new issue of Ted Naifeh’s Polly and the Pirates (Oni) is a good week, in my opinion.

Viz’s Signature imprint begins with the arrival of the first volumes of Golgo 13 and Naoki Urasawa’s Monster.

It’s like there’s something for each of my multiple personalities.

So I got my first copy of Tokyopop’s free Manga magazine in the mail the other day. Maybe I’m tipsy over the preview chapter from the next volume of Fruits Basket, but I think it’s a very nice product. I was glad to see a preview of Dragon Head included. It’s received a number of deservedly good reviews, so I’m glad that Tokyopop is giving it an extra boost in its freebie publication. (Kami-Kaze looks kind of horrible, though.)

I think Manga might be going a little overboard on the annotations they run with their sample chapters. It’s a nice idea to give some snippets on the creative process, quotes from the creators, etc., but the text can get a little purple. It was particularly noticeable in the Sorcerers & Secretaries preview. This looks like a fun, light story, but at times the crawl read like it might have been something out of the Absolute Watchmen collection. I think they should probably lean towards breezy and informative with the running commentary. What’s there ended up actually distracting from the preview itself, which probably wasn’t the intention.

There’s a short but nice interview with Mitsuzaku Mihara that actually makes me want to take a look at Doll. Am I making a horrible mistake? I’ll have to check the lists over at MangaTrade.

In other manga news, David Taylor taunts me with an example of why television is so much better in England. (Okay, probably not all television.) He also takes a look at the latest DM manga numbers. Yay! Death Note cracked the top 100 GNs!

And lastly, it’s Monday, so it’s time for the customary self-promotion. There’s a new Flipped up where I talk about how much I like Hikaru no Go.

The last couple of weeks of insight into Marvel’s fascinating diversity policies have left me with an unhealthy interest in the Joe Fridays column at Newsarama.

What’s on tap this week? Oddly enough, it starts off with Newsarama asking essentially the same questions about terrorists as they asked about gays last week:

“That said then, would or did Marvel ever consider a project where the threat of Al Queda is handled so directly?”

And would it have to be a MAX series?

There’s also some discussion of just why some fans might roll their eyes when Marvel makes a big deal about hiring a writer from another medium like television or film. Quesada dons protective gear for a bit of spelunking into the mind of the disgruntled fanboy:

“So, recently I’ve seen this trend of guys coming from the ocean and into our pond and suddenly fans are getting testy about it. Okay, I understand, they feel like we’re being invaded unfairly in some way or perhaps these guys somehow have not paid their dues or their debt to the comic’s society – which I’ve never understood because talent is talent. Perhaps some of these fans have aspirations to become comic writers one day and they see this as hurting their chances. Well, if that’s the case then that’s just silly and selfish.

“So, here’s all I ask folks to think about before jumping on these new talents, regardless of who they work for. Why are they doing it? Every one of these Hollywood writers – I’m using the term ‘Hollywood’ here as a general catch all for movies, TV and novels – can make infinitely more money doing something else. The week that they spend writing an issue of Wolverine is a week they can spend writing a script for TV, etc. and get paid so much more than comics. So, why, why dabble in this small pond? Could it be that these particular talents have an insatiable love for comics? I mean I could see fans being skeptical if there was more money in comics than in Hollywood, then I could at least buy into the logic that, hey, these people are only coming to comics for the money! But, that’s not the case. Guys like Whedon, Meltzer, Stracznyski, Heinberg, Lindelof, Verheiden etc. are doing it because they love comics and they love the characters and they love the universes. What more can you ask from a creator than love for this medium that we all in turn love as well. Not only that, these guys come to comics in complete awe of guys like Bendis and Johns and Millar. Now, why you would be in awe of Millar is a whole other thing, but you catch my drift. So, they’re taking a pay cut to work in a smaller field and they have complete reverence for those that came before and the characters and universe, why are we giving them a hard time?”

Oh, where, where, where to start? It’s like the platonic ideal of self-serving spin.

1. “They’re just jealous.” I’m trying to picture the individual who might actually think, “Damnit! They hired that scriptwriter from 24! Now they’ll never buy my pitch for an Iron Man/Punisher mini! Stupid carpetbaggers!”
2. “We should be grateful.” See, this is a bit closer to the cause of the eye-rolling, I think. Usually, it’s just an undercurrent of low self-esteem when Marvel announces a Hollywood hire. This time, it’s stripped nekkid. “These good people are sacrificing money and prestige to work with us, because they love Wolverine.” Think about that for just a minute.
3. “Not only that, these guys come to comics in complete awe of guys like Bendis and Johns and Millar.” And isn’t that just what super-hero comics need?

After a couple of weeks of horrifying quantities of books showing up in my reserve file, this Wednesday seems relatively sedate. I’m not complaining, because there’s still plenty to enjoy.

I ♥ Marvel: Marvel AI features stories by C.B. Cebulski (the brains behind the developing Jetlag anthology) and art by Tomoko Tanigiuchi, Kei Kobayashi, and Toga. Here’s a preview at The Pulse.

Fully a month after it showed up in bookstores, the sixth and penultimate volume of Satomi Ikezawa’s Othello (Del Rey) arrives at my local comic shop. I’ve really enjoyed this book and its unusual approach to standard shôjo crises, but seven volumes seems just the right length.

It’s not on this week’s shipping list, but my LCS seems to think that the second volume of Scott Chantler’s very entertaining Northwest Passage (Oni) will arrive on Wednesday. If so, yay! It’s a historical adventure with lots of action, detail, and beautiful art. (Here’s what I thought of the first chapter.)

There’s a lively discussion going on over at Love Manga on shôjo, anthologies, anime, and just how awesome Ai Yazawa is. Brigid from MangaBlog arrives to share the always welcome perspective of her shôjo-loving daughters, who enjoy both Shojo Beat the magazine and the subsequent collected versions of the serialized stories.

Speaking of Ai Yazawa and Shojo Beat, this week’s Flipped takes a look at Nana and Kamikaze Girls.

And speaking of great manga in general, several bloggers have noted that Viz is having a sale on some of its out-of-print titles, many of which are really, really terrific. There goes my tax refund.

Is it weird that the movie that convinced me Scarlett Johansson is a really good actor is The Island? It’s a terrible movie, which is precisely what you’d expect from a Michael Bay remake of Parts: The Clonus Horror. And it isn’t like I haven’t enjoyed Johansson’s performances before in much better movies.

But she’s just so damned funny in The Island – intentionally funny, but logically so within Bay’s moronic framework. She seems to have hit that precise sweet spot where a fine and talented actor does something exactly right with really, really bad material.

Up until now, I’ve been led to believe her skill set ran exactly as far as sulking beautifully and with meaning. Now I know she’s capable of keen, satirical comedy, so capable that she can pull it off probably without the director’s knowledge or consent. I want to see her in a Christopher Guest movie, riffing with Parker Posey.

I do find myself trying to picture her reaction when her agent described the part to her. “You’ll be playing the clone of a supermodel.” Pause. “For Michael Bay.” I’m guessing such a moment would leave you with two choices: laugh or cry. I’m glad she laughed.

She’s pretty much all that The Island has going for it, and the movie makes me wonder why contemporary directors are so fond of remaking wonderfully terrible movies that can’t really be improved. There’s a Poseidon Adventure remake in production (just Poseidon now, which fills me with the direst of suspicions), and seriously, there is not a more perfect, unintentionally stupid movie than the original.

The thought of someone trying to turn that kind of material into something genuinely exciting and tense is just depressing. And without the kind of B-list actresses that the 1970s seemed to produce in such wonderful quantities (Stella Stevens, Pamela Sue Martin, Carol Lynley) to liven things up, the prospects become even direr. (The only contemporary actress I can think of that has something of the same quality of a Martin or a Lynley is Milla Jovovich, and she isn’t in Poseidon. Fools!)

In the wake of last week’s glib handling of the subject of gay lead characters in Marvel comics, Newsarama gives Joe Quesada the chance to say essentially the same thing all over again, but with a more conciliatory tone. He explains the rationale behind Slap Leather’s MAX designation:

“Rawhide was labeled MAX because the major hook and focus of the project was the sexuality of the main character, a 50-plus year old established character. The reason the books featuring the characters you named in your question [Northstar, Hulkling, Asguardian] don’t carry a MAX label is because that’s not the focus of their books. The sexuality aspect of their lives is just one part of the whole that makes up their books, as opposed to Rawhide, where the fact that he was gay and his history was the major point of the book.”

I should probably confess at this point that I kind of liked Slap Leather. It required a conscious decision on my part that the book’s single joke wasn’t sniggering at Rawhide Kid but at the characters around him, and I completely understand why everyone wouldn’t come to that conclusion. It took a fair amount of squinting for me to reach it, to be honest. That said, I never thought the title was in any way progressive, just mildly amusing in a faintly subversive way. (If you want a real laugh, take a look at this old Crossfire transcript where Stan Lee maintains that there’s no innuendo in Slap Leather. Stan, there’s nothing but innuendo in it.)

So Quesada complaining that Brokeback Mountain will get the credit for humanizing the gay cowboy while Slap Leather goes unrecognized is kind of like an adult video producer claiming that, hey, they’ve had gay cowboys in their films for years, and nobody ever gave them an Oscar.

And maybe Quesada’s approach isn’t all that conciliatory after all:

“So, while some may want to get up in arms three years later that it was labeled MAX, I don’t understand why we aren’t at least celebrating the fact that it happened, that it was published and we took on the naysayers and the hardcore fanmen and the letter writers and the bloodthirsty media. That was the true triumph of Rawhide. The book and the character now exist!”

I know, I know… comic publisher attempts to reframe the argument to serve his own ends, alert the media. Still, dusting off a mothballed property and gaying it up for laughs isn’t exactly a milestone of creative daring or social progress.

It’s not entirely clear, but it does seem like the Kid could get another stab at the spotlight without the MAX stamp:

“NRAMA: That all said, would you consider publishing a new Rawhide Kid story where his sexual identity wasn’t an issue/referred to…

“JQ: Yes.”

***

Also at Newsarama, a review of a Be Beautiful title in the latest Your Manga Minute introduces me to an unfamiliar bit of fan-speak, “non-con.” That’s about the cutest euphemism for “rape” that I’ve ever seen, and I really could have gone the rest of my life without learning of it.

***

And finally at Newsarama, there’s Brian Hibbs’s eagerly awaited look at 2005 BookScan figures in the latest installment of Tilting at Windmills. This gives me the perfect opportunity to point you to the back-in-action David Taylor, who discusses the column at Love Manga. Chris Butcher takes a thorough look at comics.212.net, too. I particularly like one of the points from Chris’s summary:

“I find it vaguely exciting as a comics retailer though, knowing that there’s still an obvious (and massive) gap to fill, where breadth of selection and product knowledge is more important than not.”