ICv2 is getting a little tired of posting the same story week after week, that story being “Fruits Basket holds bookstore market in unrelenting death grip.” I can sort of sympathize, because I feel a similar wave of ennui every time I see tiresome, event-driven Marvel and DC comics at the top of ICv2’s monthly tallies of what’s selling in the Direct Market. (June? House of M 1. May? Green Lantern 1. April? New Avengers 5. And so on.)

I also tend to agree with David Taylor at Love Manga that it’s exciting to see a shôjo title at the top of the heap. Beyond that, it’s great to see FB and Fullmetal Alchemist consistently at the top of the charts because I think they’re both terrific.

(At this point, I need to interject something about publisher web sites that was discussed over at Cognitive Dissonance. Viz really, really needs to work on its web site. It’s incredibly difficult to find anything resembling general title information. Tokyopop’s, on the other hand, is a model of organization and detail by comparison.)

Okay, back to FB. I wasn’t crazy about the first volume, but the ceaseless, pounding repetition at ICv2 convinced me that all those readers couldn’t be all that wrong, so I tried subsequent digests. And I don’t know if they only started treating the paper with epidermally transmitted narcotics with the second volume or what, but that book is frighteningly addictive. I’m only up to volume four, and while I’ve managed to resist openly weeping while reading it, there have been a number of close calls. (That Momiji kid is like a pathos bomb.)

So… um… suck it up, ICv2. Yeah.

***

It’s Monday, and sure enough I’m blathering about some damned thing or another over at Comic World News. This week, it’s the latest in hot, plastic-wrapped manga from DMP.

There’s nothing like a great big comic convention. Unless it’s another great big comic convention mere weeks after the first one. That hardly seems redundant at all.

I’m glad Graeme McMillain is filtering through all the coverage for the weird stuff over at Fanboy Rampage. It’s much easier to take the bulleted version.

I have to say that I find Chicago scarier than San Diego just because of the name. “Wizard World” evokes mental images of a theme park founded entirely on the magazine’s singular creative vision, and it’s just too horrible to describe in any more detail.

Certain people… certain evil people… have taken it upon themselves to keep me up to date on just what the Newsarama community thinks of this whole manga thingamabob. Over the last week or so, they’ve been kind enough to point me to threads that address this complex subject.

First came word of this thread, winningly named “Do You Weep for Manga?” As near as I can determine, the central argument is that there are many people bemoaning manga’s limited success in comics specialty shops. The consensus? There isn’t one, but I do like this comment:

“I don’t weep for the comic shops that don’t recognize if their customer wants the product. Around here, most the comic shops carry as wide, or even wider variety of manga as the big bookstores.”

But that thread’s title is a masterpiece of subtlety compared to this little gem, called “Would you buy Manga if the art didn’t suck?” A poster starts things rolling:

“If the art was like David Finch or McNiven or JR Jr I would read Manga, but it all looks like bad Pokemon or Yugio cartoons.”

Okay, now I’m weeping. Not to worry, though. A number of manga fans, scanners humming, ride in to defend manga’s visual variety, non-suckiness, and even its bargain per-page price. My favorite post in the thread is a compare-and-contrast of a Chobits cover (Tokyopop) and one from Coven 1 (Image).

In too many years reading comics, I’ve lost count of the time I’ve looked at heated exchanges between apparently heterosexual male characters and muttered, “Just kiss already.” In the second volume of Kio Shimoku’s Genshiken (Del Rey), a man and a woman actually inspire the response.

What is this phenomenon? Hetyay?

In this case, the simmering undercurrent comes from otaku-hating Saki and nerd plus ultra Madarame. They’re natural enemies, obviously, pretty and predatory versus marginal and obsessive (think snake and mongoose), but there’s something more. They take too much delight in needling each other and zeroing in on each other’s weak points for it to be anything but blistering, shameful attraction.

And now, before I start sounding too much like an otaku myself, I’ll move on to more general reactions.

With the characters largely established in the first volume, it’s time for the manga to set up something resembling a plot. Since most of its protagonists are more interested in buying things than doing things, plots are a bit marginal. The club runs the risk of being eliminated by the officious campus activities vice president, and the members aren’t exactly equipped to respond. This leaves most of the heavy lifting to Saki, and Shimoku does a reasonably good job of illustrating the reasons why she might actually help the club. He also manages to maintain enough of her ant-at-the-picnic persona for things to be credible. It’s nice, careful character work.

But Genshiken does meander. It’s more interested in subculture immersion than narrative drive, so readers looking for a story with urgency will be disappointed. It holds up as a gently weird, funny character study, though, and I’m still enjoying it.

Oh, Digital Manga, how you tease me. You have two books coming out this week, and the pre-release buzz has me all betwixt and between.

The description of Bambi and Her Pink Gun doesn’t do much for me, but the title is certainly catchy, and the sample art is intriguing. I usually avoid lowlifes and gunfights, but a really interesting cross-section of people have praised this book or are eagerly looking forward to it, so I feel like I should set my genre prejudices aside. (I’ll even ignore the deal-breaking adjective, “Tarantinoesque,” and the endorsement of Puffy AmiYumi.)

On paper, Antique Bakery sounds like a manga created by people who have eavesdropped on my subconscious. Lyle at Crocodile Caucus was somewhat ambivalent about the first volume, though, and our tastes in manga seem to overlap. It’s possible that I’ve raised my expectations dangerously high, though Dorian at Postmodern Barney has seen and liked a scanslation of the title.

I’m glad it’s a slow week otherwise, because these two books are consuming all my anticipatory attention.

I had a list of things I’d hoped to do over the weekend and was able to check off exactly one of them (writing this week’s Flipped). I’m not really disappointed, because nothing on the list was what you would call critical, and I managed to keep myself out of trouble all the same.

I didn’t have any luck finding a copy of Capote in Kansas (Oni) at either of the local bookstores, but I did finally cave in and pick up the first volume of Gravitation (Tokyopop). I had browsed through it ages ago and wasn’t particularly impressed, but after reading the Steven and Jillian Grant’s review in the latest Comics Journal, I wanted to give it another shot. Apparently in that first glance-through, I’d fixated on the moody, angry bits and had failed to notice how funny the title is. It’s always nice to come late to a title that has plenty of volumes to pick up at leisure.

The second volume of Yotsuba&! (ADV) was nowhere to be found either, though there was an empty space on the shelf where it might once have been. So off to the internet I went, ordering both of Frederick L. Schodt’s books on manga as well (bargain priced if ordered together). Belatedly wondering how I might finance all this, I finally put some of my old comics up for auction on EBay. Nothing particularly exciting, mind you… just some test auctions. It’s just the next step in finding More Money for Manga.

I wasn’t even ambitious in the kitchen. I’d meant to look through some cookbooks and try some new recipes, but I got distracted by basil and ripe hot peppers in the garden and made the same spicy tofu I do all the time.

And the dog got a bath, and the lawn got mowed, and the house is clean, so it’s not like I was an utterly self-indulgent slug.

The first line of dialogue from Giant-Size Spider-Woman 1:

“I’m a cheap slut. I am. When did that happen exactly?”

Doesn’t that just draw you in? Don’t you want to know more? And isn’t it so bracingly modern? Welcome to the comeback trail, Spider-Woman.

Your membership papers for the Order of Former Super-Heroines Turned Self-Loathing Private Investigators Named Jessica are being processed and will be delivered within seven to ten business days.

Greg Rucka has apologized to readers of DC’s The OMAC Project for being unable to contain such an epic to the six issues of that title. Mistakes were (kind of) made, and a plot twist integral to the coherence of that mini-series actually happened in the “Sacrifice” crossover that’s running through some other titles I don’t follow. (Except for one.)

“So instead of a six issue miniseries, you get a ten issue miniseries, and I won’t fault any reader for not picking it up. I’d still suggest them though, because they’re a good story and worth reading, but I’d suggest, if nothing else, you pick up Wonder Woman #219 at the very least – call it issue OMAC #3.5 if you must, because it sets up the events of OMAC #4.”

If I can make a quick stab at paraphrasing, “We tried to contain the artificiality and cynicism, but it took on a life of its own. Plus, Wonder Woman needs the sales bump. And I’m not really apologizing, because that would be stupid, because OMAC is Important, and you should be buying it if you hope to understand the next year’s worth of DC Comics. Doesn’t ‘trinity’ sound mythic?”

He’s also apologized to writers Gail Simone (Action Comics) and Mark Verheiden (Superman) for foisting the story on their barely-begun runs on those titles. “Sacrifice” could have been called “Taking One for the Team,” apparently. Rucka somehow neglects to apologize to himself, even though one of his own books, Wonder Woman, is utterly derailed by the crossover.

I’m not going to sit here and argue that Wonder Woman is a great title, but it has a lot going for it. I really enjoy Rucka’s treatment of the Mount Olympus crowd, and I think his original aim – showing where Diana and her mission fit into the DC Universe – is interesting (when it crops up). Sure, Veronica Cale is a badly motivated and hopelessly inept arch-nemesis. Sure, the whole blindness interlude was a pointless non-starter. But scheming Greek deities go a long way with me.

Now, all that build-up seems destined to be sidelined if not abandoned entirely for the sake of Diana’s function as Amazon ex machina in OMAC, which is incredibly irritating.

But, as Johanna notes, at least it came out on time.

After reading the second issue of Shojo Beat, I’ve decided I like the idea of the magazine better than the magazine itself.

That isn’t to say that I think Shojo Beat is bad. On the contrary, I think it has a lot of strengths in terms of concept and content, and I hope it fares as well in the market as Shonen Jump. But the second issue helped me realize that anthologies just aren’t my favorite manga delivery system.

I like the big, meaty chunks of story that come in tankoubons. And I think the titles I enjoy in Shojo Beat (like Ai Yazawa’s Nana and Mitsuba Takanashi’s Crimson Hero) would read better in that format. So far, Yû Watase’s Absolute Boyfriend seems to work well in monthly doses, but I don’t think it will lose anything in collection.

The other benefit of sticking to digests is to limit my exposure to manga I really don’t like. I don’t know about you, but what little capacity for frugality I have usually results in some weird kind of entertainment masochism. I can very rarely pay for a comic, book, or movie ticket and give up halfway through, no matter how awful I think it is. If I buy an anthology, I feel compelled to read all of it in service of the abstract notion of “getting my money’s worth.”

So that means I forced myself to read the second chapters of Taeko Watanabe’s Kaze Hikaru and Kaori Yuki’s Godchild. Kaze Hikaru makes a bit more sense this time around, but I still don’t find it very interesting. (It actually had a narcoleptic effect.) Godchild is pretty to look at, but the dialogue is agonizing:

“How many times do I have to tell you that I would never give my precious little sister to a guy whose parents disowned him, even though he’s the eldest son of the Gabriel Baroncy?! Do you have a Lolita complex?”

Since I haven’t found the plots to be great shakes, the clunky, anachronistic chatter is even more of an irritant.

I’m not really sure where Marimo Ragawa’s Baby & Me is going, though I do know that it’s shamelessly manipulative. That isn’t a criticism on its own, but the manipulation here is kind of crude. I worry about the toddler wandering into an elevator shaft, worry about the kid spending decades in therapy, and puzzle at the grown-ups who don’t seem to find the situation problematic. If it were a dark comedy, it might hold together for me. As it is, I don’t know what to make of it (and I’m not inclined to watch it too closely to find out).

I do love the concept of targeted anthologies, though. If the market could sustain them, I’d like to see more, especially if they were genre-based. It’s probably impractical (and would certainly be a huge investment), but what about anthologies focusing on science fiction, fantasy, mystery, sports, and other story types, or audience-focused collections of josei or yaoi? And since I’m clearly in a fantasy world at the moment, why not mix in some avant-garde stories and genre classics along with the popular, contemporary titles, just to test demand for translations of these neglected works?

Okay, that’s a weird request coming after my claim that I really don’t like reading manga in an anthology format. But with anthologies come the possibility of more digests, which I do like, so it’s a self-serving suggestion. So in summary, I would like for manga publishers to continue spending millions of dollars on publishing experiments that may or may not result in me buying a few more paperbacks. Yes, I’m just that narcissistic.

I’m not the only one who likes Fullmetal Alchemist (Viz). It got a very positive review in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times in a piece that also looked at Negima! (Del Rey) and Hunter X Hunter (Viz). It’s nice to see manga reviews in a major metropolitan daily.

***

At Reading Along, James Schee reviews Viz’s Shojo Beat Compilation, which collects sample chapters from the line’s tankoubon titles. I almost picked this up, but I couldn’t resist the call of Watase (and I’d already picked up the first volumes of Ultra Maniac and Tokyo Boys and Girls).

A couple of weeks ago, I was among those grumbling at the flood of Viz product that came out in a single week. After a trip to Barnes and Noble, I can sort of see the logic of it. If Viz puts out all of its Shojo Beat digests in a single week, bookstores are more likely to shelve them all in one of those nifty cardboard specialty displays. (I can’t imagine bookstore employees relishing the arrival of that much material any more than manga-friendly comic shop employees do, though.)

This week, the only things shipping from Viz are the latest issues of Shojo Beat and Shonen Jump, though SB 2 has been in bookstores for a couple of weeks. It’s that kind of time lapse between bookstore and comic shop ship dates that makes me less inclined to pre-order popular manga titles through Previews, because I’m very much about the instant gratification. It’s still useful for the more off-kilter stuff, though.

***

Speaking of which, I could have sworn this was the week for Antique Bakery and Bambi and Her Pink Gun from Digital Manga. Alas, this week’s arrivals begin and end with Yellow, a yaoi title that seems to feature gangsters rather heavily. I’ll wait for the pastry chefs. (Yaoi is one of those niches of the manga market that I almost always have to pre-order, by the way. I’ve never seen any of Digital Manga’s line in bookstores in town, though I have up in Pittsburgh.)

***

Del Rey has second volumes of Genshiken and Nodame Cantabile. I thought both titles started well, and I’ll probably pick these up at some point, if not tomorrow.

There’s also a new title from Othello creator Satomi Ikezawa, Guru Guru Pon-Chan. Inter-species romance? Well, Ikezawa has already done nice work with dissociative identity disorder, so who can say how it will work out?

***

At iComics, Greg McElhatton gives a glowing review to Capote in Kansas (Oni), by Andre Parks and Chris Samnee. This sounds really intriguing, and I’ve been having very good luck with Oni books lately, whether they’re about funny, talking primates, fur traders, or ambivalent fathers.

***

Get the children inside! Tape the windows and check the expiration dates on the canned goods! Did you stock up on bottled water?! The 11th volume of Fruits Basket is coming!

Actually, I finally got around to trying the second volume of this after being somewhat unimpressed with the first. I can sense it slowly creeping up on me, kind of like when people say that pot didn’t do a thing for them the first time they tried it, then they’re begging their optometrists to diagnose them with glaucoma so they can ingest it by prescription.

***

And even DC and Marvel will be making their contributions to the week in comics. I’m looking forward to seeing if Brian K. Vaughan can pull together the various story elements of his current arc in Runaways 6. And I’m always happy to see a new issue of Legion of Super-Heroes (8). Tense teens in turmoil!

While I bought the individual issues, it’s nice to see Marvel turn right around with a collection of Dan Slott’s delightful Spider-Man/Human Torch mini in an affordable digest format. Oooh, and it’s going to have a Paul Smith cover.

And lastly, while I seem to have fewer and fewer reasons to care about Marvel’s far-flung solicitations, the announcement of the October re-launch of She-Hulk fills me with delight. Even a Greg Horn cover can’t diminish my enthusiasm.