It’s always nice when an experience exceeds your expectations. I knew I would have a great time meeting Ed, Rose, and Steven at the Pittsburgh Comicon, and I did, but I didn’t expect much from the con itself.

Fortunately, retailers from across the region had brought boxes full of trade paperbacks and seemed determined not to take them back to their respective shops. So I could overspend without feeling like I was overspending, which is actually pretty dangerous, now that I think about it. But heck, I found crazy cheap copies of stuff like Scooter Girl, The Complete Geisha, Peanutbutter and Jeremy’s Best Book Ever, and my favorite find, Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga.

Ed, it should be noted, is insanely gregarious. As a result, I could just kind of ride along in his wake and end up talking to many more people than I normally would. While there weren’t tons of creators there, Ed somehow managed to find all of the really interesting ones. And he got an incredibly adorable sketch for his book from this guy. (I do wish I hadn’t seen Jim Rugg inking additional art for the Street Angel collection, because now I’m going to have to buy the damned thing.)

Alas, there was something of a freak shortage. Just a few people in costume, and none of them really looked that bad. The Hal Jordan Green Lantern actually managed to pull it off pretty well. (Spider-Man, on the other hand, didn’t have the ass for it. Not that I was checking, or anything.) I did love the slightly-larger-than-life Spider-Mannequin at the Previews booth, slumped over in a chair like he’d passed out drinking.

All in all, it was a delightful day trip, and Ed, Rose, and Steven are really wonderful company. It makes me even more determined to go to SPX this year, so I can meet more bloggers. (By the way, if you’ve ever wondered what I look like, Rose and Steven took pictures.)

I can’t believe the Freedom Force sequel played the “bitch crazy” card. I’m deeply distressed.

I’m really not much of a con-goer, and I don’t have any particular purchases in mind, but I’m twitching with excitement over this weekend’s Pittsburgh Comicon because I get to meet some of my favorite bloggers.

Speaking of favorite bloggers, happy anniversary to Johanna Draper Carlson, who’s been writing Cognitive Dissonance for a year now. Beyond being insightful, intelligent, and an excellent source of reading recommendations, Johanna’s a really delightful person.

And since I’m in blogger love mode, I’ll point you towards Christopher Butcher’s latest offering at comics.212.net. I’m one of those comics shoppers who did the Snoopy dance on Wednesday, walking off with some of my favorite mainstream titles and Lost At Sea AND the totally unexpected arrival of a volume of True Story, Swear To God, which I’ve been meaning to try for a while now.

By the way, the owner of the shop I use is thinking of setting up a “sample corner,” where he puts out issues of smaller-press and indy books that people can read in the shop. He’s always trying to expand the shop’s inventory horizons, and he thinks this would be a good way to measure demand for books that haven’t yet set north central West Virginia on fire. (I know! A cosmopolitan enclave like that? Sorry to shatter your illusions that there’s an Isotope or Jim Hanley’s Universe on every corner.) It sounds sort of like an ongoing Free Comic Book Day or a trial library in the shop. I think it sounds like a good idea, just an extension of the fact that he encourages browsing, but if anyone out there has any experience with this kind of experiment or any feedback, let me know, and I’ll pass the message along.

The pile of books I’d like to review is getting dangerously tall. The cats eye it warily, rightly suspicious of its structural integrity. I look at it with mounting panic, realizing that I have to actually crack into it or panic will morph into resentment.

So in an effort to break the logjam, I’ve decided to try something a little different. I’m going to look at two recently sampled manga titles specifically for whether or not they inspired me to pick up further installments.

Tramps Like Us, by Yayoi Ogawa (Tokyopop), Vol. 1

What’s it about? Tough, smart Sumire Iwaya gets hit with personal and professional disappointments in fairly short order. Her boyfriend, threatened by Sumire’s success and higher status, cheats on her. At work, she’s demoted when she decks her boss after a drunken come-on. Things pick up when she acquires a pet. The pet is actually a handsome young man, “Momo”, who’ll happily trade dignity for shelter (and proximity to beautiful Sumire).

Pros:

• It’s fun to see a female protagonist who isn’t desperate to please or conform.
• The dynamic between Sumire and Momo are a nice balance between sweet and strangely unsettling.
• I like Momo’s manipulative nature is so well-suited to the pet-owner dynamic, as is his jealousy of Sumire’s suitor.
• Sumire’s acknowledgement that the situation is bizarre actually makes it seem less so.
• I’m glad to see Ogawa focus on the quiet moments of Sumire’s life in addition to the stressful ones. It really lets the reader see what she gets out of Momo’s presence in her life.

Cons:

• I can’t really think of any, aside from the fact that nothing about the art strikes me as particularly remarkable. It’s perfectly competent, though.

Verdict:

I’ll definitely buy future volumes of this, as I’m curious about how Sumire and Momo’s relationship will evolve. I’m not going to rush out right now, or anything, but it’s a prime purchase candidate for some future Saturday at the bookstore.

The Wallflower, by Tomoko Hayakawa (Del Rey), Vol. 1

What’s it about? Four vapid, squeamish boys try to score free rent for a mansion by promising the landlady they’ll pull a Pygmalion on her spooky, reclusive niece. The quartet finds their subject truly horrifying. Sunako is completely withdrawn, revels in violent splatter films, and takes pride in her complete avoidance of anything resembling grooming. She’s as horrified of the pretty boys as they are of her, and it’s revealed that her withdrawal was the result of a handsome boy’s rejection. A battle of wits and wills ensues, as Sunako resists the boys’ makeover efforts.

Pros:

• While she clearly needs psychological help, it’s hard not to root for Sunako in her desire to be left alone.
• When the book actually indulges in a quiet moment or two, it can make some insightful observations on its characters.
• There are some nicely fanciful visuals, particularly related to the attempts to transform Sunako.

Cons:

• The four boys are fairly indistinct and rather boring. I found their delicate sensibilities more annoying than amusing.
• I found Kyohei, the only boy who stands out, profoundly obnoxious.
• The comedy is often fairly shrill.
• If I never see a projectile nosebleed again, it will be too soon.

Verdict:

I probably won’t pick up further installments of The Wallflower. It doesn’t seem entirely coherent in terms of storytelling or character development, and it doesn’t exactly work with my delicate sensibilities.

BeaucoupKevin has me thinking about painted comics. I usually don’t like them very much.

That strikes me as kind of odd, given my early tastes in comic art. I was crazy about the realistic stuff… Neal Adams, George Perez, folks like that (and I still am). I remember some photo-realistic covers from issues of The Flash that were just the living end. I hated… hated Joe Staton’s cartoon-y style. It was the bane of my existence, as he seemed to draw everything at one point or another.

At that point in my life I probably would have formed a cult for Alex Ross, I think because I badly needed comics to be taken seriously. Painted comics would have been just the evidence I needed that this was an art form, not just an entertainment. Faced with the derisive assessment of comics as immature or stupid or whatever other dismissal, I could have whipped out a painted comic. Their criticisms of detractors would have frozen in their throats when faced with the seriousness, the Importance connoted by someone taking the time not just to draw the Scarlet Witch… but to paint her.

Yeah, I was pretty stupid. And weird. Don’t forget weird. (I may still be both, but that’s for you to decide.)

Now, I’m at a point in my life as a comics fan when I need them to be fun. And, as Kevin points out, painted comics are kind of the anti-fun. It’s probably unfair, but I always associate them with an excessive weightiness (or at least an intended weightiness, even if they don’t pull it off). They’re Serious. They’re Important. And worst of all, they announce it before I get a chance to decide for myself.

The cartoon-y (for lack of a better term… I really mean it as a compliment) style that I rejected as a kid is now a very handy predictor of a comic I’ll like very, very much. At the very least, I’ll appreciate the visual craft required to communicate complex, varied emotions and situations with a deceptively minimalist style. I’d much rather look at a black-and-white comic drawn by Andi Watson or Bryan Lee O’Malley than some painted thing by Alex Ross. I vastly prefer the clear, kinetic, sexy work Cameron Stewart did on Catwoman than Paul Gulacy’s. I think there’s probably more eye candy on any single page of Carnet de Voyage than there is in, say, Secret War.

This would normally be the point where I express my continued bafflement over a certain Eisner nomination for best cover artist, but I’ve talked about that. So I’ll just wrap things up by saying that I’m glad this is a Wednesday that promises a lot of fun comics. Hope my copy of Lost At Sea shows up.

(Edited to eliminate a terrifyingly familiar and unnecessary use of quote marks. Shudder.)

So the white smoke went up, and now I’ve got a Meryn Cadell song stuck in my head.

“The pope, pope, pope, pope, pope.
we all here to see the pope, pope, pope, pope, pope.
Well, you got your pope pennants, buttons, your pope clothes,
You got your pope binoculars to see him up close
and I cried when I saw that man in white.
I cried, much to my surrounders’ delight.
I cried, ’cause I couldn’t breathe anymore; I cried
’cause people were stepping on my feet.
Hey, hey Mr. Holiness way over there,
Maybe we love you, but we’re sadly lacking air.”

I don’t even know if I have that cassette any more. This is going to make me crazy.

Before getting to this week’s arrivals, I wanted to point to something Dorian posted at Postmodern Barney:

“The size of this week’s comics shipments, combined with the Free Comic Book Day books, not to mention the unfortunately close to the end of tax season timing in the United States, means it’s very likely that your local comic shop could experience a cash crunch this week. Buying an extra trade, or back issue, or sampling a comic you don’t normally buy isn’t much, but every little bit helps.”

The shipping list does seem particularly voluminous this week, so there are plenty of opportunities to expand horizons with an extra title. I’m still trying to catch up on Maison Ikkoku and a bunch of other manga titles, so that’s probably where my bonus buys will go.

As for tomorrow, some favorites are on the way, like Marvel’s Runaways 3, Livewires 3, and Young Avengers 3. (Way to drop all the teen titles in a slurry, by the way.) DC has JLA Classified 6, Manhunter 9, and Birds of Prey 81. I loved the Free Comic Book Day preview of PS238 from last year, and I’ve been meaning to catch up on the trades. The 11th issue of that series comes from Dork Storm.

Oni brings out the second issue of Andi Watson’s Little Star. The re-release of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Little Star OGN makes its delayed arrival, too. And I’ve heard good things about Sharknife. Hm… maybe I won’t need to bulk up on extra manga after all.

But, hey, if you can’t make it through the week without bringing home some manga, you could stop by Love Manga, where David Taylor has handily extracted all of the week’s offerings for your convenience.

JennyN, one of the intrepid posters over at the Flipped Forum, has found an interesting scholarly piece on yaoi manga. Author Sueen Noh interviews a group of devoted yaoi fans and explores their perspectives on the work and why it speaks to them. Noh also provides some useful insights on the genre and its origins and yaoi’s rather gauzy take on same-sex romance.

Reading it helped me understand some of the reasons I’m a bit ambivalent about yaoi titles. While I’ve always been aware of the fact that I’m not the target audience for these stories, Noh’s piece went farther in articulating why that is and what some of the genre’s underlying intents are.

But ambivalence doesn’t keep me from being curious about yaoi, and I’m looking forward to some of Digital Manga’s upcoming releases.

Another weekend, another big block of time spent thinking about things other than comics. (Actually, I did plunk down with several volumes of Negima! for this week’s column, which should go up at Comic World News sometime today.)

The highlight of the weekend was an early anniversary gift from the hubby: behold, the splendor of Birdzebo! That’s not the exact model, and we actually mounted ours on a post, partly because we can’t resist a project that requires the mixing of cement. Birdzebo isn’t quite as popular yet as the one it replaced, but the birds in our neighborhood are fairly shameless, so I’m guessing it’s just a matter of time.

Maybe it’s the insidious influence of Andy Runton’s Owly, but my gardening efforts this year seem to have shifted entirely in the direction of encouraging birds and other wildlife into the yard. (Not deer, mind you. Those hooved vermin don’t need any additional encouragement.) Part of the weekend was spent prepping the bed that’s going to host nothing but plants hummingbirds love. (I’m too lazy to maintain a hummingbird feeder, but I will spend hours dragging bags of compost across the yard. Go figure.)

Now I want to read manga about bird-watching. I don’t know if such a title exists, but one should. It would be a logical sequel to Imadoki!

Shawn Fumo at Worlds Within Worlds finds a discussion of bookstores that shelve CMX and Marvel digests with the rest of the DC and Marvel books instead of with the manga.

I’ve noticed this with the Marvel titles at some bookstores, and it’s too bad. I think titles like Runaways and Inhumans might click with manga readers. (I also wonder if titles like Livewires and Spellbinders will get the digest-sized treatment.)

I haven’t seen CMX books mixed in with the DC trades, though I’ve noticed something else. Very often, the CMX books will all be shelved with the manga under “CMX” as opposed to alphabetically by title. So Land of the Blindfolded and From Eroica With Love and whatever else will be clumped together in the Cs as opposed to with their appropriate alphabetical neighbors.

Part of that has to track back to the uninspired trade dress of the CMX books, particularly on the spines. There’s a huge CMX logo, so bland that it looks like it was created with Microsoft Word, and much smaller and equally boring title typeset lower on the spine. Basically it looks like a book called CMX that runs its chapter titles on the spine, so it isn’t too much of a surprise that bookstore employees clump it.

Just more evidence (in my opinion) that DC hasn’t done nearly enough to brand its CMX titles.

For me, a big part of the fun of awards programs like the Eisners is getting the first draft of a shopping list of books I’d like to pick up at some point. Tom Spurgeon has the list of nominees at The Comics Reporter, plus some entertainingly pungent commentary. Ed Cunard makes some fearless predictions at The Low Road.

After looking through the list (via The Beat), here are some knee-jerk reactions:

• The Red Bull will certainly be flowing at DC’s corporate stronghold, won’t it?
• Much as I like Brian K. Vaughan and Ex Machina, I do wish the nominating committee had shared the wealth a little bit. It’s kind of like the Grammy Awards.
• Surely if a very competent cover-band title like Astonishing X-Men can get nominated for best new series, She-Hulk or Street Angel could have gotten a nod.
• Best publication for a younger audience is going to be a bloodbath… a bloodbath, I say!
• Not that it has anything to do with the relative merits of the nominees for best U.S. edition of foreign material, but Vertical’s packaging of Buddha is simply spectacular.
• I’m disappointed that Bryan Lee O’Malley (Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life) didn’t get a nomination for best writer/artist – humor. (Okay, he’s probably more disappointed than I am.)
• Why do painted comics annoy me so much?
• Wait… I must be reading this wrong. Michael Turner got nominated for his covers for Identity Crisis? And Andi Watson didn’t get nominated for Love Fights?
• Nice to see Sean McKeever get a nod for talent deserving of wider recognition.
• I’m trying to remember precisely when Paul Gravett’s magnificent Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics was published. Because if it was during the last year, there’s really no excuse for it not to be nominated for best comics-related book.