At The Beat, Heidi MacDonald has a very level-headed analysis of recent shifts in the manga market. Don’t forget to read the comments, too, as they’re filled with all kinds of insightful remarks. One comes from JennyN:

“…something very similar happened to publishers of translated manga in France in the 1990s. Takeoff as of c.1992; boom period c.1996-98; speed wobbles, speed correction, some nasty upsets, strong drivers and good navigators back on track within the next couple of years.”

JennyN is one of the truly awesome regulars at the Flipped Forum. (For a probing look at manga stereotypes, check out the “East Versus West” thread.)

***

So I checked the chalkboard of the week’s releases in the window before stopping in the comic shop yesterday. I greeted my favorite clerk, the creator of Iron Fro.

“Noodle Fighter Miki?” I asked.
His mood darkened. “There aren’t any noodles in it. I checked.”
“She carries chopsticks,” the shop owner offered, as if that would mollify us.

So, after a fairly lengthy conversation about how noodles are comedy gold, chopsticks are too utilitarian to be comedy gold, and how you shouldn’t promise noodles and not deliver, the creator of Iron Fro and I moved on to our respective tasks. And yes, the shop owner was relieved.

First, Johanna Draper Carlson unveils the new look for Josie and the Pussycats. And it was bad.

Now, CBS News picks up on a Wall Street Journal story unveiling Warner Brothers’ new look for Bugs Bunny. And it is so… much… worse. Seriously, it’s like “The Dark Bunny Returns” or… I don’t even know what it’s like. (If you have the intestinal fortitude, you can find the clip from last night’s Evening News linked on the page referenced above.)

Sander Schwartz, the Warner Brothers exec interviewed for the story, says they want to make Bugs “contemporary, hip and cool for today’s kids.” (Open mouth, insert scotch.) In another interview, a child on a playground looked at a rendering and said, “That’s the evil Bugs Bunny.” I think Bugs is now being voiced over by edited audio clips taken from Wolverine tracks from one of the cartoon versions.

File under “signs of the apocalypse.”

Congratulations, Carlee. And, to all of Carlee’s worthy competitors. You’re all winners.

I’m a big believer in adopting mutts from the pound (I have two), but there’s just something about the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Sure, they’re overbred and some of the grooming choices make you wonder how they can leave the house in the morning. But… so many puppies having so much fun. I’m not made of stone, y’know.

It always fills my head with fantasies of being independently wealthy, owning a farm in Bucks County, and opening the doors to purebreds who’ve fallen on hard times.

… I really hope it isn’t Wolverine 25. Just saying.

Hey, I’ve got an idea! Why don’t we look through this week’s list and see what you could buy instead?

• Birds of Prey 79? Still being written by Gail Simone. What more do you need to know?
• Ex Machina 8? Let’s see if it earns that GLAAD nomination. (I’m pretty sure it will be entertaining even if it doesn’t, so it’s no-lose. Speaking of GLAAD, what the hell are they waiting for?)
• Manhunter 7? More Identity Crisis follow-up for those who needed a hook to try the title, but no tonal carry-over for those of us who were already enjoying it. (Which I’m pretty sure is… me.)
• Essential Luke Cage Vol. 1? Sweet Christmas! Read the stories again, knowing what you now know about Luke.
• Livewires 1? Heard good things about it, but the word “nanotechnology” makes my eyes glaze over sometimes. We’ll see.
• Runaways 1? I loved the first run of this title and see no reason why I shouldn’t feel the same way about the second.
• She-Hulk 12? Runaways returns from a break as She-Hulk heads into one. Soulless corporations giveth. Soulless corporations taketh away. I guess there can be only so many fun books in print at any given time.
• Little Star 1? I ended up liking Love Fights a lot, and I’m curious to see how Andi Watson reads in monthly doses.

See? Oodles of alternatives! (Apologies to Christopher Butcher for including suggestions from the Evil Empire, but this just isn’t a week where I can ignore its books entirely. Curse you, Dan Slott!)

From Ed Cunard at The Low Road:

“Blogs are, by nature, biased—they’re the opinions and thoughts of one (or a few) people. However, I don’t think any blog is claiming to be anything but that, which is where the difference comes in. Sites generally seem to want some kind of authority—look at how they clamor to get quoted on comics and trades, or to nab ‘exclusive’ interviews, which makes any accusation of bias more damaging than saying, ‘well, fuck, that Mike Sterling likes Swamp Thing so much, so of course he’s going to slight Man-Thing because he’s biased.’”

Inspired by Ed’s wonderful entry, I’ve decided to admit some of my own biases.

1. More comic industry professionals should consider “press-shy recluse” as a public persona.
2. White chocolate is revolting.
3. Ditto for grilled vegetables, with the possible exception of zucchini.
4. Working in a comics genre you hold in contempt seldom yields very good comics.
5. I am not the target audience for giant boobs.
6. If I found a comic that successfully pandered to my tastes in that area, I would probably buy it.
7. I have yet to read a comic by CLAMP that I really, really like, and I’m becoming less inclined to keep trying.
8. Casting contestants from other reality shows (particularly winners of other reality shows) means that The Amazing Race is dead to me.
9. A “kill list,” while an eminently practical resource for Marvel and DC’s writers, is one of those things that should never have seen the light of day with the reading public.
10. I think Spider-Man is too mopey.
11. I think Superman is too bland.
12. Comics about Batman are more interesting when Batman isn’t in them very much.
13. I don’t think Marvel will ever successfully capitalize on the fact that girls like comics.
14. There is no such thing as good pizza from a chain restaurant.
15. Gin makes better martinis, and the astringent flavor helps you regulate your consumption.
16. I will blog about just about anything, provided the subject lends itself to a terrible, pun-driven headline.

After you’re done reading Ed’s thoughts, scroll up for John Jakala’s list of 100 things he loves about comics. Or, stop by shameless Swamp Thing partisan Mike Sterling’s blog for an ever-growing list of links to… um… lists. (All of which trigger my “how could I have forgotten…” reflex.)

If you stripped the plot summary of Happy Hustle High down to its essentials, you could be forgiven for thinking I was talking about Imadoki! In HHH, an outgoing girl turns over the apple cart at a stuffy high school, making friends and encountering romantic complications along the way. It isn’t nearly as good as Imadoki!, but it’s an amiable shôjo outing.

The premise of HHH is more interesting than its actual execution. The student body of declining all-girls Uchino High School gets absorbed into an all-boys institution, Meibi, forcing all the students into a new, co-ed world. This would seem to offer all kinds of interesting comic fodder, interpersonal and sociological, but the transition goes pretty smoothly. Despite some initial anxieties, the girls quickly latch on to the vastly expanded social possibilities a co-ed school presents.

But it seems the Meibi Student Council has some fairly draconian prohibitions in place: no comics, no snacks, and, worst of all, no dating. (Try not to think too hard about why an all-boys school would have a ban on dating in place.) Reduced to giggling yes-women in the face of the clouds of testosterone, the old Uchino leadership turns to protagonist Hanabi to get the rules overturned.

Hanabi is the ideal choice. She’s an extroverted tomboy, difficult to intimidate and easily bribed with food. Hanabi has a history of standing up for her classmates, smacking down disrespectful and unsavory boys who give the girls a hard time. She steps into a student council seat to sway the boy officers’ minds on the dating rule (and score free lunches from a grateful sisterhood), determined to turn the snackless, romance-crushing institution into “Happy Hustle High!” (Mercifully, the phrase is never repeated, at least in the first volume. It’s a terrible title, really. When my partner saw the digest lying around, he asked if it was about a vocational school for prostitutes.)

Naturally, complications arise. Council President Yoshitomo doesn’t seem to care much either way. A bemused observer, he likes the idea of watching Hanabi stir up trouble and tells her she only needs the agreement of the other two officers to get her way. Council member Tokihisa comes off as a bit of a bully, but he’s prone to the same kind of persuasion as Hanabi (food). Lastly, there’s Vice President Yasuki, who doesn’t have much use for girls. He was raised in a family of men after the death of his mother, and the integration of the schools is really his first significant exposure to the opposite sex.

Guess which one sets Hanabi’s heart aflutter? Exactly. And it’s too bad, as she and Tokihisa have an easygoing chemistry and a lot in common. They also can compare notes on their complex relationships with Yasuki, who snubs Hanabi at every turn and bests Tokihisa in just about everything. It makes sense that Hanabi would be inclined to break down Yasuki’s resistance, but it’s less apparent why she becomes so smitten with him.

With the male characters introduced and the romantic complications in play, creator Rie Takada pretty much abandons the gender-integration aspects of the story. The female supporting cast, marginal to begin with, becomes even more nondescript. While Hanabi’s interactions with the boys have charm and a nice reversal here and there, I can’t help but think how much better the title would be if Takada had mined the possibilities for social satire that are inherent in the set-up. Elements of class conflict go a long way to deepen the romantic comedy of Imadoki! and the soap opera of Hot Gimmick, but the rich vein in HHH is almost entirely unexploited.

And that leaves you with a competent, reasonably charming shôjo title that has the unfortunate side effect of reminding you of its better, more complex competition. There’s nothing seriously wrong with HHH (okay, aside from the title), but there’s nothing uniquely right about it either. And as an increasing number of shôjo titles make their way into publication, it seems wasteful to have a hook with such potential and not make better use of it.

(This review is based on a preview copy provided by Viz. Happy Hustle High is set for release in March.)

Inspired by Fred Hembeck, this meme gives me a chance to show just how much of a nerd I am. Again. Some more. Choices below reflect a particular moment in time fueled by an unspecified quantity of caffeine. Certain worthy entries were no doubt left off through no one’s fault but my own. Think of it as a snapshot, not a stone carving. Ask me next week and it could be different.

The books: 1. Amelia Rules! 2. Arrowsmith. 3. Case Closed. 4. Chase. 5. Ex Machina. 6. Fake. 7. Fallen Angel. 8. Girl Genius. 9. Hot Gimmick. 10. Inhumans (by Paul Jenkins). 11. Inhumans (by Sean McKeever). 12. Justice League International. 13. Kindaichi Case Files. 14. Owly. 15. Leave It To Chance. 16. Love Fights. 17. Madrox. 18. Maison Ikkoku. 19. Manhunter. 20. Marvel’s Essential books. 21. My Faith In Frankie. 22. Planetes. 23. Runaways. 24. Scott Pilgrim. 25. Sgt. Frog. 26. Shojo Beat. 27. Suicide Squad (the Amanda Waller iteration). 28. Top Ten. 29. We3. 30. Whistle! 31. Young Heroes In Love. 32. Young Justice.

The creators: 1. Murphy Anderson. 2. Jim Aparo. 3. Ed Brubaker. 4. Kurt Busiek. 5. John Cassaday. 6. Dave Cockrum. 7. Gene Colan. 8. Andy Diggle. 9. Carmine Infantino. 10. Gil Kane. 11. Michael Lark. 12. Grant Morrison. 13. George Perez. 14. Frank Quietly. 15. Greg Rucka. 16. Gail Simone. 17. Dan Slott. 18. Yu Watase.

The runs: 1. Peter David on X-Factor. 2. “The Great Darkness Saga.” 3. The Nebulon/Headmen arc in Defenders. 4. The Serpent Crown/Old West arc in Avengers. 5. Mike Grell art on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes. 6. Much of Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. 7. Joe Kelly’s run on Deadpool. 8. Jack B. Quick from Tomorrow Stories. 9. The Gatherers arc in Avengers. 10. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. 11. Much of Sandman Mystery Theatre. 12. The Zodiac arc in Defenders. 13. Claremont and Byrne on Uncanny X-Men. 14. Warren Ellis on The Authority. 15. Kurt Busiek on Thunderbolts. 16. Early American Flagg. 17. Jim Robinson’s Starman. 18. Claremont and Paul Smith on Uncanny X-Men.

The web: 1. The Blogosphere. 2. The Comics Reporter. 3. Comic World News. 4. Comics Worth Reading. 5. Fanboy Rampage. 6. Gone and Forgotten: The Worst Comics Ever. 7. The V. 8. The X-Axis.

The characters: 1. Black Canary. 2. Carol Danvers. 3. Sue and Ralph Dibny. 4. Firebird. 5. Barda and Scott Free. 6. Hellcat. 7. Huntress (Earth One). 8. Huntress (Earth Two). 9. The Legion of Substitute Heroes. 10. Lockjaw. 11. Veronica Lodge. 12. Mantis. 13. Medusa. 14. Moondragon. 15. Moonstone. 16. Nightshade. 17. Red Guardian (Tania Belinski). 18. The Scarlet Witch. 19. Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew). 20. Teen Titans West. 21. The Vision. 22. Zatanna.

The rest: 1. Clean, well-lit comic stores. 2. Groaning shelves of manga at bookstores.

There’s something very troubling about Christopher Butcher blogging about Wolverine. All the same, he brings up a depressing development coming up in this week’s issue. Read the rumor/spoiler here, if you like.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all, honestly. But I find it hard to attribute any deep or insidious meaning to anything Mark Millar writes because his work is all so damned shallow. As Christopher points out, Millar is all about provocation without substance or any underlying philosophy, malicious or otherwise. That doesn’t stop the content from being offensive, mind you. It just mutes any specific objections you might have, because everything on the page is there for shock value.

Dorian was talking about the charge of misogyny against “Avengers Disassembled” and made an excellent point: “Why accuse the author of misogyny when it’ll suffice to call it ‘bad?'” I think that applies in this case.

So, instead of plunking down your dollars for another crassly manipulative Mark Millar comic, why not buy one that’s actually good and could use your support? Might I suggest Runaways #1?

I’ve never been very interested in Jack Kirby’s “Fourth World” characters, but last night’s episode of Justice League Unlimited has left me wanting to read more Mister Miracle-Big Barda stories.

I’ve always been more of a Barda fan based on her appearances in the Justice League International comics. She’s just such a great combination of tough and tender. Nothing wrong with Miracle, mind you, but I find him more interesting as part of a couple. I love the marital dynamic between Barda and Scott. (I hope nobody at DC reads this, remembers that they have a happy, functional couple in their stable, and rushes to Dibny them in a crappy mini-series.)

So if anyone has any favorite Barda-Scott stories to recommend, I’d be glad to hear them.

Yay! An enjoyable movie-going experience! We did one of our “get the hell out of West Virginia to someplace urban” and took the opportunity to see Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education. (If it ever runs in a theatre in the Mountain State, I will be shocked.)

First of all, the audience was startlingly well behaved. Better still, they offered some fascinating eavesdropping opportunities. There was the young gay couple seated in front of us still in the early phases of dating. (Between the movie and dinner, we had lots of chances to “rate the date.” Magic Eight-Ball says, “Don’t get your hopes up.”) Behind us, there were the gay man and his lesbian friend, talking trash about addictive prescription drugs and the people who love them.

Then, the movie started, and everyone shut up. Shocking. Entirely welcome, but shocking.

The movie itself was really engrossing. The cast was uniformly good, particularly Gael Garcia Bernal, who played a handful of mercurical, varied characters extremely well. And I loved the way Almodovar appropriated bits of Alfred Hitchcock to tell his story of characters still reeling from their memories of parochial school.

Instead of borrowing all of the gimmicky visual stuff that most directors think made Hitchcock Hitchcock, Almodovar stuck with theme and feel and genuine psychological surprise. So while the film evoked memories of Vertigo and Marnie and Psycho, it evoked the way those movies make an audience feel, not the way those looked or their mechanics.

It’s not without its troubling elements; my partner had an observation about the nature of the sex portrayed in the film. But those troubling elements feel intentional, part of the whole. And it’s always exciting to see a movie or read a book or comic that has an internal consistency and a real artistic vision. We had the same reaction to Almodovar’s Talk To Her.

So, clearly I’ve got to go over to Netflix and add some more Almodovar to the queue. Any recommendations?