The Manga Curmudgeon

Spending too much on comics, then talking too much about them

From the stack: There's Something About Sunyool

by

The title of Youngran Lee’s There’s Something About Sunyool (Netcomics) is accurate, though it takes a while to figure out what that something is and if you’d like to see more of it. By the time I’d finished the first volume, she had gone from blandly quirky to confidently madcap, and I was very much in her corner.

Sunyool is the illegitimate daughter of an ambitious politician, and she joins his family rather late in life. She’s an unruly, borderline cynical teen-ager before she goes to live with her dad, but her father eventually sees the advantages in having an attractive, marriageable daughter in his political arsenal. When she reaches her early 20s, he offers a slate of matrimonial candidates for his now fully cynical daughter to evaluate. Any of them could further his career, so it’s only a matter of which beau strikes her shifting fancy.

I always feel a certain resistance to arranged-marriage comedy, particularly when it isn’t a period piece, but Youngran Lee approaches it with such a bemused smirk that it’s hard to get too bogged down in my western perceptions. Sunyool sees the set-up as an unavoidable lark, a chore with benefits. While there are bits of her selection process that are kind of cute, it isn’t until she selects and weds the nicest of the candidates, Sihyun, that things really fall into place in a comedic sense.

The newlyweds address the fact that they don’t know each other very well, and they admit that they’d like a real marriage, at least in contrast to all of the marriages in their immediate circle. Sunyool may be in it mostly for the laughs, but she’s not immune to romance or lust, for that matter. She and Sihyun come to appreciate each other’s attractive attributes, and they eagerly anticipate the moment when their marriage of convenience will become a real love match. (They’re so eager and ardent that they make their respective best friends kind of nauseous, which is funny and reassuring to readers who might have been feeling the same way.) Then things fall apart through no fault of the lovebirds, and Lee’s capacity for cynicism fully reveals itself.

Through it all, Sunyool displays a withering capacity for bluntness and an uncanny instinct for deflating the smug, the bullying, and the deceptive. And since she moves in political circles, she never suffers a shortage of victims. This mutant ability to prick a hypocrite’s balloon is likely the “something” of the title, or at least it is for me. It might also be her ability to adapt to given circumstances, which is also charming and enviable. She’s cannily playing a game of low expectations, which even she admits, but she’s not immune to possibility. I’m looking forward to seeing her refuse to suffer new fools and roll with life’s nastier punches as the series progresses.

License Request Daily: Sailor Moon

by

Since I’m clearly in a shôjo place, it seems only appropriate to devote this week’s license request to one of the blockbusters of the category. And since Fantagraphics talked smack about it in its efforts to market Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, what better choice is there than Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon?

I’m not quite sure how many of the comic’s 18 volumes were published in English by the company that would eventually become Tokyopop, and I know it was serialized in Tokyopop’s MixxZine, but the collected volumes are out of print and kind of pricey, so it’s well past time to make it readily available. I think the license for it actually expired before original publisher Kodansha took all of its licenses back from Tokyopop.

It’s credited with breathing new life into the magic girl manga genre in Japan, and it’s also credited with really firing up the demand for shôjo in the United States. Do I need to tell you what it’s about? I do? Okay:

“The protagonist of Sailor Moon, Usagi Tsukino, an ordinary ditsy middle-school girl- or so she thinks- discovers a talking cat named Luna, who reveals Usagi’s identity as “Sailor Moon,” a special warrior with the destiny of saving the planet Earth, and later the entire galaxy. Usagi, who is the reincarnation of the Moon Princess, must now protect Earth from a series of villains, beginning with the Dark Kingdom that had appeared once before, long ago, and destroyed the kingdom of the moon.”

Basically, Usagi assembles a team of really powerful, astronomically accessorized friends who discover their destinies and save the world from people who have no love in their hearts. (They know who they are.)

The series was published in French by Glénat, though it seems like it might be out of print. As to who should republish it in English, well, that’s always a tricky question with Kodansha. They seem interested in keeping their classics back in print, especially if it requires no real effort to do so. But at the same time, it would be kind of fun if Fantagraphics, known in part for its archival impulses, would atone for its earlier snark by putting Sailor Moon back on the shelf in a prestige format.

Come on… The Complete Sailor Moon… Tell me that’s not an awesome idea.

Thursday thoughts

by

I’ve had something on my mind lately, and it seems like I’m not the only one. It’s the notion that the creative work of women, particularly when that work is created for women, is critically undervalued. I’m also wondering if that’s an overreaction on my part, so I thought I’d throw out some relevant links and try and open the topic up for further discussion.

I’ll start with a piece that Melinda (Manga Bookshelf) Beasi wrote for The Hooded Utilitarian called “Twilight and the Plight of the Female Fan.” Here’s a key paragraph:

“I’m also bothered by the strong implication that manga for girls is antithetic to solid stories and strong characters. “However, do not allow shoujo manga to intimidate you,” she says. ‘Although it is aimed primarily at young women, there are plenty of good, solid stories that are considered shoujo that I believe most people can enjoy.’ If even women feel they need to make these kinds of excuses while recommending manga written for (and primarily by) women and girls, how can we expect any of that work or the fans who read it to be respected by the larger fandom?”

This is something that’s been on my mind as it relates to critical reaction to Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories (Fantagraphics). It’s not universally true, and, again, I recognize the fact that I might be overreacting or sniffing out dismissal where none is intended, but it is nagging at me. Here are a couple of examples of things that rankle, at least a little.

Chris (Robot 6) Mautner frames his generally positive review with this:

“Dream, on the other hand, has both feet firmly planted in the world of shojo manga. The ten tales that make up this book all consist of overly sincere, heart-on-the-sleeve-style work. There’s very little ironic distancing and self-effacing humor here, although it does peep its head out occasionally. Mostly though, that’s been ignored in favor of heightened melodrama and earnest heart-tugging. While it avoids the sort of contrived, romantic, situation-comedy type plots that mark a lot of the shojo manga that has been translated into English over the past decade, there can be little doubt that Dream has more in common with Fruits Basket and Boys Over Flowers than Red Colored Elegy or Abandon the Old in Tokyo.”

Now, I could go the rest of my life without seeing Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket (Tokyopop) used as the poster child for middlebrow romantic fiction, but I recognize that it might just be me who feels that way. And while there’s a lot to appreciate in Seiichi Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy (Drawn & Quarterly), I’m more taken with its historical importance than its relative quality as an effective piece of fiction. I’ll appropriate a quote from Glenn (Monkey See) Weldon’s review of Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby (Vertigo):

“An Important book is one you appreciate. A Good book is one you care about.”

Since I happen to be of the opinion that Hagio’s work is both Important and Good, I may not be in the best position to evaluate the particular merits of Mautner’s argument above.

I feel like there’s a more successful set of generalizations in David (Newsarama) Pepose’s review of A Drunken Dream (it’s at the end of the post):

“With all of the spectacle of the Big Two — and believe me, I don’t knock it, it’s what helps give the industry some of its enthusiastic character — I think sometimes people overlook the sheer potential that human conflict can give. Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream, if nothing else, is a reminder of that, giving a plethora of all-too-human situations under the occasional sci-fi or fantasy trope.”

It doesn’t diminish shôjo in comparison to the critic’s usual tastes, taking a refreshingly neutral approach. I wish I could say the same of this review in Publishers Weekly:

“Unlike current shojo manga, Hagio’s sentiment is more restrained, recounting a calmer account of destructive sibling rivalry, a quieter portrayal of a romance destined for failure, a subtle unraveling of a young woman in mourning.”

Admirable sentiments about Hagio aside, the suggestion that there’s nothing restrained or elevated to be found in current shôjo (or josei or yaoi) is just lazy, and it’s unnecessary. It’s like the author feels the need to discredit shôjo to be taken seriously.

Again, I have to admit the possibility that I’m too generally fond of shôjo and of Japanese comics created by women to eliminate the possibility that I’m overreacting. I might be too steeped in the stuff to have any distance. But I do note that this kind of discussion has also extended to books without pictures. Back at Monkey See, Linda Holmes rounds up and adds to discussion on whether or not book critics at the New York Times take work by women seriously:

“And then you get into the questions Weiner has raised about why it is that genre or ‘commercial’ fiction should be ignored anyway. The New York Times doesn’t limit itself to art-house movies; why should it limit itself to literary fiction? That’s not necessarily a question of gender bias; that’s a matter of philosophy.”

This passage presents the possibility that this discussion might be less about gender than about commercial appeal, which is entirely fair. But even in largely commercial categories, there’s significant artistic achievement.

So I throw the topic out to you. What do you think? Does work by women manga-ka, especially work primarily conceived for an audience of women, get less critical respect than perhaps it should?

Update: Chris Mautner comments to clarify his intent with the piece, which I certainly appreciate:

“I was trying to talk about reader expectation. The fact that Fantagraphics is publishing this, plus Hagio’s high status, both here and in Japan, means that folks (especially those who prefer the type of manga D&Q publishes over the kind Tokyopop does) are likely going to come to the book with a series of expectations that aren’t going to be necessarily met because of the audience Hagio was writing for and the particular genre she was working in. Is that fair? Hell no. Will it happen. I’d put good money on it.”

Over at Robot 6, Brigid (MangaBlog) Alverson looks at shôjo as a whole and reaches some conclusions I just don’t agree with at all:

“If you are a fan, that changes—you read the books carefully, you know the different creators and the different worlds, you see a hierarchy in terms of literary quality. But a genre is a genre is a genre, and you simply can’t write a shoujo manga in which the girl is, for instance, a lesbian, or the hero is a boy because by definition that isn’t shoujo manga.”

The Seinen Alphabet: H

by

“H” is for…

High School Girls, written and illustrated by Towa Oshima, originally published by Futubasha and published in English by the defunct DrMaster. This one was subject to a lot of jokes, mostly along the lines of “Isn’t that what all manga is about?” But it’s a favorite of Ed (MangaCast) Chavez, so it deserves a place of honor.

Hayate X Blade, written and illustrated by Shizuru Hayashiya, serialized in Shueisha’s Ultra Jump and published in English by Seven Seas. It’s a favorite of Erica (Okazu) Friedman.

House of Five Leaves, written and illustrated by Natsume Ono, serialized in Shogakukan’s IKKI and on Viz’s SigIKKI site. It’s a favorite of… well… mine. And of lots of other people, I’m sure.

Lest you think that all seinen published in English has been created by women, there’s Hellsing, written and illustrated by Kouta Hirano. Hellsing is about a secret organization that protects England from various supernatural threats. Published in Japanese in Shonen Gahosha’s Young King Ours, it’s published in English by Dark Horse.

Hakusensha is best known in my neck of the woods as the publisher of terrific shôjo, but they also publish seinen in magazines like Young Animal, home to comics like Detroit Metal City and Berserk. There’s also Houbunsha, with seinen magazines like Weekly Manga Times and lots of four-panel stuff in the Manga Time family.

There are several fine-sounding series in the unpublished category.

Hataraki Man, written and illustrated by Moyoco Anno, recently resumed publication in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning.

Historie, written and illustrated by Hitoshi (Parasyte) Iwaaki, runs in Kodansha’s Afternoon. It’s about life in ancient Greece and Persia. Jason (King of RPGs) Thompson wrote about it for ComiXology.

I’d never heard of Human Crossing before, but it sounds kind of great. It was written by Masao Yajima and illustrated by Kenshi Hirokane, and it ran in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Original, winning a Shogakukan Manga Award. Another update: It seems strangely remiss of me not to specifically note that Hirokane is the godfather of salaryman manga, having created white-collar wonder Kôsaku Shima.

There’s something about the cover and concept of Hanamaru Kindergarten that I find perfectly terrifying, but perhaps this is because I’ve been listening to Ed Sizemore and Erica Friedman’s delightful podcast on moe. It’s written and illustrated by Yuto and published in Square Enix’s Young Gangan. I readily admit that I have no idea if where it falls on the cute-creepy spectrum. Updated yet again: A commenter informs me that this is very likely just cute instead of possessed of any leering intent.

What starts with the letter “H” in your seinen alphabet?

Updated to add some other titles mentioned in the comments and on Twitter by various kind folks:

  • Homonculus, written and illustrated by Hideo Yamamoto, originally published in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Spirits, which Scott Green describes as “the only manga to make [him] feel physically ill”
  • Hen, written and illustrated by Hiroya (Gantz) Oku, originally published in Shueisha’s Young Jump
  • Happy! written and illustrated by Naoki (Monster, 20th Century Boys, Pluto) Urasawa, originally published in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Spirits

    • Upcoming 9/9/10

    by

    There are new volumes of three very enjoyable series due out this week, according to the ComicList.

    In addition to being a sensitive and intelligent look at young people with big dreams (space travel, in this case), Kou Yaginuma’s Twin Spica (Vertical) is also one of the titles on the list of 50 Essential Manga for Libraries assembled by Deb (About.Com) Aoki. The third volume arrives Thursday.

    The main story in Hinako Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles (Viz) came to an end in the eighth volume, but the creator still has a relative wealth of side stories to offer. Some of them arrive this week in the ninth volume. Sand Chronicles didn’t make it on the aforementioned library list, but it certainly could have. It’s a sensitive look at a girl’s gradual maturation from pre-teen to independent woman.

    Yuki Yoshihara’s Butterflies, Flowers (Viz) offers further proof, if proof were needed, that women can be just as adept at smutty slapstick as men. The fourth volume delves further into the disastrous, dysfunctional office romance of a former aristocrat (now an office minion) and her former servant (now her boss). For added interest, this is the series that’s launching Viz’s sneaky, sideways steps into the josei market.

    What looks good to you?

    We have a Drunken winner

    by

    Congratulations to Julia on winning the copy of Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories (Fantagraphics). As you may recall, I asked entrants to pick a manga-ka who should receive the curatorial treatment. Here’s Julia’s choice:

    “I’m going to pull a selfish-license-request and go with Machiko Satonaka, another older era shojo manga artist. I’ve fallen in love with what I’ve seen of her artwork, especially the historical and period pieces and would love to read something longer by her, even if it’s short stories. I think she’d fit in nicely with the classic manga line.”

    Other recommendations included:

  • Eiichiro Oda for “a passion and determination that are hard to match in any author.”
  • Hagio assistant Yukiko Kai, “who has earned comparisons to such masters of modern Japanese literature as Yukio Mishima and Osamu Dazi from her fans deserves to be more well known to the English speaking world.”
  • Katsuhiro Otomo, so that we can “have those lesser-known stories from an acknowledged master more widely available.”
  • Shio Sato, “based entirely on the fact that [the entrant] love[s] ‘Changeling’”.
  • Yuu Watase, best known for some big hits here but who also has “quite a number of short stories under her belt, with several small anthologies of her work published in Japan.”
  • Reiko Shimizu, “an older shoujo mangaka, though not of the same generation as Hagio.”

    • By the way, one of the entrants asked a question I can’t answer, so I’ll throw it out there:

    “Just out of curiosity, you don’t happen to know if any of Ursula K. LeGuin’s works have been adapted into manga, do you? Moto Hagio’s A,A’ really makes me think of Left Hand of Darkness.”

    Anyone?

    Manga Moveable Feast: Yotsuba & Ultra Maniac

    by

    It’s sometimes diverting to consider what comics a comic-book character might enjoy. Yotsuba, the titular heroine of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! (Yen Press), is pre-school aged and strikes me as more of a doer than a reader anyway. She might enjoy Masashi Tanaka’s wordless, hyperactive Gon (CMX), since it’s got lots of animals in it. But Gon is seinen (it ran in Kodansha’s Morning), and I’ve heard tales of some little kids being perfectly horrified by this story or that. Yotsuba’s pretty sturdy, but you never know what’s going to touch a nerve, as with real kids.

    Given her various phases, she might also be really taken with Akira Amano’s Reborn, just because it features a toddler with a gun. Yotsuba seems like she enjoys a little more grit in her crime drama, so maybe Reborn might be too silly.

    I don’t think she’d have much patience for her own comic. Thinking back on my tastes as a five-year-old, I can’t remember having much interest in slice-of-life narrative. I might have liked the fact that the protagonist seemed to interact exclusively with people older than herself, since those were also my companions of choice. Back then, I tended to read a lot of Casper and Richie Rich. It now strikes me that Casper was wasting his afterlife, and I think Yotsuba would click more with the Ghostly Trio. I was a child in the early 1970s, so I can’t possibly judge how any other kid dresses, but even I knew Richie looked like a tool, no matter how swank his mansion was. He was like Thurston Howell the Fourth.

    I liked to read up, so my pre-super-hero drug of choice was Archie. More accurately, it was Betty and Veronica. Like the gay uncle I would someday become, I think I wanted to advise them both to trade up even then, and they cultivated a lifelong interest in unlikely female friendships. But gender politics aside, I always liked reading about their part-time jobs, their dates, and their various high-school woes. It didn’t do a thing to prepare me for actual high school, which was horrible, but it was a nice safe space in which to imagine what high school might be like, at its best.

    There’s something of that to Wataru Yoshizumi’s Ultra Maniac (Viz), an all-ages, five volume shôjo series about a magic-school dropout who transfers to a regular human junior-high school in our world. (Junior high school was even more horrible than high school, but I can’t remember any specific pieces of fiction lying to me about that.)

    Nina, the inept witch, meets Ayu, the pretty and poised seventh-grader who’s carefully cultivated a calm, cool and collected exterior because the boy she likes said that’s what he likes. Ayu helps Nina out with something minor, and Nina tries to return the favor with magic. Alas, Nina sucks at magic, so Ayu usually ends up in some humiliating state. Betty and Veronica cross over with Lucy and Ethel. There are some genuinely funny bits in the early going.

    It might be disappointing when Yoshizumi turns her attention to romantic possibilities for the girls, but she does something unusual. Instead of romance driving a wedge between the girls via jealousy or feelings of abandonment, it brings them closer. Nina works hard to help Ayu be happy, and Ayu returns the favor. They’re prepared to make sacrifices for each other because they genuinely like each other and friendship comes first.

    That’s an idealistic message, obviously, but it’s leavened by the fact that Yoshizumi’s female leads have great chemistry. Their various love interests aren’t really anything to write home about – nice boys, but nobody to lose sleep over, if you know what I mean. What they aren’t is domineering and jerky, as some shôjo princes can be. They respect girl power even before they realize how much of it Nina and Ayu can wield when they put their heads together.

    Re-reading the series to write this, I see some flaws that weren’t evident the first time through, as it was released by Viz. There’s a long chunk in the later volumes with a rather generic rival rearing her pretty head. She’s nowhere near as vivid or internally consistent as the stars, so it’s hard to take her mischief seriously. There’s also something mawkish about her motives, and bits of her back story are a little on the bleak side. That’s not necessarily a fatal flaw, and Yoshizui has doled out disappointments and sadness prior to this, but it still seems tonally off.

    But Yoshizumi corrects before she wraps things up, giving Nina a lovely and unexpected reward for her good intentions and occasionally successful good deeds. And Yoshizumia consistently rewards readers for sweet, well-drawn stories featuring a generally charming cast. It’s on the short side, it’s got magic and romance and comedy, and it gives younger readers a completely unrealistic glimpse into the terrifying world of junior high. What more could you want?

    License Request Day: Gokusen

    by

    This week’s letter in the Seinen Alphabet led to mention of a likely excellent josei title that starts with “G.” It’s Kozueko Morimoto’s Gokusen, originally serialized in Shueisha’s You. I’ll turn to Wikipedia for the nuts and bolts:

    “The plot involves Kumiko Yamaguchi, the granddaughter of a Yakuza boss, Kuroda of the Kuroda Ikka. Her parents died when she was younger, and her grandfather has no other descendants, so Kumiko is next in line to head the family business with the title of Ojou. However, her lifelong dream has been to become a teacher. While her grandfather approves of her choice, others in the family want her to become the next boss.

    “Kumiko (known by her students as ‘Yankumi’) becomes a teacher at an all-boys private high school. Her class is full of delinquents, but she tries her hardest to teach them not just about academics (her subject is Mathematics), but about lessons of life, much like any ‘dedicated teacher’ story. Though she’s forced to keep her family a secret from the public, her Yakuza upbringing gives her the strength and the experience to reach out to her students, while also providing comedic relief.”

    Since it will likely be a while before someone picks up the charming My Darling! Miss Bancho, left in a cage at the homeless manga shelter by CMX, this would be nice compensation, don’t you think? A forthright young woman dealing with a horde of delinquents in unexpected ways? I’m game.

    And perhaps Viz is game as well, with its recent, stealthy attempts to fold josei into its Shojo Beat line.

    (And yes, I know that there are well-liked anime and live-action adaptations of this series. That’s great. This is the Manga Curmudgeon. Not the Adapted Franchise Products Curmudgeon.)

    From the stack: A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

    by

    A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, the Fantagraphics collection of short stories from across Moto Hagio’s career, is one of those books that spoils you. It’s so lovingly conceived and beautifully produced, and the material it contains is so strong that it’s hard not to envision who might be next to receive this generous treatment. Hagio, one of the founders of modern shôjo manga and great contemporary manga in general, certainly deserves as much of a gracious spotlight as publishers are able to provide.

    We all knew this already based on work like They Were 11 and A, A Prime and the loving profile and the interview by Matt Thorn in that great issue of The Comics Journal. Thorn is back to select and translate the stories here, and really, every great manga-ka should have as devoted and talented an admirer. A Drunken Dream and Other Stories is obviously a labor of love.

    It’s also vibrant reading. When you consider vintage material, there’s always the awkward question of whether this material is being republished for archival completion or because it’s as good today as it was when it was first published. Prevailing market conditions may not be especially friendly to a virtue-based publishing strategy, but Fantagraphics is just the type to at least partially ignore those conditions for the sake of the canon. Fortunately, Hagio’s work passes both tests, historical significance and timeless excellence.

    The oldest work here, “Bianca,” is potent and alive. It’s about a brief, intense relationship between two young girls, and Hagio hits all the right notes. Visually, it tracks closest with what might come to mind when one thinks of “classic shôjo,” and it has a fascinating psychological directness that balances the glowing sweetness of the illustrations.

    From there, it’s fascinating to watch Hagio set aside visual delicacy for a style that matches her unflinching commitment to emotional detail. Take “Hanshin: Half-God,” a tale of conjoined twins. One is beautiful but virtually unable to function, with her bright, starved, ugly sister literally doing all of the heavy lifting. The amount of punch Hagio derives from the scenario is just staggering. Her grasp of an emotional triangle in “Marié, Ten Years Later” is almost as assured. She captures the wistful sadness of a trio of friends forced apart by jealousy and individual need.

    All of these stories aren’t created equal, obviously, though they all make sense in curatorial context. Having now read Hagio’s more grounded stories, I find (maybe blasphemously) that I have a little less patience for her tales that are tinged to some degree with science fiction. The centerpiece, “A Drunken Dream,” is lovely and accomplished, but the fantasy elements feel like a distraction in light of how much she can do without the extra trappings. It’s not that she’s clumsy in their execution, but the more naturalistic stories are just so piercing. Who needs jumpsuits and telepathy when you’ve got such a complex emotional core?

    Of course, a little weirdness can be tremendously advantageous, as in the gorgeous, lengthy “Iguana Girl.” In it, a smart, sensitive girl builds a satisfying adult life in spite of her mother’s neurotic cruelty. The mother sees the girl as a repulsive lizard, and the girl’s self-image agrees with the mother’s. Hagio’s rendering of the iguana girl is kind of cruelly accurate, but she finds ways to tinge the reptilian expression with sadness and regret. Even with the scaly flourishes, Hagio gets to the heart of ways a parent’s opinion can shape a child.

    I could find something to say about every story here, but I’d rather you just read them. You could even read the introduction by Trina Robbins if you absolutely must, but it doesn’t tell you anything Hagio doesn’t show in her stories. (“Make sure to have tissues on hand!” Sigh.) And after you’ve read them, I wonder if you’d agree with me that there should be more collections of this nature – short, representative works that introduce a creator over time. (And I’d love to see a companion volume of Hagio’s boys’ love stories. I have to suspect that one is in the works, as it seems bizarre for it to have so little presence here when that’s one of the reasons Hagio is a living legend.) I know that they probably aren’t easy to assemble, what with rival publishers and shifting creative fates, but I think it’s an amazingly persuasive way to sell a talent and perhaps open up demand for their longer works.

    And since I’ve ended up with a clean, extra copy of the book, I’d like to give it away. So I’ll do one of my slapdash contests. Email me at DavidPWelsh at Yahoo dot Com and name a creator who you’d like to see get the “Drunken Dream” treatment with a brief argument in their favor, and I’ll pick a winner to receive my spare copy. Deadline will be Sunday, Sept. 5, at midnight.

    The Seinen Alphabet: G

    by

    “G” is for…

    Let’s start with Gantz (Dark Horse), written and illustrated by Hiroya Oku and originally serialized in Shueisha’s Weekly Young Jump. It’s about a mysterious super-computer that plucks random people from the moment of their imminent deaths and forces them to weapon up and try and kill aliens. It’s packed with gratuitous violence and nudity, which makes it the platonic ideal of one definition of seinen.

    You can’t leave off Ghost in the Shell (Kodansha USA), written and illustrated by Shirow Masamune and originally serialized in Kodansha’s Young, mostly because it’s one of the seinen titles that people who don’t read comics have probably heard of because the anime has run on Adult Swim. It’s about hot cyborgs fighting technological crime in a future near-dystopia. It was originally published in English by Dark Horse, then it was reclaimed by Kodansha who’s busily republishing an early Dark Horse version of the book, which apparently is meant to mark their big effort in publishing their own comics in English.

    Gankutsou: The Count of Monte Cristo (Del Rey), written by Mahiro Maeda and illustrated by Yuri Ariwara, offers a sci-fi take on the classic adventure novel. It was originally published in Kodansha’s Afternoon.

    Four-panel manga can be seinen, as demonstrated by GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class (Yen Press), written and illustrated by Satoko Kiyuduki. It’s about five cute girls who study art, and it’s serialized in Houbunsha’s Manga Time Kiara Carat.

    No one has published an English version of award-winning mecha classic Galaxy Express 999, written and illustrated by Leiji Matsumoto, though five apparently published five volumes of one of the title’s sequels at some point. The original was serialized in Shogakukan’s Big Comic.

    Viz has published Gimmick!, written and illustrated by Youzaburou Kanari and illustrated by Kuroko Yabuguchi. It’s about a special-effects expert who helps people avoid difficult and potentially dangerous circumstances through the art of disguise. It was originally published in Shueisha’s Weekly Young Jump.

    My very favorite English-language seinen starting with the letter G would have to be Kio Shimoku’s Genshiken (Del Rey), which originally ran in Kodansha’s Afternoon. It’s an awesome slice-of-life series about a college club that takes an equal opportunity approach to geekery.

    It never actually ran in a magazine, but Taiyo Matsumoto’s GoGo Monster probably would have run in a seinen magazine if it had ever been serialized instead of being dropped on an eager public in its whole and perfect state.

    The beauty of Junji Ito’s Gyo (Viz) is that it manages to be both ridiculous and horrifying at the same time. It’s about fish with robotic exoskeletons who surge out of the ocean and attack people, and it’s absurd and scary in equal parts. It originally ran in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Spirits. The cover image above is from Viz’s second version of the series. The first version is less sleek, but I like it better, since it captures the story’s cheesy charm.

    And I’d be totally remiss if I didn’t mention Japan’s more ruthless answer to James Bond, Golgo 13 (published in part by Viz), written and illustrated by Takao Saito, which has been running in Shogakukan’s Big Comic since shortly after the earth cooled. Seriously, there are over 150 volumes of this series, and it’s still running. This is actually an even more platonically ideal example of a very common definition of seinen, because it’s got a super-cool salaryman whose job just happens to be killing people.

    Was the legendary alternative comics magazine Garo seinen in a technical sense? Probably not, but I suspect a lot of its readers were adult men. Here’s a piece at Same Hat! about an exhibit featuring work from Garo.

    Again, I don’t know if you can specifically define gekiga as a subset of seinen, but I suspect the dramatic stories for grown-ups had a significant audience of adult males.

    So what starts with “G” in your seinen alphabet?

    Updates:

    I was reminded of a previous license request for Osamu Tezuka’s Gringo, which was nominated for a Prix Asie and originally ran in Big Comic.