What are some of your favorite comics romances?
Sexy Voice and Robo MMF: Garrett Albright
Aside from the pleasure of seeing a bunch of people talk about a really interesting book, the Sexy Voice and Robo Manga Moveable Feast has had the happy side effect of introducing me to blogs that had previously escaped my notice. Garrett Albright of Yen Plus Info! added his thoughts on Iou Kuroda’s book and took a moment to introduce his blog:
“This is Yen Plus Info, a fan site primarily providing news and info about the Yen Plus comics anthology published by Yen Press, though lately I’ve been sharing my experiences with other comics both foreign and domestic. Why not check out the front page and browse a while?”
Click here for a running list of entries to this edition of the Manga Moveable Feast.
Sexy Voice and Robo MMF: Reverse Thieves
The Reverse Thieves, Hisui and Narutaki, provide a tag-team review of Sexy Voice and Robo:
“It has a amazingly unique visual style and storytelling approach that sets it apart from your stereotypical manga while still retaining the greatest strengths and powers of Japanese visual story telling as well. This is a good series for anyone looking to shake up their regular manga reading habits, anyone interested in indy comics no matter where they come from, and even for people who dislike anything manga related but still are interested in graphic story telling.”
Click here for a running list of entries to this edition of the Manga Moveable Feast.
Sexy Voice and Robo MMF: Michelle Smith
Michelle (Soliloquy in Blue) Smith adds her thoughts to the Sexy Voice and Robo Manga Moveable Feast:
“I really admire how Kuroda-sensei tells the story, because he doesn’t feed one the conclusions about Nico’s revelation on a spoon; all the clues are there, but one must make one’s own connections.”
Click here for a running list of entries to this edition of the Manga Moveable Feast.
License request day: Japan Tengu Party Illustrated
The focus of this week is Iou Kuroda’s Sexy Voice and Robo (Viz), and while I’ll happily suspend some of this blog’s regular features, the Manga Moveable Feast seems like a good opportunity to cast a spotlight on some of Kuroda’s unlicensed work. I’ve already made a plea for his eggplant-inspired Nasu, so the next logical choice is Japan Tengu Party Illustrated.
This four-volume series originally ran in Kodansha’s Afternoon magazine and was later collected in a three-volume set, as near as I can tell. Let me just tell you that this title has been pirated within an inch of its life. There are about three pages of copyright-violating search results. Way back in 2005, Jog named it as one of ten manga he’d like to see licensed. Here’s his description:
“This was Kuroda’s first-ever extended narrative work, the only one (I believe) to build to a finale, four volumes of aged martial-arts master bird spirits inhabiting human costumes and periodically jumping out to flap around. They’re often rude and/or lazy, even though they’re nominally around to punish vanity, and there’s a pair of mysterious girls hanging around them, one of whom might be an artificial twin of the other, except she looks and acts nothing like her. Rendered in a rough, thick, black-heavy style. A beauty!”
Some of you may already be familiar with tengu courtesy of Kanoko Sakurakoji’s Black Bird (Viz), but I’m not a fan of that title, so I’ll hold out hope for an English version of Kuroda’s take on this class of yôkai.
Sexy Voice and Robo MMF: Tangognat
Tangognat takes a second look at Sexy Voice and Robo for the Manga Moveable Feast:
“One of the things that I like about Nico is that her character is more complex than the typical precocious child you’d expect to see investigating human behavior. While she might be worldly enough to manipulate Robo in order to get help her whenever she wants, she still maintains an element of innocence and a childlike point of view.”
Click here for a running list of entries to this edition of the Manga Moveable Feast.
Sexy Voice and Robo MMF: "Mehhhh"
Sadie Mattox at Extremely Graphic takes the Manga Moveable Feast as an opportunity to read Sexy Voice and Robo for the first time, and, well…
“I know that plots are simply arenas, places for the characters to play and oftentimes they can be silly or completely unrealistic to accommodate a much larger story. However, mysteries are reliant on plot. So having myself pulled through a series of convenient coincidences not once but every single time got a bit tiring.”
Click here for a running list of entries to this edition of the Manga Moveable Feast.
Sexy Voice and Robo MMF: Harriet, Nico… Nico, Harriet
Kate (The Manga Critic) Dacey picks up on the resonances between Iou Kuroda’s Sexy Voice and Robo and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy:
“Fitzhugh helped usher in an era of young adult fiction featuring tough, psychologically complex heroines who weren’t always likable, characters like the plain, frizzy-haired Meg Murray of A Wrinkle in Time or the smart, prickly Galadriel Hopkins of The Great Gilly Hopkins. Yet Harriet remains in her own special class. Unlike Meg or Gilly, she isn’t the heroine of an inter-dimensional sci-fi epic or a gritty, realistic drama; she’s the heroine of her own story, a self-mythologizing character who inhabits a highly romanticized version of the adult world.”
And check here for a running list of entries to this edition of the Manga Moveable Feast.
Sexy Voice and Robo MMF: Touch Blue Sky
Nico, the titular Sexy Voice of Iou Kuroda’s Sexy Voice and Robo (Viz), is a busy young woman. She’s got school, a part-time job working the phones for a dating club scam, and she investigates delicate and difficult situations for an elderly retired gangster. She’s a tremendously active protagonist, and she expends considerable energy trying to figure out the world through the prisms of the mysteries she encounters.
Nico leaps into action, at least intellectually. She parses the possibilities and sifts the solutions with terrific vigor. Her confidence that her insights and analysis will lead to a desirable outcome isn’t misplaced. Nico can resolve difficulties with her intelligence and sympathetic understanding. Kuroda respects her and likes her, so her precocity is never a joke or freakish.
But even budding spies or fortune tellers need a day off. Kuroda gives Nico a beautiful bit of respite in “Touch Blue Sky.” Perhaps it’s the novelty of seeing her in a more passive role that makes me so fond of this particular chapter, or perhaps it’s the fact that her passivity is as calculated as her engagement.
The chapter starts with an extremely resonant moment. Nico is getting a haircut, a mundane and restorative activity that’s out of step with her usual agenda. This being Nico, the haircut takes place on the back of a scooter in the open air of a city park. It’s the kind of strange urban treat you’d expect a girl like Nico to discover, and she clearly revels in it. She’s a girl who lives in her head a lot of the time, and she’s earned the sensory pleasure that Kuroda grants her.
Again, this is Nico we’re talking about, so this sedate mood doesn’t persist. She drags her sidekick, Robo, to the stylist’s salon. (He wants to practice on men’s hair, and Robo can always use a pick-me-up.) Robo is barely in the chair when a fugitive drives his motorcycle through the salon’s front door.
It would be easy to say that this is when things get interesting, but they were interesting from the start, from those first, open-air snips that left Nico’s head feeling so light. Nico slips into the role of observer as the stylist, Maruo, slips into her usual role. He gets the fugitive talking, reinforcing Nico’s belief that Maruo is a kindred spirit… someone who must understand people as a part of his job. She can’t help but compare Robo’s clumsy attempts at empathy to Maruo’s composure and patience, and the peril of the situation gives way to another chance for Nico to do what’s so essential to her nature – to watch people and figure them out, with the added bonus of improving her technique in the process.
Kuroda pays special attention to Nico’s expressions in this chapter. He never really neglects them, but these are the pages where Kuroda demonstrates how many emotions he can convey in a few spare lines. Nico ranges from satiation to alarm to bemusement to curiosity to even something like despair, or at least disappointment. She may not be driving the story, but it’s clearly being viewed through her eyes and reflected on her face.
It all ends with another haircut in the open air and Nico a bit wiser than she was at the beginning. She may be a little sadder as well, and a budding hope may have proved to be futile, but she’s not going to deny herself pleasure. And she’s earned it.
Sexy Voice and Robo MMF: Eric Searleman interview
For the Sexy Voice and Robo Manga Moveable Feast, I thought it might be fun to try and interview some of the folks who worked on the book. So here’s a quick question-and-answer session with Eric Searleman, Senior Editor, VIZ Media, who edited Viz’s translation and oversaw production. (Thanks to Christopher Butcher for suggesting some of the questions below.)
TMC: Could you tell me a little bit about the genesis of the project? I may be remembering things wrong, but it seems like it came on the tail end of a period when VIZ Media was publishing a fair amount of alternative manga, followed by more of a focus on mainstream, youth-targeted stuff, and now things have swung around again with Signature and the IKKI titles. Is that an accurate timeline, or am I remembering things incorrectly?
ES: The spark was definitely sparked by the relationship between our publisher (Hyoe Narita) and Hideki Egami, the Edtor-In-Chief of IKKI magazine. The two men worked together years ago and have remained good friends. Thinking about it now, I guess you could hear the faint rumblings of www.SigIKKI.com way back in 2005 when we first published SEXY VOICE AND ROBO.
TMC: Did the knowledge that the series was essentially unfinished affect VIZ Media’s decision to license the work? Did it affect how you handled to the translation and packaging, maybe to make it seem like a more ‘complete’ work?
ES: Despite SEXY VOICE AND ROBO being unfinished, we were thrilled to publish Iou Kuroda in the U.S., he’s an amazing artist and storyteller, and deserves a wider audience. If he ever revisits the adventures of Nico and her pal Robo, I’d love to edit an expanded edition sometime. Fingers crossed.
TMC: Could you talk a bit about the design choices? I’m thinking about the size of the book in particular, which is more like an anthology or western trade paperback than what people have come to think of as the standard manga digest size.
ES: When the designer and I sat down to talk about this project, we both agreed that it deserved a prestige format. It was important to us to showcase Kuroda’s artwork in a bigger trim size. Also: in Japan SEXY VOICE AND ROBO was published (after serialization) in two books. We decided to combine those two books in a single volume to give fans a richer reading experience.
If you’re familiar with the original Japanese editions, you’ll recall that they featured appealing DayGlo-like covers. Izumi Evers, one of VIZ Media’s designers produced a handful of variant cover designs for us and her “big black brick” version got the green light.
Along with all of this we also felt that SEXY VOICE AND ROBO would have broad appeal. Obviously manga fans would dig it. But we felt American indy comic fans would like it too. I think the trim size helped attract that sort of reader.
TMC: I know it was critically well-received when it was published, but how were sales? How has it performed over the time that it’s been in print?
ES: You’re right. SEXY VOICE AND ROBO made a big splash with critics. It also helped stretch our market and, as I mentioned earlier, it helped pave the way for our current IKKI titles. Kuroda’s book has been available in the States for five years and people are still talking about it. Arguably it exists as something of a turning point for VIZ Media.
TMC: Do you think that the book would be received differently if it were to be released now, alongside the SigIkki material, rather than basically as an anomaly in VIZ Media’s line in 2005?
ES: On one hand, SEXY VOICE AND ROBO got a lot of attention initially because it was, as you say, an anomaly. For the discriminating manga reader, what else was out there at the time? Not much. On the other hand, I don’t think you can deny the fact that it would benefit mightily from our current commitment to www.sigikki.com. Ultimately I think our edition served its purpose well. It introduced Iou Kuroda’s comics to the U.S. and it helped identify a new breed of manga reader.
TMC: Has VIZ Media considered adding it to the online IKKI line-up to give potential readers another point of entry to the book?
ES: We’re happy with the core group of IKKI titles we’re serializing. And we’re happy to have SEXY VOICE AND ROBO in our backlist. Beyond that, there hasn’t been any serious discussion about adding it to www.sigikki.com. Hopefully fans of SATURN APARTMENTS and I’LL GIVE IT MY ALL… TOMORROW will follow the trail back to Sexy Voice and Robo. If they do, they’re in for a tremendous treat.
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For another perspective on Viz’s Signature line, check out Brigid Alverson’s excellent interview with Leyla Aker, Viz Media Editorial Manager, in the latest Publishers Weekly Comics Week.