Ah, the weekend is almost here. Time to relax and read. But what?
The blogosphere has a few suggestions.
For those looking for something on the literary/artistic side, David Welsh devotes his Flipped column to Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators and finds 17 different but affecting stories. The book draws together eight Japanese and nine French artists and Welsh found the stories to be quite diverse:
Japan provides a canvas, but it’s ultimately about what the creators bring to the experience. Their contributions are varied and wonderful – funny, troubling, absurd, expansive, precise, and moving, by turns.
This looks like a good addition to any home library, and David is already suggesting a companion volume, France as Viewed by 17 Creators.
On the lighter side, Tony Salvaggio at Calling Manga Island looks at two just-for-fun titles. Salvaggio likes the way Chikyu Misaki bucks the standard manga cliches, although it could fool you with the doe-eyed kawaii look, and he enjoys the humorous ninja book KageTora while admitting it’s not terribly original:
Bath scenes, unrequited love, animals that speak by holding up signs, and other hallmarks of the genre are pretty by-the-book here, but “KageTora” is still a very enjoyable read.
Of course, those books have all been out for a while. If you’ve worked your way through the stack, there’s plenty of new material this week: volume 13 of Fruits Basket, volume 2 of Dragon Head, and volume 8 of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha. Not sure what to get? Coffeeandink rummages through the shopping bag and comes up with some good comments.
Christopher Butcher really likes Dokebi Bride, a new manwha from Netcomics, and you can read the first chapter online. Chris’s take:
A more traditional-seeming ‘horror’ narrative gives way to an extended short story of familial love and tradition, which is terrifying too. The storytelling and style is a few degrees removed from manga, and if you’ve been enjoying some of the recent off-the-beaten-path manga like Monster or Dragon Head, you might want to give this one a shot.
Another Netcomics title, The Great Catsby, has also been getting good reviews, and it too is available online.
And if the lovely spring sunshine is beckoning, you can always go for a walk and listen to your manga and manga reviews instead of reading them. Tokyopop offers podcasts of the first chapters of several of its manga. I admit I haven’t tried this yet, but I have become a big fan of MangaCast, and I’ll be taking a stroll today just so I can hear the latest Manga Curry No Maki. (A note to the gadget-impaired: I bought an iPod so I could listen to these, but you can download podcasts to your computer and listen to them that way. But it’s hard to lug a laptop on your morning walk.)
