Curry and commentary

There’s a new edition of Manga Curry no Maki up at MangaCast. This one features Ed and Jack talking about Yaoi-Con, Densha Otoko, and the importance of small publishers.

At The Beat, Heidi MacDonald gives some perspective to the question of classifying manga by gender:

it seems that in a system that at least RECOGNIZES girls’ and women’s comics, they are allowed to exist. Here in the US, “girls’ comics” exist only as a hazy category in a few publishers fantasies. Which isn’t to say that girls don’t read comics, because they do, but each and every new female reader is still treated as something of a miracle of parthenogenesis — “Watson, come quickly! She’s reading SANDMAN! How could this have happened? It’s incredible!”

While we’re no fans of gender or any other kind of segregation, it does often create a safer place for material out of the “mainstream” — safely labeled as being cooty girlie stuff, it is no threat to the prevailing culture, even if everyone is free to read it — privately.

Meanwhile, at Icarus Comics, Simon Jones is tired of pundits obsessing about why women like yaoi.

Reporters grill attendees for an answer like an angry schoolmaster corraling unruly children at the end of recess, refusing to see the phenomenon as a matter of taste, desperately looking for signs of sinister witchcraft that aren’t there to make sense of something they simply cannot accept at face value.

Time to cut the “psychobabble,” he says, and treat yaoi like every other genre.

ComiPress reports on another store that sells complete sets of old manga.

Reviews: At Emily’s Random Shoujo Manga Page, Emily thoroughly enjoys Kaichou wa Maid-sama (Class President is a Maid!). Julie Gray of the Comic Book Bin reviews Q-Ko-Chan. Manga Punk’s David Doub finds some things to like about Ode to Kirihito but thinks Tezuka could have done better. At MangaNews, Floating_Sakura is disappointed by Tezuka’s Metropolis, partly because the master himself had to rush the ending. If you’re pressed for time, Jarred at the MangaCast reviews eight books in 30 minutes (and he doesn’t sound particularly rushed). For those who like a more leisurely podcast, Jack Tse looks at an unlikely trio: Eternal Sabbath, Ichigo Marshmallow, and Welcome to the NHK. And the reviewers at The Star of Malaysia get busy with reviews of Boogiepop Dual: Losers’ Circus, The Push Man, Tail of the Moon, and a fistful of other books.