MangaBlog

I still have some NYCC panels to write up, and the posts are trickling in from other sources as well. The Comics Reporter has a long list of links, but I’ll probably post a more manga-centric version at the end of the week. In the meantime, Ed has audio of the buyers’ panel and the ratings panel at the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference. At the Broccoli Books blog, Shizuki Yamashita gives her impressions. Go!Comi has photos. And Vertical’s Anne Ishii is interviewed in this video.

A French scanlation group turns up its nose at Off*Beat because it’s not Japanese. Manganews interviews creator Jen Lee Quick in response.

The MangaCast crew combs through the new manga list so you don’t have to. And David Welsh licks his pencil and goes through the latest Previews.

In the absence of much information, ICv2 speculates a bit about the Yen/PIKA acquisition.

This should be pretty cool: Netcomics will be featuring Yaoi Press titles on their site, which means they will be available as very reasonably priced webcomics.

A new month, a new Sequential Tart. This month they take on gender bending, and you know what that means: Manga!! A new issue of The Comics Journal is out as well, and Dirk whets our appetite with an excerpt of their interview with Yoshihiro Tatsumi, creator of The Push Man and Abandon the Old in Tokyo.

The New York Times discovers cosplay. (Registration may be required.) (Via Yaoi Suki.)

Please do not sneer at the following news item: Tokyopop will be publishing High School Musical and Hannah Montana cine-manga. Yes, I know, they’re not real manga, but given how people reacted to the news that sales of one volume of Naruto topped 100,000, it behooves us to be humble when faced with the Avatar cine-manga, which sold over 500,000 copies. Improbable as it seems to grownups, High School Musical may be even hotter. So think of it this way: Little kids are subsidizing the high prestige/low sales titles like Dragon Head. And now you know why the Scholastic rep was one of the most listened-to speakers at the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference.

Chris Sims thumbs through the latest Previews and has this reaction to Make 5 Wishes:

Okay, so from what I can understand from the solicitation here, Avril Lavigne’s Make Five Wishes concerns everyone’s favorite insultingly faux-punk Canadian pop tart appearing via mystical powers to her fans and inspiring them to believe in themselves and achieve their goals. Which essentially means that it’s the exact same comic as Mr. T and the T-Force, except with Avril Lavigne.

If she fights Space Dinosaurs in volume 2, I will be on ’til the break of dawn.

If you need to shake that off, check this out: Beaucoup Kevin has Junko Mizuno videos.

At One Potato Two, Satsuma would like to see Oishinbo translated someday.

At Okazu, Erica notes the passing of a yuri supporter.

Job Board: A friend of Jason Thompson is looking for an artist for a graphic novel. Also, creators take note: Yaoi Press is changing their payment system, from flat page rates to royalties.

Reviews: Mangamaniaccafe checks out vol. 1 of Juvenile Orion and vol. 3 of Tail of the Moon. At Slightly Biased Manga, Connie checks out vol. 1 of To Terra and volumes 1, 2, and 3 of W Juliet. The Library Journal reviews vol. 1 of E’S (scroll down; via the Broccoli blog.) Prospero’s Manga enjoys vol. 1 of Divalicious and vol. 1 of Innocent Bird, and update us on vol. 3 of Kuro Gane. At Active Anime, Holly Ellingwood gets her hands on vol. 10 of Death Note, and also finds time to review vol. 1 of Backstage Prince, vol. 4 of Kami Kaze, vol. 6 of La Esperanca, and vol. 4 of Loveless, while Christopher Seaman checks out vol. 2 of Banya—The Explosive Deliveryman. At Okazu, Erica Friedman enjoys vol. 2 of Read or Dream.

This article on WonderCon does a good job of explaining why most people don’t read superhero comics, but their definition of “comics” as “superhero comics from the Big Two” results in hilarious false generalizations like this:

Almost no one talks any longer about comics being a sneakily artful way of getting kids to read. There is even some fear that the current waves of adult customers represent the last generations of comics readers.

You wouldn’t know it from the posse of librarians at the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference at NYCC last week, or the number of kids on the convention floor. I will grant that this is probably the last generation of superhero readers if the publishers don’t change the model, but the writer and interviewees alike seem to suffer from a peculiar form of tunnel vision. Look no further than their dismissal of manga as “only one slice of the comics business.”

What they’re not getting is that the comics business is made up of a lot of slices, and there are going to be more. The model is changing, as we saw at the ICv2 Conference, where the big news was that graphic novels now sell better than pamphlets. And at the NYCC All Ages panel, which I will be posting about soon, there was a lot of excitement about creating comics for kids. Contrast that with this:

Brian Hibbs, owner of the Comix Experience store in San Francisco, makes the argument that cultivating adult readers is better for the maturity of the medium artistically.

“The common wisdom, when comics were considered something for kids, was that the audience turned over every three years,” Hibbs explains. “You could tell a story, and three years later you could tell the same story again.”

Well, if you treat your readers with contempt, you get what you deserve. But I don’t think Bone and Amelia Rules are using that paradigm.

Superhero comics are legitimate and important to the people who make and read them, but they are only one slice of the industry as well, and because the price of entry (in knowledge, not dollars) is so high, it is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the comics world, as this article explains very well. You can make a lot of money catering to a single group, and there’s nothing wrong with that. **cough cough yaoi manga cough cough** But don’t pretend it’s the only group that exists.

The first part of the ICv2 GN conference consisted largely of Milton Griepp presenting slide after slide showing that comics sales are growing, and the baseline for comparison was 2001. Finally someone asked, “What happened in 2000?” Here’s Griepp’s response:

I think the biggest factor was Tokyopop’s expansion of their authentic manga line and bringing in original material for girls. Suddenly there was huge growth in a business that was usually flat, and it opened up new opportunities for other categories as well.

Yes! Make comics for girls as well as boys, and you double your market share. In fact, graphic novel sales have quadrupled since 2001, which indicates a pent-up demand that wasn’t being met. No marketer can ignore that. If only there were a third gender to reach out to!

The market is deep in some places, but it’s wide overall, and it’s getting wider as different types of comics proliferate and bring in new readers. That’s why Joe Quesada’s comments about the upcoming Stephen King comic, The Dark Tower, irritated people like Kevin Church.

From Newsarama:

“[Joe] Quesada went on to say that publishing the Dark Tower comic book has been the coming out party for the comic book industry, noting that this project will be able to reach far out into the mainstream, and show that comics are a serious art form, and ‘an art form to be reckoned with.'”

Kevin:

I guess this means we’re forgetting that just in the last year or so, Fun Home was named Time’s Book Of The Year and that American Born Chinese was both nominated for a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature as well as winning the ALA’s Michael L. Printz award.

Well, you can’t forget something you never bothered to learn, but Church is right. Furthermore, when I think “literary merit,” Stephen King’s is not the first name that springs to mind.

From my vantage point at the Javits Center last week, the comics medium looked pretty robust. There was lots of excitement around new lines like Yen Press and Vertical’s manga imprint. The fangirls were hooting and hollering as CPM announced that their existing series were back on schedule. You couldn’t walk through Artists Alley, it was so packed, and the diversity of styles was impressive. Scholastic was getting a lot of buzz when people realized what their sales numbers were like. The superhero stuff was all there, but I pretty much ignored it, and I still had more than enough to keep me busy.

Oh, and one more thing: I write about manga, I read about manga, but I read other stuff as well, most recently Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries. I’m quite willing to embrace other forms of comics, even superhero comics if one catches my interest. And that’s the attitude we need to keep the medium flourishing well into the future.

UPDATE: As always, Tom Spurgeon says it better.

Well, here’s a surprise: Hachette Book Group USA, the parent company of Kurt Hassler and Rich Johnson’s new imprint, Yen Press, has acquired the French manga publisher PIKA. Exciting synergy is sure to result! I checked the site, and they don’t seem to have any global manga, and most of their titles seem to be licensed in the U.S. already, so I’m curious what they are bringing to the mix. Perhaps just more cash, as Yen sends its books to France?

UPDATE: Well, reading the press release more closely, it does look like they have some European titles. Developing…

UPDATE 2: Chloe has some thoughts.

HACHETTE LIVRE PARENT COMPANY LAGARDERE
ANNOUNCES ACQUISITION OF PIKA IN FRANCE

PARIS (February 28, 2007) — On the heels of the recent announcement regarding Hachette Book Group USA’s graphic novel imprint Yen Press’ first acquisitions comes another exciting announcement from Hachette’s parent company Lagardère. Today, Lagardère announces that Hachette Livre is acquiring PIKA, the third largest manga publisher in the French market. The acquisition of PIKA will also contribute to manga businesses across Hachette Livre, including Yen Press.

In France, the manga market has shown a strong growth over the past four years and represents one third of the comics market. PIKA, with a 12% market share and a catalog of approximately 600 titles, including a number of European-created titles, was founded by Alain Kahn in 2000. Together with publisher Pierre Valls, they both developed the business to make PIKA the #3 publisher in the French manga market.

Hachette Livre, as well as PIKA, plan to further develop partnerships with Japanese manga publishers.

For Hachette Livre, the acquisition represents a new phase in the development of its graphic novel businesses, which will be enriched by this partnership and target a new customer base with this growing genre.

Lagardère owns Hachette Livre, which is the parent company of Hachette Book Group USA.

I still have a lot of NYCC material to put up, but I won’t be posting it today as Governor Deval Patrick has chosen this particular moment to complicate my life by giving a Major Speech tonight in my city. As I work for the mayor, today will be a busy day. In the meantime, here’s what everyone else is talking about:

David Welsh gives his take on some comics-related discussions and discusses the death of Monthly Shonen Jump, the Tokyopop ratings system, and other manga news in his Flipped column.

ICv2 has more on the Yen Press announcements.

Blog@Newsarama links to some commentary on the Prince Pickles military propaganda manga.

Chloe reflects on the American Anime Awards.

At Deutsche Mangaka, Elae has the highlights of a chat with Tokyopop Germany head Joachim Kaps.

Otaku Champloo visits a manga cafe in Manila.

A different spin on Christian manga: Otaku News has info about the manga Bible—that is, the manga version of the Bible. I like the fact that it comes in Raw and Extreme editions.

Light novel news: Tokyopop has licensed the Welcome to the NHK light novel and Dark Horse will publish the Oh! My Goddess novel.

The Yaoi Review looks at new releases for March.

After the cut, links to all the reviews I could find from the past five days. There are some nice ones here, so take a look.

Active Anime

vol. 2 of Boogiepop Dual: Losers’ Circus
vol. 11 of Dr. Slump
vol. 11 of I”s
vol. 12 of I”s
vol. 2 of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
vol. 1 of Loveholic
vol. 6 of Nodame Cantabile
vol. 4 of Pichi Pichi Pitch Mermaid Melody
vol. 4 of School Rumble
Wagamama Kitchen

Anime on DVD

vol. 1 of Free Collars Kingdom
vol. 8 of Samurai Executioner
The Sky Over My Spectacles

BasuGasuBakuhatsu Anime Blog

vol. 1 of Boogiepop and Others (light novel)
vol. 3 of Galaxy Angel
vol. 2 of Scrapped Princess (light novel)

Comics Worth Reading

12 Days
vol. 1 of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster

Mangamaniaccafe

vol. 3 of Absolute Boyfriend
vol. 1 of Archlord
vol. 4 Dokebi Bride
vol. 1 of Lady Snowblood
vol. 1 of To Terra
vol. 1 of Until the Full Moon

Read About Comics

vol. 1 ofo Mushishi

Slightly Biased Manga

vol. 1 of Bride of Deimos
vol. 2 of Bride of Deimos
vol. 1 of Can’t Lose You
vol. 2 of Can’t Lose You
vol. 3 of Can’t Lose You
vol. 4 of Can’t Lose You
vol. 1 of Day of Revolution
vol. 2 of Day of Revolution
vol. 8 of Fullmetal Alchemist
vol. 9 of Fullmetal Alchemist
vol. 10 of Fullmetal Alchemist
vol. 11 of Fullmetal Alchemist
vol. 9 of Phoenix
vol. 6 of Sgt. Frog
Skyscrapers of Oz

Sporadic Sequential

Abandon the Old in Tokyo

I’ll post the full panel report in a day or so, but in the meantime, here’s the offical PR on Go!Comi’s newest title announcements.

GO! COMI ANNOUNCES FOUR NEW MANGA TITLES

Manga publisher Go! Comi announced three new series and one standalone title at their panel this weekend at New York Comic Con. The titles are evenly split between shojo and shonen titles, and include the latest from the creator of “Those Who Hunt Elves”:

“LOVE MASTER A” is a series that tells the story of a girl whose inability to get a date causes her to transform the student council into a dating service.

“KANNA” tells the story of a highschooler who wakes up one morning to find himself saddled with an adorable little girl who keeps referring to him as “Daddy!” Turns out she is his daughter in an alternate dimension, and she needs him to rescue her from the horde of monsters pursuing her across time and space.

“KING OF THE LAMP” is a one-shot by Takako Shigematsu, creator of Go! Comi’s popular shojo series “Tenshi Ja Nai!!” It’s about a playboy whose wanton ways cause him to be sealed as a genie in a lamp. His only hope of freedom is to suppress his womanizing tendencies long enough to find the perfect mates for one thousand women!

“HIKKATSU” is the story of a young man whose martial art enables him to fix appliances in a single punch — which makes him humanity’s best hope when every appliance on the planet goes haywire! This series is by Yu Yagami, the creator of “Those Who Hunt Elves.”

The series are all scheduled to start publication in Fall of 2007.