MangaBlog

The internets have yielded an unusually good harvest today—some unusual scanned manga and a couple of interesting commentaries—so fix yourself a cup of coffee and settle in for some good reading.

A little Moto Hagio to start your day: For those who missed the shoujo manga issue of The Comics Journal, Scans_Daily posts a gallery of Hagio’s art from that issue, including a short manga.

Shaenon Garrity’s Overlooked Manga Festival rolls on with a look at an awesome manga from 1931, The Four Immigrants Manga. Originally published in Japanese and English, it’s a first-hand account of immigrant life in San Francisco and includes the earthquake, dealing with anti-Japanese bigotry, and the Panama-Pacific exhibition, along with vignettes of daily life.

In case you missed the boat and didn’t get one of the galleys of To Terra that Vertical sent out last week, Christopher Butcher has a 16-page preview up at Comics212.net. It’s a sci-fi epic by Keiko Takemiya, who later achieved fame as one of the shoujo artists known as the Magnificent Forty-Niners—but this work, as Kethylia pointed out earlier this week, is a shounen manga.

Are you being served? Mickle has some thoughts on fanservice. (Via When Fangirls Attack!)

John Jakala has a great roundup of his reading in 2006. I like his conclusion: he enjoyed his comics more this year because he gave up on floppies, quit preordering, and read the reviews first.

ComiPress translates a Japanese blogger’s comparison of casual and hardcore manga readers. Also at ComiPress: more info on the Kodansha international manga competition.

MangaCast looks at this week’s manga. Executive summary: Kare Kano!

New to the blogroll: margin.notes, a blog about novels, manga, and other written media translated from Japanese to English, written by teacher and freelance writer Winnie Shiraishi. I believe she is the first person on the blogosphere to review To Terra, so that’s a good place to start. And say hello to Shuchaku East, brand new blog with a very nice design and just one post so far: a review of vol. 1 of Kami Kaze.

Reviews: “It was quite the large manga experience”: Connie has a lengthy and thoughtful review of Ode to Kirihito at Slightly Biased Manga. AfterEllen.com reviews 12 Days. (Via Journalista.) Mangamaniaccafe reads vol. 1 of Utopia’s Avenger. Kethylia gives high marks to vol. 1 of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster.

Cold Cut lists the top 300 comic books of 2006. To save you some time, Simon Jones has extracted the manga. (Link is, as always, NSFW.) It looks like Viz had a pretty good year, but IIRC, a lot of publishers aren’t represented on the list. Hard to imagine Tokyopop wouldn’t be in there somewhere. And it’s interesting (and no doubt gratifying to Simon, even though Icarus only got one spot on the list) that the top-ranking adult comic did better than the top-ranking manga. Yes, it’s true: Ice Queens did better than Naruto.

Tamika Taylor, a high-school junior, reviews Death Note for a local newspaper. It’s a nice little review and it’s nice to see a popular manga get some notice in the mainstream press. At coffeeandink, Mely and her commenters muse on the dark side of manga fandom—the bitterness and disillusionment that come when a series (Death Note) jumps the shark.

Mely lists her picks for the best licensed manga of 2006.

ChunHyang gives her take on the To Terra classification controversy:

My point: labels change over time. Knowing a work’s original stylistic label is important to understanding its history. But tweaking that label to suit current tastes isn’t necessarily a sign of ignorance, barbarity, poserdom, or—in Takemiya’s case—sexism.

Jen Parker presents the intelligent yaoi fangirls’ manifesto! And very sensible it is, too.

Elae has some updates on BL in Germany.

Just what the world needs: a Doraemon air cannon.

The user wears the air connon on his or her arm, and a powerful burst of air is fired when the user says “bang.”

At least it doesn’t sound too lethal.

Are the Japanese the only ones who use offensive racial caricatures in their comics? Nope, says John Jakala.

Save your pennies: Andre looks at Dark Horse’s offerings for April.

Lillian DP announces that volume 2 of Roadsong is now available, and she has previews on her photo page.

Reviews: Pata devotes the latest Right Turn Only!! column to manga with one-word titles: Basilisk, Emma, Life, Gachagachathenextrevolution… OK, he cheats a bit. At Mangamaniaccafe, Julie checks out vol. 2 of Nodame Cantabile and vol. 1 of Little Queen. Christopher Seaman reviews vol. 8 of XXXholic for Active Anime. Kethylia likes vol. 2 of Fushigi Yugi: Genbu Kaiden but is lukewarm on Project X: Cup Noodle. Yaoi Suki’s Jen Parker finds the first three volumes of One Thousand and One Nights more “slashable” than true BL, but she likes ’em anyway. AoD’s Matthew Alexander enjoyed vol. 1 of Kashimashi ~Girl Meets Girl~.

Anime on DVD sniffs out the latest ADV solicitations from Right Stuf:

Cromartie High School, Vol. #10 – $10.95 – 04/30/2007
Evangelion: Angelic Days (aka: Evangelion: Girlfriend of Steel 2) Vol. #04 – $9.99 – 03/31/2007
Maburaho Vol. #02 – $9.99 – 03/31/2007

(Cribbed directly because AoD eschews permalinks for these.) But where’s my fourth volume of Yotsuba&!? Nowhere to be seen. Down at the ADV manga website (last update: 9/20/04) there’s nothing but the sound of crickets chirping.

Well, vol. 12 of Naruto is showing some staying power; it’s still on the USA Today Top 150 Books, although it drops from 77th to 108th place. Vol. 9 of Death Note moves up to 126 (from 230). And vol. 15 of Fruits Basket is still hanging in there at number 148, a precipitous fall from last week’s 82nd place. They’re all kinda low, but three on the charts is not bad.

Apparently Viz has edited racially offensive caricatures in the past. This post from 2004 juxtaposes American and Japanese editions of Dragonball Z to show the obvious differences. (Via Dekadenbiyori.)