MangaBlog

I had a busy weekend, culminating with a trip today to the Essex Shipbuilding Museum to watch the launch of a hand-built wooden schooner. It was an awesome experience, and I’m really glad I got to see it. Here’s a bit of what I missed while I was out:

At Love Manga, David Taylor looks at the top 50 manga for July (actually, as a special bonus he gives us 52).

New blog alert! Manga Junkie writes about offbeat manga that are unlikely to be licensed in the U.S., at least by the manga publisher she works for. In fact, the first two she writes about are so unusual I can’t imagine who would publish them—but I wish someone would. The blogger is anonymous, but her distinctive writing style seems very familiar.

At the MangaCast, Ed is reporting on Comiket, the Japanese doujin event, which should be familiar to readers of Genshiken.

Comics-and-more introduces a new feature, Double Take, in which both Dave and Patrick review a book in a sort of Siskel-and-Ebert dialogue. The first book they take on is Drifting Classroom, a book that I enjoyed immensely—so I was glad to see them give it a big thumbs up.

Good news: Fanfare/Ponent Mon has licensed Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary, which won the 2005 Japan Media Festival Grand Prize. It’s an autobiographical account of the manga-ka’s battle with alcoholism and his experiences when he quit drawing manga and deliberately became homeless. More info is here. (Via Completely Futile.)

JP Mayer blogs about some recent translations (can you say n00b in a manga?) and the question of shrink-wrapping. On the latter topic, a commenter has a chilling anecdote:

At my local Borders Express, they locked their manga up in little plastic boxes.

They stopped (I think sales must’ve gone down), but the newest volume of series is still locked up.

Tokyopop sent me some first volumes of some new series debuting in August, and I will handle most of them as quick reviews rather than try to write a full-length review of each one, as I did with Bird Kiss and Mitzukaru Mihara’s The Embalmer. I’ll be posting these in batches over the next few days.

Because I’m the Goddess, by Shamneko

Pandora is apparently the goddess of fanservice, as she arrives on earth clad only in a few shreds of fabric and has her first wardrobe malfunction on page 5. You could write a physics thesis on the various contrivances she uses to hold up her outfits and a psych thesis on the Freudian aspects of this book, which are legion. Just looking at Pandora turns men into drooling idiots eager to do her bidding, but when she uses her goddess powers she turns into a flat-chested little girl and loses all her abilities. Only an awkward young man named Aoi is immune to her charms, and kissing him brings back Pandora’s powers as well as her voluptuous appearance. In a vague reference to Greek mythology, Pandora has been sent to earth to collect some evil “gifts” that she once let loose, and she drafts the reluctant Aoi to help. The plot is complicated and almost hallucinatory in places, as when Pandora turns Aoi into a giant pair of clippers to cut a supernatural chain. Nonetheless this is a funny and very likeable book, as long as you’re not offended by the copious amounts of fanservice. The writing is witty, the characters are engaging, and the situations made me laugh out loud. I’ll be picking up volume 2.

Grenadier, “created by” Sousuke Kaise

Lillian Diaz-Przybyl described this at SDCC as Tokyopop’s big fanservice title, and in a lineup that includes Because I’m the Goddess, that’s saying a lot. If you like big boobs and even bigger guns, this is the book for you. Rushuna, the heroine, is a good-hearted lass, but don’t get in her way: She ends one episode with a lecture about how we should all get along and trust each other, but two pages later she’s mowing down a field full of samurai with her big, blazing guns. Devotees of gritty realism can look elsewhere; while most of her assailant’s bullets go whizzing right by Rushuna, she calmly reloads her gun by popping bullets from her cleavage, lines up her bullets in single file so each one increases the power of the last one exponentially (arguably the only time that mathematical term has ever appeared in such close proximity to a sweaty bosom) and stuns bandits with a bright light that shines from her crotch. While there are a few moments of clarity in which people have real conversations and actual plot exposition occurs, the book consists mostly of fight scenes that range from chaotic to extremely chaotic, interspersed with different views of Rushuna’s anatomy. If you like this sort of thing, well, here’s a book for you; for the rest of us, just move along, nothing to see here.

Go with Grace, by George Alexopoulos
[No link because it has disappeared from the Tokyopop website; I’ll update if it reappears]

I found this manga disturbing. The setup is standard enough—bedridden girl longs to overcome her illness and enjoy life, mysterious stranger appears and helps her out—except that in children’s literature the story has a happy ending, whereas this one ends with Grace’s suicide. And that’s not a spoiler: She slashes her wrists on page one, and the rest of the book is a flashback, which makes it painful to read. The story of the ghostly Alex and the sickly Grace is the best part of the book, but the other characters are two-dimensional and the ending is hasty and contrived. A book this emotionally wrenching needs more depth to be satisfying. The artwork is absolutely lovely in places, but I can’t figure out what time period we’re supposed to be in. Grace’s sister has sausage curls and walks down a cobblestoned street with horse-drawn carriages, but a few pages later Grace is watching the news on TV. At first I thought there was some sort of parallel-universe thing going on, but this inconsistency is never explained. The best part of this book was the omake section at the end, which shows that Mr. Alexopoulos is indeed a talented artist and writer. I hope he gets right to work on his next book, and I hope he lightens the tone a bit and lets his wit shine through.

I’m not particularly anxious to stir up another yaoi discussion, but I thought this perceptive comment might be easily overlooked because it’s in a comments thread. Commenting on Chris Butcher’s post on yaoi, Alex Woolfson says

It’s interesting that “feelings of pain and longing” are often being attribued more to women than gay men by BL creators and that this perception is being used as a way to show the distinction between yaoi and gay comics. Certainly listening to Bronsky Beat’s Age of Consent as a kid and remembering now how much it resonated with me, it’s hard to imagine my “gay” feelings as a teenager and young adult (the age of many BL heroes) described as anything other than “pain and longing.” In many ways, this argument rings false to me, especially because as a gay guy I have no problem relating to the characters in these “just-for-women” works.

But that said, one of the reasons I am choosing to write “yaoi” works as a gay guy is because I believe that labeling something as manga and yaoi in particular does imply a stronger focus on relationships and emotions in the story, even if the story is an action-adventure one. And the fact that the intended “yaoi audience” is predominantly but not exclusively women encourages me as a creator to focus more on universal elements in my stories, hopefully making them fun for the whole family. So perhaps I am part of the problem, too. ;-)

(Alex’s home base is Yaoi 911.)

Newsarama has an interview with George Alexopoulos, who won a Rising Stars of Manga slot and has a new book, Go with Grace, that just came out this month.

Anime on DVD has an early review up of the the CMX title Emma. CMS has been working hard in recent months to redeem themselves from the TenTen debacle, and this title may help rebuild the good will, especially as they have pledged not to censor it. Judging from the responses on this forum thread at AoD, the fans may be ready to give them a chance.

I know I linked to this before, but if you haven’t read the Backstage feature on Anipike yet, check it out. There’s a timeline, interviews, all kindsa good stuff. I particularly like the part where the site crashes because their web host was holding the servers hostage.

Pata has a look at at recent announcements of drama adaptations of our favorite manga. Ikimashou lays on the ‘tude:

Well, if it isn’t the year of the shoujo manga adaptation. This time around the duck-lipped crybabies that will be getting the adaptive treatment are the characters of Nodame Cantabile.

Time magazine has an interview with Fruits Basket manga-ka Natsuki Takaya, and it’s clear that she’s not threatened by global manga:

Simply put, I’m glad that manga as an expressive form is expanding. I think that nationality has no relation to that which gives rise to manga. Even among the Japanese, manga creators are making their creations everyday reflecting their own individuality, with none being the same. What is important isn’t the differences between the creators but their love for manga.

On the subject of Fruits Basket, she says

I plan to conclude it within the year. I don’t really think that I’m particularly sad about it drawing to a close. If I don’t follow through with it until the end, my work won’t stand on its own. I always want to be able to draw new projects.

Takaya doesn’t exactly bare her soul in this interview; she’s rather reserved, although she does admit that she loves the TV show CSI and that doing the storyboards is her favorite part of the manga process. And I like this:

Above and beyond drawing my creations, I try to incorporate some kind of message. I try not to end as merely a question but try to provide a conclusion within the work. Furthermore, I try not to supplement this understanding outside of the work. This is because I believe that readers are free to respond to the work in their own way and that this is part of the pleasure.

Uh-oh! I was lazy a few posts back and just picked up Love Manga’s recap of the USA Today top 150. So he and I both missed the big news of the week: Volume 14 of Fruits Basket debuted at number 29. Fortunately, ANN picked up on it. That’s a personal best for this book, and it seems like the general trend is that the series is doing better as it progresses. It’s time to start speculating about what will happen if a volume hits the top ten, or even the number one spot.