MangaBlog

This week’s MangaBlogCast has a lot of news from San Diego Comic-Con, which was obviously the biggest event of the week, but there was plenty going on in the rest of the blogosphere as well. You can find podcasts of all the manga panels at MangaCast; I’m only going to link to the ones specifically mentioned in the podcast. ANN has a list of all the titles announced at the con.

I took a break from podcasting this week and left all the hard work to Jack, but I’ll be back in two weeks on the next edition of MangaBlogCast. In the meantime, stay tuned to MangaBlog for all your breaking manga news.

Here are the links for this week’s podcast:

The Yomis: The first-ever manga awards

San Diego Comic-Con Coverage

Del Rey panel
Mely’s take on Mushishi

CMX panel

Seven Seas panel
Broccoli’s announcement of E’s

Meanwhile, outside the convention center…

Tokyopop’s new website

New Tokyopop title: My Dead Girlfriend

Dirk Deppey interviews Dallas Middaugh for TCJ

Scanlations pop up in The New Statesmen

Comics sales up, graphic novels down
Top 100 graphic novels for June

Tania Del Rio on shy manga-kas
Love Manga responds

Osamu Tezuka videos

Bento Physics analyzes Nana

ANN interviews Jason DeAngelis and Adam Arnold of Seven Seas

We had a full week of manga news, and you can hear all about it at the MangaBlogCast. Show notes will be up soon.

Ok, I know I was snarking on the new Tokyopop website yesterday, but I have spent a little time clicking around and I have figured out a few things.

First of all, if you want to find a particular manga, try the “Books” link in the left-hand menu, which will bring up an alphabetical list. If you click “Manga serials” you just get the books they’re pushing today, and “Manga” brings you to their manga feature page, where you can read Telophase’s manga column, which is one of the highlights of the site as far as I’m concerned.

If you can avert your eyes from the huddled masses in the blogs, there is actually some good content here. Most of the columns look good, and there is an interview with the author of Beck. However, a caveat: Given that this is still a company site, I can’t imagine the columns and interviews are going to wander into negative or controversial territory.

Finally, it appears that they are going to make lots of chapters of their featured manga available via a manga reader, except that it’s not quite ready for prime time. When I try to read a Chapter 1, I get a message that the Manga Reader is coming soon (although subsquent chapters seem to work). It could just be that I’m using Safari on a Mac, but my philosophy is, if you can’t accomodate Macs, you’re not really a website. Anyway, I’m looking forward to that feature being fully implemented.

Bird Kiss
By Eun Ah Park
Romance/Comedy
Rated T, age 13+
Tokyopop, $9.99

Bird Kiss is a classic shoujo story with a bit more depth to the characters than usual.

Park sets the stage right up front with a super-cute retelling of the Frog Prince fairy tale before starting the schoolgirl tale that is the heart of the story. Miyoul, the heroine, is a middle school student who is infatuated with high school student Guelin and goes to all sorts of crazy lengths to get him to notice her. Tripping her up every step of the way is the geeky Heerack, who has had a crush on Miyoul forever and waits on her hand and foot, waking her up every morning for school and bringing her special lunches. Because he cluelessly follows her everywhere, he ends up getting in the way whenever she gets close to making points with Guelin.

While some of the plot points are telegraphed with screaming semaphores a mile away—is it a spoiler to reveal that Heerack is pretty good looking once he gets contacts and a decent haircut?—some of the relationships, like the class alpha-girl’s feelings for Heerack, are more complicated. Also interesting is the fact that the point-of-view character is not so perfect; Miyoul is really mean to Heerack and feels persecuted when her friends take his side. Even though her friends are right, it’s easy to be sympathetic to her confusion and resentment. If Park allows Miyoul to really develop, this could be an interesting series.

The art is very stylized. The faces have a very hard look, with big, round black eyes and dark lips, which seems to be common in manwha. Park goes a little crazy with the flower backgrounds, but I happen to like that. Sound effects are untranslated, which is distracting; I’d prefer to see small translations either alongside the characters or in the back.

With this volume the series is off to a promising start, and I’ll be interested to see how much complexity Park brings to the characters in future volumes.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy supplied by the publisher.)

At MangaCast, Ed posts audio of the Jim Henson Company Labyrinth and Dark Crystal panel.

ANN has a list of new licenses with links to their encyclopedia articles, which will have to do for now as the publishers don’t seem to have a lot of info up yet.

Wired went to the con but got distracted by the cosplayers. At least they took pictures.

Pata wraps up SDCC and fact-checks PWCW. He issues a caution about carelessly using the term “lolicon.”

Speaking of PWCW, they have two articles up that mention manga. This marketing story fills in some of the gaps, as manga sites’ coverage of the con focused on the manga panels, not the broader events. Diamond VP Kuo-Yu Liang tells PW what we all know, that manga is huge in bookstores, and what we might not have guessed, that yaoi is selling well in the southern chain Books-A-Million. And this:

He has praise for small manga publishers like Go!Comi and Seven Seas Entertainment. “They both have very strong marketing with online preview pages and message boards. They do all the stuff for their books that much bigger companies don’t do.”

Indeed. Liang also mentions Alison Bechdel’s FunHome as an example of a book that benefited from publicity in the non-comics world, such as the New York Times and NPR. I wanted to read this book ever since I heard NPR interview Bechdel (see! It works!), but I haven’t been able to find it in Borders or Barnes & Noble, although I haunt both those stores weekly. I could trek out of my way to some comic store I’ve never been to before on the off chance that they would have it, but—nah, I’ll just buy more manga instead. It’s a shame, though.

On the other hand, manga and manwha wrapup doesn’t have much that regular readers of MangaCast won’t already know. With limited time and space to cover an entire genre, they didn’t do much more than name names, although they did get a quote from Yoshihiro Tatsumi.

It’s Wednesday, and you can make your shopping list with the help of Love Manga or MangaCast, where Ed picks volume 2 of Life as his pick of the week. We’ve already bought Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne, as my girls are big fans, and I guess we’ll be heading back for volume 14 of Furuba.