MangaBlog

In my other life, I’m a freelance writer for North Shore Sunday, which covers the area north of Boston, all the way from Saugus up to Marblehead and points beyond. I’d like to do a story on manga and anime fans on the North Shore. If you’re interested in being interviewed, drop me an e-mail at the address on the right. It doesn’t matter if you’re a casual reader or a serious otaku—I’m looking for a range of people.

If you want to see what my articles are like, here are a few samples:
An interview with Sebastian Junger about “A Death in Belmont”
A story on Art Spiegelman
A theologian critiques “The Da Vinci Code”

The Beat picks up on this conversation (which has grown since I linked to it yesterday) about yaoi on a Christian parents’ bulletin board, and notes that cooler heads seem to have prevailed. Here’s a snippet from one poster:

Yaoi is “hot” right now and getting a lot of press, but it’s only one subset of a bigger picture. I think if you look at the self-imposed rating system on the yaoi titles, you’re likely to find 16-up or 18-up on the covers. So…I think part of what is involved in this issue parental responsibility. You’re not likely to allow your 12/13 year old to browse the bookstore unsupervised in the romance section or the new age section or even general fiction…don’t let them browse in the manga section unsupervised.

I’m glad the conversation is so reasonable, and that someone from within the community pointed out that all manga is not porn and not every book has to be safe for children.

This thread began with a warning that has been around as long as parenthood, although the internet makes it easier to propagate: hidden dangers to your children. It usually starts with a well-meaning parent who is genuinely shocked by something and wants to warn others: “Do you know there’s porn in manga?” I’m glad that in this case, other parents followed it with a reasoned response. In the Victorville library case, the same sort of discovery turned into a crusade and resulted in a perfectly good book being pulled from an entire library system. Trust me, we don’t want that.

This conversation makes me hopeful that there won’t be a major backlash against yaoi manga, or any other mature manga. If there is, we on Team Comix need to keep in mind that Christians are not monolithic. The most visible members of the religious right may thunder on about the evils of porn and the “homosexual agenda,” but the people in the pews are more reasonable. (Certainly that’s been my experience as a Catholic.) Dismissing or insulting them will only make things worse, and possibly alienate a group that’s really on our side.

I checked out the manga reviews on the Christian anime site, Christian Anime Alliance. The people who wrote them seem to genuinely like manga, and their take was closer to “not for kids under a certain age” than “this book should be banned” or “reading this will make you go to hell.” They even had nice things to say about Love Hina! The Christian otaku certainly bucked my stereotypes, and as a semi-churchgoing soccer mom who can’t get enough of Death Note, I hope I’m bucking someone else’s stereotypes as well.

In this week’s Flipped, David Welsh manages to find a few manga he doesn’t like.

At Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon takes a look at the Bookscan graphic novel numbers for mid-May and talks a bit about what the numbers do and don’t tell us. He provides the actual list, which is heavy on the manga—exactly the opposite of Diamond’s graphic novel list—demonstrating once more that bookstores are where people buy manga.

From the German site Animey, here is an interview in English with manga-ka Gosho Aoyama, creator of Detective Conan (link is to a fan site), which Viz retitled Case Closed. (Via Ikimashou.)

Am I the only one who thinks that a Rurouni Kenshin plushie is just plain wrong? How can he kick butt if he’s all soft ‘n’ fuzzy?

The Duluth libraries are ready for summer with plenty of manga for the kids.

“You could put the phone book in manga and it would be a bestseller,” Richgruber said. “They are flying off the shelves.”

From ComicList, here’s what to expect in your local comic store this week.

ANIME WORKS PUBLICATIONS
Eiken Vol 4, $9.99

BARBOUR PUBLISHING INC
Serenity Vol 3 Basket Case, $7.97
Serenity Vol 4 Rave N Rant, $7.97
Serenity Vol 5 Snow Biz, $7.97

DARK HORSE COMICS
Octopus Girl Vol 2, $12.95

DC/CMX
Land Of The Blindfolded Vol 8, $9.99
Megatokyo Vol 4, $9.99
Moon Child Vol 3, $9.99

ONI PRESS INC.
Love As A Foreign Language #5, $5.95

TOHAN CORPORATION
Fullmetal Alchemist Art Book Vol 3, $24.99
Hitomi No 10 Figure No Gunzo Part 2, $55.99
Hobby Japan Jun 2006, $12.99
Hyper Hobby May 2006, $16.99
Kingdom Hearts Ultimania Intro To Kingdom Hearts II T, $24.99
Megami Magazine Deluxe Vol 5, $18.99
Megami May 2006, $14.99
Naruto Movie Jump C Vol 1, $12.99
Naruto Movie Jump C Vol 2, $12.99
Newtype May 2006, $10.99
One Piece Color Walk 3 SC, $27.99
Shigeru Komatsuzaki World, $35.99
Shuffle On The Stage Oficial Visual Guide, $35.99
Yamada Akihiro Fantasy Art Works, $55.99

VIZ MEDIA LLC
Fullmetal Alchemist Profiles, $14.99
Golgo 13 Vol 3, $9.99
Hana Kimi Vol 12, $9.99
Hot Gimmick Vol 11, $9.99
Inu Yasha Ani Manga Vol 15, $11.99
Naoki Urasawas Monster Vol 3, $9.99
Shojo Beat July 06 Vol 2 #7, $5.99
Vagabond Vol 21, $9.95
Zatch Bell Vol 7, $9.99

I’m including the Tohan listings because they look like art books that would be of interest to manga readers. My daughters love these when they show up at our bookstores, and have been known to do extra chores so they can save up enough to buy them.

This week brings vol. 11 of Hot Gimmick, the manga smart women love to hate. The series wraps up with vol. 12 in September. Volume 3 of Monster is worthy of note, of course, although I bought it two weeks ago at Borders. That sort of practice is not going to endear manga to the proprietors of comics stores.

(I just went on the Viz website to check these links, and I noticed their featured “new release” is vol. 6 of Fullmetal Alchemist, which came out in March. Helloooo! Viz website people! Anybody home?)

Also notable this week is vol. 4 of Megatokyo, the first to be published since they moved to CMX. It will be interesting to see how this volume matches up with the previous three.

At MangaCast, Ed gives his take on the list.

Blogger Elizabeth McClung writes about being detained by customs at the Canadian border (she’s Canadian) while the officers went through all her manga, looking for the dirty pictures.

As soon as I declared that I had some of the japanese inspired comic books called manga, a Custom’s officer said, “That’s the stuff from Japan; there is some really obscene and filthy stuff.”

Actually, it was printed in America and rated 13+, but that didn’t hold any water with the customs guys.

I was informed that I could have put different covers on or done anything else I could to get the pornography in and that if I spoke anymore, the books would be seized. So I stood there and watched my previously new books get examined page by page, thumbed through and pressed open because it was assumed if I read manga, that I was a sex offender.

McClung goes on to say that Canadian customs has a long history of targeting gay and lesbian materials, and even materials owned by gay and lesbian travelers. Comics and other books come in for special scrutiny. She sees two culprits: overbroad obscenity laws and a customs service with little oversight. It’s worth reading the whole thing to see how far astray Canada, which usually seems like a reasonable country, has gone, and the consequences it has:

DMP, who publishes the gay themed award winning series Antique Bakery won’t sell same-sex themed books or adult comics in Canada because their distributor Diamond, doesn’t want their other shipments of comics and manga seized (including when Canada Customs held a X-men comic shipment on the belief that X-men meant X-rated!).

Customs wrangles also hastened the closure of the only lesbian bookstore in Victoria, McClung writes. Despite the hassles, she is determined to continue bringing manga into Canada.

The issue is in their head, not mine, and if I won’t give in to the dozens of different groups and societal pressures to try to put me back in the closet then I sure am not going to give in to Canada Customs. Welcome to the Gulag!

(Found via the comments to this post at postmodernbarney.)

ComiPress offers three intriguing stories to start off your week: a brief history of the relationship between manga and photocopiers, Amazon may start carrying doujinshi, and a story on how kids these days don’t know how to read manga. (All via Manganews.)

ICv2 presents their usual excellent analysis of comics and graphic novels sales and gives their version of the top 100 graphic novels, this time with sales figures.

Uh-oh. A religious bulletin board discovers yaoi, and people are not amused.

CMX has posted previews of The Recipe for Gertrude and VS.

From ANN comes the news that Del Rey has the license for a shoujo version of Densha Otoko, the story of a lonely nerd who courts a girl with help from the internet. It’s due out in November 2006. There’s more commentary on the ANN and AoD forums for. This is the third version announced in English; Viz and CMX are slated to bring out translations of two different three-volume seinen versions of the story.