MangaBlog

Here’s the latest news from Victorville: The Barstow Community College Library has ordered copies of Paul Gravett’s Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics and will put them on display when they arrive, probably at the end of the month.

“Our feeling is that we would like to see the book returned to the shelves of the county libraries,” Kyri Freeman, librarian at the Thomas M. Kimball Library at the college, said.

Freeman said she and many librarians believe the book did not go through an appropriate process before it was banned.

“In effect, we feel it was an act of censorship and not appropriate,” she said.

Freeman said the book, which she has not read, would be a good fit with the library’s collection, and that the college plans to offer a course on graphic novels in the future. Members of the public can look at the book in the library, but only faculty and students will be able to check it out.

And this is what you call ironic:

Although the Manga book cannot be checked out at the county library branches, a link to the county library’s Web site allows a viewer to purchase the book for $24.95.

Visiting family, big (paying) work project, kids who want to be fed regularly (the nerve!)… and so much going on in the mangaworld! What’s a girl to do? Post the links and leave the hard work up to her readers. Here’s the latest roundup:

David Welsh devotes this week’s Flipped column to the power of yaoi, looking to recapture the thrill of the first time. His two picks, Loveless and Shout Out Loud!, come close.

The Japan Times serves up an article by Fred Schodt on learning Japanese from manga.

Mark Blum, Associate Professor in the East Asian Department at State University of New York, Albany, marvels that recently most of his students are motivated to study Japanese because of manga and anime. He says manga are a particularly good resource for the 14-20 age group because they combine “creative artwork, a nostalgia for the pre-puberty experience of cartoon viewing and comic reading, and themes of greatest concern to adolescents and young adults: sex and violence.”

Absolutely! I took two years of French in college, but when we moved to Geneva and I needed to say more than “la plume de ma tante est sur la table,” I took to reading the local scandal sheet, La Suisse. Between the murderous dominatrix and the muesli-smuggling scandal, I had plenty of motivation to look up unfamiliar words. This article has lots of very useful tips and I highly recommend it.

Tokyopop is launching a line of translated fiction for young adults.

Fruits Basket and Naruto own the BookScan graphic novels list, taking 12 of the top 14 spots between them. Kingdom Hearts is doing pretty well, too, with all 3 volumes in the top 12.

Mangacast looks at the April 26 comics and chooses Boys of Summer as the pick of this week. Also at Mangacast is the Taiyosha Top 10, with our beloved Yotsuba&!, vol. 5, topping the list.

From Manganews comes word that Death Note is ending. Death Note junkies, start looking now for a new fix. Would Her Majesty’s Dog fill the bill? Manga-ka Mick Takeuchi will be appearing at this year’s Anime Expo.

Can’t figure out what to spend your money on this week? Jog goes through this week’s new releases, including the much-awaited paperback version of vol. 1 of Tezuka’s Buddha and new volumes of Death Note, Eden, and Robot.

Speaking of robots, here’s an article about a Japanese manga about robots by Minoru Kamiya:

It’s taken four years, but ROBO-ONE has finally reached manga status in Japan. This summer a new manga will hit bookstore shelves featuring the uniquely Japanese robo-sport front and center.

The Florida Sun-Sentinel has a nice, thorough story on Jewish and Christian graphic novels, including the manga Serenity. I thought the Jewish entry, Megillat Esther, sounded more interesting:

The story, about a Jewish maiden in ancient Persia who becomes a queen and saves her people from genocide, is told both in the original Hebrew and English, although some pages are wordless. Other pages have numbers at the bottom indicating rabbinical commentaries from books such as the Talmud, and there is a detailed, scholarly bibliography at the back.

At the same time, it is a typical graphic novel: Female characters tend to be voluptuous, and the pages are peppered with self-deprecating wisecracks. Near the end of the story, one small character says, “The whole thing seemed a bit overdrawn to me.”

I also like it that the writer of the article gives a deadpan shout-out to Christian comics pioneer Jack Chick.

From ComicList, here are the manga appearing in comics stores this week:

A. D. VISION
Nge Angelic Days Manga, Vol 1, $9.99
Orphen Manga, Vol 5, $9.99

ANTARCTIC PRESS
How To Draw Manga The Fred Perry Way DVD

DARK HORSE COMICS
Eden, Vol 3: Its An Endless World, $12.95
Lullabies From Hell Vol 1 TPB, $12.95

DC COMICS
Testarotho, Vol 4, $9.99
Tower Of The Future, Vol 3, $9.99

DEL REY
Genshiken, Vol 5, $10.95
Guru Guru Pon Chan, Vol 4, $10.95
Nodame Cantiabile, Vol 5, $10.95
Pichi Pichi Pitch, Vol 1, $10.95
Tezukas Buddha, Vol 1 (resolicited), $14.95
Tsubasa, Vol 9, $10.95

DIGITAL MANGA DISTRIBUTION
Robot, Vol 2, $24.95

TOKYOPOP
Avatar Cinemanga, Vol 2, $7.99
Earthian, Vol 3, $14.99
Id Entity, Vol 6, $9.99
Kindaichi Case Files, Vol 13, House Of Wax, $9.99
Mobile Suit Gundam Ecole Du Ciel, Vol 3, $9.99
Neck And Neck, Vol 5, $9.99

VIZ MEDIA LLC
Beauty Is The Beast, Vol 3, $8.99
Black Cat, Vol 2, $7.99
D Gray Man, Vol 1, $7.99
Death Note, Vol 5, $7.99
Dr Slump, Vol 7, $7.99
Hunter X Hunter, Vol 8, $7.99
Is, Vol 7, $7.99
Knights Of The Zodiac, Vol 15, $7.95
Ouran High School Host Club, Vol 6, $8.99
Prince Of Tennis, Vol 13, $7.95
Rurouni Kenshin, Vol 26, $7.95
Shaman King, Vol 9, $7.95
Ultimate Muscle, Vol 12, $7.95
Whistle, Vol 11, $7.99

I’m bumping these links up from the comments for those who are following the Victorville manga case. These are three articles that ran on the op-ed page of the Victorville Daily Press on April 23.

Dangerous step on Fahrenheit 451 road, by Suzanne Oliver, a retired librarian and former branch manager of the Victorville library:

Here is how I see the stone rolling and gathering moss. The action will be to remove all offensive materials from library shelves. Remember that this is subjective—everyone in the community can demand that his recommendations be recognized because precedent has been set.

Protecting the children should come first, by Bill Postmus, the chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, who ordered the book removed from the library:

The word censorship does not apply in this case. Censorship would be preventing this book from being published and read, which the county obviously does not have the ability to do. The County is not preventing adults from viewing what they want to view.

However, I do not believe the county has an obligation to provide this type of material for them at taxpayer expense. And considering the Library currently has no measures in place to prevent children from checking out these materials, I had an obligation to have the book in question removed.

Silencing the library, by Steve Williams. This bears the header “Our Opinion” so it presumably reflects the paper’s stance:

Aren’t the libraries there to serve the literary interests of the general public. And if that’s so, does Mr. Postmus have an obligation to “respect the values” of all his constituents? Or just those with whom he agrees?

All three are worth reading in their entirety.

The folks at Manganews have translated, for your reading pleasure, an interview with Japanese manga-ka Hikaru Sato. Sato is the creator of Edomae no Shun (apparently, a manga about sushi), which appears in Weekly Manga Goraku in Japan. It’s an interesting peek into the life of a manga creator, but it also reads like a how-to manual for aspiring writers. He started out motivated by passion:

When I was in middle school I used to read “Circuit of Wolf” by Satoshi Ikesawa and Akio Chiba’s “Captain”. I was so touched by “Captain” one time that I started to cry. I was thinking, “One can be so moved by manga”, and wanted to write manga myself. I started to draw manga until late at night.

Then he made an important connection: Undeterred by the fact that he wasn’t any good, he sent his manga to an established cartoonist, Tokuhaka Nakashima. When Sato graduated from high school, Nakashima’s editor remembered him and he ended up as an intern for Nakashima. There he learned the most important lesson an artist or writer can learn:

“Finish the draft fast, the deadline is a high priority” is one of the lessons I learned from Mr. Nakashima.

His first manga debuted in Shonen Jump when he was 20. He focused on building a solid career, although it was almost derailed at one point by a brush with fame. Sato seems attribute his success to that old (and very true) chestnut about applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair:

Also, this may be just professional pride, but I trained myself to “just keep working.” You lose your skill if you don’t work. You need to keep going in this line of work.

And I thought this was kind of sweet:

I feel that manga is really for kids and it is something you continue to enjoy from your childhood. So, I don’t want to fake it or be mediocre.

All reporters end an interview by asking what’s next. For Sato, who listed deep sea fishing as his hobby, the logical followup to a sushi manga is a fishing manga, and it will be interesting to see what comes of this:

Fishing has a lot of romance.

DMP, Del Rey, are you listening?

Ah, the weekend is almost here. Time to relax and read. But what?

The blogosphere has a few suggestions.

For those looking for something on the literary/artistic side, David Welsh devotes his Flipped column to Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators and finds 17 different but affecting stories. The book draws together eight Japanese and nine French artists and Welsh found the stories to be quite diverse:

Japan provides a canvas, but it’s ultimately about what the creators bring to the experience. Their contributions are varied and wonderful – funny, troubling, absurd, expansive, precise, and moving, by turns.

This looks like a good addition to any home library, and David is already suggesting a companion volume, France as Viewed by 17 Creators.

On the lighter side, Tony Salvaggio at Calling Manga Island looks at two just-for-fun titles. Salvaggio likes the way Chikyu Misaki bucks the standard manga cliches, although it could fool you with the doe-eyed kawaii look, and he enjoys the humorous ninja book KageTora while admitting it’s not terribly original:

Bath scenes, unrequited love, animals that speak by holding up signs, and other hallmarks of the genre are pretty by-the-book here, but “KageTora” is still a very enjoyable read.

Of course, those books have all been out for a while. If you’ve worked your way through the stack, there’s plenty of new material this week: volume 13 of Fruits Basket, volume 2 of Dragon Head, and volume 8 of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha. Not sure what to get? Coffeeandink rummages through the shopping bag and comes up with some good comments.

Christopher Butcher really likes Dokebi Bride, a new manwha from Netcomics, and you can read the first chapter online. Chris’s take:

A more traditional-seeming ‘horror’ narrative gives way to an extended short story of familial love and tradition, which is terrifying too. The storytelling and style is a few degrees removed from manga, and if you’ve been enjoying some of the recent off-the-beaten-path manga like Monster or Dragon Head, you might want to give this one a shot.

Another Netcomics title, The Great Catsby, has also been getting good reviews, and it too is available online.

And if the lovely spring sunshine is beckoning, you can always go for a walk and listen to your manga and manga reviews instead of reading them. Tokyopop offers podcasts of the first chapters of several of its manga. I admit I haven’t tried this yet, but I have become a big fan of MangaCast, and I’ll be taking a stroll today just so I can hear the latest Manga Curry No Maki. (A note to the gadget-impaired: I bought an iPod so I could listen to these, but you can download podcasts to your computer and listen to them that way. But it’s hard to lug a laptop on your morning walk.)