MangaBlog

Fresh from a session in the dentist’s chair, I’m just taking a quick swing around the mangaworld this morning while I wait for the Novocain to wear off. Then I have to do some Serious Writing For Money, but I’ll be back tomorrow.

For those of us who don’t want to sort through all the superhero stuff, Chris Butcher has a great summary of the manga panels at NYCC.

At Twitch, someone has posted stills and a cast list for the live-action film being made in Japan from the manga Death Note.

New blog discovery: Fleen, which covers webcomics, something I don’t pay enough attention to. I’ll be checking in periodically to further my education. Meanwhile, Jarred Pine has an interesting post on the AoD blog about digital manga. As some sort of this is in the future, it’s worth a read.

At ICv2, a look at new plans for Dark Horse.

Finally, this is only slightly off topic, but as a fan of The Comics Curmudgeon, I have become a devoted reader of the comic strip Mark Trail. This morning, I commented to my husband, “Mark Trail is taking on the Kelo decision.” Turns out I’m not the only one who caught that. (Hat tip: The Comics Reporter.)

The Herald Tribune of… uh… somewhere in Florida (what is it with newspapers not putting their home city on the website?) has an interview with Buzz Dixon, author of the Christian OEL manga Serenity. Dixon first started experimenting with a Christian comic at the request of Stan Lee:

“Stan’s idea was Spider-Man at home reading the Bible and the Green Goblin coming over to fight,” Dixon said in a telephone interview from his home in Chatsworth, Calif.

Don’t have time to read all the NY Comic-Con coverage? Toon Zone wraps it up with some quick-read one-minute interviews.

Is CMX beyond redemption? Not according to Fred “Piro” Gallagher of Megatokyo, who announced at NYCC that he is moving from Dark Horse to CMX. Megatokyo will be the first OEL manga for CMX, and Fred comments on his site:

In talking with the DC / CMX folks, I got a strong sense of commonality between what I wanted to do and where they wanted to go with manga. I feel they have an excellent understanding of what it takes to create the kind of work I want to produce and know that they are going to be very supportive of my efforts.

This interview at the Pulse has more details.

This could be interesting: An audio interview with Shawne Kleckner, founder of Right Stuf.

In Japan, Wai Wai delivers your morning dose of outlandish with a story about an adult manga that is offering a pair of pre-schooler’s underpants as a promotional item. How bad is this?

“Not even I can make a comment about little girls’ underpants being given away,” an admitted pedophile tells Cyzo.

Running out of stuff to read? Ed Chavez at Anime on DVD has been keeping busy at NYCC, jotting down announcements of new releases (and adding a bit of commentary). Check the blog, because a lot of them are already out there, but here are the new titles:

Tokyopop:

Manhwa
Recast by hui kye
Queens
Peppermint

Manga
Welcome to the NHK
My Hime
Bus Gamer

BLU Manga
Black Knight from Tsurugi Kai
Junjo Romantica by Nakamura Shungiku
Gerard et Jacques from Yoshinaga Fumi (Antique Bakery)

BeBeautiful:

Casino Lily, by Niita Youka
Renai a la Carte, by Minami Haruka
HanaIro Virgin Soil, by Minami Haruka

Viz:

Viz Signature: Drifting Classroom, by Umezu Kazuo
Shonen Jump: Busou Renkin, by Watsuki Nobuhiro, 9 vols

AoD also reports that CMX has picked up The Recipe for Gertrude, The Empty Empire, Omakue Desu and Emma. And this:

In non-related but amusing news, CMX has also apparently acquired the rights to Megatokyo from Dark Horse, making them the billionth company to handle publishing the title.

ADV has acquired the rights to Sugar: A Little Snow Fairy and manga from the Lime studio.

Manganews has a list of new Tokyopop titles which have appeared on Amazon.com (not on the Tokyopop website):

Because I’m the Goddess by Shamuneko
Bird Kiss (manwha) by Eun Ah Park
Genju no Seiza by Matsuri Akino
Grenadier by Sousuke Kaise
Hoshi no Koe by Mizu Sahara
Peach Girl: Sae’s Story (Ura Peach Girl) by Miwa Ueda
Saver (manwha) by Eun-Young Lee
Zyword by by Tamayo Akiyama

Also, Viz has acquired Law of Ueki.

For those who are more interested in next week than next summer, David Welsh lists the new series debuting in March, along with a bit of commentary.

This what-is-manga article in the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times does a great job of explaining what shoujo manga is and why girls like it. The reason, as in the Baltimore Sun article I linked to earlier, is that the writer went out and talked to some real shoujo readers, rather than assembling the usual stereotypes.

I liked this:

For $10, a young reader could get 200 pages of adventure, peril and life – all easily tucked into a backpack.

(Think of it as portable angst.) Here’s 14-year-old Lyndsi Williams explaining why she likes Revolutionary Girl Utena:

“She’s just different. She’s not afraid; she’s individual,” said Lyndsi, a cherub-faced student at Palm Harbor University High School. “Like me, I’d rather go outside in the rain than shop.”

Girls like Lyndsi are drawn to manga, in part, because they identify with the characters.

“In shojo, a girl will run into a wall,” said Lyndsi, who is a member of the school’s anime club, which is mostly female. “That I can relate to. That’s something I’d do.”

And in case you think teenagers can’t smell the difference between authenticity and a cheesy commercial product, here’s Lyndsi again:

“When I first saw manga stuff I was interested because I hadn’t seen it before,” Lyndsi says. “It was something that didn’t have Hollywood written all over it.”

The girls nod in agreement.

“It’s something about it,” says Meteka Smart, 15. “Like I can come here and hang out and read this and feel totally safe.”

Reporter Nicole Johnson interviews the usual suspects—Milton Greipp of ICv2, who seems to be everywhere this weekend, someone from Tokyopop, manga-ka Svetlana Chmakova, and the manager of the local Barnes & Noble—to produce a nicely balanced article that has the ring of authenticity to it. It’s worth taking 10 minutes to read the whole thing.

That’s the provocative headline on the PW wrapup of the NYCC panel discussion titled “A Nosebleed means WHAT?: Sexuality in Japanese Manga.” One of the big problems librarians face is where to put the books:

Genre’s like Yaoi (boys in love with boys comics) can really produce problems for librarians, because manga is considered a category for teens rather than adults. One librarian said that if she had a manga collection for adult readers, yaoi wouldn’t be a problem. But, she said, manga is categorized for teens.

Some librarians complained that the ratings weren’t descriptive enough, and that some series start out fairly clean but heat up in subsequent volumes. Reviews and previews emerged as a way to help sort them out.

On the topic of the Japanese tendency to be, uh, franker about sex, Tokyopop’s Lillian Diaz-Pryzbyl made an important distinction:

“It’s not always acceptance [of sex],” she said of the sex depicted or alluded to in manga, but she conceded that manga often creates “an awareness [about sex].”

As a parent, I think that’s key. Actually, many younger teens are already aware of sex, but they don’t quite know what to make of it. Manga are one way for them to put it in context. My kids are 11 and 13. Some of the titles they are reading have sexual situations but most don’t push an “everybody’s doing it” attitude; in fact, the girls in these stories are rather puritanical. If the books are providing good role models, who, for example, say no if pressured to have sex against their will, I’m OK with that. Sometimes a character finds herself in a compromising or dangerous situation, and kids need to know that that can happen as well. For the manga-reading parent, some plots provide a starting point for talking about sex. But even if it’s just the kids reading the books, I think it’s useful to think about these situations before they start happening.

Obviously, the dynamic changes for older teens who read more mature books. But it would be incredibly unrealistic to have a book about teenagers that didn’t deal with sex. The more important question is whether it is exploitative or demeaning or otherwise unhealthy. We need to pay more attention to that and worry less about wardrobe malfunctions.

The Sunday papers include two more attempts to explain this manga thing to a bewildered public.

The Baltimore Sun weighs in with a fairly short article that mostly gets it right. Reporter Elizabeth Lange focuses tightly on shoujo manga and talks to readers and librarians, which gives a little fresher take:

“Eventually the whole superhero thing gets to be very predictable,” says Kelsie Cooper, 17, a senior at Roland Park Country School and a founder of the school’s anime and manga club. “It’s all about their weapons and their costumes. Manga focuses more on character. A lot of kids are into The O.C. and One Tree Hill [TV shows]. A lot of the shojo stories are similar, but more realistic.”

“Sometimes you feel girly,” adds her friend Allie Simmons, 17, about shojo’s appeal. “It’s about feelings, and it’s so easy to read. It’s like sometimes you want to eat ice cream and watch a chick flick.”

Lange can talk about manga style without getting stuck on big eyes and big boobs, and the kids she interviews are reading fairly sophisticated books. Here’s a list of manga mentioned in the piece: W Juliet, Boys Over Flowers, Sugar Sugar Rune, The Wallflower, Fruits Basket, Sensual Phrase.

By contrast, the Somewhere In Pennsylvania Patriot News article falls flat. It might help to read the lead paragraphs of the article, but the website chopped them off. The reporter’s byline is also missing, but whoever it is managed to talk to lots of manga professionals without gleaning any insights deeper than “Manga has intricate story lines” or that some manga have naughty bits but others don’t. Manga mentioned here: Sailor Moon, Peach Fuzz, Van Von Hunter, Naruto, Fullmetal Alchemist. Nothing out of the mainstream.

The package is redeemed, however, by the sidebar on the impact of manga on local comics stores. I thought this was kind of interesting:

“Right now there are about 3,000 to 3,500 comic shops in the U.S.,” said Comics Journal editor Dirk Deppy. “That equals to about one shop for every 30,000 miles. It’s as if American comic shops don’t count almost.”

It’s a valid point*, although it ignores the effects of density. There are quite a few comics stores in big cities, for instance, while there are most likely none in the Mojave desert. Still, even here in the greater Boston area, comics stores are thin on the ground. The sidebar also mentions cost as an issue:

“What we found was that online sellers and then … the big chain stores, up to and including Target and Wal-Mart, would have retail prices substantially lower than ours, due mostly to their enormous purchasing power,” he said.

I’d say that’s more true of anime than manga, because they don’t have much manga at Target (I never shop at Wal-Mart so I can’t speak to that). It is true that manga is cheaper online, but shipping costs often wipe out much of the difference, and in our house, we’re all about instant gratification. But given that the price difference between Barnes & Noble and my local comics store is only a dollar a title, I’d opt for the LCS if it had a better selection. In fact, we’ve already switched from B&N to Borders for pretty much that reason, even though it’s more money and a longer drive.

Finally here’s Deppey on the American comics industry:

“American comics went into retirement,” he said, “catering more and more to hardcore fans. It’s a one-genre medium, and the books have become more arcane.”

Deppey’s point is that comics stores limit themselves to that market, and I’m not sure how true that is. In fact, the owners of the comics stores say they like manga and see it as a way to grow their customer base.

It’s a good idea. There’s a comics store in the next town over from me, and despite the fact that I will drive on the expressway to get to the big Borders, or fight Cambridge traffic to go to the Japanese mall in Porter Square, I have never bothered to check it out. Advertising probably wouldn’t hurt. In fact, if a bunch of LCS owners got together and ran an ad in Shojo Beat, with a list by state of their locations, my eagle-eyed daughters would probably spot it and insist that we go there.

*UPDATE: No, it’s not. The area of the U.S. is about 3.5 million square miles; divide that by 3,500 and you get one comics shop per 1,000 square miles. Deppey is off by an order of magnitude. Thanks to the MangaHusband for pointing this out.