MangaBlog

I started out this Valentine’s Day with an hour and a half in the dentist’s chair, so even though I came home to chocolates from my sweetheart, it will be an hour or so before I can enjoy them. In the meantime, I got a kick out of this story in The Jakarta Post about Indonesian teenagers picking up on Valentine’s Day from Japanese manga. That means they learn the peculiarly Japanese version, in which the girls give the boys chocolates. A month later, on White Day, the boys are supposed to reciprocate. However, I can’t imagine that Valentine’s Day features as largely in, say, Naruto, as in Fruits Basket, so I wonder how the boys know what to do.

Of course, we have the obligatory disapproving comment from a local grownup:

“For Indonesian teenagers, especially Muslims, it is not necessary to celebrate Valentine’s Day,” said Dapiarso, chairman of the school board of State High School No. 47 in Tanah Kusir, South Jakarta.

“Besides, it is not part of our culture, it’s a celebration that could (in the end) make free sex legal. So it’s better if we don’t celebrate it at all,” he said.

You can practically hear the kids muttering, “If only it were that easy!”

At Anime on DVD, Ed Chavez’s series continues with a look at how CMX fared in 2005. Actually, it’s about how CMX became the most reviled manga publisher of 2005, after editors there decided to redraw the naughty bits out of Tenjho Tenge (for those late to the party, the details are here). When the fans reacted with predictable rage (hey, CMX, read blogs much?), the publisher responded with… nothing. Bad move.

The upshot is that although CMX did publish some really good manga last year (Gals! and Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne are big in my house, and Chikyu Misaki is getting good word-of-blog), no one noticed. That’s partly due to Ten-Ten-gate and the distrust that followed and partly due to CMX’s failure to get the word out about new titles.

Now CMX is the publisher everyone loves to hate, and that’s not entirely fair. Ed points out that most of their titles have escaped Bowdlerization and the translations are pretty good (I’ll have to take his word for that). Bottom line:

CMX has the infrastructure, they have the production abilities but until they have the love for manga (and I am not joking), I do not think readers will consider them a major publisher any time soon.

Anime on DVD has posted its Best Manga Awards, and I predict that the blogosphere will be pleased. Fruits Basket picks up the laurels for best overall release and best shoujo, while Sexy Voice and Robo gets the nod for best one-shot book, Death Note for best series, and Yotsuba&! wins the prize for best youth/all ages title. Bleach wins the Best Shonen award, although a lot of women seem to read it, and XXXHolic is voted the best mature manga. Shojo Beat wins the Best Periodical, a category in which the competition is, admittedly, rather thin. Note that, this being AoD, there was no OEL manga category. However, I think the titles listed are a very good representation of what the bloggers liked this year, especially Death Note, Yotsuba&! and Sexy Voice and Robo. No Planetes, though.

My prediction: Look for Cantarella somewhere on that list next year.

At The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon picked up on something I missed in the distribution article below:

The NYT article also lets drop the approximate number of clients Tokyopop picked up in its Sunday newspaper launch: 30, a solid number perhaps better than it sounds depending on the percentage of big-paper clients.

That percentage seems to be pretty high. Here’s the list from the creators’ website:

Newspapers already on board to run the series include the Chicago Tribune, Detroit News, Los Angeles Times, Denver Post, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Portland Oregonian, Tucson Citizen, Boston Globe, Gardner MA News, Vancouver Sun and the Calgary Alberta Herald!

And then St. Paul, Minnesota, picked it up last week. Glaringly absent from that list is any mention of New York, and I can’t tell if the Daily News or the Post has picked it up. I’m not sure it matters there.

The strip does seem to be well placed, but as I commented the other day, the Sunday funnies may not be the ideal format for manga. The Boston Globe runs it unreadably small, and the syndicator seems to have dropped a lot of pages to make the story move faster. It would have made more sense to run Azumanga Daioh on the daily pages than to put a slice’n’diced Peach Fuzz in only on Sundays.

My review of Crossroad is up at Manga Life.

In this week’s Flipped column, David Welsh goes all Valentine’s Day on us by looking at the odd couples in Nana and Kamikaze Girls.

At comics-and-more, Think About Comics gives two thumbs up to Monster and Dragon Head. At IGN, reviewer A.E. Sparrow likes Monster as well. I think I’ll be adding it to my stack.

This* article about distribution is strictly insider baseball, but it has some interesting insights. For the uninitiated, distributors are the middlemen between publishers and retailers, although the bigger publishers have distributing arms. The article is about how several publishing houses were making pitches to distribute Tokyopop’s books.

Graphic novels generally, and manga specifically, are among the few rapidly growing areas of the publishing business, so securing the right to distribute Tokyopop’s books was a hotly contested prize.

Tokyopop ended up going with the company that bought their previous distributor. Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley, sounding like a wild and crazy guy, explains,

We looked at a lot of other options that were very much bigger than Perseus, but we needed someone who both had the technology and systems we needed to continue to grow, and who fit our business. We’re radical, crazy, teen-pop-culture guys who do a lot of wild stuff and who have to turn on a dime.

Radical and crazy in a practical, profit-seeking way, that is:

Tokyopop is looking to push manga even further into the mainstream, hoping to gain inroads into mass merchandisers, grocery stores, gift and specialty stores and other places where popular fiction and nonfiction books are sold. As such, Tokyopop says it believes the battle for manga superiority is likely to be as much a fight among distributors as it is a struggle for the best cartoonists, characters and storylines.

God help me if they start selling manga in the grocery stores. Just reserve my spot at the poorhouse now. Except I doubt they’ll put anything at Target or Stop & Shop that I didn’t buy five years ago. I’ll still have to trek to a real bookstore to get to the full line.

One side note: the article describes Tokyopop as “this country’s largest publisher of English-language manga,” which doesn’t seem right to me. Everything I’ve read seems to indicate that Viz is putting out more manga per month and selling more of it.

Oh, and this is how the New York Times describes manga: “the Japanese book-length comics larded with doe-eyed characters with chiseled good looks and hard bodies.” Aaargh!

*The article is from the New York Times but I linked to another site to avoid registration. Original NYT article is here.