MangaBlog

Both my daughters are devoted Fruits Basket fans, and they like to pre-order so they can get the books as soon as possible. Today, they pointed out something that strikes me as strange:
On its website, Tokypop gives the release date of Fruits Basket Volume 12 as December 13. Amazon says it will be available on December 30. But Barnes & Noble says they can get it for you on September 28. Not only that, their remarkably prescient website tells me that “People who bought this book also bought… Fruits Basket Volume 13.” Eh? OK, maybe they’re referring to pre-orders, which strikes me as cheating. Anyway, the anomaly continues, as we’ll be able to buy volume 13 in from Barnes & Noble in October or direct from Tokyopop in … uh… never mind, the link isn’t even there yet, let alone a release date.
Then I was looking at previews of Her Majesty’s Dog and noticed that it will initially be available “exclusively at Borders and Waldenbooks. Volume 1 will be available everywhere in April 2006.” In this post on the Anime on DVD forums, Jake Forbes of Go! Comi says the book will be available in Borders and Waldenbooks in late October. That’s a hell of a lag, and it means they miss out on Christmas sales everywhere else.
I’m a reader, not an industry-watcher, so maybe I’m missing something here, but if the book is ready to ship, why cut your sales by only offering it in one chain? And isn’t that a bit hard on independent retailers?

Sequential Tart has a fun piece on the geometry of the manwha love triangle, in which Jen Bomford explains how you can use hair to tell the good guys from the bad guys: short and neat is a boy you can bring home to Mom, while spiky or long hair promises excitement but trouble.
Judging from 50 Rules for Teenagers, Korean schools have the same policy as my daughter’s Catholic school: “Only your God-given hair color is permitted.”

As we haven’t been able to get away for a vacation this year, my two daughters are sitting around reading manga the way some people eat potato chips. My 12-year-old is up to volume 12 of Kare Kano and volume 5 of DN Angel, while the 11-year-old is reading and re-reading Gals!, the latest Fruits Basket, and Full Moon. We’ve also been passing around 50 Rules for Teenagers, an old-ish manwha that everyone except my husband likes. I just picked up the Papercutz graphic novel of Nancy Drew (volume 1) but haven’t got to read it because the girls got it first. And I bought Midori Days but found it disappointing; the story is just too weird for me.

Christopher Butcher Comics.212.net, is musing about a possible shakeout in the manga industry, a thought triggered by a “fairly well-sourced rumour” that ADV and Geneon* are suffering because of truckloads of returns from a chain store that has dropped manga. Some skepticism is expressed in the comments section, but everyone seems to agree that things are rocky at ADV right now.
If this is the first sign of a market contraction, Chris predicts that companies hit with a cash crunch will not keep older titles, even earlier volumes of a current series, in print. In fact, he says, that is already happening, and it’s going to hurt retailers and the industry as a whole.

if you’re ADV and you can get orders for 5,000 copies of a new volume of Full Metal Panic, or you can fill the accumulated 500 copy back order of a previous volume of Full Metal Panic, you go where the money is and try to forget that you’re in the business of selling backlist.

This would be bad for retailers and readers alike, but I see an opportunity for a savvy entrepreneur to pick up the licenses on out-of-print titles and do cheap reprints, the way Dover does for scholarly books and classics. Manga are black and white, so the production costs must be fairly low (except for the cover), and fans who have been reading scanlations and manga printed on pulp paper can’t be too picky about things like paper quality.
I’d also like to see a market for used manga, which would cut the cost of trying out a new series and help keep older volumes circulating. I’m guessing retailers would reject that idea, though.
Chris also notes that Viz and Tokyopop are shipping fewer titles this year than last, which may be a sign that the correction is already under way and doing what it is supposed to do. But it doesn’t take away the temptation to ignore the backlist.

*UPDATE: Thanks to reader Za for pointing out what I should have known all along, that Geneon doesn’t publish manga.

A quick note on something that would be interesting if I were in California, which I’m not: Chico State University (about 90 miles north of Sacramento) is holding a series of lectures, workshops, and art exhibits with the theme “Shojo Manga! Girl Power!” and focusing on “the recent success of female animators and the emergence of strong heroines as cultural icons.” The series will include talks by legendary director Hayao Miyazake (Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away) and manga experts Keiko Takemiya and Yukari Fujimoto.

On AlterNet, an article on shoujo manga from the marketing point of view. Not much new here, but it’s a good introduction to the market, using the launch of Shojo Beat to discuss the success of shoujo titles in the US. Key quote:

U.S. comic books are owned by corporations and their major franchises, with characters like Spider-Man and Superman treated more like trademarks than fictional characters. Their appearances, personalities and storylines are carefully monitored by the publisher and their titles are expected to maintain their status quo indefinitely: no deaths for major characters; no retirement; no reevaluation of priorities.

“Japanese comics are creator-owned and the creator makes sure that their characters evolve and change over time,” Sebastian says. “With manga there’s a beginning, there’s a middle and there’s always an end. It’s story oriented rather than franchise oriented.”

This reminds me of an anecdote I read on the blogaround (sorry, I can’t remember where and now I can’t find it) Peter David’s site about a kid who was a huge Spiderman fan—he had the game, the video, the action figure—but had never read the comic. On the other hand, my 12-year-old is angling for extra chores right now (a first!) so she can buy volume 11 of Kare Kano. But she has no interest in getting a Kare Kano lunchbox.
Shojo Beat reminds me a lot of the British girls’ comics I read as a kid. Like Shojo Beat’s stories, they were printed in black and white on cheap paper, and the plots were similar, tales of plucky orphans, misunderstood schoolgirls, mysteries, space aliens, etc. We lived in the U.S., but my aunt in Ireland used to send me Bunty, Judy, Diana, and Jackie, in big rolls wrapped with brown paper. I still remember how excited I was when they arrived and I could settle down for a few hours with “Pip at Pony School” and “The Four Marys.” Now my kids are the same way when Shojo Beat hits the newsstand or the next episode of DN Angel comes out.
(I note with despair that Inu Yasha is up to volume 41 in Japan. If the series my girls read go on for that long, I’ll have to figure out a way to make this manga gig pay.)
Those who have been complaining lately about the way the mainstream press writes about comics will be pleased to know that the author manages to avoid mentioning “big eyes” and never once pontificates that “comics aren’t just for kids any more.” The only whisper of a cliche is the word “Gadzooks!” in the second graf.
UPDATE: Thanks to Alex Scott for steering me to the right site for the Spiderman example.