MangaBlog

Half our order came in today from Overstock.com. The good news is that was pretty quick considering we placed the order on the Friday evening before a three-day weekend. The bad news is that because overstock.com doesn’t give the volume number as part of the item descriptions, I ordered volume 1 of Gals! instead of volume 2.
What I have learned from this is to check the ISBN, which I could have gotten from the CMX website. (As a former book editor, I can’t plead ignorance as an excuse, just laziness.) However, at seven bucks, this came cheaper than most life lessons.
Are the savings worth it? Yes, actually. As I write this, Ultra Maniac 1 lists at $9.99 and is $6.43 on overstock.com, plus $1.40 shipping, for a total cost of $7.83. The lowest price on Amazon.com’s Amazon Marketplace is $6.25, but shipping is $3.49, for a total of $9.76. Barnes and Noble’s website has it for $8.09 plus $3.99 shipping, or a total of $12.08, although they offer free shipping if you buy $25 or more.
So yes, overstock.com is a good deal. I’d use it again, but next time, I’ll be more careful.
That doesn’t mean I’m giving up the instant gratification of going to the bricks-and-mortar store and getting the book right away, along with a nice latte. I’ll be doing that this afternoon, by the way. I still owe my daughter Gals! volume 2.

The Financial Times serves up Kamikaze kittens (love that hed), a thoughtful essay on the Japanese penchant for juxtaposing cuteness with sex and violence. Writer Andrew Lee links the dark side of kawaii/manga/anime culture to recent events, including the recession of the 1990s, the Kobe earthquake, the gassing of the Tokyo subways, and the recent trend of internet suicide pacts. He does his homework, talking to several artists working on the thin line between art and pop culture.
In view of the recent discussion of the role of girls/women in manga, I thought this comment by manga novelist Junko Mizuno was particularly revealing:

”Japanese people like the image of a ‘strong/weak’ character,” she tells me when I ask about the trend of schoolgirls with swords. “For example in Sumo, if a very small sumo wrestler is able to beat a bigger sumo wrestler he is very popular. So the idea of women who look weak but are actually very strong is very popular in Japan.” So is this evidence that women are getting more powerful while the men remain childlike? “I think that women have actually gotten stronger,” she says. “But looking at the manga drawn by men lately, I think they seem to be in a state of struggle or are confused.”

Over at ICv2, Steve Bates riffs on the stereotypical comics store:

I call it the “3-D Model:” Dark, Dirty, and Disorganized.

He gets some pretty funny digs in but also makes a serious point: To attract the next generation of comic book fans, these stores need to cater not just to the kids but to their parents, who still control the benjamins.

What happens when Mom walks in with Janie and Junior and catches a whiff of Jocko behind the counter, who gave up bathing to protest the heinous treatment of Hydro-Man? What will Dad do when he and Little Timmy trip across Heavy Metal mixed with Batman Strikes? Assuming, of course, they even set foot in a shop barely lit by one flickering-humming fluorescent bulb, carpeted with Yu-Gi-Oh! wrappers and HeroClix boxes, which looks like it was organized and decorated by Hurricane Andrew.

Well, I’m the Mom in this scenario, and I used to shop in a store like that, back in the 80s when I lived in Brooklyn. The look of the place never bothered me as much as the attitude of the people who worked there, who seemed to regard customers as intruders. Even today, I don’t mind dirt as much as dirty looks.
Bates is concerned about losing a generation of comic-book readers, but what’s really at risk is a generation of independent retailers. We buy lots of manga, but we buy it online or in a chain bookstore.
Borders and Waldenbooks have great manga sections and the books are easy to find. The ultimate testament to their success: I have had several conversations there with hard-core comics fans, the sort of guys who would be right at home at Subterranean Comix. Our local Barnes & Noble carries a lot of titles, but they are so disorganized that it’s hard to find a specific title. Also, the bookshelf is about 7 feet tall, not so good for vertically challenged people like myself and my kids. Besides the clean carpets and good coffee, all three stores offer helpful, knowledgeable employees.
Last week, I discovered overstock.com. The prices are a bit lower than standard retail, but their interface needs work: With multi-volume titles, they don’t include the volume number as part of the title. Sometimes there is a cover image, sometimes there isn’t. Thus it is that I accidentally bought Ultra Maniac volume 2, and then had to go back and buy volume 1 as well. I also bought Gals! volume 2. I ordered all this on July 1, and I’m curious to see how quickly it gets here. (Ultra Maniac 2 doesn’t ship till September.)

The Taipei Times reports that the film production house of manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka (“Astro Boy”) is planning to make an anime-style film in China for the Chinese market, using local talent and a plot based on Chinese fairy tales. Relations between Japan and China have been rocky of late, and some folks are hoping that anime and manga can bridge the gap:

With Japan’s relations with its neighbors haunted by its militarist past, a panel of experts in December advised Koizumi to turn anime into foreign policy.

“These cultural assets are now considered a part of Japan’s strength, as is evident from the expression now being bandied about: `Japan’s Gross National Cool,”’ said the report by the Japan Forum on International Relations.

A review of a Japanese film festival in St. Petersburg—that’s Russia, not Florida—points out that “there’s something fundamentally unsettling about Japanese anime,” and it’s not what you think (sex, violence, fan service). It’s that anime and manga use a childlike medium to confront the Big Questions of Life.

With childlike curiosity, using simple lines and exaggerated expressions, anime and manga have presented people copulating and fighting, destroying then creating, defying yet crying, seething but dreaming. And beside the action, reflected in the large tea-cup eyes of the main hero or heroine, there has often flickered the thought: In this animated world, why does this action make sense?

Adopting a child’s persona, animators have challenged audiences to provide a better answer than: “Well, it’s all kinda complicated…”

Now here is some synergy: USA Today and other sources report that manga has come to CosmoGIRL, in the form of a two-page strip that will run in the monthly magazine. The writer is Svetlana Chmakova, author of the online manga Chasing Rainbows and Night Silver. Judging from her online work, Chmakova seems to get the manga genre, so hopefully this will be more than just an American strip redrawn with chibbi and big eyes.
Meanwhile, the Papercutz manga of Nancy Drew is on the racks. I haven’t found a copy yet, but Darren Schroeder reviews it on the Silver Bullet Comic Books site and finds more good things to say about the art than the writing.
With Dark Horse publishing manga versions of Harlequin romances, manga is definitely infiltrating the girl world. While Nancy Drew does lend herself to simplistic plots, I can see the Harlequin romances as being a good fit with the manga mindset. And if they break the usual romance formula a bit and add some complexity, well, so much the better.