Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

MJ

Saturday Spotlight: Working

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As has often been the case lately, this week was all about work for me. And by “work,” I don’t mean the self-assigned variety like running Manga Bookshelf. I’m talking about the work that forces me out of the house daily, actually pays my bills, and occasionally stretches my mind and body to the limit.

Whenever I ponder “work” and manga at the same time, my thoughts tend to wander to David and his particular love for workplace manga. They also wanders to Suppli, one of the few manga about a woman in the workplace I can think of that’s been translated (partially) into English. So for this week’s Saturday Spotlight, I shall combine the two together, by pointing you to David’s article on Suppli, originally published for his “Flipped” column at The Comics Reporter, and later reprinted at The Manga Curmudgeon.

Fellow office ladies everywhere, please enjoy David’s thoughts on Suppli.

Going Digital: September 2011

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Welcome to Going Digital, a new, monthly feature focusing on manga available for digital viewing or download. On the first weekend of each month, the Manga Bookshelf bloggers will review comics we’ve read on our computers, phones, or tablet devices, to give readers a taste of what’s out there, old and new, and how well it works in digital form.

This month, we take a look at manga published for viewing on the iPad, Kindle, and web browser. Device, OS, and browser information is included with each review as appropriate, to let you know exactly how we accessed what we read.

iPad

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 1 | By Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima | Dark Horse App | iPad 2, iOS 4.3 – Reading comics on a tablet adds a whole new decision-making category. In the old days, there were simply comics you wanted to read enough to own and comics you didn’t. (I say this as someone who isn’t fortunate to live near a library with a large selection of comics.) Now, with a number of publisher-specific applications, there’s a new subset: comics one might like to read, assuming they didn’t have to kill a tree to do it, which can be purchased for less than the cost of a physical copy.

Lone Wolf and Cub is sort of the perfect inaugural for me in this category. It’s a very accomplished work, one that arguably belongs in a theoretical canon of licensed manga, but its subject matter doesn’t speak specifically to me as a reader. I enjoy reading the comic and find the variations on its episodic core – accomplished killer uses a baby in his murder-for-hire work – very clever and perversely funny, but I don’t necessarily want a whole shelf of volumes staring down at me. It’s great pulp, which isn’t something I want to read often or read repeatedly, but it’s something I can enjoy occasionally on a rainy weekend afternoon.

Koike does a splendid job coming up with scenarios that call for the specific, almost superhuman skills of his assassin protagonist. Koike also throws in some marvelous use of the assassin’s toddler companion; he’s a spooky little presence, and Koike invites the reader to wonder just how aware the kid is of how he’s being used. Kojima does absolute justice to the material, from evocative period details to energetically staged violence to ostensibly adorable little kids. Kojima makes it all happen in a seemingly effortless and fluid way, which is just what this kind of material demands.

I know a lot of people view this title as a classic, and it might be slightly sacrilegious to view it as an amusing diversion, but that’s my response, and it’s the reason I’ll keep it in mind when making manga purchases on my tablet. — David Welsh


Kindle

Hot Steamy Glasses | By Tatsumi Kaiya | Digital Manga Publishing | Kindle (3rd Generation) – Like many Americans, I got a Kindle last Christmas. One of the first purchases I made for the device was Hot Steamy Glasses, a BL title from DMP. Here is a dramatic reenactment of what happened next:

“The book downloads onto the Kindle. Michelle opens it. “Wow, this looks like crap,” she thinks. “I shall hit this button that resizes text.” Nothing. “I shall try zooming.” Teensy improvement ensues. “Well, so much for that, then.”

I never bought another manga for the Kindle after that, and I never read Hot Steamy Glasses, either, until now.

While it’s absolutely true that there is no real way to enlarge the text and that it is pretty durn small, it’s still readable and I got used to it after a while. It’s not a comfortable experience, though. It’s also impossible to offer any kind of art critique if you’re reading manga on the Kindle; as opposed to the crisp black-and-white pages you’d get at VIZManga, for example, on a Kindle everything is just sorta blurry and grey. On the plus side, at least I can sit on my couch and read.

Hot Steamy Glasses itself is oddly mediocre. It isn’t bad, but it’s pretty shallow and unconvincing in its portrayal of a determinedly straight guy (Fumiaki) who finally admits that he reciprocates the feelings that his long-time friend (Takeo) has been confessing for ages. There are some amusing things about it—once Fumiaki finally agrees to go out with Takeo, they spend their first five weekends sitting around watching anime, and it turns out that Takeo’s ideas about “going out” are incredibly pure. But I just never really bought Fumiaki’s sudden transformation, and kept expecting Takeo to end up with Fumiaki’s much nicer younger brother instead.

I guess paying $6 for a Kindle edition of a book I didn’t like very much is better than paying $13 for same, but my advice to those considering reading manga on their Kindle is simple: “Don’t.” – Michelle Smith


Web Browser

Madame Joker, Vol. 1 | By Naka Tomoko | Futubasha/JManga | OSX 10.6.7, Firefox 5.0 – As a woman of a certain age, I’m temperamentally predisposed to liking stories about women who are smart and confident but not in their first blush of youth. So when I read the description of Naka Tomoko’s Madame Joker, I knew I had to read it:

“Ranko Gekkouji; a woman, a widow, blessed with wealth, with beauty, and with adorable children. Everyone is jealous of her gorgeousness, the envy towards her countless. But, that won’t stop Ranko as she fearlessly solves cases!”

Alas, the execution isn’t quite as fabulous as the summary. Though Ranko is a brash, memorable character, the script suffers from a bad case of obviousness. Ranko’s family members spend a lot of time telling each other how they’re related and explaining Ranko’s behavior, though even the least attentive reader could deduce these things for herself. The description, too, makes Ranko sound like Jessica Fletcher’s spry, sexy daughter-in-law, when in fact Ranko is more of a clever meddler than a Miss Marple-in-training, derailing a two-timing novelist’s career and thwarting a hostess’ scheme to marry for money. And the artwork! “Hot mess” is being kind.

For all its clumsiness, however, Madame Joker scores points with its strong cast of female characters. Ranko and her mother-in-law are both appealingly frank, discussing men, sex, and money with a salty candor that’s hilarious; neither seems the least bit concerned with appearances, either, doing and saying what they please, even when it scandalizes the men of the household. It’s a stretch to call Madame Joker a female empowerment fantasy — Ranko’s power, after all, comes from being a beautiful, rich widow, not a surgeon, police officer, or mother — but it’s fun to see a forty-something women get to enjoy traditionally male privileges. – Katherine Dacey

******

Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru, Vol. 1 | By Masakazu Ishiguro. | Shonen Gahosha/JManga | Windows XP, Firefox 6.0.1 – I had recommended this Young King OURS title when we were discussing JManga, mostly for the virtue of being a title that was a) available and b) not from Futabasha or Leed, as I didn’t want to be too biased towards one publisher after my prior Futabasha reviews. JManga seems to be pushing it hard as well, having it be #1 on their list of ‘100 unpublished in NA manga’ on the site. Unfortunately, the manga doesn’t quite live up to the hype.

It’s not actively bad, and certainly good for a chuckle, but seeing this comedic take on a cafe, and the life of the plucky yet dense heroine, Hotori, who works there as a maid, I was reminded that most of the slice-of-life we see here these days tends to be 4-koma style. This has regular 16-17 page chapters, and as such I think I was expecting more forward plot and character development than there ended up being. There does seem to be a bit of a plot hook in Hotori being a mystery addict; in fact, the best chapter was one where she actually got to be clever, deducing a mystery about a 4-eyed painting.

Unfortunately, most of the volume is more about watching goofy Hotori do dumb things. The translation is decent – there were a few parts that even seemed to be adapted with an English reader in mind (Hotori worries about PETA after trying to capture a tailless cat), but overall there wasn’t quite enough here to make me hungry for future volumes. — Sean Gaffney

******

Tired Of Waiting For Love | By Saki Aida & Yugi Yamada | Digital Manga Guild/eManga | Mac OS 10.7.1, Safari 5.1 – Kyousuke Sawaragi has been sentenced to five years in prison for dealing drugs for his yakuza boss. There, he meets Sone, a violent yakuza from a rival group, and his prison plaything, Shuuya. Though reluctant to get mixed up with either, Sawaragi finds himself protecting Shuuya and even becoming his cellmate, though he carefully resists Shuuya’s grateful advances. Once released from prison, Sawagari sheds his former life and devotes himself to the care of his widower brother-in-law and young nephew, but his past comes back to haunt him when he discovers Shuuya collapsed on the street.

This one-shot is significant as the first release from Digital Manga Publishing’s Digital Manga Guild, a new initiative intended to harness the talent and enthusiasm of fan translators, editors, and letterers in order to publish more manga in English without the prohibitive up-front costs associated with traditional licensing. Whether the DMG system is fair to its localizing teams or healthy for the industry as a whole is a conversation for another day, but what’s clear from the initiative’s first release is that it is capable of producing work roughly on par with DMP’s more conventionally localized works.

Kimiko Kotani, the one-woman localization team behind Tired of Waiting for Love, is clearly competent, though she does have her awkward moments when it comes to English prose. Sentences like “I have always lived my life the way that I wanted to live but the water that I was led to drink that should have been sweet, was always bitter,” cry out plaintively for editorial attention to punctuation and flow. Fortunately, these instances are few, and Kotani ultimately offers up a product that is clear, readable, and vastly more professional-looking than much of DMP’s other digital-only venture—its Harlequin Manga line.

It helps, of course, that the material is strong, particularly for a BL one-shot. Author Saki Aida and artist Yugi Yamada have crafted a touching, visually expressive tale that manages to maintain emotional believability within what is essentially a fantasy setting. And though the story never strays away from familiar BL territory, it’s consistently engaging.

All-in-all, Tired of Waiting for Love is a promising debut for both Kotani and the Digital Manga Guild. – MJ

Some reviews based on digital copies provided by the publisher.

Saturday Spotlight: Stormy Sea

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It’s a tense weekend here on the east coast, but an impending storm provides a great excuse to stay inside and read manga, or at least read about manga, as long as the electricity holds. For my part, stormy seas put me in mind of Daisuke Igarashi’s melancholy beauty, Children of the Sea, published here in English on Viz’s SigIKKI imprint.

I’m a big fan of Children of the Sea, my first impressions of which can be found here, but my favorite discussion of the series’ first volume came from our own Kate Dacey, whose review is consistently the first thing to spring to my mind whenever I think of this title.

From her review:

The ocean occupies a special place in the artistic imagination, inspiring a mixture of awe, terror, and fascination. Watson and the Shark, for example, depicts the ocean as the mouth of Hell, a dark void filled with demons and tormented souls, while The Birth of Venus offers a more benign vision of the ocean as a life-giving force. In Children of the Sea, Daisuke Igarashi imagines the ocean as a giant portal between the terrestrial world and deep space, as is suggested by a refrain that echoes throughout volume one:

From the star.
From the stars.
The sea is the mother.
The people are the breasts
Heaven is the playground.

If you happened to miss this the first time around, do yourself a favor and check out this week’s Saturday Spotlight: Children of the Sea, Vol. 1 at The Manga Critic!

Saturday Spotlight: Yoshinaga

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The Manga Moveable Feast is nearly upon us once again, this time co-hosted by Comic Attack!‘s Kristin Bomba and Animemiz Linda Yau. The subject this month is the ever-glorious Fumi Yoshinaga, which brings us to this week’s Saturday Spotlight!

Just over a year ago, I hosted a week-long celebration of Yoshinaga’s work here at Manga Bookshelf, including reviews, essays, and roundtables on series like Flower of Life, Antique Bakery, and Ooku: The Inner Chambers. So, in the spirit of next week’s Yoshinaga MMF, I offer you the index to that celebration.

Also, within that week, I’d like to direct special attention to both the Yoshinaga edition of BL Bookrack, co-written by me and the lovely Michelle Smith, and a roundtable on Gerard & Jacques, again featuring Michelle and me, along with David Welsh, Robin Brenner, Danielle Leigh, and Eva Volin. As someone who is often critical of some of the genre’s most pervasive tropes, I think it’s worth noting that Yoshinaga is the kind of writer who can make even my least favorite of these work, proving that there’s almost no hurdle good writing can’t overcome.

Please enjoy these year-old thoughts on Yoshinaga, and keep your eyes peeled for new ones as the Yoshinaga MMF gets underway!

Saturday Spotlight: revisiting NANA

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There are a couple of factors influencing my choice for this week’s Saturday Spotlight. First, following last week’s news regarding the return of Wild Adapter and today’s announcement that CLAMP is resuming Legal Drug, Michelle asks on Twitter, Can we hope for NANA?

Secondly, as some of you may know, I moonlight as a singing/acting coach, and this week I had the unique pleasure of experimenting with some cross-discipline learning while coaching a group of very talented young women. As part of a week-long acting intensive, we spent a day working with scripts pulled from some of my favorite manga—beginning with dialogue only, and then later studying the ways in which the mangaka used the artwork to “direct” the scenes, from one emotional beat to the next, emphasizing the importance of body language and the spaces between the dialogue.

One of these scenes came from the fourth volume of NANA, reawakening my love for the series, and inspiring me to recommend it, at least to the 17+ crowd. Of course, even today, the best tool I have for this is an older post from 2008, Why you should read NANA.

Still the most-viewed post on the site, this “persuasion post” was responsible for my introduction to quite a number of folks in the manga blogosphere, and my feelings for the series have remained mostly unchanged since that time. If you’ve never been sold on NANA, check it out!

Saturday Spotlight 7/30/11

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Welcome again to Saturday Spotlight, a new weekend feature dedicated to exploring the depths of the Manga Bookshelf archives.

This week’s choice is a fairly recent addition to our archives, but also especially relevant today. In the spirit of our currently-running Manga Moveable Feast, featuring Natsuki Takaya’s shoujo epic Fruits Basket it seems appropriate to shine this week’s Saturday Spotlight on Michelle’s recent review of another Takaya series, Twinkle Stars. Though Twinkle Stars has yet to be licensed in the US, it is available in English from Chuang Yi Publishing in Singapore, distributed by Madman Entertainment (Australia).

From Michelle’s review, “I thought I might be disappointed by this series. There’s no shortage of complaining Takaya fans online, after all, and it’s not like her other series Tsubasa: Those With Wings or Phantom Dream really knocked my socks off, though I did come to like the latter by the end. After having read these two volumes, however, I am left to conclude that the chief complaint of unhappy fans is that Twinkle Stars is nothing like Fruits Basket.”

Read the rest of Michelle’s review here!

Wild Adapter moves to Ichijinsha

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Thanks to a tip from a generous commenter, we’ve just heard the news that Kazuya Minekura’s Wild Adapter, subject of our recent Manga Moveable Feast has been given new life, thanks to a rights transfer from Tokuma Shoten to Ichijinsha.

News on this development is available in Japanese here in Minekura’s blog, and summed up by generous fans in English. According to these fans, Ichijinsha will begin re-releasing the series’ tankobon with new covers and limited edition drama CDs beginning in October, with the series eventually resuming serialization in Comic Zero Sum (home of Minekura’s Saiyuki Reload). Ichijinsha’s “teaser site” announcing the upcoming releases can be found here.

Though this series’ lengthy hiatus has generally been chalked up to Minekura’s health problems over the past few years, fans have long speculated on whether the delay might also be due to the series being (as our commenter put it) “not BL enough” for its publisher, and some of what we see here seems to support that theory.

While there is no date yet set for the series’ return to serialization, this move does provide hope for American fans as well, as the promise of new content may increase the chances of the series being re-licensed for English release.

3 Things Thursday: Fruits Basket Favorites

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It’s Manga Moveable Feast time once again, which so often inspires me to think about 3 things. This week, I have with me a special guest for 3 Things Thursday, Soliloquy in Blue‘s Michelle Smith, who, like me, is a big fan of this month’s MMF topic, Natsuki Takaya’s shoujo epic Fruits Basket.

We’ve already talked at length about the series as a whole, but one thing we’d like to linger on just a little bit longer is some discussion of our very favorite characters in the series. Fruits Basket is a treasure trove of complex, deeply moving characters, each of which could easily inspire hours of discussion. We don’t have hours, but we do have some favorites, and this seemed like the ideal time to share them. We’ve each picked three, so let’s start with Michelle’s! (Click images to enlarge.)

Michelle’s 3 Favorite Fruits Basket Characters

1. Yuki Sohma – My love for Yuki springs largely from a sense of pride in how much he blossoms over the course of the series. As he recounts the story of his childhood to Manabe, Yuki says, “There was something I wanted… loving parents… a home that no one would ever want to leave. A happy home. A warm place… with everyone smiling at me.” But Yuki was denied this. His parents valued him not for himself, but as a tool to gain favor within the Sohma family. Family members revered and reviled him just because of his status as the rat, something he had no control over. Even when he left the main house to live with Shigure and attend high school, the other students saw him not for himself, but as a princely figure.

Only Tohru saw and accepted the real Yuki. And once he found that with her, once he had that warm and happy home, he was finally able to move beyond the past and begin figuring out what kind of person he wanted to be in the future. One of my favorite Yuki moments occurs directly on the heels of his conversation with Manabe, where Yuki articulates his desire to give support to someone in the future, not just receive it.

2. Ayame Sohma – As a teenager, Ayame was self-absorbed and didn’t realize, until Hatori pointed it out to him, that the things he said and did could actually hurt other people. One of those he hurt was Yuki, who had reached out to him as someone he might be able to tell about his unhappy life as Akito’s companion. Ayame failed him then, but now regrets that deeply and tries his best to form a relationship with the little brother whom he once ignored. Sure, he’s kooky and outlandish, but he’s also absolutely sincere in his love for Yuki, and little by little wins his confidence.

My favorite Ayame moment occurs in volume thirteen, when he interrupts the parent-teacher conference Yuki and his mother are attending, deflects all of their mother’s hostility onto himself, and helps Yuki find the courage to tell her that he will be the one deciding his own fate. I also love that Ayame immediately texts Hatori to let him know Yuki said he is reliable.

3. Hatori Sohma – Hatori, the quietly suffering woobie. How I love him. There are no shortage of sad characters with painful backgrounds in Fruits Basket, but the first such story we learn about in detail involves Hatori and Kana, a special, optimistic woman who loved Hatori and accepted him, curse and all. What she couldn’t accept was the guilt after Akito reacted violently to their relationship and severely wounded Hatori, putting him in the dreadful position of eventually wiping all of her memories of their time together in order to ease her suffering. Because this revelation occurs so early in the series, everything Hatori does from that point on is tinged with sadness as we know what he’s gone through. He’s also the only one who can reign in Ayame’s enthusiasm or dare to talk with Shigure about his schemes.

So, while I wouldn’t exactly call this my favorite Hatori memory, it’s certainly an indelible one.

MJ’s 3 Favorite Fruits Basket Characters

1. & 2. Arisa Uotani & Saki Hanajima – Like David, I’m a sucker for great female friendships, and no friends could be greater than Fruits Basket‘s Uotani and Hanajima. Though they are each fantastic characters in their own right, nothing beats them as a team, looking after (and being looked after by) their dearest treasure in the world, Tohru Honda. They’re happiest as a trio, of course, but fiercest as a deadly duo that doesn’t take crap from anyone. Not that Takaya limits them to a life of badassery, mind you. They’re also just as kind, broken, and unexpectedly vulnerable as anyone else in the series, and that’s saying quite a bit. I would happily read an entire series chronicling the lives of Uotani and Hanajima, their adventures, loves, and triumphs as young adults and beyond. They’re just that awesome.

Still, I admit I love them best when they’re kicking ass. Don’t you?

3. Momiji Sohma – And should one require more evidence that David and I share a brain, my third favorite character in the series—and my very favorite Sohma—is little rabbit Momiji. We meet Momiji as a hoppity, cheerful boy, but it isn’t long before we learn that he’s one tough kid. Having watched his own mother beg to have her memories of him erased, he lives as a stranger from her, keeping a brotherly eye on his little sister from afar, whom he hopes he might one day be allowed to spend time with. He’s also the first person to put himself between Akito and Tohru—a favor Tohru returns in kind.

Though Momiji is at his best when he’s happy (and awesomely brave when he’s being rebellious), one of my very favorite Momiji moments is this scene from volume eleven. After standing up to Akito, against the grain of their supernatural bond, and watching Tohru, in turn, stand up for him, he finds himself suddenly overcome by being just a kid, unable to hold back his tears. It’s a rare glimpse at the most vulnerable side of Momiji, and I dare you not to tear up when reading it in context.

Readers, which three characters from Fruits Basket do you love best? Let us know in comments!

Going Digital: Viz Media & Square Enix

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It’s the weekend of San Diego Comic Con, which for manga fans generally means a flurry of excitement over new license announcements (Sean has the lowdown over at his blog, if you haven’t been there already). The announcements that excited me most this weekend, however, were those to do with various publishers’ digital initiatives, including some pretty impressive-sounding details about Jmanga, a massive web-based project involving most of Japan’s major manga publishers, expected to launch in August.

The cry for browser-based manga portals (as opposed to device-specific mobile apps) has been loud and clear from much of the manga blogosphere, and nearly everyone can agree that providing legal digital manga on the platform most easily available to the largest number of people is the best chance publishers have of fighting against widespread piracy. Though it’ll be a while before we’ll see what Jmanga really has to offer, I thought I’d take the chance to check out a couple of newer web-based initiatives available now, from Japanese publisher Square Enix and American publisher Viz Media.

Square Enix Manga Store

One of Jmanga’s Japanese holdouts, of course, is Square Enix, who launched their own digital manga website back in December with mostly negative reviews from the manga blogging community, who felt that the prices were too high and the interface too cluttered and difficult to navigate. I’m a huge fan of many Square Enix manga, but with first volumes of older series going for $5.99 apiece, there wasn’t much impetus for checking out Square Enix’s manga store when it first launched. This week, however, a Comic-Con special offering a free volume of selected manga just for clicking “Like” on their Facebook page was enough to finally lure me in.

After doing my duty on Facebook, I clicked over to the main site to get my free manga, and encountered possibly the most maddening registration/login process I’ve dealt with in years. Though I’d apparently created an account back when they first launched (which I discovered when my chosen username was already in use), even after going through their process to recover my password, I then had to log in at least three times, on three different pages, before even getting to the page where I could actually pick out my free manga.

Once I’d chosen my volume, I then was told I had to download special software to view it, called “Keyring FLASH.” This is not a concept I’m particularly fond of, since it requires that the user always be on their own home computer in order to view the manga they’ve purchased. Even if someone has already paid for manga from Square Enix, if they are accessing the internet from a library/school/work/public computer or a shared computer where they don’t have administrator privileges, they will be unable to access what they’ve bought. The application isn’t exactly lightweight either, downloading as a 40 MB disc image for installation. By the time I’d finally managed to jump through Square Enix’s registration hoops, picked up my manga, and installed the software to view it, I was so tired of the whole thing, I decided to leave the reading for later. This was a mistake.

Picking up later, the most immediately troublesome thing about the Square Enix manga storefront, is that, from the front page, there’s no obvious way to log in to your account. In fact, it seems you have to click into the store first, not the most intuitive setup, at which point a “Log In” button finally appears. Clicking on the “Members” button on the front page, which might seem like the obvious choice, is a grave error, as it actually takes you back to the Square Enix main site, where a “Members” login button in the middle of the page leads only to confusion and chaos, as being a “Member” apparently has nothing at all to do with the manga store. Use only the “Log In” button above the navigation bar. Just trust me on this.

If you’ve managed to log in to the manga store, you’ll see a page with your “bookshelf” on it, and images of the series you’ve purchased volumes of. Clicking on the icon for the series will take you away from your bookshelf and onto the main page for that item in the store, so you must click on the icon for the volume number you want to read instead.

Once in the site’s manga viewer, there are two size choices for reading your manga. On my 1920 x 1080-resolution screen, those choices worked out to be either “way too small to read” or “twice as tall as my maximum browser window,” the latter with the option of using the mouse to pan up and down each page in order to read it all, which reverts back to the too-small size every time a page is turned, requiring a click on the toolbar to magnify the page each time. I would have taken a screen shot of this, just to display the basic layout, but an attempt to do so resulted in an angry popup informing me that a capture application had been “ditected,” [sic] turning the page blank. Even an attempt to screencap the error just generated another error, demonstrating the real purpose of the Keyring FLASH application as nothing more than clunky DRM.

In the end, I came away feeling blind, exhausted, technologically frustrated, and pretty sure that Square Enix believes I am a thief, none of which gave me much inspiration to continue on. I possibly wanted to die, definitely wanted to get that software off my computer, and ultimately did not read the free volume of manga I’d gone through so much to obtain. I doubt very much I’ll be using their manga store again, and I’m afraid I can’t recommend it.

Vizmanga.com

After my experience with Square Enix, the idea of trying to navigate yet another online manga portal was difficult to stomach, but Viz Manga’s new initiative, Vizmanga.com, was a bit too enticing to ignore. Working in sync with Viz’s mobile apps, Vizmanga.com offers the opportunity to buy volumes of digital manga via any one of its available portals, and then read those volumes using any of them, with the user’s purchased manga always available for download on any supported device.

I already had an account through Viz’s iPad app, so I was able to log in on the website (from the front page, natch) using that pre-existing account. From there, though, I immediately feared another Square Enix nightmare. Though my account name was definitely correct, and I’d logged in successfully, on the page where the manga I’d purchased previously on the iPad should have appeared, I simply received a message letting me know I hadn’t yet purchased any.

My heart sank. I grasped around for any kind of help, and at first all I could find was a “Feedback” button on the left-hand side. I sent off a quick message using that button, but since it appeared to be intended for general customer feedback kind rather than support, I didn’t expect (nor did I receive) a response. Then I clicked around to this page, linked from the storefront’s “Buy it once, read it anywhere” image. At the bottom of that page was an e-mail address for the app’s technical support, so I sent off an e-mail to that address as well. After doing that, I received a response very quickly from Viz’s VP of Digital Publishing, Brian Piech, directly addressing my problem (no automated help desk response here), confirming what I’d said already and asking for a few more details. And though it took the better part of a day to fix whatever was wrong with my account, I received frequent updates on the situation from Brian, who stayed on the case with Viz’s engineers until the issue was resolved. Similarly, an inquiry about a pricing error in Viz’s iPad app, sent to the same address, elicited an immediate response from Digital Marketing Director, Candice Uyloan, who apologized for the problem and e-mailed me back within an hour to let me know it had been fixed.

Though encountering technical difficulty with something newly launched is not particularly rare in the digital world, in my experience, swift, attentive tech support is, and I can’t possibly praise Viz’s digital team enough for the way they addressed my problems. My one complaint is that the app support e-mail address should be more clearly visible, ideally from any page on the site, but at least on the site’s front page.

Now, finally to the manga! Though Viz wasn’t giving away any manga, they’ve put everything on sale for 40% off until the end of the month, which gave me a great excuse to finally pick up the first double-sized edition of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game, which I haven’t yet purchased in print, but has been loudly recommended by all of my favorite critics. After making the purchase on my iPad and calling up Cross Game from my “My Manga” page on Vizmanga.com (which I’ve only had to log into once, by the way, over the past three days), there was no special software to download, just a clean, easy-to-navigate viewer that loads quickly on the page. The fact that this viewer comes without any built-in accusations of piracy is definitely a bonus.

Though Viz’s default page size is larger than Square Enix’s, there is no tool built-in at all for enlarging the page, which is its only downside (See note at the end of the paragraph for correction on this). Both DMP’s eManga and Yen Press’ Yen Plus web viewers do a better job with viewing size than Square Enix or Viz. Fortunately, Viz’s standard size is fairly readable on my 1920 x 1080-resolution desktop monitor. My 1280 x 800-resolution laptop screen fares slightly less well, simply because the reader is taller than my maximum browser size, requiring me to scroll to see the full page, though of course this is at least consistent, page-to-page. Unlike Viz’s i0S apps, a two-page spread is the only reading option, which makes good sense on increasingly-dominant widescreen monitors, but may require horizontal scrolling on older CRTs or smaller netbooks. Edited to add: I’ve been informed by a commenter than if you hover over the top of the manga you will see an option to make the manga full-screen, and it appears to be true! I suggest that it might be a good idea to make this more obvious, since my curser never had occasion to hover there on its own, and this is not indicated anywhere on the page.

The best feature of all this, of course, is that my purchased manga is available for me to read on every digital device I own—my iPad, iPhone, and computer—allowing me to read it however I want. My device of choice will probably remain my iPad, which is more ideally suited to reading comics than either of my other devices, thanks to its size, screen resolution, touch screen, and rotating interface (see my earlier review for more details), but cross-platform availability is a boon for fans without iOS devices, and does remove some of the pinch from Viz’s regular pricing for those of us with multiple points of access. That said, I do hope that Viz might be able to see their way toward lowering those prices on a permanent basis, should the new web platform really take off.

All-in-all, Vizmanga.com appears to provide a well-supported, well-designed platform for digital manga, and an answer to many manga fans’ most earnest digital requests. Recommended.

Saturday Spotlight

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Though maintaining a blog is all about producing new content, day after day, sometimes it’s nice to reach into the archives and revisit something a bit older. An article’s shelf life can be tragically brief in the fast-paced comics blogosphere, despite its ongoing relevance.

With that in mind, welcome to Saturday Spotlight, a new weekly feature here at Manga Bookshelf dedicated to digging up these treasures from the gloomy depths of our database and bringing them back into the light.

Before I get to this week’s spotlight, however, a bit of sad news. With the English-language manhwa market having slowed to something slightly more lethargic than a crawl, I’ve decided to fold Manhwa Bookshelf back into the main site. This is heartbreaking for me, given that my intent in creating Manhwa Bookshelf was to help establish English-translated manhwa as a distinct entity. But with too little going on to provide regular content on even a monthly basis, whatever manhwa content Hana and I are able to muster in this climate is more likely to receive the attention it deserves in a higher-traffic venue. All existing Manhwa Bookshelf posts have now been redirected here to Manga Bookshelf, and can be accessed as a category here.

That said, it should be no surprise that this week’s subject of our Saturday Spotlight comes originally from Manhwa Bookshelf, now reformatted for and reposted here at the main blog.

Back in June of last year, Manhwa Bookshelf contributor Hana Lee wrote a wonderful article, An Introduction to Korean Webcomics. With Korean publisher iSeeToon (who adapt Korean webcomics for the iPhone) emerging as the most active publisher of new manhwa series in the English-language market, it seems especially appropriate to bring Hana’s article into the spotlight once more.

So please enjoy An Introduction to Korean Webcomics!

3 Things Thursday: Out of my dreams

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Though my commute to work is too short to allow the consumption of podcasts in a timely manner, over the past few days, I’ve been slowly working my way through the latest installment of Ed Sizemore’s Manga Out Loud, featuring Takako Shimura’s Wandering Son. I still have a ways to go, but one of the topics that has engaged me deeply so far has been discussion of Shuichi’s nightmares in the book, and what they reveal about his fears and his state of mind as he works through his discomfort and disconnection with his biologically assigned gender.

I rambled on a lot about this in comments to the entry, mainly because the harshness of his later nightmare in the volume resonated so strongly with me personally and the nature of my own worst nightmares.

The truth is, I’m pretty obsessed with dreams and dream worlds (pleasant or otherwise) and always have been, and while many works of fiction use dreams as a narrative device, it’s not all that often that they use them in a way that really rings true to me. Obviously, what “rings true” to me in a dream sequence is going to be largely informed by my own dream experiences and may not reflect the experiences of others, but this is an area in which Shimura’s vision of her character’s dreams really shines. I’ll probably have more to say about this as I discuss the series further, but in the meantime, let’s have ourselves a 3 Things Thursday!

3 manga series that heavily (and effectively) make use of dreams

1. After School Nightmare | Setona Mizushiro | Go! Comi – One of my greatest regrets will always be that I could not find the time to participate in the Manga Moveable Feast for this title, because I have a lot to say about it, not the least of which would be regarding its use of shared nightmares as its primary plot device. In these students’ nightmares, they each appear as manifestations of their darkest secrets, and while, as Erica Friedman points out in the Wandering Son podcast, these secrets tend to come from a place of self-loathing, the line between what we fear about ourselves and what we fear other people think of us is often a pretty difficult one to draw. It took me a long time to realize that the horrible things people say about me in my nightmares are less often what I fear they think of me and more what I secretly fear about myself. It’s me writing the script, after all. This is a distinction that After School Nightmare completely gets, and that has a lot to do with why I found it so effective as a dream-based manga. Furthermore, it uses its nightmare setting as a metaphor for the state of being a teenager, when emotional vulnerability to one’s peers is more terrifying than anything else the subconscious mind could possibly dream up.

2. Please Save My Earth | Saki Hiwatari | Viz Media – Probably I’ve already talked this one to death in my recent discussion with Michelle at The Hooded Utilitarian, but moving to the happier side of dream fantasy, nothing can possibly beat Saki Hiwatari’s Please Save My Earth, in which a group of teenagers discover through a series of shared dreams (is there a theme here?) that they are the collective reincarnation of a group of alien scientists sent to study Earth from the Moon. Unlike After School Nightmare, this series resonates more strongly with the best dreams of my youth and the sense that our dream worlds might be just as real as our waking lives. This was a recurring theme in my childhood, and Please Save My Earth is in many ways a perfect representation of my own deepest pre-teen fantasies. Interestingly, like After School Nightmare, this series also touches on questions of gender identity, though it fails to dig as deeply, and of course neither approach the subject with the same kind of maturity as Wandering Son.

3. xxxHolic | CLAMP | Del Rey Manga – Though this is a manga that hooked me long before its use of dreams as a major narrative device, there are few examples that I love more. From Watanuki’s frequent dream-based encounters with Doumeki’s grandfather to his complete inability to maintain his waking consciousness throughout some of the later volumes, CLAMP’s use of dreams in this series is emotionally and narratively spectacular. This series goes further than either of the others in questioning the concept of reality vs. dreams, as it plunges Watanuki from waking to dreaming and back again, leaving both he and us disoriented as to which is which much of the time. It’s revealing and immersive, which is what makes it so effective for me. Also? Kinda gorgeous.

Readers, do you have favorite dream-based manga?

3 Things Thursday: Characterization & Emotional Truth

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Though I rarely wax nostalgic over flame wars, I’ll admit that searching for the comment I quoted in yesterday’s “Soapbox” post led me to revisit the material that inspired it. I won’t reiterate the entire argument here, or even my entire premise, but here’s a brief excerpt that I think expresses quite well what my purpose is in experiencing and writing about fiction:

“My focus as a reader/critic/human being is now and always will be discussion/analysis of a work’s emotional content. That is what I know about, and that is what I’m most interested in and qualified to write about. That is what my background prepares me for. That is what I care about in the world. The real purpose of fiction in my life is that it gives me the opportunity to interact directly with someone else’s inner life. This is not only what I find most compelling about other people, but I’d even go so far as to say it’s the way I best connect with the human race as a whole. It’s is a delicious smorgasbord of humanity. It’s where people communicate what’s most important to them, often even within formulaic structures and “fluff” pieces. It is, on a very basic level, a window into another person’s soul.”

Let me elaborate just a little on that. Like a lot of voracious readers, I’m a fairly introverted person. One of the side-effects of this is that I spent the vast majority of my growing years appreciating and cultivating my own inner life to a much greater extent than the one I physically shared with other people. This does not mean that I don’t like other people or don’t enjoy interacting with them. It does mean that I often find I understand other people more easily when I’m given the opportunity to examine their inner lives, and since I think understanding other people is a pretty vital part of life, I spend a lot of time doing that.

It is this, along with a number of other factors, that led to me spending most of my youth and a large chunk of my working adulthood as a singer and stage actress. As immersive as reading or watching fiction can be, there is nothing more revealing (and, frankly, thrilling) than exploring someone else’s inner world by actually becoming a player in it. It’s a transformative experience in every way, and I recommend it heartily, if not as a way of life, at least as an enlightening pastime.

I bring all this up, because I’ve previously mentioned that I think my approach as a manga critic is deeply informed by having been an actor, but I’ve never really explained what that means. What I mean when I say that, is that I think being an actor gave me some specific tools for understanding storytelling, particularly in terms of characterization and emotional truth (the two main elements I’m referring to when I mention “emotional content”), both of which are essential to effective, believable fiction, regardless of medium.

Now, to the point! All this has been a fairly long-winded introduction to this week’s 3 Things…

3 critical elements of characterization in storytelling I learned from The Theater:

1. Intention. I’m not here to argue acting technique, and frankly, I think a lot of it is pretty hit-or-miss, but I will say that out of all the various techniques I encountered during my years of study and professional work, the thing that consistently worked for me was a focus on intention. What do I want, and how do I get it? Nearly everything we do as human beings is motivated by intention, and this is true of fictional characters as well, at least the ones that are written effectively. One of the things I most enjoy looking at when I’m analyzing comics, is the intention of each of the story’s characters, and how consistently the author is able to maintain those intentions throughout the work. Certainly a particular character’s intention may change over the course of a series (and even within that, there is an intention in every moment that may actually, realistically conflict), but a strong writer will discover that her characters’ intentions are more important than her own when it comes to writing a believable story. Which brings us nicely to…

2. Truth. When asked if he preferred playing good guys or bad guys, Willem Dafoe is famously quoted as having said, “Ain’t no difference. Everybody thinks they’re righteous.” This is absolutely so, and a failure to recognize this fact is why so many stories that feature the concept of “good vs. evil” fail to ring true. People are masters of self-deception, and all of us will do what we convince ourselves is right, even if “right” translates as “right for us” or “the right way to avoid having to do things we don’t like.” Even if we say we did something we know is wrong, we’ve still justified to ourselves why we were “right” to do it anyway. That’s just what we do. It’s how we continue to go on. While humans as a society may strive (mostly unsuccessfully) to identify common truths, it’s clear to anyone who has spent five minutes watching the evening news that trying to lay out universal concepts of “good” and “evil” is beyond futile.

What’s not at all futile, however, is determining individual truth, and when it comes to characterization, this is vital. The best writers know how to separate their own personal truths (which may influence things like theme) from the individual truths of their characters, allowing each of them to exist truthfully and independently in the story. When something reads as out of character, most of the time it’s because the writer has forgotten this, or has tried to use a character as a shortcut to the writer’s own truth. This really never works. For an actor, this kind of writing is deadly, because it means she must take actions that are at odds with her intentions. This is no less deadly for a comic.

3. Show, don’t tell. But don’t “show” either. “Show, don’t tell,” is a pretty fantastic mandate. It instructs writers of all kinds to let both their own ideas and their characters’ intentions be revealed through action instead of narration or inner dialogue, and often an adherence to this directive is what makes the difference between a story that doesn’t work and one that does. But one thing actors learn pretty early on, is that sometimes “showing” can be just the same as “telling.” What I’m talking about here is what we’d refer to in high school acting class as “indicating.” When an actor is “indicating,” instead of doing something, she’s trying to show the audience that she’s doing something, essentially telling them what she feels by using familiar gestures or visual cues. For instance, instead of thinking, “I’m really sad,” and acting on her whatever her intention is from that point, she’s thinking, “I have to show the audience that I’m really sad,” and actually trying to make that her intention. You might think this works, but it doesn’t, because instead of watching the character, the audience is actually watching the actor, which is not the same thing at all, and will never read as true.

Comics creators can fall into the same trap, essentially using “showing” as “telling,” even without narration or dialogue. A writer may think he is carefully revealing his character’s thoughts and intentions in the manner of “show, not tell,” but because he’s so worried that the audience may not get it, he’s inserted some extra visual cues and emphasis, just to make sure, and before he knows it, he’s actually telling instead, even without using any words. This pulls us out of the character’s truth and into the author’s process, making the character less believable.

With a character’s truth and intention in place, any comic can be believable, whether it’s a deep look at the psychology of mountain climbers or a cracktastic boys’ love epic. Any type of story can be believable if it is rooted in emotional truth, and it is through these stories that we continue to understand and learn from each other as we struggle with the realities of our lives. Creating, distributing, and experiencing/interacting with art is the most powerful method we have for establishing human connection.

And that’s what I learned from the theater.

Soapbox: Women’s Manga

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Over the weekend, I participated in a discussion about josei manga (manga for women) on Ed Sizemore’s Manga Out Loud podcast, along with Manga Out Loud regular Johanna Draper Carlson and guest David Welsh. I was pretty surprised to be invited to this discussion since I’m not particularly knowledgeable about josei manga, nor have I written much about it here at Manga Bookshelf. In the end, though, I was quite thrilled to be there, as the topic resonated strongly with me in one way especially.

I’ve harped a bit on this before, in articles like Twilight & the Plight of the Female Fan at The Hooded Utilitarian, about fan perception of fiction for girls, and most recently in a mini-rant (scroll to item 3) about industry perception of boys’ love manga. One of the things that bothers me most as a fan of comics created for female readers is how little respect they command outside of their target audience (and often even within their target audience), to the point that we as an industry end up either apologizing for or deliberately concealing their intended demographic in order to try to make them palatable to others.

Publishers do it, and who can blame them? Would Ooku and Bunny Drop sell if they were marketed as part of a josei line? Would Wild Adapter have remained in print so long if TOKYOPOP had released it on their BLU imprint? Sadly, the answer is, “probably not.” Everybody’s research has proven to them that while women will buy books marketed for men, the opposite is simply not true. So who can blame them for trying to attract a broader audience, if all that means is that they simply decline to mention that a book was originally created for women? It’s still the same book after all, right? Do I want to see these things in print, or would I rather they just faded away, like all the books from Aurora Publishing and NETCOMICS, whose awesome collection of women’s manhwa apparently couldn’t survive even in digital form?

Readers do it, and it’s hard to blame them either. Who hasn’t been put in the position of having to over-explain to a skeptical friend, “I know the cover is pink, but it’s really good, I swear!” We explain because we think we have to, and we think we have to because we’ve been conditioned to believe that something specifically created with girls or women in mind is less well-crafted, less intelligent, and less universally relevant than something that’s not. I came down pretty hard on female readers in that earlier HU article for distancing themselves from “girly” stuff, but there are a lot of reasons why that happens, a lot of traps set for women to fall into, and it’s really quite difficult to avoid those traps since they’ve been in place for so long.

We’ve been told repeatedly (and many of us, recently) that certain traits most often attributed to works for women are inherently inferior to those valued by men, and it’s difficult to make an argument against biases that are treated as fact to begin with. Not all that long ago, for instance, after I’d taken the time to write a thoughtful, heartfelt explanation of what I look for in fiction, how I talk about it, and why I think that is important, a man commented with this reductive statement, “MJ: Your school of fiction was established over 200 years ago: sentimentalism. It had its virtues, but there are good reasons why sentimentalism is generally deprecated today.”

Well. How can someone argue with “facts” like those?

And the truth is, I’m far from immune to the traps, especially when it comes to talking about romance comics, and particularly boys’ love, which I’ve made the mistake of critiquing as a genre in the past. Take my writing for the recent Manga Moveable Feast, for instance. Though I think I should be able to say, “Wild Adapter is an excellent manga,” explain why it is excellent, and leave it at that, what I found myself saying (sometimes subtly) throughout all my features was, “Yes, Wild Adapter is BL, but you should read it anyway, because it’s an excellent manga,” or even “Yes, Wild Adapter is BL, but you should read it anyway because this really smart man says it’s an excellent manga.” It was desperate and out of character, but I could feel myself doing it, and I couldn’t stop because I felt so strongly that the series was being dismissed out of hand specifically for that reason.

So what can we do when the biases are so clear? What can we even ask for in an industry that struggles for readers regardless of demographic?

Maybe all we can do is continue talking about it, at least for now. So, readers, what do you think?

Download the podcast, “The Plight of Josei Manga,” at Manga Out Loud.

3 Things Thursday: Wild Adapter

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One of my favorite quotes so far from this month’s Manga Moveable Feast comes from David Welsh, as he describes why Wild Adapter is, in his words, “bathtub manga.” “Well,” he says, “it’s partly because, empirically good and ambitious as Wild Adapter is, it doesn’t wear its quality on its sleeve. It gives you the opportunity to believe that you’re indulging in a guilty pleasure, even though you’re actually seeing a spectacular piece of craftsmanship.”

David has a habit of writing brilliant things I wish I’d come up with myself, and this observation definitely belongs in that category. He’s absolutely right. One of the things that makes Wild Adapter so enjoyable to read is that it creates a sense of decadent self-indulgence while actually delivering Damn Good Comics. As a result, the experience is completely satisfying, even after the initial glow of frivolity has passed.

With this in mind, I give you this week’s 3 Things…

3 guilty pleasures in Wild Adapter that aren’t so “guilty” after all:

1. Cracktastic plotting. An emotionally detached youth is drawn into the yakuza, only to become unintentionally involved with a mysterious drug that turns its users into mad, hairy beasts, ultimately leading him to adopt a part-man, part-beast to whom he becomes deeply (but ambiguously) attached. Later, the two of them accidentally fight crime. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? And yeah, it totally is. Thing is, all the craziness is so firmly rooted in emotional truth that it somehow actually works. What should be completely unbelievable becomes fantastically believable, leaving readers free to ride high on the adrenaline created by its outrageous, violent adventure, without worrying about a painful crash later on. Minekura writes crazy, but she’s solid to the core, and so is Wild Adapter.

2. Stunning sensuality. Despite this series’ fairly minimal sexual content, it is one seriously sexy manga. I mean, really, really sexy, and that’s not a characteristic I’d attribute to many series, including those that contain a lot of nudity and/or sex. Most deliberately sexy manga are hardly sexy at all, at least in my experience. Of course, what’s sexy about Wild Adapter isn’t actually the sex at all, most of which amounts to small-time crooks getting it on with women they had to pay, or skeevy yakuza bosses coercing their underlings into special service. None of that is what makes this series so sexy, and that’s part why its sensuality maintains itself so well. Minekura creates her manga’s super-sexy aura with superb characterization and an incredible sense of style, without having to rely on less reliable elements like revealing clothing or heavy bedroom action.

3. Boys’ love. Good romance is incredibly difficult to write (with or without explicit sex involved), and though there is plenty of good romance available in the English-language BL market, it’s also full to overflowing with examples of all the ways in which romantic fiction can fail. As a result, it’s a genre that gets little respect among critics, even those who recognize the the real worth of romantic fiction. It’s telling, I think, that TOKYOPOP chose to release Wild Adapter as part of their mainstream line of manga, rather than on their BL imprint, BLU. On one hand, this decision makes good business sense and reflects Wild Adapter‘s wide appeal. On the other, it clearly demonstrates that while TOKYOPOP may have believed that non-BL fans might buy Wild Adapter, they did not for a moment believe that they would buy it with a BL label.

In yesterday’s roundtable, Michelle, David, and I spent some time discussing the ways in which Wild Adapter does and does not conform to common BL tropes. And while it’s true that the series lacks many of the elements that frequently characterize “BL,” what it doesn’t lack is actually the thing I read BL for in the first place, and that would be love between boys. Though Wild Adapter does not contain the worst of the BL genre, it does contain the best, and both Minekura and the genre deserve credit for that. So while I am certainly adamant that non-fans of BL should give Wild Adapter a try, that’s not because the story isn’t BL. They should read it because it’s really good BL, and people should know what that looks like.

Readers, got any “guilty pleasures” that really aren’t guilty at all?

Follow Friday: The MB Gang

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It’s been a while since I put together a Follow Friday post, and with all the recent additions to the Manga Bookshelf family, it seems only right to make sure you all know how and where to follow this fine group of writers. You can check out our About Us page for a full list of everyone who has ever written for this network, but here’s a quick rundown of our current and recent contributors.

Bloggers

Our brilliant main bloggers can all be found on Twitter, and all of them have been more communicative than I have been lately. Manga Critic Katherine Dacey is the @manga_critic there as well, just as Manga Curmudgeon David Welsh is known as @MangaCur. The lovely Michelle Smith of our newest blog, Soliloquy in Blue, can be found @swanjun.

Contributors

A number of our regular contributors are avid twitterers as well, including anime reviewer Cathy Yan (@twoif), manhwa maven Hana Lee (@troisroyaumes) and our newest addition to the team, Okazu‘s Erica Friedman (@Yuricon).

Guests

Furthermore, you should be following all our wonderful special guests! You can find a slew of these lovely folks on Twitter, including Eva Volin (@funnypages), Robin Brenner (@nfntrobin), Khursten Santos (@khursten), Connie C. (@simside), Ed Sizemore (@edsizemore), and Aja Romano (@ajafair).

I can, of course, be found on Twitter (@mbeasi), and you can keep up with our daily postings at the main account (@mangabookshelf).

Hope to see you there!