Unshelved

It’s a good thing that this post goes under Unshelved, as this announcement is so new there’s not even a cover art image to give you. Warner Brothers has announced the 2nd of its Platinum Collection sets for Blu-Ray on October 16th, with 3 discs containing 15 cartoons and bonus features. There’s also a separate 2-DVD set with just the cartoons.

Like the first Platinum Collection, 80% of these cartoons have been previously released on the Golden Collection DVDs. If you have a fantastic audiovisual setup that shows the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD, you might want to buy them again. Otherwise, there are ten new to DVD cartoons here to inspire grumpy cartoon fans to purchase it anyway. So here’s a breakdown:

DISC 1
A Wild Hare (1940, Avery) (Academy Award Collection)
Buckaroo Bugs (1944, Clampett) (GC5)
Long-Haired Hare (1949, Jones)(GC1)
Ali Baba Bunny (1957, Jones) (GC5)
Show Biz Bugs (1957, Freleng) (GC2)
The Wise Quacking Duck (1943, Clampett) (GC5)
What Makes Daffy Duck? (1948, Davis) (NEW TO DVD)
Book Revue (1946, Clampett) (GC2)
Deduce, You Say (1956, Jones) (GC1)
Porky In Wackyland (1938, Clampett) (GC2)
You Ought To Be In Pictures (1940, Freleng) (GC2)
Porky In Egypt (1938, Clampett) (GC3)
Back Alley Oproar (1948, Freleng) (GC2)
Little Red Rodent Hood (1952, Freleng) (GC5)
Canned Feud (1951, Freleng) (GC1)
Gift Wrapped (1952, Freleng) (GC2)
Birdy And The Beast (1944, Clampett) (NEW TO DVD)
Home, Tweet Home (1950, Freleng) (NEW TO DVD)
Going! Going! Gosh! (1952, Jones) (GC2)
Zipping Along (1953, Jones) (GC2)
Scent-Imental Romeo (1951, Jones) (Pepe DVD)
The Foghorn Leghorn (1948, McKimson) (GC1)
The High And The Flighty (1956, McKimson) (NEW TO DVD)
Tabasco Road (1957, McKimson) (GC4)
Mexicali Shmoes (1959, Freleng) (GC4)

DISC 2
Wabbit Twouble (1941, Clampett) (GC1)
Rabbit Fire (1951, Jones) (GC1)
Rabbit Seasoning (1952, Jones) (GC1)
Duck! Rabbit, Duck! (1953, Jones) (GC3)
Drip-Along Daffy (1951, Jones) (GC1)
My Little Duckaroo (1954, Jones) (GC6)
Barbary-Coast Bunny (1956, Jones) (GC4)
Tortoise Beats Hare (1941, Avery) (GC2)
Tortoise Wins By A Hare (1943, Clampett) (GC1)
Rabbit Transit (1947, Freleng) (GC2)
Porky’s Hare Hunt (1938, Hardaway/Dalton) (NEW TO DVD)
Hare-Um Scare-Um (1939, Hardaway/Dalton) (NEW TO DVD)
Prest-O Change-O (1939, Jones) (NEW TO DVD)
Elmer’s Candid Camera (1940, Jones) (GC1)
Bugs Bunny Gets The Boid (1942, Clampett) (GC1)
The Bashful Buzzard (1945, Clampett) (GC5)
The Lion’s Busy (1950, Freleng) (NEW TO DVD)
Strife With Father (1950, McKimson) (NEW TO DVD)
An Itch In Time (1943, Clampett) (GC3)
A Horsefly Fleas (1947, McKimson) (NEW TO DVD)
Hollywood Steps Out (1941, Avery) (GC2)
Page Miss Glory (1936, Avery) (GC6)
Rocket-Bye Baby (1956, Jones) (GC6)
Russian Rhapsody (1944, Clampett) (GC6)
Dough Ray Me-Ow (1948, Davis) (GC4)

DISC 3 (Included in Blu-ray Only)
King-Size Comedy: Tex Avery and the Looney Tunes Revolution (new documentary)
Tex Avery, the King of Cartoons (1988 film)
Friz on Film (GC extra, 70-minute documentary)
ToonHeads: The Lost Cartoons (GC extra, from the TV show)
Real American Zero: The Adventures of Private Snafu (GC extra)
The World of Leon Schlesinger (GC extra)
Friz at MGM (Captain and the Kids cartoons) (GC extra)
The Best of the Rest of Tex (MGM cartoons? unknown)
Private Snafu (GC extra)
Mr. Hook (GC extra)

So, what’s new? What Makes Daffy Duck is a great wacky Daffy cartoon, one of Davis’ best. Birdy and the Beast is the last Clampett Tweety cartoon to be restored for DVD/Blu-Ray, and he’s at his nastiest. Home Tweet Home is the last remaining early Sylvester/Tweety pairup not to be on DVD. The High and the Flighty features the one off pairing of Foghorn Leghorn with Daffy Duck, here a traveling salesman.

Porky’s Hare Hunt is the first appearance of ‘proto-Bugs’, a goofy, Woody Woodpecker-ish rabbit that eventually evolved into the Bugs who debuted in A Wild Hare. Hare-Um Scare-Um features the same rabbit, and should have its original ending, lost for more than 70 years, restored! (This is the biggest reason to get the set.) Prest-O Change-O features Jones’ Two Curious Puppies, dialogue-free characters he used in the early days, battling a white rabbit who, again, is one of Bugs’ ancestors.

The Lion’s Busy features Beaky Buzzard, and has him battling an eccentric lion in a battle of wits and patience. (Beaky is smarter here than his other three cartoons.) Strife With Father is Beaky’s last cartoon, and is a parody of actor Ronald Coleman, here cast as an English Sparrow. Lastly, A Horsefly Fleas features the return of the ‘Food Around The Corner’ flea, who is still looking for a place to stay and eat.

Is that enough to justify buying 40 cartoons over again? Well, I suppose it depends how hardcore a fan you are!

“And everyone lived happily ever after?”
“Well, no, almost everybody died.”
— David Addison and Agnes DiPesto, Moonlighting

(Spoilers for the ending of xxxHOLIC are within this article)

I’d been going back and forth about what to write for this month’s Manga Moveable Feast. I could always just punt and link to the many prior CLAMP reviews I’ve done – but that would be wrong. So I started pondering titles of theirs that I really enjoyed that I could discuss. Man of Many Faces, CLAMP School Detectives, Card Captor Sakura, Magic Knight Rayearth, Wish, Suki…

Hey wait, aren’t those all over 12 years old? Why don’t I talk about the more recent CLAMP series I’m a huge fan of?

…oh.

Yeah, it’s time to come out and say it. While there’s lots of recent CLAMP stuff I enjoy for a certain character, or a story arc, or maybe an interesting idea to start things off… when it comes to modern CLAMP I always find more problems than I really want to. It’s not even that they used to ‘write happy endings and now they don’t’, as I sometimes whined about on Twitter. RG Veda, Tokyo Babylon and X are not exactly happy fun times. And Kobato is a recent light and fluffy series that really never appealed to me at all.

As CLAMP have matured over the years, they’ve gained a depth to the quality of their storytelling. And while this is normally a thing to applaud, I think with their group it highlights that they come up with fantastic ideas and are not always so good at following through. Their first major epic will likely never be finished, partly due to events beyond their control and disagreements with Kadokawa Shoten, but also I think due to a lack of desire to return to it (let’s face it, I think if they really wanted to, X could be completed, apocalyptic earthquake images or no). Chobits was their attempt to write a seinen manga that also examined the otaku obsession with perfect virgin toys, but it was designed to discomfit as much as entertain, and also had enough fanservice that I felt they were trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Then there is Tsubasa. It has to be said, the main reason why I have so much difficulty with CLAMP in the 00s may be Tsubasa, if only due to its kudzu-like qualities. Tsubasa was CLAMP starting up a ‘star system’ for their characters, similar to Tezuka, where beloved characters we’ve seen before are shown in new and different roles – particularly Card Captor Sakura’s stars. And I quite enjoyed the first few volumes. It ran in Weekly Shonen Magazine, so there was a lot of action and magic, as well as the usual CLAMP BL tease between Fai and Kurogane, the manga’s only two ‘original’ characters. Indeed, seeing Sorata and Arashi as a happy couple (well, as happy as Arashi gets) in one world almost made the entire manga worth it.

But starting from around the second half, where they run into most of the X cast in an AU retelling of that world… epic plotlines that bring together elements from all your worlds are all very well and good, as long as you can keep things understandable and have a simple logic to everything. This became impossible towards the end of Tsubasa. I’ll be honest, I’m still not quite sure what happened, and after about the 4th clone I didn’t really want to go back and read it all again to find out. More to the point, everyone became so MISERABLE. Granted, Kurogane and Syaoran are normally not happy go lucky, but the angst was piled on in a way that felt overdone.

I’d mentioned Tsubasa was kudzu, mostly as I felt it grew to strangle everything it touched. No work felt that touch more than xxxHOLIC. The series were always intended to be lightly connected – the two had occasional crossover chapters when Yuko’s magic was needed – but for a while it was possible to read xxxHOLIC without bothering with Tsubasa at all. And then came the revelations about Watanuki. Now, I am totally biased about this. If I had to pick my favorite post-2000 CLAMP series, xxxHOLIC would win in a walk. And Watanuki is the main reason for this. He’s their best character in years, snarky without being a jerk, angsty without being overdone, and the perfect straight man to Yuko’s shenanigans, Himawari’s cheeriness, and Doumeki’s deadpan style.

And then, right around Volume 13, it becomes impossible to read xxxHOLIC without understanding what’s going on in Tsubasa. Now, this is hardly unique to CLAMP, and is a great way to get people to buy multiple series. The problem is what it does to xxxHOLIC: the plot stops. Seriously, all forward motion for the remaining few volumes simply halts. CLAMP must have been aware of this, they certainly telegraphed it enough. Watanuki ends up not even being able to leave the confines of the shop. Himawari and Doumeki both leave offscreen, Himawari to get married to someone we never see or hear about, and things finally grind to a halt 100 years later, where… everything is still in stasis. If Tsubasa ends with a giant 50-car pileup of plots, xxxHOLIC drifts to the side of the road and fills with carbon monoxide.

Another issue with the way CLAMP’s star systems work is that they continue some of their characters’ stories after the ‘happily ever after’ of their own titles… even if you don’t want them to. Tezuka, at least, never pretended that when you saw Rock in one title and then another, it was the same Rock later in his life. But two of my favorite cute and fuzzy early CLAMP series, Campus Detectives and Man of Many Faces, both have their leads show up in minor roles… in X. Really, CLAMP, really? I went through two volumes of adorable fluff between Akira and Utako (you too will believe in the romance between a 9-year-old and 5-year-old!) only to see them in THIS plot? So I guess they lived happily ever after until their world was consumed in fire, then.

Part of maturity is in seeing that things aren’t just black and white, and that every happily ever after is followed by ‘until they died’, because such is life. And yet this is fiction, not reality. And dammit, I admit it: I liked CLAMP better when they did sugar-candy coated happy endings. They didn’t even have to be shallow: no one is accusing Card Captor Sakura or Rayearth of a lack of drama. But in getting deeper and more complicated, CLAMP has also made things far more convoluted than they needed to be, developed ideas that tended to have unforeseen and unfortunate issues if you really thought about it (hi, Angelic Layer!), and show off a disturbing lack of pacing that may also come from ‘we are famous enough so that we can be serialized whenever we put a few pages together’ (xxxHOLIC, towards the end of its run, sometimes ran for only 8-9 pages per issue).

This is not apparently going to be ending soon. Their new continuation of Legal Drug, now retitled Drug & Drop, apparently has Watanuki popping up, and also crosses with Kobato. CLAMP just likes doing this. Which is fine. I just miss the old, uncomplicated CLAMP, with simple plots in a shoujo vein. Modern CLAMP is fascinating, but that fascination can also turn into a fatal attraction.

The CLAMP edition of the Manga Moveable Feast is well on its way! I kicked things off yesterday morning with my Introduction & CLAMP Directory, including an overview of all CLAMP’s works published in English.

The blogosphere was a-buzz with CLAMP yesterday, and I’m quite pleased to note that many of the entries I received came from writers outside the usual crowd. Keep ’em coming, fandom!

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Over at the Organization Anti-Social Geniuses, Justin was so eager to start, he began a day early, expressing his (so far) disappointment with CLAMP’s work and asking for suggestions in Sunday Spotlight: Where Should One Start With CLAMP?

Jade at Jade’s Escape laments the difficulty of finding CLAMP fans in Okinawa, in CLAMP: The Known-Unknown Manga-ka.

“Who?”

“You know, CLAMP,” I said excitedly before repeating the name with Japanese pronunciation: “Ku-la-n-pu”. My Japanese co-worker scrunched up his face in the same way my students looked at me whenever I spoke English.

“Who?”

At Experiments in Manga, Ash Brown offers up a CLAMP-focused My Week in Manga: July 16-July 22, 2012.

Aaron speaks his mind at Manga Energy, sharing his personal view on one of CLAMP’s recurring themes, in Love Is Not All You Need: A Refutation of Clamp’s underlying philosphy of “love”.

At The Manga Otaku, Tiffany mulls over a few thoughts on Chobits.

And back home at Manga Bookshelf, Michelle, Sean, and I make CLAMP the subject of our latest Pick of the Week.

In CLAMP reviews, yesterday brought us Lexie’s take on Clover at Poisoned Rationality, and Ayame’s on Man of Many Faces at The Beautiful World.

That’s the roundup for Day 1! More to come! All entries are linked from the CLAMP MMF archive.

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To submit your contributions to the CLAMP MMF for inclusion in this month’s archive, please send your links by email to mj@mangabookshelf.com or via Twitter to @mjbeasi. If you would like your contribution(s) to be hosted at Manga Bookshelf, please email them to MJ, along with any included images.

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Once again, I was not at San Diego Comic Con this year, but I have access to The Internet, so can offer my unsolicited opinions anyway. :) SDCC over the last few years has been more ‘media’ oriented than ever, so it’s no surprise that the manga news was relatively quiet, though there were a couple of ‘big news’ items.

Viz was the first panel, and didn’t have any major print manga announcements. However, they did debut their Android VizManga app at last. I downloaded it to my phone. There were initial hiccups with zooming and availability, but as I look at the site this morning, both are fixed, though the zoom seems to be very fussy – I had to go forward and back a bit to get to the size I wanted. I didn’t initially have my Excel Saga volumes available for download, but that seems to have resolved itself as I type this. No doubt there will be improvements and upgrades, but this is a good first step for Viz in stepping away from the iMarket. The other big news of interest for manga fans was the Nausicaa boxset, which looks impressive, and apparently will have a poster.

Kodansha came next. Obviously, their big push was for Sailor Moon, which has done very well for them. I was a bit disappointed that they did not announce the two ‘short story’ volumes that come after the 12-volume re-release – I hope there isn’t a hold-up with Takeuchi. (The rumor is she asked them not to put the extras in the NA versions, though that is of course merely a rumor.) They discussed previously revealed releases: Genshiken: 2nd Season in September; Missions of Love (aka Watashi ni xx Shinasai!) in November, and Battle Angel Alita: Last Order 16 in December, which moved companies in North America just as it did in Japan. Alita also gets an omnibus so folks can catch up on what they missed – I presume the omnibus is only of Last Order, rather than the original series.

The new announcement was that of Negiho!, a spinoff/alternate universe of the original Negima series that was not written or drawn by Akamatsu but apparently had his consent. The premise is that the majority of the female students in Negi’s class are kindergartners, and Negi is their 15-year-old teacher that they all get crushes on. It started in one of Kodansha’s magazines for kids, but rapidly moved to a shonen spinoff Bessatsu Shonen Magazine as everyone realized it was more otaku-oriented. It’s meant to hit all the moe and cute buttons at once, so if you like cute little moe girls, you should enjoy it. Further, deponent sayeth not. >_>

JManga was the big news of last year’s SDCC, and they did their best to make this year the same. They are close to finally getting the iOS and Android apps for their site, and those should be going live in October – and that includes Android tablets.

They announced a few new titles coming out in the next couple of weeks, the big surprise of which to me was Sun-Ken Rock, a martial arts yakuza manga set in Korea that runs in Shonen Gahosha’s Young King. It’s… a very, very Young King title, let me tell you, and I would definitely expect to hit that ‘yes, I am over 18’ button if you plan on reading any of it.

There’s also a much-anticipated BL title: Dousei Ai (Same-Sex Love), from the author of After School Nightmare. It’s an old Biblos title from the 1990s, so I’m going to guess it ran in Be x Boy. It apparently has a complex plot with multiple protagonists.

JManga also announced at the last minute (literally: they got the OK to announce it minutes before the panel) that they will be working with Kodansha to rescue some of the old North American titles that were coming out via Tokyopop and Del Rey but are now either out of print or were killed for low sales. They can’t say what they are, but there are several I’d love to see. Love Attack? Kindaichi Case Files? Moyashimon? School Rumble? The possibilities are limitless! Speaking of Kodansha, they’re joining with Shueisha and Futabasha to sponsor a translation contest for JManga, the grand prize being a trip to Japan. Contestants get either a shoujo Shueisha title, a seinen Kodansha title, or a seinen Futabasha title. No word on whether the winners end up on the site – if so, it would mean Shueisha would join Kodansha in finally letting some of their works on the JManga site. Which can only be great. All in all, a very good panel for JManga, and I’m pleased to still see them doing well 1 year on.

Normally, Udon’s video-game based manga is not one I pay attention to all that much. (We can basically guess Silent Mobius was cancelled by now, right?) But this time around they announced the start of an artbook line, with Evangelion’s Chronicle: Illustrations leading the way. The intriguing one for me is the Read Or Die archive, which apparently takes in both the OAVs and TV, and a Haruhi Suzumiya book as well. Most artbooks are 75% pictures and 25% text at the back, so get imported a lot by fans who don’t care they can’t read 1/4 of it. If there are some cool interviews or the like with these, it would definitely justify a purchase.

Yen Press also had a few goodies to tell us about. The big one was leaked a little early by Amazon.uk (really, Amazon takes all the fun out of company panels these days), but that’s OK. It’s BTOOOM!, a survival game title for the video game fan from Shinchosha, running in their Comic Bunch line. The covers, at least in Japan, are parodies of real-life ‘game covers’ you’d see for the X-Box, Playstation, etc. – let’s hope those can stay. It should do quite well for action fans.

Another intriguing title for Yen was Momoiro Shoten e Youkoso, aka Welcome to the Erotic Bookstore. This is a comic essay series from Media Factory (did it run in Flapper?) about, well, a bookstore that decides to add a few toys to their line. It’s going to be digital only, possibly both to avoid bookstore issues with the content and also as it would cost less than printing it out. I’m definitely intrigued, though – these sort of titles almost never get licensed over here.

Lastly, there is Another, a 5 volume (4 + prequel) manga based on a horror light novel, which Yen has also licensed. Yen says it hopes to put out more novels in the future, which hopefully shows that Book Girl is at least not selling poorly. The manga ran in Kadokawa Shoten’s Young Ace, and is about a classroom that features a girl that everyone seems to ignore, and who looks like Abiru Kobushi from Zetsubou-sensei. Between Higurashi/Umineko and this, Yen seems to be dipping its toes more and more into the horror market. Hopefully it sells scarily well! (slap) I’m sorry, that pun was uncalled for.

Shonen Jump Alpha had one new announcement, with a series so new I don’t have a picture of it. From what I have seen of Takama-Ga-Hara, though, it seems the sort of manga that is very much in line with all the other Jump manga that currently run in Alpha. It’s ‘that Jump sort of manga’, if you know what I mean. They’re also speeding up Blue Exorcist a bit in order to catch up with Japan; it will be appearing 2 chapters a week for a month, then will be every month, 2 weeks after Japan (as with the other Weekly Jump titles).

There was some disappointment on Twitter that the popular mid-level Jump series were once again ignored by Viz. Sket Dance, Kuroko no Basket, Beelzebub, Medaka Box, and Nisekoi. All but the last even have anime series that could be tied in. Though, notably, none of them have anime series with a dub. The reason that we’re seeing Takama-Ga-Hara and Barrage, I expect, is that they’re low-risk high-reward investments. They’re the type of title casual Jump readers like. If they sell well, great. If they bomb in Japan and end after 3 volumes, well, a new series can replace it that is also low-risk. On the other hand, licensing, say, Sket Dance would require releasing 24 volumes in a hurry to catch up with Japan. Same goes with all the others I listed. Nisekoi is popular in Japan, and only has a few volumes to its name, but it has a different problem; it’s a romantic comedy with no supernatural content. I can’t even recall the last Jump manga Viz licensed without some type of fantasy element. Was it Strawberry 100%? In any case, I’d love to see all these titles, but sadly can understand why they were once again not mentioned at Jump’s panel.

And so that’s a wrap; I don’t think today has any major manga content, at least not of the ‘new licenses’ variety. Any thoughts or opinions? For a slumping market, I thought this was a pretty good SDCC; certainly we’re seeing more evidence that digital is the wave of the future.