Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Unshelved

MMF: Yoshinaga top five

by

I suppose that, since I asked others to pick their favorite Fumi Yoshinaga title, I should be willing to make the same impossible choice. It’s a thankless process, to be honest, since almost all of her works that have been published in English (which is almost all of them) assert their worth so forcefully. But, since I feel forced to do so, here are my five favorite works by Yoshinaga, in order:

  1. Antique Bakery, Digital Manga Publishing, four volumes, originally published in Shinkoshan’s Wings: As with many who left comments, this was my introduction to Yoshinaga, and it’s hard to get over your first time. A handsome straight guy opens a bakery and hires an irresistible gay guy to be his pastry chef. Additional employees of varying individual adorability hare subsequently hired, and Yoshinaga gives a glimpse into their complicated lives and those of their customers, friends, and families.
  2. Flower of Life, Digital Manga Publishing, four volumes, originally published in Shinkoshan’s Wings and later republished by Hakusensha: Yoshinaga dissects the milestones and tropes of school comedy with such precision and warmth that this series could easily have taken first place, though Antique Bakery gains an additional, slight edge by being about grown-ups. We follow a group of classmates and their teacher as they get to know outgoing (and blunt) Harutaro, a new student who missed a year due to leukemia treatment.
  3. Ichigenme: The First Class Is Civil Law, 801 Media, two volumes, originally published by Biblos: As I wrote in greater detail earlier this week, Ichigenme is at the very top of my list of favorite yaoi, tied with Saika Kunieda’s Future Lovers (Deux Press). What Yoshinaga has here is a fully fleshed-out tale of evolving love between grown-ups, funny, smart, and sexy as you could hope.
  4. All My Darling Daughters, Viz Signature, one volume, originally published in Hakusensha’s Melody: This is quite possibly my favorite fictional examination of a mother-daughter relationship, an all-too-often neglected dynamic. This collection of interconnected short stories isn’t limited to that topic, and Yoshinaga does a marvelous job throughout, but the best moments involve a grown woman whose relationship with her mother changes when the mother begins a new relationship with a much-younger man.
  5. Ôoku: The Inner Chambers, Viz Signature, currently serialized in Hakusensha’s Melody: It’s probably strange, if not blasphemous, to put Yoshinaga’s most critically acclaimed series last on this list, but it’s hard not to favor completed works over one that’s still ongoing, good as that series may be. And, don’t get me wrong, Ôoku is very, very good. This history-with-a-spoke-in-the-wheels saga looks at a feudal Japan where the male population was decimated by disease, leaving the women to assume power, with all of the intrigue, drama, and conflicted emotions that prospect suggests.

There. I’ve committed my list to blog. I actually feel liberated. And it should probably be noted that all of these titles are among my favorite manga published in English, period.

Upcoming 8/17/2011

by

If your comic shop is of the Diamond dependent stripe, you may be disappointed by this week’s ComicList, as there’s next to no manga in evidence. Never fear, though! There is one exciting arrival to please the discerning comics reader.

That would be the fourth volume of Lewis Trondheim’s Little Nothings: My Shadow in the Distance (NBM). Trondheim’s self-deprecating, autobiographical comics are always funny and observant in just the right ways. I reviewed the third volume, Uneasy Happiness, for the inaugural Not By Manga Alone column.

Of course, for those served by more diversely sourced comic shops, you can take a look at the Manga Bookshelf Pick of the Week roundup, and you can peruse this week’s Bookshelf Briefs for our takes on a variety of recent releases.

By the way, a new alphabet begins this week, but I think I’ll keep the theme a surprise. I’m sneaky that way!

 

Scary Book Volume 1: Reflections by Kazuo Umezu

by

Horror manga is generally not my thing. I do appreciate it when I stumble across it, but I’ve never felt the urge to collect all the volumes of a horror manga series. I am glad I tried out this volume of Scary Book, just because I haven’t read much Umezu before. This volume features two stories: “The Mirror” which shows what happens to a vain rich girl when the reflection she admires has a mind of her own and “The Demon of Vengeance” which has an almost inspiring story of revenge.

Emi lives in a mansion with an elaborate mirror. She loves standing in front of it, but as she grows older she starts to feel uneasy. She has a boyfriend, and is admired for her looks, but she’s old fashioned and affected in her mannerisms. When Emi’s boyfriend Mitsugu attempts to be physically affectionate with her she dumps him, then returns to her house where she keeps having horrible accidents, as if the mansion is trying to destroy her. Things get even worse when she has a dream about her reflection coming out of the mirror to strangle her only to wake up to see that her evil doppleganger is loose in the world, systematically destroying Emi’s life. The premise of an evil mirror twin might seem simple, but I was impressed by the way Umezu wrung every opportunity for psychological humiliation out of this story. Emi finds herself dating the class nerd, she fails at school for writing backwards, Mirror Emi takes her place with her family, and Emi finds herself wandering around town in shabby clothes only to find that no one is capable of recognizing her as a rich beautiful girl anymore. Even though Emi isn’t a particularly likeable character, I did like seeing that she starts taking action against Mirror Emi as the story progresses, she isn’t content to see her life taken over by a supernatural entity. Umezu’s illustrations are effective in portraying the creeping sense of menace that pervades the story as Emi finds herself fearful of mirrors or any reflective surface. He relies on stark black and white contrast often, saving details for when he is focusing on extra horrifying images, like Mirror Emi’s expressions of hatred.

“The Demon of Vengeance” is the story of a vassal who finds his life destroyed and manages to live in order to inflict the most horrible revenge on the lord who betrayed him, even when you might think that it might be physically impossible for him to do anything. I won’t say much because I don’t want to give anything away, but there were some moments in this story that were almost hilariously over the top in their deception of righteous anger. One of the things that is fun about Umezu is that people are fully committed to their emotions. No one is mildly afraid or angry, they are more scared than anyone ever has or ever will be again! Scary Book was a pleasant change of pace from my usual manga reading.

Random weekend question: playing favorites

by

As we all gear up for the Fumi Yoshinaga Manga Moveable Feast, I must ask the inevitable, almost impossible question. What’s your favorite Yoshinaga work in translation?

Every time I try to come up with an answer, another title clears its throat to reassert its worthiness. And Kodansha hasn’t yet let me read What Did You Eat Yesterday? How can I possibly make a fully informed choice until that title is available in English?

But you might be more decisive than I am, so feel free to hold forth in the comments!

 

Oresama Teacher Volumes 3 and 4

by

Oresama Teacher is rapidly becoming one of my favorite shojo series due to the fact that it isn’t like most of the other manga in the Shojo Beat imprint. Instead of exploring teen romance, this manga focuses on dumb comedy. Even though many of the characters are idiots, they are also endearing because their idiocy stems from personality quirks that also make them strong. Mafuyu is going away for high school in an attempt to put her juvenile delinquent past behind her, but she finds out that her teacher Takaomi is her long-lost neighbor who trained her in all of her fighting techniques.

In the third volume of Oresama Teacher, Mafuyu goes home to visit her old gang. She’s curious to see how they’re doing without her leadership, and she misses her friends. Mafuyu gets caught up in her old school rivalries and winds up kidnapped with her two former sidekicks, the enthusiastic Kanagawa and the masochistic Maizono. There is nothing that better expresses the differences between Oresama Teacher and more typical shoujo manga than a great scene of Mafuyu lecturing her former lackeys about the proper way to position one’s hands when being tied up by kidnappers. She gives a full on mini-tutorial about techniques to escape binding, then realizes that her instructions are useless because the boys are already tied up. She breaks the boys out, only to be pushed aside as they face their confrontation with their rivals. Mafuyu wonders about the nature of their friendship, only to realize that everyone’s acting unconcerned about her help because they need to stand up for themselves on their own. This was actually a cute message, delivered with a light touch along with Mafuyu’s humorous MacGyver-like fighting techniques.

One of the reasons why I like Oresama Teacher so much is that there isn’t very much conventional romance in it. Mafuyu may be a hardened juvenile delinquent, but she has very little idea what to do about the opposite sex, other than registering that she may have confusing feelings for someone before she moves on to give an enemy a well-deserved beatdown. The fourth volume of the manga brings back Mafuyu’s gender swapped disguise as Natsuo when Takaomi announces that the Public Morals Club has to fight the Yojimbo club. Mafuyu is worried about Hayasaka’s fighting abilities. He’s good at fighting but is so single-focused that he lets himself get hurt. As Natsuo, Mafuyu tries to teach Hayasaka how to dodge and block and think more strategically in a fight. Hayasaka doesn’t seem to be clued in that Natsuo and Mafuyu are never in the same place at the same time, and look alarmingly similar.

One of my favorite moments in this volume was the depictions of torturous mental calculations Mafuyu does about Hayasaka’s fighting abilities while she’s thinking in class. She stares at him intently, throws her head down, bangs on her desk, mopes, and then indulges in an evil smirk when she hits on her training plan. Hayasaka looks mystified and then both confused and alarmed.

Both volumes end with a Mafuyu/Takaomi story. In one, she’s forced to stay over at his place when she accidentally gives her house key to the school’s bancho. In another, they go to the beach with complications as Mafuyu doesn’t even remember that she can’t swim until she’s floating on a swim toy in deep water. While the prospect of a student/teacher relationship isn’t a plot point that comes up very often in the manga that gets translated here, it is hard to picture anything happening with Mafuyu and Takaomi at this point in the series. Takaomi is so manipulative and evil, yet weirdly protective when it comes to Mafuyu actually suffering any harm.

I enjoy Oresama Teacher a lot more than other shoujo humor titles. There’s something about the juxtaposition of all the dumb, character based humor and violent fights that just has me much more invested in wanting to know what will happen to the characters even after four volumes.

Review copies provided by the publisher.

Saturday Spotlight: Yoshinaga

by 1 Comment

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!

Upcoming 8/10/2011

by

I have no idea who sells this wonderfully horrifying thing, but they are doing the work of the angels. Kate Dacey very kindly tweeted this in my direction with her customary perfect timing, as my ComicList pick of the week — the 15th volume of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack from Vertical — relies heavily on the participation of creepy little Pinoko for some of its spectacular highs. I discussed some of those heights in this week’s Bookshelf Briefs.

And that’s really the best that Diamond has to offer this week, so why not take a look at what some people think is the best the whole comics medium has to offer? The Hooded Utilitarian continues to populate its International Best Comics Poll index, and there’s a delightful piece by Shaenon Garrity on what she deems “The HU Lady List.” Over at the Manga Bookshelf, MJ ponders the process and discusses her choices.

 

Comics Poll. List. Thing.

by 14 Comments

If you’re a regular reader of comics blogs, I’m sure you’ve heard the news!

According to a consensus of 0.000003 % of the world’s population (no, really, I looked it up) these 115 titles are the best (or perhaps most universally favored) comics. That’s 211 of the 6,954,167,299 estimated people in the world, who of course don’t actually even agree with each other, since no single comic received more than 50 votes. Whether any one person who voted has read every comic that was nominated between all 211 people (or even every single comic in the top 115) let alone every comic ever published in the world is anyone’s guess, but I’m going to go with “probably not.”

So what we really have here is an extremely tiny subset of the world’s population reporting that, of the comics they’ve read, these are the ones that no more than a quarter of them agree might be the best.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to ridicule this process, by any means. I am one of the 0.000003 %, after all! I’m just offering my perspective, and perhaps some insight on why I don’t personally place a lot of value on lists like these, at least as a tool for evaluating art. Lists like these can be interesting and even revealing (I think this one is both), but ultimately they tell us more about the people who voted than they do about whatever it is that’s being voted on. And though I’m all for creating opportunities for people to discuss their favorite or most admired comics, I will say outright that I don’t believe that it is actually possible to determine the 10 (or 100 or 1000) best comics, or the best anything that must be subject to human opinion alone. There are no scientific benchmarks by which to measure creative work—no speed tests to run or performance goals to reach. Just as each person who creates comics brings his or her individual passions and values to the work, each person who considers comics does the same, which is why even among a minuscule 211 people, no more than 50 can agree on the relative value of a single work, or probably even what “value” means in the first place.

So, let’s clarify again. What this poll represents is an extremely tiny subset of the world’s population reporting that, of the comics they’ve read, these are the ones that no more than a quarter of them agree might be the best, based on their individual backgrounds, values, artistic sensibilities, ages, genders, philosophical mindsets, and personal standards for the medium.

Personally, I think this is great. For me, this lack of agreement is meaningful in itself, and goes a long way towards illustrating why I think art, in all its forms, is so valuable in the first place. But it also illustrates why I value individual opinion more than group consensus, both personally and as a tool for posterity, as difficult as those may be to retain over time. While it’s interesting to note the results of a poll like this, and I’ll probably take a look at a few of the recommended works I’ve missed, as a whole, I can’t help feeling that this list has very little to do with me. That’s not a reflection on this list (I’m quite enjoying the discussion around this list), but rather on all lists of this kind. Because when it comes to art, in the end, I’m interested in pursuing the threads most meaningful to me, which I’m more likely to discover with the help of like-minded individuals than I am through majority opinion, even when that majority consists of only fifty or so people.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that my real interest in this poll is in the individual results, which have begun to be published today! Check out the first group of individual lists at the Hooded Utilitarian here—a group which, thanks to the power of alphabetical order, happens to include mine.

Given my relatively narrow background in comics (almost exclusively manga & manhwa, and even then just what I’ve been able to read over the course of a few years), it would have been ludicrous for me to attempt a list of “best” comics, so I went for “favorite” (as allowed by the poll’s rules). And since “favorite” is an incredibly fluid thing with me, based on an ever-shifting multitude of factors, I must also qualify this as “favorites in the moment.”

Here was my list (including attached notes):

A fairly arbitrary list of ten of my favorite comics, subject to change at any particular moment, and in no particular order:

Hikaru no Go by Yumi Hotta & Takeshi Obata
Please Save My Earth by Saki Hiwatari
Banana Fish by Akimi Yoshida
Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa
Flower of Life by Fumi Yoshinaga
Ode to Kirihito by Osamu Tezuka
Wild Adapter by Kazuya Minekura
Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa
Tokyo Babylon by CLAMP
Maison Ikkoku by Rumiko Takahashi

With one major exception, I restricted this list to completed series (or, at least, completed in Japan, and very nearly completed here).

I might also note that, with one and a half exceptions, my choices were all created by women. Make of that what you will. Possible twinge of regret: not including Bloom County.

Whatever you think about “best of” polls, comics, or any of this at all, the conversation is lively at The Hooded Utilitarian, so do check it out! And keep an eye out at HU over the next week or so, for more essays (look, Shaenon Garrity’s posted one about female cartoonists just today!) and individual results!

Edited to add: In the event anyone’s interested, here’s where I talk (sometimes with others) about some of the comics on my list: Hikaru no Go, Please Save My Earth, Banana Fish, Paradise Kiss, Flower of Life, Ode to Kirihito, Wild Adapter, Fullmetal Alchemist, Tokyo Babylon. It’s interesting to note that the one series on the list I’ve never written anything substantial about (Maison Ikkoku) is the only one that made the top 115. I guess I’d better fix that!

Saturday Spotlight: revisiting NANA

by 2 Comments

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!

Harlequin Manga Quick Takes – Married by Mistake!, Caribbean Desire, and Marriage Wanted

by

All titles available on emanga.com.

Married by Mistake by Takako Hashimoto and Renee Roszel Wilson

I didn’t realize when I started this that it is a further book in a series with a harlequin manga I read earlier, To Marry a Stranger. In this book, the heroine of To Marry a Stranger has been impregnated by her husband with an eye patch. Helen starts having contractions near the infamous “Mansion of Love” so of course she and her sister Lucy are stuck with having to deal with a sudden home birth in the romantically cursed house. Lucy manages to assist her sister with having twins in the space of a panel. Let me tell you, I’ve had twins and it doesn’t happen that quickly! Lucy is exhausted after assisting her sister and thinks back about her fiance Stader, who kept postponing their marriage. This Stadler guy is no prize as in Lucy’s memory he appears with wavy hair and an odd sort of cravat. Do not trust a man wearing a cravat unless you live in the early 19th century, ladies. Lucy is woken by Jack, a man with intense eyebrows and a decent suit who is wearing a tie instead of a cravat. This looks promising.

Lucy mentions the legend that if a woman spends the night of her birthday at the mansion of love, the first man she sees the next day will be her destined love. It is the day after her birthday, and Jack looks both befuddled and horrified. He’s Lucy’s ex-stepbrother and he has loved her for a long time. It turns out that Lucy’s horrible cravat-wearing fiance has decided to get engaged to an actress and travel to Lucy’s hometown in a fit of cravat-inspired cruelty. Lucy’s family promptly decides that Lucy has to pretend to have a fiance for revenge and Jack is just the person for the job. The art in this adaptation is really much better than the typical Harlequin manga title. The backgrounds might be sparse, but the character designs are distinct and attractive. What I found most amusing was the wacky facial expressions of Lucy’s family as they cheer on her fake romance. I was especially amused by the antics of Lucy’s one-eyed brother-in-law Damian who was the tortured hero in To Marry a Stranger, as he keeps popping up in chibi form with a big grin to cheer on his sister-in-law. In conclusion, men with cravats are bad, but men with eye patches or suits are good. This is what I’m taking away from this Harlequin manga.

Caribbean Desire by Cathy Williams and Takane Yonetani

The cover for this looks good, because it appears that there are wind machines blowing the male and female leads’ hair in opposite directions. Unfortunately the inside of this manga doesn’t feature the goofy fun I tend to prefer in my Harlequin manga adaptations. Emma arrives on an island to interview the rich businessman Alastair for his biography. She develops an intense dislike for the Conrad, the man currently running Alastair’s company. Emma has a secret connection with Alastair’s family, but will she reveal her secret before it is too late? And what will she do with her growing attraction to Conrad? The storyline was as predictable as Harlequins usually are, but there wasn’t really any humor to lighten things up. The art and adaptation were pretty typical, with stiffly posed characters and sketchy backgrounds. This wasn’t a good title to read right after Married by Mistake!, because it really suffered in comparison.

Marriage Wanted by Debbie Macomber and Eve Takigawa

Savanna is a wedding coordinator with an injured leg. Dash is a divorce attorney who has given up on love. Together they find love through a marriage of convenience, as one always does in Harlequin romance world. I tend to enjoy Harlequin manga very much when the art has a vaguely 1980s aesthetic. Even though this adaptation was produced in 2005, I still see a bit of a retro feel to the art with Dash’s square jaw and Emma’s bright eyes. Savanna is convinced the she’ll never find love because her limp makes her unattractive to men. Dash comes into Savanna’s store and proceeds to lecture her about the meaninglessness of weddings when he finds out that she’s planning his little sister’s wedding. Dash and Savannah spend more time with each other and decide to enter into a marriage of convenience when he needs a wife to get a promotion and she needs a husband to get her parents to stop being so overprotective. There wasn’t much humor in this title, but the art was better than average and it was fun seeing Dash and Savanna argue with each other over the value of marriage.

Access to electronic copies provided by the publisher.

Black Blizzard by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

by

Black Blizzard by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

I haven’t read Tatsumi’s critically acclaimed The Push Man or A Drifting Life, so I’m probably starting at the wrong place by reading the earlier Black Blizzard. This manga has a pulpy appeal and when you consider that it was produced in the 1950s when the author was 21, it is pretty amazing.

Black Blizzard opens with a piano player frantically practicing. His fingers are jittery and drops of sweat are flying off him. A man in a fedora and trenchcoat enters the room. The piano player is expecting him. He collapses on the piano, saying “I killed someone, but it can’t be…it can’t be true!” The story picks up again with a train moving through a desolate winter landscape. The piano player is now handcuffed to a hardened criminal. There’s a crash, and the criminal takes the opportunity to escape, dragging the hapless musician along with him. They move through a blizzard trying to evade capture and take refuge in a desolate cabin together. The criminal is keen on sawing the musician’s hand off so the duo can separate, but the piano player objects. He starts telling the sad story of how he wound up handcuffed to a murderer, beginning with his involvement with a circus girl with a lovely voice. The escaped prisoners grow more frantic to detach from each other, leading to a surprising bargain and a plot twist that requires a healthy tolerance for contrived endings.

Tatsumi’s art style is sparse and dynamic. The characters are rendered with just a few effective lines for their facial expressions. The blizzard is depicted with slashing diagonal lines, making it easy to picture the horrible winds that buffet the escaped prisoners. Tatsumi relies on some straightforward square and rectangular grids but he varies his perspective often for effect – focusing on a face, a broken glass, and the snow building up on a deserted building. The production by Drawn and Quarterly plays up Black Blizzard’s pulpy heritage. The pages are tipped in yellow, and the jacket copy imitates the text you’d see on an old noir paperback. This manga is flipped, which I adjusted to ok. What I found distracting was the way the sound effects were handled. In some places the sound effects are left in the Japanese, with a note providing translation but on most pages the sound effects are translated. The original sound effects just looked so much more stylish on the page even though the translated effects mimicked the same style.

This wintery crime manga was a perfect thing to read on a hot summer night. The ending of the manga wrapped up things a bit too nicely, but I put the book down amazed that this was the work of such a young creator. There’s an interesting interview with Tatsumi in the back of the book that provides some background on the creation of the book. It was interesting to hear that single volume manga like Black Blizzard was produced for the rental book market in 1950s Japan.

Here and there, mostly there

by

It’s Monday! More specifically, it’s the Monday following the conclusion of the Fruits Basket Manga Moveable Feast! I’m going to use that as an excuse to be a bit lazy and just point your attention elsewhere.

I did muster a couple of Bookshelf Briefs this week: Kikuko Kikuya’s Entangled Circumstances (Digital Manga) and the sixth volume of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ôoku: The Inner Chambers (Viz). I won’t spoil the suspense by telling you which one I liked better, though I can’t imagine it will come as an earth-shattering surprise.

Nor will I rob you of the sense of discovery involved with clicking through to my Pick of the Week! Let’s just say that I was a little resentful that I couldn’t find it at Barnes & Noble this weekend and leave it at that.

So, since I’m abdicating any responsibility to provide original content here, where might you turn for such things? Well, The Hooded Utilitarian is unveiling the results of its ambitious International Best Comics Poll. It should make for interesting reading.

And I wasn’t surprised to see Tom Spurgeon be the first person I noticed draw the comparison between DC’s delayed reaction to bad PR for the paucity of female creators in its upcoming re-launch and the flack Fantagraphics got when it re-launched The Comics Journal with an apparent paucity of female contributors. I’m a little confused by Tom’s assertion that the latter issue has actually been entirely rectified. The Cartoonist’s Diary feature as certainly put women in the spotlight, but only one of the Journal’s 13 regular columns is written by a woman. The site does have women among their roster of reviewers, which is nice, and editorial coordinator Kristi Valenti is developing content in a variety of areas. Still, it’s not exactly parity. I can totally agree that it’s better than DC’s 1%, though.

Update: Seconds after I posted this, I noticed that Deb Aoki had posted a summary of the Best and Worst Manga Panel from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Go, look, and see how their picks track with yours!

 

Fruits Basket MMF: Sunday wrap-up

by

We have a couple more pieces before we officially close up this installment of the Manga Moveable Feast!

At Otaku Ohana, Jason Yadao takes a retrospective look at his relationship with Fruits Basket:

Readers loved Fruits Basket. So much so, in fact, that the hyperbole on the books’ covers gradually built over the series’ run.  Need to be reminded that Fruits Basket was “The #1 selling shojo manga in America!”? There was a blurb for that, starting from volume 5 …

And at All About Manga, Daniela Orihuela-Gruber admits that she came to Fruits Basket later than some of her peers, but she fell hard:

In short, I really could have used Fruits Basket and its complex drama about a number of well-meaning souls tormented by a restrictive and isolated society, then freed by great friendship and love. I would have loved to learn that I didn’t need to be trapped into being “friends” anyone in that school in order to have the life I wanted.

You can see a listing of all of the Feast posts here. Thanks so much to everyone who weighed in with such insightful posts. You made the week a treat!

Next up in Manga Moveable Feasts is an in-depth look at the gifted and awesome Fumi Yoshinaga, to be hosted by Kristin (Comic Attack!) Bomba an Linda (Animemiz) Yao. Kate (The Manga Critic) Dacey has the full roster of upcoming events.

 

Fruits Basket MMF: Saturday links

by

Tons of great reading today! And it’s not even over! (That’s my way of saying I’ll do one more round-up tomorrow.)

First of all, Laura (Heart of Manga) Mucciarone takes a particularly apt approach to character examination:

Along with the character analyses I’ve seen other bloggers post, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the characters align with their equivalent zodiac personalities. I did some research to find information on Chinese astrology and over-arching personality traits that are supposedly observable in anyone born within a particular year of the zodiac. I thought I’d post them here and let you see if you agree with them matching Takaya’s characters.

Adam (Completely Futile) Stephanides has some questions about Tohru’s idealized mother, Kyoko:

There’s one discordant element from the start, though: Tohru’s constant self-denigration. Even as she’s unselfishly helping everyone, she feels guilty for not being unselfish enough. My favorite example is the time when, after visiting Rin (who doesn’t even like her) in the hospital, she condemns herself for having forgotten for a moment about her goal of lifting the curse. If Kyoko was so wonderful, why was Tohru so bent on punishing herself?

Sometimes, it takes a village to address a book. That’s the approach the citizens of Manga Village took with their roundtable:

Connie: Too many!  Way too many!  I hate hate hate series with a huge cast of characters like this, especially characters that are introduced to fulfill a role (in this case, because there needs to be 14 Sohma family members) and then don’t figure into the story at all later.  Ritsuka is the best example in this series, but that was the worst case scenario.  Takaya does do a good job of juggling all the other characters, but the side effect is that the main story seems to drag on forever.

MJ and Michelle Smith take another bite at the apple with their latest Let’s Get Visual discussion:

MICHELLE: So, we’ve been talking about Fruits Basket all week, but I’m certainly not yet weary of the topic. How about you, MJ?

MJ: I suspect I could discuss Fruits Basket for weeks on end!

I could certainly read their discussions of the series for weeks on end. So it’s nice that MJlooks back on Michelle’s examination of Takaya’s Twinkle Stars.

Again, thanks to everyone who’s linked to or tweeted about this iteration of the Manga Moveable Feast! If you’ve got a link you’d like to share, email me at DavidPWelsh at Yahoo dot Com or post a link in the comments.

 

Saturday Spotlight 7/30/11

by Leave a Comment

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!