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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

fantagraphics

The Poe Clan, Vol. 1

August 15, 2019 by Katherine Dacey

Since its debut in Bessatsu Shōjo Comic, Moto Hagio’s The Poe Clan has proven almost as enduring as its vampire protagonists, living on in the form of radio plays, CD dramas, a television series, a Takarazuka production, and a sequel that appeared in Flowers forty years after the series finished its initial run. The Poe Clan’s success is even more remarkable considering that Hagio was in the formative stages of her career, having made her professional debut just three years earlier with the short story “Lulu to Mimi.” Yet it’s easy to see why this work captivated female readers in 1972, as Hagio’s fluid layouts, beautiful characters, and feverish pace brought something new to shojo manga: a story that luxuriated in the characters’ interior lives, using a rich mixture of symbolism and facial close-ups to convey their ineffable sorrow.

The Poe Clan‘s principal characters are Edgar and Marybelle Portsnell, the secret, illegitimate children of a powerful aristocrat. When their father’s new wife discovers their existence, Edgar and Marybelle’s nursemaid leads them into a forest and abandons them. The pair are rescued by Hannah Poe, a seemingly benevolent old woman who plans to induct them into her clan when they come of age. The local villagers’ discovery that the Poes are, in fact, vampirnellas (Hagio’s term for vampires) irrevocably alters Hannah’s plans, however, setting in motion a chain of events that lead to Edgar and Marybelle’s premature transformation into vampirnellas.

Though my plot summary implies a chronological narrative, The Poe Clan is more Moebius strip than straight line, beginning midway through Edgar and Marybelle’s saga, then shuttling back and forth in time to reveal their father’s true identity and introduce a third important character: Alan Twilight, the scion of a wealthy industrialist whose confidence and beauty beguile the Portsnell siblings. In less capable hands, Hagio’s narrative structure might feel self-consciously literary, but the story’s fervid tone and dreamy imagery are better served by a non-linear approach that allows the reader to immerse themselves in Edgar’s memories, experiencing them as he does: a torrent of feelings. Furthermore, Hagio’s time-shifting serves a vital dramatic purpose, helping the reader appreciate just how meaningless time is for The Poe Clan’s immortal characters; they cannot age or bear children, nor can they remain in any school or village for more than a few months since their unchanging appearance might arouse suspicion.

Hagio’s artwork further reinforces the dreamlike atmosphere through inventive use of panel shapes and placement, with characters bursting out of frames and tumbling across the page, freeing them from the sequential logic of the grid. In this scene, for example, Hagio uses these techniques to depict an act of impulsive violence—Alan pushes his uncle down a flight of stairs—as well as the reaction of the servants and relatives who bear witness to it:

While the influence of manga pioneers like Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori is evident in the dynamism of this layout, what Hagio achieves on this page is something arguably more radical: she uses this approach not simply to suggest the speed or force of bodies in motion, or the simultaneous reactions of the bystanders, but to convey the intensity of her characters’ feelings, a point reinforced by the facial closeups and word balloons that frame the uncle’s crumpled body.

Her method for representing memories is likewise artful. Through layering seemingly arbitrary images, she creates a powerful analogue for how we remember events—not as a complete, chronological sequence but a vivid collage of individual moments and details. In this passage, Hagio reveals why one of Edgar’s schoolmates has confessed to a theft he didn’t commit:

The final frame of this passage reveals the source of Killian’s pain: he witnessed another boy’s suicide. But Killian isn’t remembering how the event unfolded; he’s remembering the things that caught his eye—birds and branches, feet dangling from a window—and his own feelings of helplessness as he realized what his classmate was about to do.

As ravishing as the artwork is, what stayed with me after reading The Poe Clan is how effectively it depicts the exquisite awfulness of being thirteen. Alan, Edgar, and Marybelle feel and say things with the utmost sincerity, so caught up in the intensity of their emotions that nothing else matters. Through the metaphor of vampirism, Hagio validates the realness of their tweenage mindset by depicting their existence as an endless cycle of all-consuming crushes, sudden betrayals, and confrontations with hypocritical, dangerous, or bumbling adults. At the same time, however, Hagio invites the reader to see the tragedy in the Portsnells’ dilemma; they are prisoners of their own immaturity, unable to achieve the emotional equilibrium that comes with growing up.

One final note: Fantagraphics deserves special praise for their elegant presentation of this shojo classic. Rachel Thorn’s graceful translation is a perfect match for the imagery, conveying the characters’ fervor in all its adolescent intensity, while the large trim size and substantial paper stock are an ideal canvas for Hagio’s detailed, vivid artwork. Recommended. 

This post was updated on August 23rd with more accurate information about the current status of The Poe Family‘s serialization in Flowers. Special thanks to Eric Henwood-Greer for the correction!

THE POE CLAN, VOL. 1 • ART AND STORY BY MOTO HAGIO • TRANSLATED BY RACHEL THORN • FANTAGRAPHICS • 512 pp. • NO RATING

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Classic Manga, fantagraphics, moto hagio, The Poe Clan, Vampires

The Most Anticipated Manga of 2016

January 4, 2016 by Katherine Dacey

We’re kicking off 2016 with a look at the manga titles and trends we’re most excited about. Joining me and Brigid is manga journalist and critic Deb Aoki, former guide to AboutManga.com, current host of Manga Comics Manga, and Publishers Weekly contributor.

What new manga are we looking forward to this year?

New Fruits BasketBRIGID: Fruits Basket! Natsuki Takaya’s tangled tale of a cursed family was one of the first shoujo manga I ever read, and I’m looking forward to re-reading it with a more experienced eye (and a better translation).

The other upcoming manga that everyone seems to be looking forward to is Princess Jellyfish, which Kodansha is publishing in double-sized omnibus volumes. This josei title about a bunch of nerdy girls living in their own rooming house sounds like it will be a lot of fun.

In terms of continuing series, I loved the first volume of Planetes and I’m looking forward to more. It’s a smart science fiction story with likeable characters and thoughtful storylines, and Dark Horse’s new edition is a beautiful two-volume omnibus that really feels like something special. I can’t wait to read more of Hiroya Oku’s Inuyashiki, about two humans given extreme superpowers in a freak accident—one uses them for good, one… doesn’t—and Yoshitoki Ōima’s A Silent Voice, an amazingly powerful story that’s about bullying but also about alienation and redemption. One more: Your Lie in April, which has kind of slid under the radar, a shonen romance about musicians that, like A Silent Voice, goes beyond the standard shonen romance tropes and has relatable characters experiencing real emotions.

On a general note: When I was compiling my lists of the best new and ongoing manga series of 2015, I was struck by how many really good manga debuted in 2015. From all accounts, 2016 is going to be even better.

haikyuuDEB: I’m most excited about the trend where manga publishers are taking chances on titles and genres that were once considered the third rail/extra risky to license, like sports manga. Super excited about the Summer 2016 arrival of the first volumes of Haikyu!! by Haruichi Furudate and Kuroko’s Basketball by Tadatoshi Fujimaki from Shonen Jump/VIZ Media! I love Haikyu!! a lot — been watching the first and second seasons on Crunchyroll over and over again. the characters are really wonderful — it’s delightful to see the team grow and reach new heights every time. It’s got lots of heart and humor as well as exciting sports action. It’s now one of my all-time faves!

I’ve also been enjoying the recently released Yowamushi Pedal by Wataru Watanabe, a manga about a hapless anime otaku who discovers that he has a talent for bicycle racing. Big ups to Yen Press for publishing this fairly long series in double-sized volumes.

queen-emeraldas-smallAnother example of manga publishing biz in the US dipping their toes into riskier fare is the upcoming publication of three classics: Rose of Versailles by Riyoko Ikeda from Udon Entertainment, Queen Emeraldas by Leiji Matsumoto from Kodansha Comics, and Otherworld Barbara by Moto Hagio from Fantagraphics Books.  For too long, the classics that are the foundation of manga in Japan have been largely unavailable in English. I’m hoping that these titles succeed so we can someday get more.

Also super excited about having more manga by Asano Inio available in English. Solanin and What a Wonderful World! are go-to recommendations for anyone who loves indie comics and is curious about manga. Now VIZ Media is publishing the mind-bending Goodnight Pun Pun, and A Girl on the Shore, coming from Vertical Comics. Both should be on your pre-order lists, as these are beautifully drawn, thought-provoking books that everyone will be talking about in the months to come.

rose-of-versailles-udonKATE: I share Deb’s excitement about classic manga. It’s a risky undertaking for any publisher, especially when so many readers are young (under 20) and not particularly curious about the medium’s roots. It will be interesting to see if UDON can pitch Rose of Versailles to the Shojo Beat crowd; though the artwork is a little dated, the melodrama, costumes, and kick-butt female lead have obvious parallels with titles in VIZ, Kodansha, and Yen’s catalogs. Who knows? It could be a surprise hit.

Speaking of vintage titles, I’m ecstatic about Drawn & Quarterly’s new Kitaro volumes. D&Q will be releasing these previously untranslated stories in slimmer, kid-friendly editions–a departure from their 2013 Kitaro release, which screamed “prestige project!” I think that’s a smart move: adults with an interest in Shigeru Mizuki’s work will buy it in almost any format, but younger manga fans need a length and trim size that reflects their own reading habits.

Another title on my must-read list is Jiro Taniguchi’s Guardians of the Louvre, which NBM Publishing will be releasing in April. The previous installment of the Louvre series–Hirohiko Araki’s Rohan at the Louvre–was the ultimate otaku two-fer: a ghost story and a standalone chapter in the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure saga. Taniguchi’s book will undoubtedly be a more sober affair, but one I’m anticipating with the same eagerness: I can’t wait to see how Taniguchi integrates the museum’s famous collection into his story.

fukufukuIn the just-for-fun department, I Am a Hero, a zombie thriller from Dark Horse, is near the top of my list, as are VIZ’s Haikyu! (mentioned by Deb above), Vertical’s FukuFuku: Kitten Tales, and the final installment of DC Comics’ Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga. I’m also looking forward to Wandering Island, a story about a gutsy young woman who runs an air mail service in a remote corner of Japan. The illustrations are by Kenji Tsurata, the creator of the criminally under-appreciated Spirit of Wonder, which was published by Dark Horse in 1998.

Last but not least, I’d also make a plug for The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Anime and Manga. This visual biography clocks in at a hefty 900 pages, highlighting important periods in Tezuka’s career as an illustrator and animator. Its author, Toshio Ban, worked closely with Tezuka in the 1970s and 1980s, giving Ban a unique perspective on his subject. As an added bonus for American readers, Stone Bridge Press brought in Frederick L. Schodt to do the translation.

How about conventions—does anything look particularly tempting?

DEB: I’m always curious to see what Toronto Comic Arts Festival will be bringing as their guests this May. Last year was Gurihiru and Aya Kanno, prior years brought Konami Kanata, Moyoco Anno, Akira Himekawa, Usamaru Furuya, Est Em, Natsume Ono and Yoshihiro Tatsumi to name just a few. I don’t know what they have planned, but I know it’ll be worth the trip!

As booth space and tickets get harder and harder to get at San Diego Comic-Con, Anime Expo in Los Angeles has turned into the Japanese content biz must-go show. I’ve noticed that more companies from Japan are buying booths, and see lots of meetings / business being conducted at the show.

It’s great that AX is getting bigger and bigger, but I worry that it creates a situation where the anime/manga world becomes even more segregated/separated from the general pop culture community that converges at Comic-Con and similar American shows. This is especially irksome because it seems like most of the Western comics / pop culture press corps basically ignore / don’t report on / don’t attend Anime Expo or any of the announcements that come out of this show.

This pisses me off because anime/manga matter more than ever — especially as its fandom tend to skew younger, are more active, and more interested in all kinds of entertainment from US and Japan compared to their counterparts on the superhero side of the comic shop. So much for my “be less crabby in 2016” resolution… ;-)

KATE: I had a blast attending shows like New York Comic Con and Wondercon in the late 2000s. The last time I attended NYCC, however, I felt that the show had taken a much sharper turn towards the television, film, and gaming industries, and was losing its identity as a comics convention. The manga publishers were still there, of course, but it was harder to circulate and interact with editors and sales reps because of the enormous crowds. That experience pretty much soured me on going to any more big conventions. TCAF always sounds like a blast, but the timing never works for me; I’m always knee-deep in final exams and student papers when it rolls around!

BRIGID: I echo Deb’s concern about AX, but it does seem like this year, the news was spread across a broader swath of conventions—and many of the new licenses, including Fruits Basket, were announced on Twitter. The presence of so many people from the Japanese publishers—not just creators but editorial staff as well—was very noticeable this year and shows that the publishers are taking the American audience seriously. It also enhanced the experience to see, for instance, the editor of Noragami explaining the process of how it went from sketches to finished page. I’m looking forward to more of that at the larger shows as well as the more intimate experience at the smaller shows, where the creators and their readers are not so far apart.

Any predictions about the industry?

DEB: Almost all signs point to a healthier, more robust manga publishing business in 2016, which is a great thing. I don’t see the same rush to publish anything and everything vaguely manga-ish (even crappy manga) that I saw prior to the crash of the late 2000’s — publishers seem to be making more careful choices, more calculated risks. The fact that they’re taking any risks at all — by expanding genres, offering their stories via more digital channels and doing more simulpub/same day as Japan releases, is a good sign.

I’m also intrigued/encouraged by the efforts being made by Japanese manga publishers to welcome submissions by creators from outside of Japan, like Comics Zenon’s Silent Manga Audition contests and the Japanese edition of Shonen Jump’s latest contest to get published in their online magazine, Jump Plus. It’s no secret that many up-and-coming comics creators from around the world are inspired by manga, so it’ll be very interesting to see what happens when more of these creators get exposure in Japan and guidance from Japan’s top-notch manga editors.

magus1KATE: I’m consistently impressed by Seven Seas’ tenacity and business acumen, but not so impressed with the actual titles they license. Last year, however, Seven Seas published The Ancient Magus’ Bride and acquired Orange, neither of which fit the profile of a typical Seven Seas manga; if anything, both seemed like the kind of titles that CMX used to license. That gamble has paid off with Bride, which recently cracked the NY Times Manga Bestseller list. My prediction: Seven Seas will continue to make bold licensing choices in 2016, even as vampire-monster girls remain their core business.

BRIGID: I see publishers taking manga more seriously as the audience expands. While the “pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap” attitude that made Tokyopop and Viz’s Shonen Jump lines such a success ten years ago works well with teen readers, who gobble up manga in quantity, publishers are starting to cater to older readers who want a somewhat better experience. The oversized omnibus isn’t that much more expensive than single volumes, but it allows for a more satisfying reading experience, and publishers often include extras like better quality covers and color pages. Viz’s new edition of Monster, Dark Horse’s Planetes, and Yen Press’s Emma are all examples of this, and Kodansha gets a shoutout for not only its superb editions of Vinland Saga but its deluxe Attack on Titan Colossal Edition. This seriousness goes beyond production values to the licensing of quality manga that might not have found a market in earlier years, including Inuyashiki and Naoki Urasawa’s Master Keaton.

gekiga01If any publishers are reading this, I have a very specific licensing request. There’s a small French publisher called Lezard Noir that is publishing some amazing manga in French; I spoke to the publisher when I was in Angouleme two years ago and was really impressed with his line, which includes Minetaro Mochizuki’s Chiisakobé, Bonten Taro’s Sex & Fury, and Masahiko Matsumoto’s Gekiga Fanatics. I’m not the only one—every year at least one of his books is picked as an official selection by the Angouleme festival. I’d love to see some U.S. publishers pick up these titles in a similar format—I think they would have a lot of appeal to those older, more sophisticated manga readers.

Filed Under: FEATURES, MANGABLOG Tagged With: Drawn & Quarterly, fantagraphics, Kodansha Comics, Leiji Matsumoto, Most Anticipated Manga, moto hagio, NBM Publishing, Ryoko Ikeda, Seven Seas, Stone Bridge Press, Udon Entertainment, Vertical Comics, viz media, yen press

BL Bookrack: The Heart of Thomas

January 19, 2013 by MJ and Michelle Smith 7 Comments

heartofthomasMICHELLE: Thanks for joining us for the first BL Bookrack column of the new year. This time we’re doing something a bit different and devoting this month’s column to Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas, which is one of the most historically significant works influencing the boys’ love genre in Japan, and the most historically significant one currently available in print in English.

But, y’know, I feel like bestowing this weighty mantle upon the work could overshadow the fact that it’s very dramatic, emotional, and romantic. It seems best to me to take it on its own terms.

MJ: I agree, Michelle—which isn’t to say that The Heart of Thomas doesn’t earn its historical weightiness! Its influence is significant for good reason. But perhaps what I found most striking about it is just how much it has to offer without any knowledge of its significance at all. And though understanding its context is important and worthy discussion, there are plenty of critics on hand to do just that. Here in our column, I’m personally more interested in discussing it… well, as itself. If that makes sense.

MICHELLE: My thoughts exactly!

I suppose we ought to start with a summary, which is gonna be a toughie, but here goes…

The Heart of Thomas begins with the suicide of thirteen-year-old Thomas Werner. In love with his classmate, Juli, Thomas sees this act as a way to “bring him back to life.” The two had been classmates at a German boarding school called Schlotterbach, and we meet Juli on the morning the students have reconvened after Easter vacation, where news of Thomas’ death spreads quickly. After a letter from Thomas lets Juli know the death was not an accident, he’s plunged into turmoil, which only worsens when a transfer student named Erich—who bears a strong physical resemblance to Thomas, though with a much pricklier personality—arrives on the scene.

(click images to enlarge)

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The three primary characters—in addition to Juli and Erich, there’s also Oskar, Juli’s roommate—have all been broken in some way, and the story revolves around their intertwining relationships and the secrets each keeps hidden. Each one is complex, and each one becomes completely beloved to the reader by the end.

MJ: I think for a story like this, that’s a perfectly good summary! And by “a story like this,” I mean a story that is almost entirely focused on its characters’ feelings and their relationships to each other—and themselves—with very little investment in plot, outside of a few significant events. That these few events are almost entirely deaths (including Thomas’ opening suicide) and other tragedies might make the book sound rather melodramatic, and I suppose on the surface it is. But in the story’s boarding school setting, this is somehow completely appropriate. In this highly structured environment, largely removed from their families and the rest of the outside world, the boys at Schlotterbach thrive on those big moments—the few sensational events that make their way in from the world—and without enough of those, they must create whatever else they can on their own.

MICHELLE: In his introduction, translator Matt Thorn writes that Hagio at one point had attempted to remake the series with female characters (to appeal to female readers), but found pressure to make things more realistic and plausible and it just didn’t work. There had to be a feeling of “other” about the characters and the setting in order for her to be able to tell the story she wanted. And once I read the manga, I had to agree that it would not have worked otherwise.

Too, while on the surface it might seem/be melodramatic, when you get down to it… it’s really all about Juli’s ability to accept forgiveness and forgive himself. And that’s not melodramatic at all.

MJ: Also, the idea that the story’s emphasis on dramatic events makes it unrealistic I think deliberately ignores what it is to be an adolescent. Even teens and pre-teens who go to regular, modern public schools essentially live in their own society that is very much separate from the rest of the world, and it’s a society that is, frankly, terrifying. I think adults often willfully forget this (and who can blame them?) but it’s true. The public tragedies are real (one of my high school teachers killed himself in the middle of our senior year—and doesn’t everyone have some kind of tragic story like this that affected their entire school?) and the private ones are even more so. Regardless of the precise circumstances, is Juli’s struggle to accept himself as a whole person really alien to any teen?

MICHELLE: Now you’re making me remember the public tragedies of my youth, some of which I’d forgotten about!

This seems like a good time to focus on Juli for a bit, since he’s really quite interesting. We don’t get all the details, but Juli’s German mother seems to have married a German citizen of Greek heritage. Juli looks a lot like his father and his unusual black hair generates a lot of commentary, from admiring classmates to his hateful grandmother, who still clings to ideals about German purity. (I did wonder what year this was supposed to be, but I believe West Germany is referenced at one point, so it’s got to be after 1949 and, thus, World War II.)

IMG_0248

Grandma also bears a grudge because she had to take on the debts left behind when Juli’s father passed away. This fills Juli with the desire to change her attitude by becoming as successful as possible and paying her back. To this end, he attempts to become the perfect student. And for a while, he does quite well. He’s admired, he’s loved by Thomas, he loves Thomas in return, but there’s a darkness in him that leads him to accept the invitation of a creepy older student to meet him in a certain room on campus. The secret of what went on there is the last to be revealed in the story, so I won’t divulge it here, but the end result is that he’s utterly filled with self-loathing and cannot accept that Thomas really means it when he says that he loves him and coldly rejects him in public.

Oskar alone among the students knows what has happened, and has been assigned to share a room with Juli and watch over him. He’s therefore privy to the facade Juli struggles so hard to maintain and the cracks that form when Juli learns that Thomas sacrificed his angelic self for him. It takes a long time before Erich’s emotional frankness and Oskar’s example of forgiveness combine to allow him to finally admit the truth of his love for Thomas and to understand that Thomas would forgive him anything. Now he can forgive himself.

IMG_0230

MJ: Related to this, I have to just make a comment here regarding Thomas vs. Erich, because while Erich’s ability to express his feelings openly is part of what ultimately saves Juli from his own self-loathing, Thomas was just as open about his feelings with Juli—yet his way of trying to save Juli I think only broke him more. In the end, I think it’s Erich’s rebellious, combative nature that makes the difference. After Juli’s horrible experience, he can’t believe that Thomas would love him, and he feels the same disbelief about Erich’s open confessions of love. But where Thomas’ solution was to sacrifice himself, Erich’s is to fight (and fight hard), and it’s this that finally gets through to Juli.

I bring this up specifically because this is a column about BL, and there’s a (much-deserved) stigma around older works involving same-sex relationships that end in suicide. But (aside from the fact that this story actually begins with the suicide) where The Heart of Thomas really stands out here is that, from my perspective, it views that kind of sacrifice as… well, ultimately pointless. Throughout the story, even to the end when Oskar persuades Erich to remain at school rather than retreating to his stepfather’s house, Hagio makes it clear that running away is not the answer. We’re given the romantic option of viewing Thomas’ sacrifice as beautiful and selfless, but we’re clearly shown that Erich’s instinct to fight against that sacrifice is the way to really bring Juli back to life.

MICHELLE: Very well said! I also wonder if part of it is that Erich, playing the part of Thomas surrogate (a role which he tries hard to escape, but which might actually help Juli in the end) represents someone who can love Juli and not be hurt by the sins and darkness Juli is burdened by. Erich is strong, smart, and feisty. He believes in love and in God, and despite his pretty looks, he’s not fragile but instead resilient. That’s why, in the end, Juli can confess what happened to Erich and yet feel absolved, in a way, by Thomas.

MJ: Speaking of that connection, there’s a fairly creepy scene late in the manga where Erich has been invited to visit Thomas’ family whom he discovers wish to adopt him. Erich wisely declines the Werners’ offer to become a stand-in for their dead son, but afterwards he regrets turning down the opportunity to see Thomas’ old room as he discovers more and more the feelings and philosophies they shared in common. It’s an important realization, because it’s this that allows Erich to put aside his resentment towards Thomas for looking so much like him and dragging him into so much drama, in order to be able to help Juli, and also himself. Understanding that the emotional honesty that made fitting in at Schlotterbach so difficult could actually be an asset I think is pretty huge for Erich.

IMG_0244

MICHELLE: Definitely. In general, it’s a treat watching Erich mature over the course of the series. Another important moment comes when his mother passes away and he suddenly and viciously regrets his own selfishness in opposing her marriage. It would’ve made her happy, but he clung to her and held her back. Later, when he’s able to finally see the good in his stepfather and accept a home with him, it’s a very touching moment. Knowing he has this secure future (where he’s wanted for himself, not for any resemblance to Thomas) gives him the strength to not only commit more fully to studying at school, but to be forthcoming with his feelings for Juli.

MJ: I agree, it’s a real treat watching him grow up, especially as early on he seems the least likely character to be helping anyone else heal.

So, let’s talk about Oskar a bit. He’s actually my favorite character in the book, probably because he’s the least like me. Heh. Oskar is a terrible student who smokes, skips class, and is generally considered to be a screw-up, but he’s also utterly confident, incredibly insightful and fantastic in a crisis. He’s the guy you want in your corner because you know he can handle anything life throws at him with elegant competence, up to and including things like discovering that his father murdered his mother (or that he’s not actually his father at all). If I wrote Heart of Thomas fanfiction, it would all be about Oskar.

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MICHELLE: Oskar is my favorite too, and became so pretty much immediately. He’s just got this air of… languid sorrow about him. He reminds me of someone from Fruits Basket, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it’s Momiji. He’s popular and has charisma to spare, but he’s also known tremendous family grief. When he came to the school (around age ten, I think), he’s described as having grown-up eyes and speaking with grown-up words. He’d seen and experienced so much that he was really no longer on the same level as his classmates. Recognizing the “difference” in Juli was something that drew them together.

Did you know that Hagio actually wrote a one-shot about Oskar’s life prior to entering school? It’s called “Houmonsha.” Hope we get that in English at some point!

MJ: I did not! Oh, how I want to read that!

I can see the Momiji comparison (especially older Momiji—Oskar is by no means cuddly), though I’d also suggest that I think Oskar is the most overtly sexualized of the main characters in the story. Hagio writes him and (especially) draws him as a sexual being, with an attractive swagger and abundant bangs, and I’m pretty sure he even gets the most action of anyone in the story (which has, overall, not much action by modern BL standards). While both Thomas’ and Erich’s love for Juli is portrayed in a very pure, innocent light, Oskar’s feelings are allowed to display a bit more ambiguity, and though nothing actually sexual ever happens between them (despite a rumor spread at one point by a jealous younger student), he’s the only one of all Juli’s admirers with whom one could imagine that it might.

MICHELLE: I hadn’t thought about that before in those terms, but maybe some of that sensuality is what I was picking up on with the term “languid.” It also probably has something to do with being a year older than the others; he’s also interested in girls (well, at least enough to flirt with the ones in town) where some of the others aren’t yet.

Talking about the action or lack thereof… are there really any honest-to-goodness on-the-lips kisses in this series that are not brought on by anger or extortion? Ante witnesses Oskar performing mouth-to-mouth and names a kiss as the price for his silence, Erich wrangles a kiss from Juli later, too, and comments upon its bitterness. The only real kiss Juli ever bestows is one on Erich’s cheek right at the very end of the series.

MJ: The closest I can remember to anything like that is actually not on the lips. There’s a really interesting moment on the day that Oskar takes Erich in to town to learn about girls. The two get into some heated discussion about Thomas that ends with Oskar warmly embracing Erich, kissing him, and holding him in a way that really does not feel platonic while comparing Thomas to Amor, the god of love. It’s a strangely intimate little moment.

IMG_0250

Modern BL, of course, tends to include much, much more sexual content than can be found in The Heart of Thomas, but very little of it can hold a candle to Hagio’s work when it comes to musing on the value of love.

MICHELLE: Oh yes, I’d forgotten about that moment. If you were to write an epilogue starring Oskar, what do you think the chances are of he and Erich ultimately ending up together? For Erich, it’d mean another important relationship in his life that began on the basis of a shared love for someone else, but it seems at least possible to me.

MJ: Yeah, actually, that’s the likeliest actual couple in the story as far as I’m concerned, though I’d see it as something a ways in the future, for sure. I might write some sort of awkward future meeting between Oskar and Juli, after Juli has left seminary, but for romance? I’d go Oskar/Erich all the way. In a way, I think the relationship you describe is the one they already sort of have, and what’s kind of surprising about it, is that it feels healthier than one might expect. During that final scene where Oskar is convincing Erich to stay with him (and all of them) at school, there’s an unexpected sense of joy on the page—unexpected by me, anyway. Juli’s leaving, but it’s not the end of the world for anyone, including Oskar and Erich, and that sort of real optimism about their futures without him just took me by surprise. It was kind of awesome, really.

MICHELLE: I felt that, too. It is a new beginning, for everyone involved. You know, it was probably very wise of Hagio to never write a sequel wherein Oskar and Erich do get together—I mean, there must have been some sort of fan demand for this!—because she might’ve had to address the “what happens when school ends?” question. Now we can simply imagine them together instead of knowing they ended up moving on and marrying, et cetera, however poignant that may be.

MJ: Yes, given the time and place, Oskar and Erich’s story as a couple probably ends much less romantically than we’d like. We’re better off with fanfiction, I’m guessing. Which I now want to write. Oops?

Speaking of joy, I feel like we need to spend at least a few minutes here just talking about Hagio’s artwork because… oh, the glory of her artwork! You know I’m a sucker for classic shoujo in general, but Heart of Thomas is just exquisite in every way.

MICHELLE: It really is, and I definitely kept thinking throughout, “Oh, I bet MJlikes this page!”

There were quite a few pages I liked and made note of along the way. Page 157, with that top panel of the memory of Thomas haunting Juli and then in panel three morphing into Erich. Page 201, a color page wherein Juli looks dapper and elegant and Erich looks a little Bohemian or something with his interesting cross-legged pose. Page 241, where Thomas’ outline dominates the page while Juli narrates about how loving Thomas filled him with terror…. I could go on and on.

IMG_0253                       IMG_0252

MJ: Yes, yes! What’s hardest here is trying to choose! I have particular love for a sequence early on—which I almost hate to bring up, because I know the panels leading into it are a source of pain for Matt Thorn, who surely loves this book more than anyone—but there’s an incredible scene on pages 29-31, in which Juli is dreaming about Thomas throwing himself off the bridge into his arms, that is just spectacularly eerie and expressive. Hagio’s emotional imagery is so clear throughout—she truly shows us her characters’ hearts through the artwork.

IMG_0241

MICHELLE: I also really admired that, even though you’ve got all these kids in identical uniforms, some of whom have similar hairstyles, I was still never confused as to who I was looking at. (This also goes for Erich and Thomas, who share the same face!) And she didn’t achieve this distinction through wild appearances—though a couple of the older boys do look very unique—but just sheer drawing technique.

MJ: Yes, she pours so much characterization into body language and facial expression! It’s exactly the sort of work I long to point out to manga detractors who complain about big-eyed generic illustrations, in part because the characters indeed do have big eyes, which Hagio uses to great advantage. I could look at this book forever, and it’s possible I might.

In case it isn’t obvious to anyone reading this, I loved this manga with my whole heart. And I’ll admit that’s not exactly what I expected. I expected to find it visually beautiful and worthy as a classic, but I also expected it to be very dated and I thought the story might not appeal to my tastes as a modern fan. Instead, I found it to be both beautiful and emotionally resonant to an extent I’ve rarely experienced—especially in BL manga. This is a book I’d wholeheartedly recommend to any comics fan, without reservation. It’s an absolute treasure.

MICHELLE: After experiencing some disappointment with the story of Princess Knight, another historically significant work whose English release I had long desired, I was a little worried myself, but I needn’t have been. The Heart of Thomas was even better than I’d hoped. I hope it does well for Fantagraphics!

MJ: I hope so, too! Thank you, Moto Hagio, Matt Thorn, and Fantagraphics, for giving us the opportunity to read this gorgeous work.


All images copyright 2007 Moto Hagio, new edition copyright 2012 Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

More full-series discussions with MJ & Michelle:

Moon Child | Fullmetal Alchemist | Paradise Kiss | Tokyo Babylon (with guest Danielle Leigh)
The “Color of…” Trilogy | One Thousand and One Nights | Please Save My Earth
Princess Knight | Fruits Basket | Wild Adapter (with guest David Welsh) | Chocolat

Full-series multi-guest roundtables: Hikaru no Go | Banana Fish | Gerard & Jacques | Flower of Life

Filed Under: BL BOOKRACK Tagged With: fantagraphics, matt thorn, moto hagio, the heart of thomas, yaoi/boys' love

The Best Manga of 2011: The Manga Critic’s Picks

December 31, 2011 by Katherine Dacey 27 Comments

The usual gambit for introducing a year-end list is to remark on the abundance of good titles, acknowledge the difficulty in choosing just ten (or five, or three), and comment on the overall state of the industry. And while I certainly debated what to include on my list, I’ll be honest: 2011 yielded fewer contenders for Best Manga than any other year I’ve covered. The dearth of new titles was attributable to publishers’ financial prudence; companies released fewer books, licensed fewer series, and focused on repackaging older content for budget-conscious consumers. And though I selfishly wish that more new material had been released this year, I think manga publishers have done an excellent job of responding to their biggest challenges: a sluggish economy, digital piracy, and Borders’ bankruptcy.

So what titles made my 2011 list? My top ten are below, along with my list of favorite continuing series, favorite finales, and favorite guilty pleasures.

10. BREATHE DEEPLY (Yamaaki Doton; One Peace Books)

Part sci-fi thriller, part coming-of-age story, this engrossing drama examines the relationship between two young men: Sei, who grew up in a world of privilege, and Oishi, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Both Sei and Oishi fall in love with Yuko, a sickly girl whose incurable illness inspires her suitors to become medical researchers. In less capable hands, Breathe Deeply might have been a mawkish paean to the purity of young love, but the husband-and-wife team of Yamaaki Doton have a keen ear for dialogue; the interactions between Yuko and her two suitors are tinged with an authentic mixture of adolescent anxiety, sexual longing, and braggadocio. Clean, expressive artwork and well-rounded characters help sell the story, especially in its final pages. One of 2011’s best surprises.

9. THE SECRET NOTES OF LADY KANOKO (Ririko Tsujita; Tokyopop)

Kanoko, the sardonic heroine of The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko, is a student of human behavior, gleefully filling her notebooks with detailed observations about her classmates. Though Kanoko would like nothing more than to remain on the sidelines, she frequently becomes embroiled in her peers’ problems; they value her independent perspective, as Kanoko isn’t the least bit interested in dating, running for student council, or currying favor with the alpha clique. Kanoko’s sharp tongue and cool demeanor might make her the mean-girl villain in another shojo manga, but Ririko Tsujita embraces her heroine’s prickly, opinionated nature and makes it fundamental to Kanoko’s appeal. It’s a pity TOKYOPOP didn’t survive long enough to finish this three-volume series, as it’s one of the best shojo titles in recent memory.

8. WANDERING SON (Takako Shimura; Fantagraphics)

In her thoughtful review of volume one, Michelle Smith praised Takako Shimura’s deft use of perspective: “The main thing I kept thinking about while reading Wandering Son… is how things that seem insignificant to one person can be secretly, intensely significant to someone else.” Shimura’s ability to dramatize each character’s unique point of view is one of the reasons Wandering Son never feels preachy, even though the topic suggests an Afterschool Special; we are always exquisitely aware of the subtle but important changes in the way each character views herself, as well as her fears and hopes.

7. PRINCESS KNIGHT (Osamu Tezuka; Vertical, Inc.)

What Osamu Tezuka’s New Treasure Island (1946) was to shonen, his Princess Knight (1953-56) was to shojo: both were long-form adventure stories with cinematic flair. Neither could be said to be the “first” shonen or shojo manga, but both had a profound influence on the artists who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, offering a new storytelling model for them to emulate. Viewed through a contemporary lens, Princess Knight hasn’t aged quite as well as New Treasure Island, as it’s saddled with some woefully antiquated notions of gender. At the same time, however, it’s easy to see why this story appealed to several generations of Japanese girls: Sapphire gets to eat her cake and have it too, having swashbuckling adventures *and* winning the hand of Prince Charming. –Reviewed at Manga Bookshelf on 11/21/11 and The Manga Critic on 12/19/10

6. TANK TANKURO: GAJO SAKAMOTO, MANGA’S PRE-WAR MASTER, 1934-35 (Gajo Sakamoto; Press Pop)

Almost twenty years before Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy took flight in the pages of Shonen Kobunsha magazine, Gajo Sakamoto’s Tank Tankuro enchanted Japanese youngsters with his monster-fighting exploits and cool gadgets. Though the series’ propaganda intent is impossible for contemporary readers to ignore — Tank fights the Chinese, who are portrayed in less-than-flattering terms — Presspop’s new anthology demonstrates that Sakamoto’s artistry has aged more gracefully than his storylines. Sakamoto’s work is packaged in a handsome, hardcover edition that includes thoughtful extras: a contextual essay by translator Sunsuke Nakazawa, an interview with Sakamoto’s son, and an article by Sakamoto himself, discussing the character’s origin.

5. STARGAZING DOG (Takashi Murakami; NBM/Comics Lit)

Consider yourself warned: Stargazing Dog is a five-hanky affair. The two interconnecting vignettes that comprise this slim volume explore the bond between Happie, a shiba inu, and Daddy, his owner. When Daddy loses his job, his home, and his family, he and Happie hit the road in search of a new life. Though the outcome of Happie and Daddy’s journey is never in doubt — we learn their fate in the opening pages of the book — Murakami draws the reader into their story with an honest and unsparing look at the human-dog compact that may remind cinephiles of Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 12/23/11

4. ONWARDS TOWARD OUR NOBLE DEATHS (Shigeru Mizuki; Drawn & Quarterly)

In this blistering indictment of Japanese militarism, Shigeru Mizuki draws on his own experiences during World War II to tell the story of a platoon stationed in Papua New Guinea. The soldiers face a terrible choice: fight a hopeless battle, or face execution for treason. Like many war stories, Onwards Toward Our Noble Deaths documents the tremendous human sacrifice of modern armed conflict: gruesome injuries, senseless deaths, devastated landscapes. What lends Mizuki’s narrative its special potency is his depiction of the senior officers; their perverse dedication to their mission turns them into tyrants, more concerned with saving face than saving their own soldiers’ skins. Essential reading for anyone interested in World War II.

3. THE DROPS OF GOD (Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto; Vertical, Inc.)

As Oishinbo handily demonstrated, a skilled writer can fold a considerable amount of educational detail into a story without reducing it to a textbook. The Drops of God follows a similar template, imparting highly specialized information about wine with the same natural ease that Law & Order illustrates the inner workings of a crime investigation. At the same time, however, Drops is a delicious soap opera, filled with domineering fathers, mustache-twirling villains, evil beauties, eccentric oenophiles, and down-on-their-luck restauranteurs. Even if the reader isn’t the least bit interested in wine, he’ll find the drama as irresistible as an episode of Dynasty. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 12/16/11

2. A ZOO IN WINTER (Jiro Taniguchi; Fanfare/Ponent Mon)

Drawing on his own experiences, Jiro Taniguchi spins an engaging tale about a young man who abandons a promising career in textile design for the opportunity to become a manga artist. Though the basic plot invites comparison with Bakuman, Taniguchi does more than just document important milestones in Hamaguchi’s career: he shows us how Hamaguchi’s emotional maturation informs every aspect of his artistry — something that’s missing from many other portrait-of-an-artist-as-a-young-man sagas, which place much greater emphasis on the pleasure of professional recognition than on the satisfaction of mastering one’s craft. Lovely, moody artwork and an appealing cast of supporting characters complete this very satisfying package.  —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/28/11

1. A BRIDE’S STORY (Kaoru Mori; Yen Press)

A Bride’s Story, which takes place on the banks of the Caspian Sea, explores the relationship between Amir Halgal, a nineteen-year-old nomad, and Karluk Eihon, the eldest son of sheep herders. Though their marriage is one of political expedience, Amir is determined to be a good wife, doing her utmost to learn her new family’s customs, befriend the members of their extended clan, and earn her new husband’s respect. Kaoru Mori is as interested in observing Amir’s everyday life as she is in documenting the growing conflict between the Halgal and Eihon clans, yet A Bride’s Story is never dull, thanks to Mori’s smart, engaging dialogue; as she demonstrated in Emma and Shirley, Mori can make even the simplest moments revealing, whether her characters are preparing a manor house for the master’s return or skinning a freshly killed deer. By allowing her story to unfold in such a naturalistic fashion, A Bride’s Story manages to be both intimate and expansive, offering readers a window into life along the Silk Road. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/24/11

HONORABLE MENTIONS

As in previous years, I had difficulty limiting myself to just ten titles, so I compiled a list of manga that didn’t quite make my best-of list, but were thoroughly enjoyable:

  • OTHER AWESOME DEBUTS: The Book of Human Insects (Vertical, Inc.), Tesoro (VIZ)
  • BEST CONTINUING SERIES: 20th Century Boys (VIZ), Bunny Drop (Yen Press), Chi’s Sweet Home (Vertical, Inc.), Cross Game (VIZ), Ooku: The Inner Chambers (VIZ), Twin Spica (Vertical, Inc.)
  • BEST NEW GUILTY PLEASURE: Blue Exorcist (VIZ), Oresama Teacher (VIZ)
  • BEST REPRINT EDITION: Magic Knight Rayearth (Dark Horse), Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (Kodansha Comics)
  • BEST MANGA I THOUGHT I’D HATE: Cage of Eden (Kodansha Comics)
  • BEST FINALE: Black Jack, Vol. 17 (Vertical, Inc.)

So now I turn the floor over to you, readers: what were your favorite new manga of 2011?

Filed Under: Manga Critic Tagged With: Drawn & Quarterly, Fanfare/Ponent Mon, fantagraphics, Gajo Sakamoto, Jiro Taniguchi, Kaoru Mori, NBM/Comics Lit, One Peace Books, Osamu Tezuka, PressPop, Shigeru, Tokyopop, vertical, yen press

The Best Manga of 2011: The Manga Critic’s Picks

December 31, 2011 by Katherine Dacey

The usual gambit for introducing a year-end list is to remark on the abundance of good titles, acknowledge the difficulty in choosing just ten (or five, or three), and comment on the overall state of the industry. And while I certainly debated what to include on my list, I’ll be honest: 2011 yielded fewer contenders for Best Manga than any other year I’ve covered. The dearth of new titles was attributable to publishers’ financial prudence; companies released fewer books, licensed fewer series, and focused on repackaging older content for budget-conscious consumers. And though I selfishly wish that more new material had been released this year, I think manga publishers have done an excellent job of responding to their biggest challenges: a sluggish economy, digital piracy, and Borders’ bankruptcy.

So what titles made my 2011 list? My top ten are below, along with my list of favorite continuing series, favorite finales, and favorite guilty pleasures.

10. BREATHE DEEPLY (Yamaaki Doton; One Peace Books)

Part sci-fi thriller, part coming-of-age story, this engrossing drama examines the relationship between two young men: Sei, who grew up in a world of privilege, and Oishi, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Both Sei and Oishi fall in love with Yuko, a sickly girl whose incurable illness inspires her suitors to become medical researchers. In less capable hands, Breathe Deeply might have been a mawkish paean to the purity of young love, but the husband-and-wife team of Yamaaki Doton have a keen ear for dialogue; the interactions between Yuko and her two suitors are tinged with an authentic mixture of adolescent anxiety, sexual longing, and braggadocio. Clean, expressive artwork and well-rounded characters help sell the story, especially in its final pages. One of 2011’s best surprises.

9. THE SECRET NOTES OF LADY KANOKO (Ririko Tsujita; Tokyopop)

Kanoko, the sardonic heroine of The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko, is a student of human behavior, gleefully filling her notebooks with detailed observations about her classmates. Though Kanoko would like nothing more than to remain on the sidelines, she frequently becomes embroiled in her peers’ problems; they value her independent perspective, as Kanoko isn’t the least bit interested in dating, running for student council, or currying favor with the alpha clique. Kanoko’s sharp tongue and cool demeanor might make her the mean-girl villain in another shojo manga, but Ririko Tsujita embraces her heroine’s prickly, opinionated nature and makes it fundamental to Kanoko’s appeal. It’s a pity TOKYOPOP didn’t survive long enough to finish this three-volume series, as it’s one of the best shojo titles in recent memory.

8. WANDERING SON (Takako Shimura; Fantagraphics)

In her thoughtful review of volume one, Michelle Smith praised Takako Shimura’s deft use of perspective: “The main thing I kept thinking about while reading Wandering Son… is how things that seem insignificant to one person can be secretly, intensely significant to someone else.” Shimura’s ability to dramatize each character’s unique point of view is one of the reasons Wandering Son never feels preachy, even though the topic suggests an Afterschool Special; we are always exquisitely aware of the subtle but important changes in the way each character views herself, as well as her fears and hopes.

7. PRINCESS KNIGHT (Osamu Tezuka; Vertical, Inc.)

What Osamu Tezuka’s New Treasure Island (1946) was to shonen, his Princess Knight (1953-56) was to shojo: both were long-form adventure stories with cinematic flair. Neither could be said to be the “first” shonen or shojo manga, but both had a profound influence on the artists who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, offering a new storytelling model for them to emulate. Viewed through a contemporary lens, Princess Knight hasn’t aged quite as well as New Treasure Island, as it’s saddled with some woefully antiquated notions of gender. At the same time, however, it’s easy to see why this story appealed to several generations of Japanese girls: Sapphire gets to eat her cake and have it too, having swashbuckling adventures *and* winning the hand of Prince Charming. —Reviewed at Manga Bookshelf on 11/21/11 and The Manga Critic on 12/19/10

6. TANK TANKURO: GAJO SAKAMOTO, MANGA’S PRE-WAR MASTER, 1934-35 (Gajo Sakamoto; Press Pop)

Almost twenty years before Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy took flight in the pages of Shonen Kobunsha magazine, Gajo Sakamoto’s Tank Tankuro enchanted Japanese youngsters with his monster-fighting exploits and cool gadgets. Though the series’ propaganda intent is impossible for contemporary readers to ignore — Tank fights the Chinese, who are portrayed in less-than-flattering terms — Presspop’s new anthology demonstrates that Sakamoto’s artistry has aged more gracefully than his storylines. Sakamoto’s work is packaged in a handsome, hardcover edition that includes thoughtful extras: a contextual essay by translator Sunsuke Nakazawa, an interview with Sakamoto’s son, and an article by Sakamoto himself, discussing the character’s origin.

5. STARGAZING DOG (Takashi Murakami; NBM/Comics Lit)

Consider yourself warned: Stargazing Dog is a five-hanky affair. The two interconnecting vignettes that comprise this slim volume explore the bond between Happie, a shiba inu, and Daddy, his owner. When Daddy loses his job, his home, and his family, he and Happie hit the road in search of a new life. Though the outcome of Happie and Daddy’s journey is never in doubt — we learn their fate in the opening pages of the book — Murakami draws the reader into their story with an honest and unsparing look at the human-dog compact that may remind cinephiles of Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 12/23/11

4. ONWARDS TOWARD OUR NOBLE DEATHS (Shigeru Mizuki; Drawn & Quarterly)

In this blistering indictment of Japanese militarism, Shigeru Mizuki draws on his own experiences during World War II to tell the story of a platoon stationed in Papua New Guinea. The soldiers face a terrible choice: fight a hopeless battle, or face execution for treason. Like many war stories, Onwards Toward Our Noble Deaths documents the tremendous human sacrifice of modern armed conflict: gruesome injuries, senseless deaths, devastated landscapes. What lends Mizuki’s narrative its special potency is his depiction of the senior officers; their perverse dedication to their mission turns them into tyrants, more concerned with saving face than saving their own soldiers’ skins. Essential reading for anyone interested in World War II.

3. THE DROPS OF GOD (Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto; Vertical, Inc.)

As Oishinbo handily demonstrated, a skilled writer can fold a considerable amount of educational detail into a story without reducing it to a textbook. The Drops of God follows a similar template, imparting highly specialized information about wine with the same natural ease that Law & Order illustrates the inner workings of a crime investigation. At the same time, however, Drops is a delicious soap opera, filled with domineering fathers, mustache-twirling villains, evil beauties, eccentric oenophiles, and down-on-their-luck restauranteurs. Even if the reader isn’t the least bit interested in wine, he’ll find the drama as irresistible as an episode of Dynasty. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 12/16/11

2. A ZOO IN WINTER (Jiro Taniguchi; Fanfare/Ponent Mon)

Drawing on his own experiences, Jiro Taniguchi spins an engaging tale about a young man who abandons a promising career in textile design for the opportunity to become a manga artist. Though the basic plot invites comparison with Bakuman, Taniguchi does more than just document important milestones in Hamaguchi’s career: he shows us how Hamaguchi’s emotional maturation informs every aspect of his artistry — something that’s missing from many other portrait-of-an-artist-as-a-young-man sagas, which place much greater emphasis on the pleasure of professional recognition than on the satisfaction of mastering one’s craft. Lovely, moody artwork and an appealing cast of supporting characters complete this very satisfying package.  —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/28/11

1. A BRIDE’S STORY (Kaoru Mori; Yen Press)

A Bride’s Story, which takes place on the banks of the Caspian Sea, explores the relationship between Amir Halgal, a nineteen-year-old nomad, and Karluk Eihon, the eldest son of sheep herders. Though their marriage is one of political expedience, Amir is determined to be a good wife, doing her utmost to learn her new family’s customs, befriend the members of their extended clan, and earn her new husband’s respect. Kaoru Mori is as interested in observing Amir’s everyday life as she is in documenting the growing conflict between the Halgal and Eihon clans, yet A Bride’s Story is never dull, thanks to Mori’s smart, engaging dialogue; as she demonstrated in Emma and Shirley, Mori can make even the simplest moments revealing, whether her characters are preparing a manor house for the master’s return or skinning a freshly killed deer. By allowing her story to unfold in such a naturalistic fashion, A Bride’s Story manages to be both intimate and expansive, offering readers a window into life along the Silk Road. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/24/11

HONORABLE MENTIONS

As in previous years, I had difficulty limiting myself to just ten titles, so I compiled a list of manga that didn’t quite make my best-of list, but were thoroughly enjoyable:

  • OTHER AWESOME DEBUTS: The Book of Human Insects (Vertical, Inc.), Tesoro (VIZ)
  • BEST CONTINUING SERIES: 20th Century Boys (VIZ), Bunny Drop (Yen Press), Chi’s Sweet Home (Vertical, Inc.), Cross Game (VIZ), Ooku: The Inner Chambers (VIZ), Twin Spica (Vertical, Inc.)
  • BEST NEW GUILTY PLEASURE: Blue Exorcist (VIZ), Oresama Teacher (VIZ)
  • BEST REPRINT EDITION: Magic Knight Rayearth (Dark Horse), Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (Kodansha Comics)
  • BEST MANGA I THOUGHT I’D HATE: Cage of Eden (Kodansha Comics)
  • BEST FINALE: Black Jack, Vol. 17 (Vertical, Inc.)

So now I turn the floor over to you, readers: what were your favorite new manga of 2011?

Filed Under: Classic Manga Critic, Manga Critic, Recommended Reading Tagged With: Drawn & Quarterly, Fanfare/Ponent Mon, fantagraphics, Gajo Sakamoto, Jiro Taniguchi, Kaoru Mori, NBM/Comics Lit, One Peace Books, Osamu Tezuka, PressPop, Shigeru, Tokyopop, vertical, yen press

Wandering Son 1 by Shimura Takako: A

March 10, 2011 by Michelle Smith

Book description:
The fifth grade. The threshold to puberty, and the beginning of the end of childhood innocence. Shuichi Nitori and his new friend Yoshino Takatsuki have happy homes, loving families, and are well-liked by their classmates. But they share a secret that further complicates a time of life that is awkward for anyone: Shuichi is a boy who wants to be a girl, and Yoshino is a girl who wants to be a boy. Written and drawn by one of today’s most critically acclaimed creators of manga, Shimura portrays Shuishi and Yoshino’s very private journey with affection, sensitivity, gentle humor, and unmistakable flair and grace. Volume one introduces our two protagonists and the friends and family whose lives intersect with their own. Yoshino is rudely reminded of her sex by immature boys whose budding interest in girls takes clumsily cruel forms. Shuichi’s secret is discovered by Saori, a perceptive and eccentric classmate. And it is Saori who suggests that the fifth graders put on a production of The Rose of Versailles for the farewell ceremony for the sixth graders—with boys playing the roles of women, and girls playing the roles of men.

Wandering Son is a sophisticated work of literary manga translated with rare skill and sensitivity by veteran translator and comics scholar Matt Thorn.

Review:
The main thing I kept thinking about while reading Wandering Son—beyond the continuous undercurrent of general squee—is how things that seem insignificant to one person can be secretly, intensely significant to someone else.

Wandering Son begins simply. Nitori Shuichi (the translation retains Japanese name order) is an extremely shy fifth-grade boy, and as the volume opens, he and his sixth-grade sister, Maho, are preparing for their first day at a new school. Upon arrival, Shuichi is instructed to sit next to Takatsuki Yoshino, a girl so tall and handsome that she’s called Takatsuki-kun by her classmates. They become friends.

One day, when Shuichi goes to Takatsuki’s house to work on some homework, he spies a frilly dress hanging in her room. Perhaps Takatsuki didn’t mean much of anything when she suggested that Shuichi should wear it, but it’s an idea that refuses to leave his head, despite his protests that he isn’t interested. He ends up taking the dress home and giving it to Maho, but its presence in their shared bedroom taunts him.

At this point, Shuichi isn’t thinking about things like gender identity. He’s ten! Instead, he’s dealing with processing the new idea that he could wear a dress and that he might even want to. Slowly, and bolstered by interactions with another encouraging classmate, he begins experimenting. First, he buys a headband. Then he tries dressing as a girl while no one else is home. Finally, when Takatsuki reveals her own treasured possession—her elder brother’s cast-off junior high uniform—he tries going out as a girl in public, with Takatsuki (as a boy) at his side.

One wonders what would’ve happened to Shuichi without Takatsuki to set the example. Would he have become aware of these feelings within himself eventually or been somehow unfulfilled forever? Her comments and her acceptance mean more to him than she knows, as he has a habit of internalizing things that are said to him. After an adorable turn in a female role in a drag version of The Rose of Versailles at school, for example, Maho conversationally notes, “You should have been born a girl.” Again, this is a concept that’s new to Shuichi, but one he gradually comes to believe is true. When his grandmother promises to buy him a present, he visualizes his female form and realizes it’s what he most wants. “Even grandma can’t buy me this.”

I had no problem seeing Takatsuki as a boy throughout, because of her inner certainty and obviously boyish appearance, but Shuichi was more problematic. The moment he confronts the mental vision of what he feels he should be, however, and realizes that he truly wants to be a girl, he starts to become one for the reader. By contrast, it’s shocking when the onset of her first period reminds readers that Takatsuki is biologically female. Though she mostly projects a confident air, her anguish at the undeniable truth that she is not really a boy is intense.

The story is subtle, simple, poignant, and innocent. The tone is matched by Shimura’s uncluttered artwork, which features big panels, little screentone, and extremely minimal backgrounds. These factors combine to make the volume go by quickly, and all too soon it’s over. While waiting for volume two, in which Shuichi and Takatsuki will progress to the sixth grade, I suspect I will have to console myself with the anime adaptation, currently available on Crunchyroll.

The first volume of Wandering Son—published in English by Fantagraphics—will be available in June 2011. The series is still ongoing in Japan, where it is currently up to eleven volumes.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Filed Under: REVIEWS Tagged With: fantagraphics, Takako Shimura

The Best Manga of 2010: The Manga Critic’s Picks

December 6, 2010 by Katherine Dacey 16 Comments

For all the upheaval within the manga industry — the demise of CMX, Del Rey, and Go! Comi, the layoffs at VIZ — 2010 proved an exceptionally good year for storytelling. True, titles like Black Butler, Naruto, and Nabari no Ou dominated sales charts, but publishers made a concerted effort to woo grown-ups with vintage manga — Black Blizzard, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories — edgy sci-fi — Biomega, 7 Billion Needles — underground comix — AX: A Collection of Alternative Manga, The Box Man — and good old-fashioned drama — All My Darling Daughters, Bunny Drop. I had a hard time limiting myself to just ten titles this year, so I’ve borrowed a few categories from my former PCS cohort Erin Finnegan, from Best New Guilty Pleasure to Best Manga You Thought You’d Hate. Please feel free to add your own thoughts: what titles did I unjustly omit? What titles did I like but you didn’t? Inquiring minds want to know!

10. CROSS GAME (Mitsuri Adachi; VIZ)

In this sometimes funny, sometimes melancholy coming-of-age story, a family tragedy brings teenager Ko Kitamura closer to neighbor Aoba Tsukishima, with whom he has a fraught relationship. Though the two bicker with the antagonistic gusto of Beatrice and Benedict, their shared love of baseball helps smooth the course of their budding romance. To be sure, Cross Game can’t escape a certain amount of sports-manga cliche, but Mitsuri Adachi is more interested in showing us how the characters relate to each other than in celebrating their amazing baseball skills. (Not that he skimps on the game play; Adachi clearly knows his way around the diamond.) The result is an agreeable dramedy that has the rhythm of a good situation comedy and the emotional depth of a well-crafted YA novel, with just enough shop-talk to win over baseball enthusiasts, too.

9. AX: A COLLECTION OF ALTERNATIVE MANGA (Various Artists; Top Shelf)

The next time someone dismisses manga as a “style” characterized by youthful-looking, big-eyed characters with button noses, I’m going to hand them a copy of AX, a rude, gleeful, and sometimes disturbing rebuke to the homogenized artwork and storylines found in mainstream manga publications. No one will confuse AX for Young Jump or even Big Comic Spirits; the stories in AX run the gamut from the grotesquely detailed to the playfully abstract, often flaunting their ugliness with the cheerful insistence of a ten-year-old boy waving a dead animal at squeamish classmates. Nor will anyone confuse Yoshihiro Tatsumi or Einosuke’s outlook with the humanism of Osamu Tezuka or Keiji Nakazawa; the stories in AX revel in the darker side of human nature, the part of us that’s fascinated with pain, death, sex, and bodily functions. Like all anthologies, the collection is somewhat uneven, with a few too many scatological tales for its own good, but the very best stories — “The Hare and the Tortoise,” “Push Pin Woman,” “Six Paths of Wealth,” “Puppy Love,” “Inside the Gourd” — attest to the diversity of talent contributing to this seminal manga magazine. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/21/10

8. NEKO RAMEN (Kenji Sonishi; Tokyopop)

If you’ve ever lived with a cat or dog, you know that no meal is complete without a pet hair garnish. Now imagine that your beloved companion actually prepared your meals instead of watching you eat them: what sort of unimaginable horrors might you encounter beyond the stray hair? That’s the starting point for Neko Ramen, a 4-koma manga about a cat whose big dream is to run a noodle shop, but author Kenji Sonishi quickly moves past hair balls and litter box jokes to mine a richer vein of humor, poking fun at his cat cook’s delusions of entrepreneurial grandeur. Taisho is the Don Quixote of ramen vendors, dreaming up ludicrous giveaways and unappetizing dishes in an effort to promote his business, never realizing that he is the store’s real selling point. The loose, sketchy artwork gives the series an improvisational feel, while the script has the pleasant, absurdist zing of an Abbott and Costello routine. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/2/10

7. AYAKO (Osamu Tezuka; Vertical, Inc.)

Combining the psychological realism of Dostoevsky with the social consciousness of Tolstoy and Zola, Osamu Tezuka uses conflicts within the once-powerful Tenge clan to dramatize the social, political, and economic upheaval caused by the American occupation of post-war Japan. No subject is off-limits for Tezuka: the Tenge commit murders, spy for the Americans, join the Communist Party, imprison a family member in an underground cell, and engage in incest. It’s one of Tezuka’s most sober and damning stories, at once tremendously powerful and seriously disturbing, with none of the cartoonish excess of Ode to Kirihito or MW. The ending is perhaps too pat and loaded with symbolism for its own good, but like Tezuka’s best work, Ayako forces the reader to confront the darkest, most corruptible corners of the human soul. As with Apollo’s Song, Black Jack, and Buddha, Vertical has done a superb job of making Tezuka accessible to Western readers with flipped artwork and a fluid translation.

6. BUNNY DROP (Yumi Unita; Yen Press)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a thirty-something bachelor unexpectedly becomes a parent to a cute little girl, leading to hijinks, misunderstandings, and heart-tugging moments. That’s a fair summary of what happens in Bunny Drop, but Yumi Unita wisely avoids the pitfalls of the single-dad genre — the cheap sentiment, the unfunny scenes of dad recoiling in horror at diapers, runny noses, and tears — instead focusing on the unique bond between Daikichi and Rin, the six-year-old whom he impetuously adopts after the rest of the family disavows her. (Rin is the product of a liaison between Daikichi’s grandfather and a much younger woman.) Though Daikichi struggles to find day care, buy clothes for Rin, and make sense of her standoffish behavior, he isn’t a buffoon or a straight man for Rin’s antics; Unita portrays him as a smart, sensitive person blessed with good instincts and common sense. Clean, expressive artwork and true-to-life dialogue further inoculate Bunny Drop against a terminal case of sitcom cuteness, making it one of the most thoughtful, moving, and adult manga of the year.

5. BLACK BLIZZARD (Yoshihiro Tatsumi; Drawn & Quarterly)

Written in just twenty days, this feverish pulp thriller plays like a mash-up of The Fugitive, The 39 Steps, and The Defiant Ones as two convicts — one a hardened criminal, the other a down-on-his luck musician — go on the lam during a blinding snowstorm. The heroes are more archetypes than characters, drawn in bold strokes, but the interaction between them crackles with antagonistic energy; they’re as much enemies as partners, roles that they constantly renegotiate during their escape. Evocative artwork — slashing lines, dramatic camera angles, images of speeding trains — infuses Black Blizzard with a raw, nervous energy that nicely mirrors the characters’ internal state. Only in the final, rushed pages does manga-ka Yoshihiro Tatsumi falter, tidily resolving the story through an all-too-convenient plot twist that hinges on coincidence. Still, that’s a minor criticism of a thoroughly entertaining story written during a crucial stage of Tatsumi’s artistic development. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 9/9/10

4. HOUSE OF FIVE LEAVES (Natsume Ono; VIZ)

Timid ronin Akitsu Masanosuke can’t hold a steady job, despite his formidable swordsmanship. When a businessman approaches him with work, Masanosuke readily accepts, not realizing that his new employer, Yaichi, runs a crime syndicate that specializes in kidnapping. Masanosuke’s unwitting participation in a blackmailing scheme prevents him from severing his ties to Yaichi; Masanosuke must then decide if he will join the House of Five Leaves or bide his time until he can escape. Though Toshiro Mifune and Hiroyuki Sanada have made entire careers out of playing characters like Masanosuke, Natsume Ono makes a persuasive case that you don’t need a flesh-and-blood actor to tell this kind of story with heartbreaking intensity; she can do the slow-burn on the printed page with the same skill as Masaki Kobayashi (Hara Kiri, Samurai Rebellion) and Yoji Yamada (The Twilight Samurai) did on the big screen. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 8/20/10

3. TWIN SPICA (Kou Yaginuma; Vertical, Inc.)

Asumi Kamogawa is a small girl with a big dream: to be an astronaut on Japan’s first manned space flight. Though she passes the entrance exam for Tokyo Space School, she faces several additional hurdles to realizing her goal, from her child-like stature — she’s thirteen going on eight — to a faculty member who blames her father for causing a fiery rocket crash that claimed hundreds of civilian lives. Yet for all the setbacks she’s experienced, Asumi proves resilient, a gentle girl who perseveres in difficult situations, offers friendship in lieu of judgment, and demonstrates a preternatural awareness of life’s fragility. Twin Spica follows Asumi through every stage of training, from physics lectures to zero-G simulations, showing us how she befriends her fellow cadets and gradually learns to rely on herself, rather than her imaginary friend, Mr. Lion. Though Twin Spica was serialized in a seinen magazine, it works surprisingly well for young adults, too, an all-too-rare example of a direct, heartfelt story that’s neither saccharine nor mawkish.  –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/3/10

2. ALL MY DARLING DAUGHTERS (Fumi Yoshinaga; VIZ)

The five vignettes in All My Darling Daughters depict women negotiating difficult personal relationships: a daughter confronts her mother about mom’s new, much younger husband; a college student seduces her professor, only to dump him when he tries to court her properly; a beautiful young woman contemplates an arranged marriage. Like all of Yoshinaga’s work, the characters in All My Darling Daughters love to talk. That chattiness isn’t always an asset to Yoshinaga’s storytelling (see Gerard and Jacques), but here the dialogue is perfectly calibrated to reveal just how complex and ambivalent these relationships really are. Yoshinaga’s artwork is understated but effective, as she uses small details — how a character stands or carries her shoulders — to offer a more complete and nuanced portrait of each woman. Quite possibly my favorite work by Yoshinaga.

1. A DRUNKEN DREAM AND OTHER STORIES (Moto Hagio; Fantagraphics)

Not coincidentally, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories was my nomination for Best New Graphic Novel of 2010 as well. Here’s what I had to say about the title over at Flashlight Worthy Books:

Moto Hagio is to shojo manga what Will Eisner is to American comics, a seminal creator whose distinctive style and sensibility profoundly changed the medium. Though Hagio has been actively publishing stories since the late 1960s, very little of her work has been translated into English. A Drunken Dream, published by Fantagraphics, is an excellent corrective — a handsomely produced, meticulously edited collection of Hagio’s short stories that span her career from 1970 to 2007. Readers new to Hagio’s work will appreciate the inclusion of two contextual essays by manga scholar Matt Thorn, one an introduction to Hagio and her peers, the other an interview with Hagio. What emerges is a portrait of a gifted artist who draws inspiration from many sources: Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishimonori, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, Frances Hodgson Burnett and L.M. Montgomery.

For the complete list — including nominations from David “Manga Curmudgeon” Welsh, Brigid “MangaBlog” Alverson, Lorena “i heart manga” Ruggero, and Matthew “Warren Peace Sings the Blues” Brady — click here. To read my full review of A Drunken Dream, click here.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Done because there are too menny… great manga, that is, to confine myself to a traditional top ten list. With apologies to Thomas Hardy, here are some of the other titles that tickled my fancy in 2010:

  • OTHER AWESOME DEBUTS: Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me Happy (Yen Press), Saturn Apartments (VIZ), 7 Billion Needles (Vertical, Inc.)
  • BEST CONTINUING SERIES: Itazura na Kiss (DMP), Ooku: The Inner Chambers (VIZ), Suppli (Tokyopop), 20th Century Boys (VIZ)
  • BEST NEW ALL-AGES MANGA: Chi’s Sweet Home (Vertical, Inc.)
  • BEST NEW SERIES THAT’S ALREADY ON HIATUS: Diamond Girl (CMX), Stolen Hearts (CMX)
  • BEST NEW GUILTY PLEASURE: Demon Sacred (Tokyopop), Dragon Girl (Yen Press)
  • BEST REPRINT EDITION: Cardcaptor Sakura (Dark Horse), Little Butterfly Omnibus (DMP)
  • BEST MANGA I THOUGHT I’D HATE: Higurashi When They Cry: Beyond Midnight Arc (Yen Press)
  • BEST FINALE: Pluto: Tezuka x Urasawa (VIZ)

Filed Under: Manga Critic Tagged With: cmx, Dark Horse, DMP, Drawn & Quarterly, fantagraphics, fumi yoshinaga, moto hagio, Naoki Urasawa, Osamu Tezuka, SigIKKI, Tokyopop, Top Shelf, vertical, VIZ, yen press, Yoshihiro Tatsumi

The Best Manga of 2010: The Manga Critic’s Picks

December 6, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

For all the upheaval within the manga industry — the demise of CMX, Del Rey, and Go! Comi, the layoffs at VIZ — 2010 proved an exceptionally good year for storytelling. True, titles like Black Butler, Naruto, and Nabari no Ou dominated sales charts, but publishers made a concerted effort to woo grown-ups with vintage manga — Black Blizzard, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories — edgy sci-fi — Biomega, 7 Billion Needles — underground comix — AX: A Collection of Alternative Manga, The Box Man — and good old-fashioned drama — All My Darling Daughters, Bunny Drop. I had a hard time limiting myself to just ten titles this year, so I’ve borrowed a few categories from my former PCS cohort Erin Finnegan, from Best New Guilty Pleasure to Best Manga You Thought You’d Hate. Please feel free to add your own thoughts: what titles did I unjustly omit? What titles did I like but you didn’t? Inquiring minds want to know!

10. CROSS GAME (Mitsuri Adachi; VIZ)

In this sometimes funny, sometimes melancholy coming-of-age story, a family tragedy brings teenager Ko Kitamura closer to neighbor Aoba Tsukishima, with whom he has a fraught relationship. Though the two bicker with the antagonistic gusto of Beatrice and Benedict, their shared love of baseball helps smooth the course of their budding romance. To be sure, Cross Game can’t escape a certain amount of sports-manga cliche, but Mitsuri Adachi is more interested in showing us how the characters relate to each other than in celebrating their amazing baseball skills. (Not that he skimps on the game play; Adachi clearly knows his way around the diamond.) The result is an agreeable dramedy that has the rhythm of a good situation comedy and the emotional depth of a well-crafted YA novel, with just enough shop-talk to win over baseball enthusiasts, too.

9. AX: A COLLECTION OF ALTERNATIVE MANGA (Various Artists; Top Shelf)

The next time someone dismisses manga as a “style” characterized by youthful-looking, big-eyed characters with button noses, I’m going to hand them a copy of AX, a rude, gleeful, and sometimes disturbing rebuke to the homogenized artwork and storylines found in mainstream manga publications. No one will confuse AX for Young Jump or even Big Comic Spirits; the stories in AX run the gamut from the grotesquely detailed to the playfully abstract, often flaunting their ugliness with the cheerful insistence of a ten-year-old boy waving a dead animal at squeamish classmates. Nor will anyone confuse Yoshihiro Tatsumi or Einosuke’s outlook with the humanism of Osamu Tezuka or Keiji Nakazawa; the stories in AX revel in the darker side of human nature, the part of us that’s fascinated with pain, death, sex, and bodily functions. Like all anthologies, the collection is somewhat uneven, with a few too many scatological tales for its own good, but the very best stories — “The Hare and the Tortoise,” “Push Pin Woman,” “Six Paths of Wealth,” “Puppy Love,” “Inside the Gourd” — attest to the diversity of talent contributing to this seminal manga magazine. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/21/10

8. NEKO RAMEN (Kenji Sonishi; Tokyopop)

If you’ve ever lived with a cat or dog, you know that no meal is complete without a pet hair garnish. Now imagine that your beloved companion actually prepared your meals instead of watching you eat them: what sort of unimaginable horrors might you encounter beyond the stray hair? That’s the starting point for Neko Ramen, a 4-koma manga about a cat whose big dream is to run a noodle shop, but author Kenji Sonishi quickly moves past hair balls and litter box jokes to mine a richer vein of humor, poking fun at his cat cook’s delusions of entrepreneurial grandeur. Taisho is the Don Quixote of ramen vendors, dreaming up ludicrous giveaways and unappetizing dishes in an effort to promote his business, never realizing that he is the store’s real selling point. The loose, sketchy artwork gives the series an improvisational feel, while the script has the pleasant, absurdist zing of an Abbott and Costello routine. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/2/10

7. AYAKO (Osamu Tezuka; Vertical, Inc.)

Combining the psychological realism of Dostoevsky with the social consciousness of Tolstoy and Zola, Osamu Tezuka uses conflicts within the once-powerful Tenge clan to dramatize the social, political, and economic upheaval caused by the American occupation of post-war Japan. No subject is off-limits for Tezuka: the Tenge commit murders, spy for the Americans, join the Communist Party, imprison a family member in an underground cell, and engage in incest. It’s one of Tezuka’s most sober and damning stories, at once tremendously powerful and seriously disturbing, with none of the cartoonish excess of Ode to Kirihito or MW. The ending is perhaps too pat and loaded with symbolism for its own good, but like Tezuka’s best work, Ayako forces the reader to confront the darkest, most corruptible corners of the human soul. As with Apollo’s Song, Black Jack, and Buddha, Vertical has done a superb job of making Tezuka accessible to Western readers with flipped artwork and a fluid translation.

6. BUNNY DROP (Yumi Unita; Yen Press)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a thirty-something bachelor unexpectedly becomes a parent to a cute little girl, leading to hijinks, misunderstandings, and heart-tugging moments. That’s a fair summary of what happens in Bunny Drop, but Yumi Unita wisely avoids the pitfalls of the single-dad genre — the cheap sentiment, the unfunny scenes of dad recoiling in horror at diapers, runny noses, and tears — instead focusing on the unique bond between Daikichi and Rin, the six-year-old whom he impetuously adopts after the rest of the family disavows her. (Rin is the product of a liaison between Daikichi’s grandfather and a much younger woman.) Though Daikichi struggles to find day care, buy clothes for Rin, and make sense of her standoffish behavior, he isn’t a buffoon or a straight man for Rin’s antics; Unita portrays him as a smart, sensitive person blessed with good instincts and common sense. Clean, expressive artwork and true-to-life dialogue further inoculate Bunny Drop against a terminal case of sitcom cuteness, making it one of the most thoughtful, moving, and adult manga of the year.

5. BLACK BLIZZARD (Yoshihiro Tatsumi; Drawn & Quarterly)

Written in just twenty days, this feverish pulp thriller plays like a mash-up of The Fugitive, The 39 Steps, and The Defiant Ones as two convicts — one a hardened criminal, the other a down-on-his luck musician — go on the lam during a blinding snowstorm. The heroes are more archetypes than characters, drawn in bold strokes, but the interaction between them crackles with antagonistic energy; they’re as much enemies as partners, roles that they constantly renegotiate during their escape. Evocative artwork — slashing lines, dramatic camera angles, images of speeding trains — infuses Black Blizzard with a raw, nervous energy that nicely mirrors the characters’ internal state. Only in the final, rushed pages does manga-ka Yoshihiro Tatsumi falter, tidily resolving the story through an all-too-convenient plot twist that hinges on coincidence. Still, that’s a minor criticism of a thoroughly entertaining story written during a crucial stage of Tatsumi’s artistic development. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 9/9/10

4. HOUSE OF FIVE LEAVES (Natsume Ono; VIZ)

Timid ronin Akitsu Masanosuke can’t hold a steady job, despite his formidable swordsmanship. When a businessman approaches him with work, Masanosuke readily accepts, not realizing that his new employer, Yaichi, runs a crime syndicate that specializes in kidnapping. Masanosuke’s unwitting participation in a blackmailing scheme prevents him from severing his ties to Yaichi; Masanosuke must then decide if he will join the House of Five Leaves or bide his time until he can escape. Though Toshiro Mifune and Hiroyuki Sanada have made entire careers out of playing characters like Masanosuke, Natsume Ono makes a persuasive case that you don’t need a flesh-and-blood actor to tell this kind of story with heartbreaking intensity; she can do the slow-burn on the printed page with the same skill as Masaki Kobayashi (Hara Kiri, Samurai Rebellion) and Yoji Yamada (The Twilight Samurai) did on the big screen. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 8/20/10

3. TWIN SPICA (Kou Yaginuma; Vertical, Inc.)

Asumi Kamogawa is a small girl with a big dream: to be an astronaut on Japan’s first manned space flight. Though she passes the entrance exam for Tokyo Space School, she faces several additional hurdles to realizing her goal, from her child-like stature — she’s thirteen going on eight — to a faculty member who blames her father for causing a fiery rocket crash that claimed hundreds of civilian lives. Yet for all the setbacks she’s experienced, Asumi proves resilient, a gentle girl who perseveres in difficult situations, offers friendship in lieu of judgment, and demonstrates a preternatural awareness of life’s fragility. Twin Spica follows Asumi through every stage of training, from physics lectures to zero-G simulations, showing us how she befriends her fellow cadets and gradually learns to rely on herself, rather than her imaginary friend, Mr. Lion. Though Twin Spica was serialized in a seinen magazine, it works surprisingly well for young adults, too, an all-too-rare example of a direct, heartfelt story that’s neither saccharine nor mawkish.  —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/3/10

2. ALL MY DARLING DAUGHTERS (Fumi Yoshinaga; VIZ)

The five vignettes in All My Darling Daughters depict women negotiating difficult personal relationships: a daughter confronts her mother about mom’s new, much younger husband; a college student seduces her professor, only to dump him when he tries to court her properly; a beautiful young woman contemplates an arranged marriage. Like all of Yoshinaga’s work, the characters in All My Darling Daughters love to talk. That chattiness isn’t always an asset to Yoshinaga’s storytelling (see Gerard and Jacques), but here the dialogue is perfectly calibrated to reveal just how complex and ambivalent these relationships really are. Yoshinaga’s artwork is understated but effective, as she uses small details — how a character stands or carries her shoulders — to offer a more complete and nuanced portrait of each woman. Quite possibly my favorite work by Yoshinaga.

1. A DRUNKEN DREAM AND OTHER STORIES (Moto Hagio; Fantagraphics)

Not coincidentally, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories was my nomination for Best New Graphic Novel of 2010 as well. Here’s what I had to say about the title over at Flashlight Worthy Books:

Moto Hagio is to shojo manga what Will Eisner is to American comics, a seminal creator whose distinctive style and sensibility profoundly changed the medium. Though Hagio has been actively publishing stories since the late 1960s, very little of her work has been translated into English. A Drunken Dream, published by Fantagraphics, is an excellent corrective — a handsomely produced, meticulously edited collection of Hagio’s short stories that span her career from 1970 to 2007. Readers new to Hagio’s work will appreciate the inclusion of two contextual essays by manga scholar Matt Thorn, one an introduction to Hagio and her peers, the other an interview with Hagio. What emerges is a portrait of a gifted artist who draws inspiration from many sources: Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishimonori, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, Frances Hodgson Burnett and L.M. Montgomery.

For the complete list — including nominations from David “Manga Curmudgeon” Welsh, Brigid “MangaBlog” Alverson, Lorena “i heart manga” Ruggero, and Matthew “Warren Peace Sings the Blues” Brady — click here. To read my full review of A Drunken Dream, click here.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Done because there are too menny… great manga, that is, to confine myself to a traditional top ten list. With apologies to Thomas Hardy, here are some of the other titles that tickled my fancy in 2010:

  • OTHER AWESOME DEBUTS: Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me Happy (Yen Press), Saturn Apartments (VIZ), 7 Billion Needles (Vertical, Inc.)
  • BEST CONTINUING SERIES: Itazura na Kiss (DMP), Ooku: The Inner Chambers (VIZ), Suppli (Tokyopop), 20th Century Boys (VIZ)
  • BEST NEW ALL-AGES MANGA: Chi’s Sweet Home (Vertical, Inc.)
  • BEST NEW SERIES THAT’S ALREADY ON HIATUS: Diamond Girl (CMX), Stolen Hearts (CMX)
  • BEST NEW GUILTY PLEASURE: Demon Sacred (Tokyopop), Dragon Girl (Yen Press)
  • BEST REPRINT EDITION: Cardcaptor Sakura (Dark Horse), Little Butterfly Omnibus (DMP)
  • BEST MANGA I THOUGHT I’D HATE: Higurashi When They Cry: Beyond Midnight Arc (Yen Press)
  • BEST FINALE: Pluto: Tezuka x Urasawa (VIZ)

Filed Under: Classic Manga Critic, Manga, Manga Critic, Recommended Reading Tagged With: cmx, Dark Horse, DMP, Drawn & Quarterly, fantagraphics, fumi yoshinaga, moto hagio, Naoki Urasawa, Osamu Tezuka, SigIKKI, Tokyopop, Top Shelf, vertical, VIZ, yen press, Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Pick of the Week: A Drunken Dream

August 24, 2010 by MJ 10 Comments

Buy this book – As I peruse this week’s new arrivals at Comicopia.com, I feel a bit sad. There are a number of new volumes that might normally catch my eye for Pick of the Week. Rasetsu, for instance, has become quite a favorite. And who can resist Sand Chronicles?

This week, however, everything fades in the presence of a newly-released collection of short manga from shojo pioneer Moto Hagio, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. The book is published by Fantagraphics, and edited and translated by Matt Thorn.

Simply put, this book is gorgeous. You can expect a review here soon at Manga Bookshelf, though there’s no way I’ll come even close to doing it justice, unlike Kate Dacey, whose recent review should be required reading all on its own. Visit Publishers Weekly for a very generous preview, if you’re wondering just what I mean by “gorgeous.” Also, check out the slideshow at Fantagraphics’ website for a glimpse of its spectacular, hardcover glory. This is not a cheap book (in any sense of the word), and it is a must-buy for any fan of sequential art.

For my thoughts on one of the very few of Hagio’s works to be published in English, you can read my review of the out-of-print short series They Were Eleven.

This is a release I’ve been eagerly anticipating since its announcement. Visit your local bookstore to find out why.

Filed Under: PICK OF THE WEEK Tagged With: fantagraphics, matt thorn, moto hagio, pick of the week

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

July 22, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

The 1970s marked a turning point in the development of shojo manga, as the first time in the medium’s history that a significant number of women were working in the field. These “founding mothers” weren’t the first female manga artists; Machiko Hasegawa was an early pioneer with Sazae-san,[1] a comic strip that first appeared in her hometown newspaper in 1946, followed in the 1950s by such artists as Masako Watanabe, who debuted in 1952 with Suama-chan, Hideko Mizuno, who debuted in 1956 with Akakke Pony (Red-Haired Pony),[2] and Miyako Maki, who debuted in 1957 with Hahakoi Waltz (Mother’s Love Waltz). Beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing throughout the 1970s, more female creators entered the profession, thus beginning the quiet transformation of shojo manga from sentimental stories for very young readers to a vibrant medium that spoke directly to the concerns and desires of teenage girls.

Several figures played an important role in affecting this transformation. One was Osamu Tezuka, whose Princess Knight (1954)[3] is often erroneously described as “the first shojo manga.” (Shojo manga, in fact, dates to the beginning of the twentieth century, when magazines such as Shojo Sekai, or Girls’ World, featured comics alongside stories, articles, and illustrations.) An affectionate pastiche of Walt Disney, Zorro, and Takarazuka plays, Tezuka’s gender-bending story focused on a princess with two hearts — one female, one male — who becomes a masked crusader to save her kingdom from falling into the hands of a wicked nobleman. However conventional the ending seems now — Princess Sapphire eventually marries the prince of her dreams and hangs up her sword — the story was a rare example of a long-form adventure for girls; well into the 1950s, most shojo manga featured plotlines reminiscent of Victorian children’s literature, filled with young, imperiled heroines buffeted by fate until happily reunited with their families.

Another major influence was Yoshiko Nishitani, whose ground-breaking series Mary Lou appeared in Weekly Margaret in 1965. Mary Lou was among the very first shojo manga to feature an ordinary teenager as both the protagonist and romantic lead; its eponymous heroine suffered from the kind of everyday problems — a beautiful older sister, a boy who sends confusing signals — that invited readers to identify with her. Like Princess Knight, the gender politics of Mary Lou may strike contemporary Western readers as nostalgic at best, retrograde at worst, but Nishitani’s ability to make a compelling story out of ordinary adolescent experience struck a chord with Japanese girls, providing an important model for subsequent generations of shojo artists.

Moto Hagio and The “Founding Mothers” of Modern Shojo

In the hands of the Magnificent Forty-Niners and the other women who entered the field in the 1970s,  shojo manga underwent a profound transformation, giving rise to a new kind of storytelling that emphasized the importance of relationships and introspection, even when the stories took place in eighteenth-century France (The Rose of Versailles), Taisho-era Japan (Haikara-san ga Toru, or, Here Comes Miss Modern), or the distant future (They Were Eleven!). Inspired by Tezuka’s cinematic approach to storytelling, they sought to dramatize their characters’ inner lives with the same dynamism that Tezuka brought to car chases, fist fights, and heated conversations. Hagio and her peers placed a premium on subjectivity, trying their utmost to help readers see the world through the characters’ point of view, eschewing tidy grids for fluid, expressionist layouts, and employing an elaborate code of visual signifiers to represent emotions from love to anxiety — symbols still in widespread use today.

Moto Hagio was one of these shojo trailblazers, making her professional debut in 1969 with “Lulu to Mimi,” a short story that appeared in the girls’ magazine Nakayoshi. In the years that followed, she proved enormously versatile, working in a variety of genres: “November Gymnasium” (1971) explores a romantic relationship between two young men, for example, while The Poe Family (1972-76) focuses on a vampire doomed to live out his existence in a teenage boy’s body. Hagio is perhaps best known to Western readers for her science fiction’s unique blend of social commentary and lyrical imagery. A, A’, for example, examines the relationship between memory and identity, while They Were Eleven tackles the thorny question of whether gender determines destiny.

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

The ten stories that comprise A Drunken Dream span the entire length of Hagio’s career, from “Bianca” (1970), one of her first published works, to “A Drunken Dream” (1985), a sci-fi fantasy written around the same time as the stories in A, A’, to “The Willow Tree” (2007), an entry in her recent anthology Anywhere But Here.

What A Drunken Dream reveals is an author whose childhood passion for Frances Hodgson Burnett, L.M. Montgomery, and Isaac Asimov profoundly influenced the kind of stories she chose to tell as an adult. “Bianca,” for example, is a unabashedly Romantic story about artistic expression. The main narrative is framed by a discussion between Clara, a middle-aged woman, and an art collector curious about the “dryad” who appears in Clara’s paintings. As a teenager, Clara secretly witnessed her younger cousin Bianca dancing with great abandon in a wooded glen, a child’s way of coping with the pain of her parents’ tumultuous relationship. Bianca’s dance haunted Clara for years, even though their acquaintance was brief. “The way [Bianca] danced… the way it made me feel… I can’t describe it in words,” the middle-aged Clara explains to her guest. “But the thrill of that moment still shines today, and still shakes me to my core. And it was my irresistible need to draw that which led me to become a painter.”

Other stories explore the complexity of familial relationships. “Hanshin: Half-God,” for example, depicts conjoined twins with a rare medical condition that leaves one brilliant but physically deformed and the other simple but radiantly beautiful. When a life-threatening condition necessitates an operation to separate them, Yudy, the “big sister,” imagines it will liberate her from the responsibility of caring for and about Yucy, never considering the degree to which she and Yucy are emotionally interdependent. In “The Child Who Comes Home,” the emphasis is on parent-child relationships, exploring how a mother and her son cope with the death of the family’s youngest member. Throughout the story, the deceased Yuu appears in many of the panels, though we are never sure if Yuu’s ghost is real, or if his family’s lingering attachment to him is making his memory palpable.

iguanagirlThe emotional core of A Drunken Dream — for me, at least — is Hagio’s 1991 story “Iguana Girl.” Rika, the heroine, is a truly grotesque figure — not in the everyday sense of being ugly or unpleasant, but in the Romantic sense, as a person whose bizarre affliction arouses empathy in readers. Born to a woman who appears human but is, in fact, an enchanted lizard, Rika is immediately rejected by her mother, who sees only a repulsive likeness of herself. Yuriko’s disgust for her daughter manifests itself in myriad ways: withering put-downs, slaps and shouts, blatant displays of favoritism for Rika’s younger sister Mami. As Rika matures, Hagio gives us tantalizing glimpses of Rika not as an iguana, but as the rest of the world sees her: a lovely but reserved young woman. As with “The Child Who Comes Home,” the heroine’s appearance could be interpreted literally, as evidence of magical realism, or figuratively, as a metaphor for the way in which children mirror their parents’ own flaws and disappointments; either way, Rika’s quest to heal her childhood wounds is easily one of the most moving stories I’ve read in comic form, a testament to Hagio’s ability to make Rika’s fraught relationship with her mother seem both terribly specific and utterly universal.

Perhaps the best compliment I can pay Hagio is praising her ability to make the ineffable speak through pictures, whether she’s documenting the grief that a young woman feels after aborting her baby (“Angel Mimic”) or the intense longing a middle-aged man feels for the college friends who abandoned him (“Marie, Ten Years Later”). Nowhere is this more evident than in the final story, “The Willow Tree.” At first glance, the layout is simple: each page consists of just two large, rectangular panels in which a woman stands beneath a tree, watching a parade of people — a doleful man and a little boy, a group of rambunctious grade-schoolers, a teenager wooing a classmate — as they stroll on the embankment above her. A careful reading of the images, however, reveals a complex story spanning many years. Hagio uses subtle cues — light, weather, and the principal character’s body language — to suggest the woman’s relationship to the people who walk past the tree. The last ten panels are beautifully executed; though the woman never utters a word, her face suddenly registers all the pain, joy, and anxiety she experienced during her decades-long vigil.

For those new to Hagio’s work, Fantagraphics has prefaced A Drunken Dream with two indispensable articles by noted manga scholar Matt Thorn.[4] The first, “The Magnificent Forty-Niners,” places Hagio in context, introducing her peers and providing an overview of her major publications. The second, “The Moto Hagio Interview,” is a lengthy conversation between scholar and artist about Hagio’s formative reading experiences, first jobs, and recurring use of certain motifs. Both reveal Hagio to be as complex as her stories, at once thoughtful about her own work and surprised by her success. Taken together with the stories in A Drunken Dream, these essays make an excellent introduction to one of the most literary and original voices working in comics today. Highly recommended.

A DRUNKEN DREAM AND OTHER STORIES • BY MOTO HAGIO, TRANSLATED BY MATT THORN • FANTAGRAPHICS • 288 pp.

NOTES

1. The Wonderful World of Sazae-San ran in newspapers from 1946 to 1974. The collected strips, comprising 45 volumes in all, have been perennial best-sellers in Japan, with over 60 million books sold. It’s imporant to note that Sazae-san is not shojo manga; the story focuses on a resourceful, strong-willed housewife and her family, a kind of Mother Knows Best story. Nonetheless, Machiko Hasegawa is an important figure in the history of the medium, both for the influence of her strip and her trailblazing role as a female creator.

2. For more information about Hideko Mizuno, see Marc Bernabe’s recent profile and interview at Masters of Manga.

3. Princess Knight has a long and complex publishing history. The original story appeared in Shojo Club from 1953 to 1956, was continued in Nakayoshi in 1958, and revived again for Nakayoshi in 1963. The third version is generally considered to be the definitive one; Tezuka re-worked a few details from the original version and re-drew the series. In 2001, Kodansha released a bilingual edition of the 1963 version which is now out of print.

4. Both essays originally appeared in issue no. 269 of The Comics Journal (July 2005).

FOR FURTHER READING

Bernabe, Marc. “What is the ‘Year 24 Group’?” Interview with Moto Hagio. [http://mastersofmanga.com/2010/06/hagioyear24] [Accessed 7/22/10.]

Gravett, Paul. Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics. New York: Collins Design, 2004.

Randall, Bill. “Three By Moto Hagio.” The Comics Journal 252 (April 2003). (Full text available online at The Comics Journal Archives.)

Shamoon, Deborah. “Revolutionary Romance: The Rose of Versailles and the Transformation of Shojo Manga.” Mechademia 2 (2007): 3-18.

Schodt, Frederick. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. New York: Kodansha International, 1983.

Thorn, Matt. “The Multi-Faceted Universe of Shoujo Manga.” [http://www.matt-thorn.com/shoujo_manga/colloque/index.php] (Accessed 7/21/10.)

Thorn, Matt. “What Japanese Girls Do With Manga and Why.” [http://www.matt-thorn.com/shoujo_manga/jaws/index.php] (Accessed 7/21/10/)

Toku, Masaki, ed. Shojo Manga! Girl Power! Chico, CA: Flume Press, 2005.

Vollmar, Rob. “X+X.” The Comics Journal 269 (July 2005): 134-36.

WORKS BY MOTO HAGIO AND HER PEERS (IN ENGLISH)

Aoike, Yasuko. From Eroica With Love. La Jolla, CA: CMX Manga/Wildstorm Productions, 2004 – 2010. 15 volumes (incomplete).

Ariyoshi, Kyoko. Swan. La Jolla, CA: CMX Manga/Wildstorm Productions, 2005 – 2010. 15 volumes (incomplete).

Hagio, Moto. A, A’ [A, A Prime]. Translated by Matt Thorn. San Francisco: Viz Communications, 1997. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/31/10.)

Hagio, Moto, Keiko Nishi, and Shio Sato. Four Shojo Stories. Translated by Matt Thorn. San Francisco: Viz Communications, 1996. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/31/10.)

Mitsuse, Ryu and Keiko Takemiya. Andromeda Stories. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2007. 3 volumes. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/26/10.)

Takemiya, Keiko. To Terra. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2007. 3 volumes. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/23/10.)

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Classic, fantagraphics, Magnificent 49ers, moto hagio, shojo

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

July 22, 2010 by Katherine Dacey

The 1970s marked a turning point in the development of shojo manga, as the first time in the medium’s history that a significant number of women were working in the field. These “founding mothers” weren’t the first female manga artists; Machiko Hasegawa was an early pioneer with Sazae-san,[1] a comic strip that first appeared in her hometown newspaper in 1946, followed in the 1950s by such artists as Masako Watanabe, who debuted in 1952 with Suama-chan, Hideko Mizuno, who debuted in 1956 with Akakke Pony (Red-Haired Pony),[2] and Miyako Maki, who debuted in 1957 with Hahakoi Waltz (Mother’s Love Waltz). Beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing throughout the 1970s, more female creators entered the profession, thus beginning the quiet transformation of shojo manga from sentimental stories for very young readers to a vibrant medium that spoke directly to the concerns and desires of teenage girls.

Several figures played an important role in affecting this transformation. One was Osamu Tezuka, whose Princess Knight (1954)[3] is often erroneously described as “the first shojo manga.” (Shojo manga, in fact, dates to the beginning of the twentieth century, when magazines such as Shojo Sekai, or Girls’ World, featured comics alongside stories, articles, and illustrations.) An affectionate pastiche of Walt Disney, Zorro, and Takarazuka plays, Tezuka’s gender-bending story focused on a princess with two hearts — one female, one male — who becomes a masked crusader to save her kingdom from falling into the hands of a wicked nobleman. However conventional the ending seems now — Princess Sapphire eventually marries the prince of her dreams and hangs up her sword — the story was a rare example of a long-form adventure for girls; well into the 1950s, most shojo manga featured plotlines reminiscent of Victorian children’s literature, filled with young, imperiled heroines buffeted by fate until happily reunited with their families.

Another major influence was Yoshiko Nishitani, whose ground-breaking series Mary Lou appeared in Weekly Margaret in 1965. Mary Lou was among the very first shojo manga to feature an ordinary teenager as both the protagonist and romantic lead; its eponymous heroine suffered from the kind of everyday problems — a beautiful older sister, a boy who sends confusing signals — that invited readers to identify with her. Like Princess Knight, the gender politics of Mary Lou may strike contemporary Western readers as nostalgic at best, retrograde at worst, but Nishitani’s ability to make a compelling story out of ordinary adolescent experience struck a chord with Japanese girls, providing an important model for subsequent generations of shojo artists.

Moto Hagio and The “Founding Mothers” of Modern Shojo

In the hands of the Magnificent Forty-Niners and the other women who entered the field in the 1970s,  shojo manga underwent a profound transformation, giving rise to a new kind of storytelling that emphasized the importance of relationships and introspection, even when the stories took place in eighteenth-century France (The Rose of Versailles), Taisho-era Japan (Haikara-san ga Toru, or, Here Comes Miss Modern), or the distant future (They Were Eleven!). Inspired by Tezuka’s cinematic approach to storytelling, they sought to dramatize their characters’ inner lives with the same dynamism that Tezuka brought to car chases, fist fights, and heated conversations. Hagio and her peers placed a premium on subjectivity, trying their utmost to help readers see the world through the characters’ point of view, eschewing tidy grids for fluid, expressionist layouts, and employing an elaborate code of visual signifiers to represent emotions from love to anxiety — symbols still in widespread use today.

Moto Hagio was one of these shojo trailblazers, making her professional debut in 1969 with “Lulu to Mimi,” a short story that appeared in the girls’ magazine Nakayoshi. In the years that followed, she proved enormously versatile, working in a variety of genres: “November Gymnasium” (1971) explores a romantic relationship between two young men, for example, while The Poe Family (1972-76) focuses on a vampire doomed to live out his existence in a teenage boy’s body. Hagio is perhaps best known to Western readers for her science fiction’s unique blend of social commentary and lyrical imagery. A, A’, for example, examines the relationship between memory and identity, while They Were Eleven tackles the thorny question of whether gender determines destiny.

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

The ten stories that comprise A Drunken Dream span the entire length of Hagio’s career, from “Bianca” (1970), one of her first published works, to “A Drunken Dream” (1985), a sci-fi fantasy written around the same time as the stories in A, A’, to “The Willow Tree” (2007), an entry in her recent anthology Anywhere But Here.

What A Drunken Dream reveals is an author whose childhood passion for Frances Hodgson Burnett, L.M. Montgomery, and Isaac Asimov profoundly influenced the kind of stories she chose to tell as an adult. “Bianca,” for example, is a unabashedly Romantic story about artistic expression. The main narrative is framed by a discussion between Clara, a middle-aged woman, and an art collector curious about the “dryad” who appears in Clara’s paintings. As a teenager, Clara secretly witnessed her younger cousin Bianca dancing with great abandon in a wooded glen, a child’s way of coping with the pain of her parents’ tumultuous relationship. Bianca’s dance haunted Clara for years, even though their acquaintance was brief. “The way [Bianca] danced… the way it made me feel… I can’t describe it in words,” the middle-aged Clara explains to her guest. “But the thrill of that moment still shines today, and still shakes me to my core. And it was my irresistible need to draw that which led me to become a painter.”

Other stories explore the complexity of familial relationships. “Hanshin: Half-God,” for example, depicts conjoined twins with a rare medical condition that leaves one brilliant but physically deformed and the other simple but radiantly beautiful. When a life-threatening condition necessitates an operation to separate them, Yudy, the “big sister,” imagines it will liberate her from the responsibility of caring for and about Yucy, never considering the degree to which she and Yucy are emotionally interdependent. In “The Child Who Comes Home,” the emphasis is on parent-child relationships, exploring how a mother and her son cope with the death of the family’s youngest member. Throughout the story, the deceased Yuu appears in many of the panels, though we are never sure if Yuu’s ghost is real, or if his family’s lingering attachment to him is making his memory palpable.

iguanagirlThe emotional core of A Drunken Dream — for me, at least — is Hagio’s 1991 story “Iguana Girl.” Rika, the heroine, is a truly grotesque figure — not in the everyday sense of being ugly or unpleasant, but in the Romantic sense, as a person whose bizarre affliction arouses empathy in readers. Born to a woman who appears human but is, in fact, an enchanted lizard, Rika is immediately rejected by her mother, who sees only a repulsive likeness of herself. Yuriko’s disgust for her daughter manifests itself in myriad ways: withering put-downs, slaps and shouts, blatant displays of favoritism for Rika’s younger sister Mami. As Rika matures, Hagio gives us tantalizing glimpses of Rika not as an iguana, but as the rest of the world sees her: a lovely but reserved young woman. As with “The Child Who Comes Home,” the heroine’s appearance could be interpreted literally, as evidence of magical realism, or figuratively, as a metaphor for the way in which children mirror their parents’ own flaws and disappointments; either way, Rika’s quest to heal her childhood wounds is easily one of the most moving stories I’ve read in comic form, a testament to Hagio’s ability to make Rika’s fraught relationship with her mother seem both terribly specific and utterly universal.

Perhaps the best compliment I can pay Hagio is praising her ability to make the ineffable speak through pictures, whether she’s documenting the grief that a young woman feels after aborting her baby (“Angel Mimic”) or the intense longing a middle-aged man feels for the college friends who abandoned him (“Marie, Ten Years Later”). Nowhere is this more evident than in the final story, “The Willow Tree.” At first glance, the layout is simple: each page consists of just two large, rectangular panels in which a woman stands beneath a tree, watching a parade of people — a doleful man and a little boy, a group of rambunctious grade-schoolers, a teenager wooing a classmate — as they stroll on the embankment above her. A careful reading of the images, however, reveals a complex story spanning many years. Hagio uses subtle cues — light, weather, and the principal character’s body language — to suggest the woman’s relationship to the people who walk past the tree. The last ten panels are beautifully executed; though the woman never utters a word, her face suddenly registers all the pain, joy, and anxiety she experienced during her decades-long vigil.

For those new to Hagio’s work, Fantagraphics has prefaced A Drunken Dream with two indispensable articles by noted manga scholar Matt Thorn.[4] The first, “The Magnificent Forty-Niners,” places Hagio in context, introducing her peers and providing an overview of her major publications. The second, “The Moto Hagio Interview,” is a lengthy conversation between scholar and artist about Hagio’s formative reading experiences, first jobs, and recurring use of certain motifs. Both reveal Hagio to be as complex as her stories, at once thoughtful about her own work and surprised by her success. Taken together with the stories in A Drunken Dream, these essays make an excellent introduction to one of the most literary and original voices working in comics today. Highly recommended.

A DRUNKEN DREAM AND OTHER STORIES • BY MOTO HAGIO, TRANSLATED BY MATT THORN • FANTAGRAPHICS • 288 pp.

NOTES

1. The Wonderful World of Sazae-San ran in newspapers from 1946 to 1974. The collected strips, comprising 45 volumes in all, have been perennial best-sellers in Japan, with over 60 million books sold. It’s imporant to note that Sazae-san is not shojo manga; the story focuses on a resourceful, strong-willed housewife and her family, a kind of Mother Knows Best story. Nonetheless, Machiko Hasegawa is an important figure in the history of the medium, both for the influence of her strip and her trailblazing role as a female creator.

2. For more information about Hideko Mizuno, see Marc Bernabe’s recent profile and interview at Masters of Manga.

3. Princess Knight has a long and complex publishing history. The original story appeared in Shojo Club from 1953 to 1956, was continued in Nakayoshi in 1958, and revived again for Nakayoshi in 1963. The third version is generally considered to be the definitive one; Tezuka re-worked a few details from the original version and re-drew the series. In 2001, Kodansha released a bilingual edition of the 1963 version which is now out of print.

4. Both essays originally appeared in issue no. 269 of The Comics Journal (July 2005).

FOR FURTHER READING

Bernabe, Marc. “What is the ‘Year 24 Group’?” Interview with Moto Hagio. [http://mastersofmanga.com/2010/06/hagioyear24] [Accessed 7/22/10.]

Gravett, Paul. Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics. New York: Collins Design, 2004.

Randall, Bill. “Three By Moto Hagio.” The Comics Journal 252 (April 2003). (Full text available online at The Comics Journal Archives.)

Shamoon, Deborah. “Revolutionary Romance: The Rose of Versailles and the Transformation of Shojo Manga.” Mechademia 2 (2007): 3-18.

Schodt, Frederick. Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. New York: Kodansha International, 1983.

Thorn, Matt. “The Multi-Faceted Universe of Shoujo Manga.” [http://www.matt-thorn.com/shoujo_manga/colloque/index.php] (Accessed 7/21/10.)

Thorn, Matt. “What Japanese Girls Do With Manga and Why.” [http://www.matt-thorn.com/shoujo_manga/jaws/index.php] (Accessed 7/21/10/)

Toku, Masaki, ed. Shojo Manga! Girl Power! Chico, CA: Flume Press, 2005.

Vollmar, Rob. “X+X.” The Comics Journal 269 (July 2005): 134-36.

WORKS BY MOTO HAGIO AND HER PEERS (IN ENGLISH)

Aoike, Yasuko. From Eroica With Love. La Jolla, CA: CMX Manga/Wildstorm Productions, 2004 – 2010. 15 volumes (incomplete).

Ariyoshi, Kyoko. Swan. La Jolla, CA: CMX Manga/Wildstorm Productions, 2005 – 2010. 15 volumes (incomplete).

Hagio, Moto. A, A’ [A, A Prime]. Translated by Matt Thorn. San Francisco: Viz Communications, 1997. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/31/10.)

Hagio, Moto, Keiko Nishi, and Shio Sato. Four Shojo Stories. Translated by Matt Thorn. San Francisco: Viz Communications, 1996. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/31/10.)

Mitsuse, Ryu and Keiko Takemiya. Andromeda Stories. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2007. 3 volumes. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/26/10.)

Takemiya, Keiko. To Terra. New York: Vertical, Inc., 2007. 3 volumes. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 5/23/10.)

Filed Under: Manga Critic Tagged With: Classic, fantagraphics, Magnificent 49ers, moto hagio, shojo

More From Fantagraphics

March 9, 2010 by MJ 7 Comments

As you all know, the manga blogosphere exploded yesterday with the news that Fantagraphics is launching a new manga line, edited and curated by Matt Thorn. Thorn is widely acknowledged as the west’s leading authority on shojo manga, particularly the works of The Year 24 Group/Magnificent ’49ers, very little of which has ever been translated into English.

For shojo fans (and indeed serious manga fans as a whole) this announcement is beyond exciting, a fact plainly demonstrated by the massive outpouring of joy between manga bloggers and fans yesterday afternoon on Twitter. Many have expressed speechlessness over the news. At The Manga Curmudgeon, David Welsh is keeping a running list of blog reactions and official news.

In the wake of the initial announcement, both Fantagraphics and Matt Thorn have come forward with further details, including a list of stories …

Read More

Filed Under: NEWS Tagged With: fantagraphics, manga

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