Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Katherine Dacey

Pick of the Week: Easy Pickings

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SEAN: My Brother’s Husband 2. Wow, that was easy.

MICHELLE: Yep.

KATE: In the interest of making this a polysyllabic Pick of the Week, I’ll agree with Sean and Michelle’s choice while adding two of my own: volume six of Golden Kamuy, everyone’s favorite manly cooking manga, and volume one of 20th Century Boys, back again as a series of handsome two-in-one omnibus volumes. If you missed Naoki Urasawa’s twisty thriller the first time around, now’s your chance to discover what all the fuss is about.

ASH: The final volume of My Brother’s Husband is definitely my pick this week although, like Kate, I have my eye on a few other things as well, including Golden Kamuy, the debut of Otherworldly Izakaya Nobu, and the last bit of Erased.

ANNA: There’s a lot of great manga coming out this week, but I’m going to take the opportunity to celebrate the new edition of Twentieth Century Boys. A great opportunity for people who missed it the first time around.

MJ: I will use more than one syllable, but there’s only one choice for me this week. My Brother’s Husband. The end.

Pick of the Week: Lots and Lots of Stuff

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ASH: So many interesting manga are being released this week, it’s difficult to pick just one! A couple in particular have especially caught my attention, though. There’s Dementia 21 which should be… memorable, and then there’s Dragon Goes House Hunting which has a premise that delights me utterly.

MICHELLE: I am also really, really delighted by Dragon Goes House Hunting, but I know that I will love the latest volume of The Ancient Magus’ Bride, so that’s my official pick this week.

KATE: I can’t limit myself to a single pick, especially since there are so many intriguing debuts! Topping my list would be Dragon Goes House Hunting followed by The Delinquent Housewife! and Tomo-chan Is a Girl!, though I’m also curious about Radiant. I’m also curious about — and wary of — Dementia 21, which looks like the stuff nightmares are made of.

SEAN: As others have noted, there’s an embarrassment of riches this week. I think I will throw my lot in with The Delinquent Housewife!, whose cover art and description combine to make it look like it was written just for me.

ANNA: I agree, The Delinquent Housewife! looks hilarious just judging from the cover! That’s my pick as well.

MJ: I feel a bit iffy on this week’s releases as a whole, but I think I’ll throw in my vote for Radiant. Wizards are generally a win for me, so I’m going to bet that I’ll like it!

Chio’s School Road, Vol. 1

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With the new school year underway, now seemed like the ideal time to review Chio’s School Road, a gag manga about an average teen with a rich imagination and a talent for getting into trouble. Think of it as a female answer to My Neighbor Seki or Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto!!, two similar comedies in which a high school student turns out to have some truly astonishing skills.

Chio’s School Road is built on a simple but sturdy premise: Chio Miyamo, an average high school student, goes to comic lengths to avoid embarrassment. And by “comic lengths,” I mean diving into dumpsters, hiding in a tree, and giving her best friend a passionate kiss to conceal the fact they were eavesdropping on the popular kids. To be sure, these kind of scenarios are standard comic fodder, but Tadataka Kawasaki takes the gags in such unpredictable directions that the payoffs are fresh and funny without frustrating the reader’s desire to see the dignity-challenged Chio prevail.

In chapter three, for example, Chio stumbles into an alley blocked by members of a biker gang. Her attempt to slip past them goes awry, leading to confrontation in which Chio inadvertently escalates the situation with a nervous stutter. “You pick a fight and then laugh? You got some balls!” the head biker declares, prompting Chio to reveal her “true” identity as Bloody Butterfly, an assassin who’s “out every night packing heat” in the mean streets of Tokyo. The joke, of course, is that Chio is recycling bits of dialogue from her favorite first-person shooter game, delivering her lines with the swagger of a yakuza foot solider — a swagger she can’t sustain as soon as she arrives on school grounds.

The only strike against Chio’s School Road is the fan service. In one particularly egregious sequence, Kawasaki draws a woman’s chest as if two balloon animals were tussling under her sweater. (Seriously, folks: breasts do not look like balloon animals. Not even on a braless woman. No, really.) These panels are noticeable in part because his draftsmanship is otherwise crisp and convincing, creating a vivid sense of the urban neighborhood where Chio attends school, and strong sense of the characters’ personalities. Still, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Chio’s School Road to fans of My Neighbor Seki and Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto!, as it delivers a steady stream of amusing, weird, and well-executed jokes. Better still, Chio earns its laughs honestly by reminding us that Chio isn’t ordinary at all; she’s just striving to be. Recommended.

Chio’s School Road, Vol. 1
Art & Story by Tadataka Kawasaki
Translated by Alexander Keller-Nelson
Yen Press, 160 pp.
Rated OT, for Older Teens (Sexual and bathroom humor; fan service)

Pick of the Week: Beat Surrender

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MICHELLE: For me, Skip Beat! will always win any week in which it appears. I do love it so.

SEAN: I have to agree, Skip Beat! is what has me most excited for this week.

KATE: This is a Shonen Jump week for me: I’ll be picking up volume two of Demon Slayer — the monster manga with heart! — and volume one of Dr. STONE, which has been garnering good reviews around the web.

MJ: I was a big fan of the too-short trilogy, QQ Sweeper, which hit a lot of my supernatural investigator-type buttons. I haven’t kept up with its sequel (reboot?), Queen’s Quality, but I think that is my mission this week!

ANNA: Any week that features a new volume of Skip Beat is a week to celebrate!

ASH: So many great releases this week! Skip Beat is always welcome, but I have some catch up reading I need to do before I can get to it, so my pick this week goes to Demon Slayer, which is still so early on in the series that I haven’t had a chance to fall behind yet. Although I am curious about Dr. STONE, too…

Pick of the Week: Again!! Again (Again?)

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SEAN: I know my pick this week should be Cutey Honey: The Classic Collection, despite the fact that I know it will depress me in the end. I’m also interested, as always, in Nisioisin’s works, so Otorimonogatari is also a possible choice, despite ALSO ending on a down note. But I will be good. Please support Cutey Honey so we can get more series like it (by which I mean Shameless School).

KATE: I’m going to be super-predictable and shill for Again!! again. It’s easily one of the best new series of 2018, with humor, heart, and a wicked edge that prevents the story from feeling too pat. I’ll also be picking up Cutie Honey, as I want to support Seven Seas’ efforts to bring more classic manga to the US.

MICHELLE: I’m definitely keen to read more Again!! but The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window comes out so infrequently, to so little fanfare, and is so stellar that I just have to laud it when given the chance.

ANNA: Out of everything coming out this week, no question I’m most excited about Again!!

ASH: And once again… Again!! (And also Cutie Honey)

MJ: I’m going to back up Michelle this week, and encourage everyone to catch up on The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window! It’s so easy for me to forget digital titles when new volumes are released, and this one is worth remembering.

Pick of the Week: We’re Still Amazed This Was Licensed

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MICHELLE: As usual, there’s a lot coming out that interests me, but if I’m honest, it’s the sports manga that calls the most stridently. DAYS, Giant Killing, and Yowamushi Pedal can share my pick this week, for all are awesome, though perhaps the bicycle boys have a bit of an edge.

SEAN: There are a truly ridiculous number of light novels coming out this week, but the one that attracts my attention the most is Kokoro Connect. I loved the anime, I loved the manga, and I expect I will really love the light novel. Also, for once revel in seeing teenage romantic drama written well!

ASH: Yowamushi Pedal continues to be very high on my list, as does Silver Spoon, but I think I’ll throw my pick towards the final volume of the deluxe Battle Angel Alita this week. Not only does the volume include both endings of the series proper (which I’m only now finally getting around to reading), it also collects the related manga Ashen Victor along with in-depth interviews with Yukito Kishiro.

KATE: I only have eyes for one title this week: Silver Spoon, quite possibly my favorite new manga of 2018. You should read it, too. ‘Nuff said.

MJ: I basically have nothing to say except, “What Kate said.”

ANNA: I’m terrible in that I haven’t read volume 1 of Silver Spoon yet. But if I was able to actually keep up on all the manga that I’m interested in, I’m confident that I would love it just as much as everyone else who picked it this week.

Laid-Back Camp, Vol. 1

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Laid-Back Camp may be the most quintessentially Japanese thing I’ve read this year: it features cute girls doing cute things while imparting information about camping gear. There’s no real plot to speak of, just a meet-cute in the first chapter that introduces seasoned camper Rin to enthusiastic newbie Nadeshiko. Through one of those only-in-manga coincidences, Rin and Nadeshiko attend the same school, where two other girls — Aoi and Chiaki — are struggling to recruit members for their Outdoor Exploration Club. You can guess what happens next: Nadeshiko joins the club and, by dint of her Golden Retriever personality, brings the skeptical Rin into the fold.

Each chapter is built around a skill, a piece of equipment, or a location. In “Mount Fuji and Cup Ramen,” for example, Rin explains how to build the perfect campfire, calling dried pine cones “nature’s premier fire starter,” while in “You Can Only Go Camping If You Have the Gear,” the Outdoor Exploration Club pores over catalogs, debating the merits of down and synthetic sleeping bags. These passages are deftly woven into the fabric of each story, playing a natural part of the girls’ conversations as they plan camping trips. Dashes of humor and breath-taking scenery add welcome nuance to the storytelling, preventing it from tipping into edu-manga dullness or yon-koma hijinks. Best of all, Rin is a genuinely interesting character, a small, self-sufficient kid who likes solo camping trips. Though volume one doesn’t explain how she caught the camping bug, author Afro has done such a good job of fleshing out Rin it doesn’t matter; we can see how someone so introspective and independent would welcome the opportunity to be alone in nature. Recommended, even for those who prefer the Great Indoors.

Laid-Back Camp, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Afro
Translation by Amber Tamosaitis
Yen Press, 178 pp.
Rated T, for Teen

Pick of the Week: Sleepy Blue Skies

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SEAN: I’ve heard good things about That Blue-Sky Feeling, but feel fairly confident the rest of the team will be weighing in on that one. So my pick this week is Accomplishments of a Duke’s Daughter. I’m a sucker for isekai with a female lead, and this one has the basic premise of the heroine ending up in the otome game she’s played… as the main antagonist. Should be great fun.

MICHELLE: I don’t read much in the isekai genre, but Accomplishments of a Duke’s Daughter might be the exception. Still, Sean is right that I’m most eager to read That Blue-Sky Feeling. Slice-of-life sounds like just the thing.

ASH: Sean has me pegged, too! While as always there are multiple releases that interest me this week, That Blue Sky Feeling is without a doubt my pick. I’ve likewise heard great things about this thoughtful and sweet gay coming-of-age story.

KATE: Since it’s been hot and sticky this week, my vote is for fun. I’ll be picking up the third volume of Toppu GP, which I’ve been enjoying despite my total lack of interest in motorcycles, and the second volume of Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle, which I just reviewed and adored.

ANNA: Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle Volume 2 for me as well! I’m in the mood for a pleasant diversion, and I enjoy the way this fantasy comedy manga subverts the familiar trope of a princess in distress.

Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle, Vol. 1

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Since one in four Americans suffer from insomnia, it seems like there’s a natural market for Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle, a manga about a character so determined to get a good night’s sleep that she’d risk death or dismemberment for forty winks. Sleepy Princess plays the title character’s insomnia for laughs, however, turning the heroine’s quest for the perfect mattress into a light-hearted romp, rather than an expensive ordeal involving black-out curtains, melatonin, and meditation videos. That the story is fun and breezy is nothing short of a miracle, though older readers may experience a twinge of jealously at Princess Syalis’ ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime once she has the right gear.

Author Kagiji Kumanomata handles the set-up with great economy: in just two pages, we learn the Demon King has kidnapped Syalis in a bid to conquer the human world. Though the Demon King stashes Syalis in a dungeon populated by fearsome beasts, Syalis quickly sizes up the situation and makes it work to her advantage. “Since I’m hostage, the Demon King has no intention of harming me,” she notes. “I have no duties to take care of here… And the food’s pretty tasty!” The one drawback to her new digs? “I haven’t been able to get a good night’s rest since I was brought here!” she exclaims.

A chance encounter with teddy demons leads to her first epiphany: her captors’ fur is the ideal stuffing for a comfy pillow. Before long, Syalis is roaming the castle in search of softer sheets, mosquito netting, and a more natural light source, the better to regulate her body’s circadian rhythms. Her dogged efforts to sleep longer or more soundly confound her jailers, who are astonished at how brazenly she takes what she needs; Syalis dies at least three times in her quest for the perfect sleep accessories. (Don’t worry; a handsome demon cleric is on hand to resurrect her mangled body.)

As with other one-joke manga, Sleepy Princess occasionally strains for laughs; an episode involving poison mushrooms falls flat, as does a spoof of Princess Knight. The chapters’ brevity helps keep the story from bogging down in bad jokes, as does Kumanomata’s consummate attention to detail; there’s always something funny happening, even if the gags are buried in the background or lurking on the edges of the page. An artful adaptation by Annette Roman helps bridge the translation divide, as do Susan Daigle-Leach’s marvelous sound effects. (If you’ve ever wondered what a posse of demon teddy bears might sound like, she’s got you covered.) Best of all, Kumanomata has barely scratched the surface when it comes to insomnia, leaving the door open for future quests, from finding the right bedtime snack to finding the right temperature for sleeping. Recommended.

SLEEPY PRINCESS IN THE DEMON CASTLE, VOL. 1 • BY KAGIJI KUMANOMATA • TRANSLATION BY TETSUICHIRO MITAYKI • ADAPTATION BY ANNETTE ROMAN • TOUCH-UP ART AND LETTERING BY SUSAN DAIGLE-LEACH • VIZ MEDIA • 174 pp. • RATED TEEN (13+) FOR FANTASY VIOLENCE

Pick of the Week: Our Favorite Yearly Pick

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MICHELLE: It’s the first week of August and that can mean only one thing: my annual opportunity to pick Kaze Hikaru! I am also super excited about the new volume of What Did You Eat Yesterday?, however.

ASH: As Sean recently noted, there’s lots and lots and lots being released this week. Shoujo, shonen, seinen, and even josei manga are all represented and I’m reading SO MUCH of it. However, the release that I’m perhaps most interested in this week actually isn’t manga at all but Shinsuke Nakamura’s autobiography King of Strong Style.

SEAN: I suspect Anna will also be picking Kaze Hikaru, so I’ll pitch in for her and make my pick the lucky 13th volume of Yona of the Dawn. Every volume deserves to be read and reread, like a favorite childhood story. I love it to bits.

ANNA: It is such a tough choice because I love Kaze Hikaru and Yona of the Dawn so much! But with only one volume of Kaze Hikaru coming out a year, I have to take the opportunity to highlight it whenever I can. It is such a great, underappreciated series.

KATE: Kaze Hikaru. ‘Nuff said.

Shibuya Goldfish, Vol. 1

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Shibuya Goldfish falls somewhere along the horror continuum between Sharknado 3 and Jaws: it’s too competently executed to be a guilty pleasure but too predictable to be genuinely scary. Though the premise has serious camp potential, author Hiroumi Aoi settles for a pedestrian approach to the material, trapping his cast in a high-rise shopping center where death lurks around every corner. There are a few glimmers of imagination here and there, but the overall result lacks the visceral punch, humor, or sheer imagination of other entries in the Killer Fish genre.

The story begins in media res, with a shot of Hachiko — Shibuya’s most famous statue — stained in blood. We then cut to an image of a panting, wild-eyed teen staring incredulously at a monstrous goldfish feasting on a pedestrian in the middle of a busy street. “That day was the first time I ever saw someone die,” Hajime solemnly informs us, before a flashback reveals what led up to this gruesome scene.

I won’t lie: those opening pages are a tantalizing hook for a horror buff. Though Aoi doesn’t reveal where the goldfish came from, he sells the Fish-Gone-Wild concept by emphasizing the predators’ size, numbers, and blank-eyed stares, making us appreciate the sheer incongruity of Volkswagen-sized fish swarming through an urban landscape. The goldfish’s penchant for uttering intelligible phrases — “I’m home, mom,” one burbles — adds another layer of mystery to their existence: are they truly sentient or are they merely ghosts, back to haunt the owners that flushed them down the toilet?

Where Shibuya Goldfish falls short is the human dimension. Hajime is the only character who’s properly fleshed out, an earnest, slightly awkward high school student whose dreams of becoming a filmmaker are dashed by the catastrophe. The other characters are more placeholders than people, dropped into the story to generate conflict or provide useful information about goldfish behavior before dying. In recognition of their liminal status, Aoi only bestows names on a small fraction of the cast, one of whom — the beautiful, bitchy Chitose Fukakusa — is such a vile male fantasy that the introduction of two more competent, sincere female characters in chapters two and three barely erase the memory of Fukakusa’s manipulative behavior and panty flashes.

The other fundamental issue with Shibuya Goldfish is the artwork, which juxtaposes photo-realistic backgrounds and fish with generic character designs. The tension between these two modes of representation ends up robbing volume one’s creepiest scenes of their dramatic impact, as the full horror of what happens to several characters is muted by Aoi’s blandly rendered faces and bodies; the grotesque bodily deformations that make Junji Ito, Hideshi Hino, and Kanako Inuki’s work so arresting barely elicit a “yuck!” in Aoi’s hands. It’s a pity these moments don’t land with more oomph because Shibuya Goldfish flirts with an interesting idea: the notion that a pet as small, helpless, and disposable as a goldfish might be the downfall of humanity, punishing us for our reckless treatment of other living things. Perhaps Aoi will delve into the monsters’ origins in future volumes, but the so-so execution of these foundational chapters didn’t reel me in. Your mileage will vary.

SHIBUYA GOLDFISH, VOL. 1 • BY HIROUMI AOI • TRANSLATED BY KO RANSOM • YEN PRESS • 242 pp. • RATED OT (OLDER TEEN) FOR LANGUAGE, NUDITY, AND VIOLENCE

Pick of the Week: Wandering Off the Map

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MICHELLE: There’s not much on the manga front this week that really calls to me, so instead I’ll devote my pick to a charming graphic novel that came out a couple weeks ago. The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins is adapted from a great podcast in which three brothers play Dungeons & Dragons with their dad. The graphic novel cuts out most of the out-of-character interaction and presents as more of a straightforward fantasy story, but with loads of jokes (and profanity). Also, it’s the first graphic novel to score the #1 position on the New York Times Paperback Trade Fiction list! Check it out, won’t you?

KATE: I’m with Michelle: this week’s manga list is just not ringing my bell. So I’ll use today’s column to shamelessly plug one of my favorite ongoing series, Hiromu Arakawa’s Silver Spoon. It’s funny, wise, and surprisingly serious at times, but so well done that you will laugh AND cry at least once per volume. The first three volumes are available right now, giving you a chance to catch up before volume four arrives in August. Not convinced? Here’s what I had to say about volume one.

SEAN: I will stick with the actual list, but I’ll go with prose this time around. I keep waiting for it to get so dark I lose interest, but through the last two volumes, The Saga of Tanya the Evil has proven to be an excellent, if very long, read. I look forward to the third novel.

ASH: While I certainly have plenty of reading to catch up on, it is an extremely rare week that there isn’t at least one release I’m looking forward to getting my hands on. This week that release is the most recent omnibus of I Am a Hero. Even having grown tired of the inundation of zombie media, I still find this series to be one heck of a ride.

ANNA: There isn’t much coming out this week that I’m interested in, which is good, as I’m going to use the time to get caught up on my reading. One recent release that is non-manga that I think is cool is Viz getting into translated amigurumi books! San-X Crochet Patterns is my pick.

Manhwa 100

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As a reviewer, I’ve found Manga: The Complete Guide (Del Rey), Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Stonebridge Press), and Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics (Laurence King Publishing) indispensable references, whether I’m searching for information about a series’ publication history or looking for insight into a particular artist’s style. I hoped that Manhwa 100: The New Era for Korean Comics would provide a similar perspective on the Korean comics industry. Unfortunately, Manhwa 100 turned out to be an ambitious but poorly executed attempt to highlight the medium’s most popular, influential series.

In terms of organization and metholodgy, Manhwa 100 falls somewhere between Manga: The Complete Guide and Dreamland Japan, offering summaries of one hundred books, some of which have been translated into English. Each entry includes basic information about the series’ print run (e.g. number of volumes, magazine of serialization), its author, and its crossover into other media (e.g. videogames, television programs), as well as a plot summary and an assessment of the work’s artistic merit. Entries are grouped according to audience, with sections devoted to sunjeong (girls’) comics, boys’ comics, adult comics, and “webtoons,” comics that debuted online but were later anthologized in print.

We learn in the introduction that a committee of thirty industry professionals chose the books featured in Manhwa 100. The exact selection criteria are never satisfactorily explained, though it’s obvious the committee made a concerted effort to represent a broad spectrum of styles and subjects; no artist has more than one entry devoted to her work. Most books are of recent vintage, with only a smattering of titles released in the 1970s and 1980s.

And here I have a confession to make: I was sorely tempted to call my review “Manhwa 100: Cultural Learnings of Comics for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Korea.” Why? The text is awash in awkward phrases, grammatical errors, egregious typos, and ill-advised attempts to keep it real with slangy, conversational phrases that clash violently with the prevailing tone. The entry for Blue, a title by Lee Eun-hye, is typical of the book:

Comic book characters are used in many character merchandises now, but it was [sic] not very actively used in the 1990s. However, the comics of Lee Eun-hye were widely used in character merchandises, even in the 1990s. This is because the author has the knack of using colors as one of her main themes. As she said in her own words, “color in itself is a story.”

As she proclaims in Jump Tree A+, her previous work to Blue, the teenage years are the “Green Age.” Her new story, Blue, represents the young adult age. The color blue in the comic has two sides. It represents a bright fresh side of youth, and it also represents sadness and gloom. The twenty-somethings in the comic are both fresh and youthful, but at the same time lonely and nostalgic.

A rich man’s illigitemate [sic] son Seung-pyo, passionate dancer Hae-joon, his faithful follower Yeon-woo, smart but cold Hyun-bin, and strong charismatic rocker Ha-yun: Blue revolves around these five characters. The loneliness in Blue was sprouted from self-pity and narcissism. Like in many of her other comics, author Lee Eun-hye pushes her characters into their own narcissistic world disconnected from each other.

That is why Blue is beautiful. The earnest characters express their life honestly. And the poetic narration and symbolic monologues add to its beauty. In 1997, an OST disc, inspired by the comic, was…

Yes, the entry really does end with an incomplete sentence.

If I’m reading the text correctly, this confusing verbiage could be boiled down to three talking points: (1) Lee’s manhwa was among the first to inspire “character goods” (phone cards, figurines, stationery, keychains, etc.); (2) her books feature beautifully drawn, emotionally stunted characters; and (3) her books are popular enough to be adapted into TV shows, CD dramas, and the like. Though it’s obvious she views color as a metaphor for age and mood, it’s not clear how or if she uses color in her work–a crucial point, given the increasingly important role that color is beginning to play in manhwa. It’s also unclear what distinguishes Lee’s work from other sunjeong titles, as symbolism, emotionally-charged conversation, and interior monologues are staples of the medium, not personal idiosyncrasies.

If the book synopses are frustrating, the contextual essays are downright obtuse. With titles such as “Open a Manhwa Book, Become a Friend of Korea” and “Manhwa in America: The New World of Charms Yet to be Discovered,” their stilted language and boastful claims for manhwa’s international importance make them sound like Pravda articles. Anyone hoping for insight into the differences between manhwa and manga (or other sequential art traditions, for that matter) will be frustrated by the maddeningly vague, jingoistic text which acknowledges stylistic similarities between manhwa and manga while arguing for significant differences in subject and approach. As manhwaga Lee Hyun-se explains:

While the Japanese samurai pulls out his sword for the completion of his skill, the Korean warrior draws his sword in revenge of his family or to fight against his or her sworn enemy. The Japanese hero walks the glorified path of the hero, which is as clear as the blood he spills, but the Korean hero trudges, stumbling upon his own defects.

Lee attributes the difference in approach to Korea’s lengthy history of occupation, contrasting it with Japan’s long period of isolationism and political intrigue. “The endless internal strife of the Japanese builds up a sense of hubris and elitism,” he argues, “while being on the defense instills a sense of humility and compassion for others… The hero of Japanese manga is ‘I’ while the hero in Korean manhwa is ‘We.’” It’s an interesting but flawed thesis, akin to suggesting that Howard’s End and Finnegan’s Wake are utterly different because one was written by a British imperialist and the other by a downtrodden Irishman. Lee seems to forget that avenging one’s family (or village, or sweetheart, or mentor) is one of the most basic manga plotlines, transcending genre and time period. He also overlooks the important role of community in manga; for every Lone Wolf, there are just as many characters who discover their purpose when they join a particular group, whether it be the school council (a la Love Master A) or the Shinsengumi (a la Kaze Hikaru).

Given Manhwa 100‘s limitations, I’m reluctant to recommend it; anyone hoping for an indispensable reference or an introduction to Korean comics will find this book baffling. For those already enchanted with manhwa, however, I’d suggest reading Manhwa 100 in the same spirit that our grandparents and parents flipped through the Sears Roebuck catalog: as a book of possibilities, a wish list for readers who enjoyed Shaman Warrior, One Thousand and One Nights, Bride of the Water God, or Dokebi Bride. I’ve already spotted dozens of great candidates for licensing, from Be Good, a comedy about a gangster who goes back to high school at 40, to Buddy, a sports drama set inside the ultra-competitive world of women’s golf.

POSTSCRIPT, 2/3/09: I corresponded with the editorial staff at NETCOMICS, who explained that they had a contract with the Korea Culture and Content Agency (KOCCA) to distribute Manhwa 100 in North America. The book was written and produced by C&C Revolution, a private company. (No individuals are named as authors.) NETCOMICS is not responsible for the book’s editorial content, just for its distribution.

This review originally appeared at The Manga Curmudgeon on February 2, 2009.

Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking, Vol. 1

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Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking may not be as relentlessly intertextual as Ulysses, but this Japanese import is nearly as rich in puns, social commentary, pop-culture parody, and allusions to TV shows, novels, movies, and manga. I can’t imagine adapting such a culturally specific text for Western audiences, yet the folks at Del Rey have made a game effort to do just that. Given the scope and complexity of the task, I think translator Joyce Aurino has produced an eminently readable script that captures the darkness and absurdity of Koji Kumeta’s original. I just wish it were, y’know, funnier.

The premise seems ripe with comic potential. High school teacher and profound pessimist Nozomu Itoshiki lands the gig from hell: an all-female class of stalkers, hikokimori, obsessive text-messagers, bossy perfectionists, panty-flashers, and perky optimists. Try as he might to escape his obligations, his students foil his repeated suicide attempts, compounding his sense of despair and driving him to more extreme, ridiculous measures.

Through a series of interconnected vignettes, we begin to grasp the true extent of Itoshiki’s negativity as well as the sheer nuttiness of his students. In “Zetsubou-Sensei Returns,” for example, Itoshiki instructs his students to complete a “Post Graduation Career Hope Survey” by listing the three dreams they’re least likely to realize, e.g. playing baseball for Yomiuri Giants, recording a best-selling pop album. His sour-spirited effort quickly backfires, however, when the school’s guidance counselor reads the responses and praises Itoshiki for encouraging his students to dream big. In “Before Me, There’s No One; Behind Me, There’s You,” Matoi Tsunetsuki, a.k.a. “super-love-obsessed stalker girl,” develops an unhealthy attachment to Itoshiki. Matoi pursues her teacher with steely determination, adopting his trademark yukata, building a shrine to him, and following him everywhere. The chapter ends with a brilliant stroke, as one of Matoi’s former love interests begins tailing her to find out who’s replaced him, only to discover a chain of stalkers trailing in Matoi and Itoshiki’s wake.

Unfortunately, many of the stories require too much editorial intervention to elicit real laughs, as Kumeta’s panels abound in the kind of small but important details that resist easy translation: brand name parodies, puns on famous literary works, misspelled words, and so forth. The story titles, too, require explanation; “Behind Me, There’s No One,” for example, is a riff on a poem by Kotaro Takamura, while “Beyond the Tunnel Was Whiteness” appropriates a line from Yasanuri Kuwabata’s Snow Country. Absent this rich network of cultural references, Kometa’s comedy loses some of its fizz, playing more like a mild satire of shojo manga conventions than a scathing commentary on contemporary Japan.

If the text sometimes disappoints, the artwork does not. Kumeta uses a stark palette with large patches of pure black and plenty of white space. His highly stylized character designs have a pleasing, geometric quality about them, as do the patterns in their clothing. Though his faces are the essence of simplicity— just a few lines and two dark coals for eyes—Kumeta animates them with skill, registering the full gamut of emotions from anger to joy. His students are virtually interchangeable, save for their accessories and hairstyles: a black eye and a sling for the class masochist, blonde hair and strawberry-print underpants for the class exhibitionist. Again, Kumeta’s economy of form works beautifully, underscoring the extent to which Itoshiki views all of the girls in the same light: as nuisances.

I wish I liked Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei better, as I think Kumeta is a terrific artist with a fertile imagination. But it’s awfully hard to laugh when 70% of the jokes require footnotes. (If you disagree, try this exercise: watch an episode of Seinfeld, The Chapelle Show, or South Park with someone who’s new to the United States. Then try explaining why the jokes work. You’ll quickly realize the degree to which the creators rely on your knowledge of literature, politics, movies, and pop music for laughs.) I’m also a little uncomfortable with the way Kumeta depicts the female students, as he skates a thin line between poking fun at stock manga characters and portraying teenage girls as desperate, manipulative, boy-crazed hysterics. I wouldn’t go as far as to label the text misogynist—that term seems much too strong—but I would feel more at ease with the material if Kumeta’s cast was comprised of troublesome girls and boys—equal opportunity neurosis, if you will.

That said, I’m not ready to declare Zetsubou-Sensei a dud; I’m just not sure how invested I am in a series that requires its own set of cultural Cliff Notes to decode.

This review originally appeared at The Manga Curmudgeon on March 4, 2009.

The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read

by

In the early 1950s, horror comics were big business. Out of the eighty million floppies sold each month, nearly one in three featured a vampire, a zombie, a cannibal, a werewolf, a parasitic alien, or a vengeful spirit. The comics were as sensational as their titles and were popular with kids—that is, until the Comics Code Authority effectively banned them in 1954 with its prohibition against “lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations.”

The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read focuses on horror’s brief renaissance in the 1950s. The first third of the book provides a historical overview of the genre, tracing horror comics’ roots back to the popular crime serials of the 1940s. The rest of the book explores the numerous subgenres and tropes found in series such as Tales from the Crypt, Tomb of Terror, The Thing, and Dark Mysteries. Each chapter is organized around a theme—vampirism, werewolves, zombies—and copiously illustrated with full-color reproductions of covers as well as complete stories ranging in length from one to twelve pages. Rounding out the volume is a 25-minute DVD containing “Confidential File,” a 1955 television documentary meant to show the harmful effects of comics on children.

Author Jim Trombetta is an excellent curator, selecting some of the era’s most memorable stories for inclusion in the book, from “Foul Play” (1953), a short piece in which a baseball team punishes its uppity pitcher, to “Some Die Twice” (1954), a longer story about a modern-day slave trader who falls prey to a tribe of cannibals. Through short but trenchant analyses of each story, Trombetta makes a persuasive case that horror comics gave readers a way to thumb their noses at polite society. Authors challenged the social emphasis on conformity, normalcy, and knowing one’s place by depicting all sorts of taboo behavior, from garden-variety criminal acts (e.g., extortion, robbery) to necrophilia. The stories were lurid, exciting, and decidedly un-PC, often reinforcing racist and sexist stereotypes, even as they lashed out at traditional authority figures.

Trombetta’s writing is lively and full of interesting observations, especially in his efforts to show the connection between America’s emerging military might and civilian reservations about the Korean War. His chapters on brainwashing and zombies, in particular, reveal the extent to which the plight of American POWs captured the popular imagination. Stories like “The Brain-Bats of Venus” (1952), for example, depicted pilots falling victim to a race of mind-controlling aliens—a thinly veiled allegory for the kind of reprogramming that Chinese captors allegedly conducted on American prisoners. Likewise, Trombetta’s chapter on vampirism does an excellent job of examining the way in which latent fears of miscegenation were embodied in the vampire’s unique mode of reproducing: swapping blood with the victim.

The only drawback to Trombetta’s approach is that his interpretations aren’t always as explicit or convincing as they could be. By lumping vampirism and cannibalism under the common heading of “The Hunger,” for example, Trombetta misses an opportunity to explore the very different ways in which these two categories reflected American anxieties about racial integration. His critique of horror comics’ not-so-latent sexism, too, would have benefited from more historical context, given the large numbers of women displaced from wartime jobs.

On the whole, however, The Horror! The Horror! is a beautifully designed, carefully researched book that chronicles one of the most important, vital genres in American comics while capturing its pulpy spirit.

This review originally appeared at The Graphic Novel Reporter on November 1, 2010.