Katherine Dacey

Show Us Your Stuff: Lovely Duckie’s Manga Library

March 8, 2012 by Katherine Dacey 11 Comments

Greetings! This Thursday’s featured collector is Candace, an avid reviewer who writes about manga and anime at her site Lovely Duckie’s Blog. Like many manga fans, Sailor Moon played an essential role in introducing her to Japanese animation and comics. In the nine years Candance has been a collector, her tastes have evolved to include a wide variety of shojo and josei titles — she counts Skip Beat! and Tokyo Crazy Paradise among her favorites — as well as series such as Bakuman, The Drops of God, and Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Oh, and her library is one of the largest we’ve featured to date, with other 2,600+ volumes. My only question: does she have staff to help her shelve and catalog it all?! – Katherine Dacey

How long have you been collecting manga?

January 2003. I started off REAL slow, I was only able to keep up with a single series at a time. As I got old enough to have a job my collection grew. I used to work one day at a bakery once a week to buy 3-4 volumes of manga every other week or so. Now that I’ve graduated college and have a job I pre-order whatever I want, it’s heaven.

What was the first manga you bought?

I pre-ordered volume one of Sailor Moon (Pocket Mixx) from the Barnes and Noble one town over from where I lived. The next series I tried out was Cardcaptor Sakura, but I was also eyeing Fushigi Yugi. (I didn’t actually read Fushigi Yugi until many years later.) After Cardcaptor Sakura, I had my hands full trying to buy every CLAMP series I could; the only ones I missed out on were Clover (THANK YOU Dark Horse for the re-release) and a couple of the CLAMP School volumes.

How big is your collection?

I’m at 2600+, the list I keep is a bit outdated but you can see most of what I own at this link (http://www.justmanga.com/vmb/13795). I’m in a situation where I can have lots of shelves and easy access to most of my manga, I recently had to pack up two bins and fill the top shelf of the guest bedroom closet because my figures were competing for the space. I decided to cut back on figures to save money and space, so those two bins may be able to be unpacked again, we’ll see. Not going to lie… when it’s time to move to a new home, this is going to be a major inconvenience for me and my significant other. When I moved last time I collected LOTS of wine boxes from the liquor store and packed them in those. Wine boxes are a nice size that makes it so I don’t accidentally make any one box that’s too heavy.

What is the rarest item in your collection?

I’m not sure, once I own the manga (or art book) I don’t really keep tabs on if it becomes rare or not…I’d guess perhaps owning all of Basara is the rarest series I own. Volumes 18-20 seem pretty overpriced at the moment. I also think a few of my Kindaichi Case Files manga volumes are difficult to buy at a reasonable price, back when I bought the set a few years ago some volumes were already starting to be a pain to find. And since Tokyopop is no more, I doubt there are any reprints of Kindaichi. I also own most of the Osamu Tezuka volumes released in the US including all of Phoenix. For art books… my Cardcaptor Sakura (English) #1-3 art books seem somewhat rare, I also have all the (Japanese) Aria art books.

What is the weirdest item in your collection?

It could be my used copy of InuYasha, which the previous owner colored in tops on all of the breasted yokai. There were a lot of harpie-like creatures so he/she had their work cut out for him/her! If an average friend off the street came into my collection room and selected a manga at random…there are quite a few series that I can think of that they would find weird. Hands down the weirdest series for me to read was After School Nightmare; the ending especially was an extremely weird moment for me. Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is another series I love that could be considered very weird, I can think of many scenes that are shocking to someone casually flipping through.

In terms of just items I own (not just manga)…the weirdest item is probably my Franky POP Megahouse Figure, his outfit/character design is extremely difficult to explain…and figure manufacturer really didn’t need to add that much detail to his speedo…darn you Megahouse for your accuracy.

How has your taste in manga evolved since you started your collection?

It was all magical girl stuff at first, then shoujo, then shonen, and now I read just about every genre. My favorite reads are good mystery series. I also tend to favor seinen, and slice-of-life series. I’ve found that if it’s available I prefer to watch the anime of my favorite shonen series over the manga, my all time favorite anime is One Piece, but I can’t say for sure it’s my all time favorite manga. In general I think most action series can be made significantly better by anime because the flow of the action is easier to appreciate, plus sometimes the (Japanese) voice actors breathe even more life into the character on top of the good structure made by the manga-ka.

Who are your favorite comic artists?

CLAMP, Yoshiki Nakamura, Ririko Tsujita, Osamu Tezuka, Eiichiro Oda, Kozue Amano, Fumiya Satō/Yōzaburō Kanari, Kenta Shinohara, Naoki Urasawa, Ai Yazawa, Inio Asano

What series are you actively collecting right now?

Too many to name. But some of the volumes I look forward to the most are Skip Beat!, A Bride’s Story, Higurashi When They Cry, Ai Ore!, Bakuman, Drops of God, Bunny Drop, Alice in the Country of Hearts, Yotsubato, Ikigami, Kingyo Used Books, Kobato, March Story, and Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.

Favorite Series that were Dropped (US Release)

The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko, Aria, V.B. Rose, Bride of Deimos, Kindaichi Case Files, Swan, GinTama, Pet Shop of Horrors: Tokyo, The Queen’s Knight, The Stellar Six of Gingacho

Favorite Series that may never make it to the US

Tokyo Crazy Paradise, Sket Dance, Glass Mask, Parfait Tic, Koi Dano Ai Dano

Do you have any tips for fellow collectors (e.g. how to organize a collection, where to find rare books, where to score the best deals on new manga)?

I try and put my complete series in spots that are more difficult to access, because I tend to have to disturb that shelf less often (adding more volumes and pulling down older volumes to re-read before reading the newest volumes). I tend to buy deep bookcases and double layer my manga (so entire rows are hidden from view by more manga), so do as I say and not as I do, if possible openly display all your ongoing series. It’s a major headache to read the latest volume of a series and then not be able to find where the rest of the series is.

Just because the first few volumes of a series are easy to find (and cheap) doesn’t mean the rest of the series will be easy to find too. In fact, sometimes it’s a sign of the exact opposite. If there is a series you’re interested in, go to Amazon and check to make sure no single volumes are out of print (OOP). It’s dangerous to the wallet to get deeply involved in a series that will later force you to separate with excessive amounts of money from a seller for a single volume. If this series has a few OOP volumes that are significantly overpriced, try to find some scans and read them on-line to preview the series. If it’s something you think you’ll REALLY love, then go to eBay and wait to buy the whole series as a set. Plan on having to pay more than the total MSRP of each book totaled, but USUALLY that total still ends up being less than separately tracking down each individual volume. Sure, the first 11 volumes may be available from sellers for 1 cent plus shipping, but those volumes in the teens that cost $50 – $90 a piece will completely suck away all your savings from the previous volumes. Plus if you buy them as a group on eBay you tend to get a set that’s less worn, all the worst condition volumes of manga I own were from sellers on Amazon not accurately describing the condition of the volume. (There is NO SUCH THING as a “like New” ex-library copy of manga in my opinion!) But DON’T underestimate buying from Amazon sellers either, I’ve had cases where I got an entire series at half its MSRP because I bought from lots of different sellers at 1 cent per volume.

If you like to keep up with all your series, and you have a lot of series originally priced at under $10, then use Amazon. If a manga is originally priced at under $10 it will be buy 3 get the 4th free with free shipping (free shipping at over $25 which is around what it will cost). Currently I wait for enough of my Viz shoujo series to have a bunch of available pre-orders and put them on order all at once. And YES buy 3 get the 4th free does work on pre-orders too, now. But the drawback is that more and more manga is originally prices at over $9.99 these days, so I can’t apply the sale to as many series as I once did. But Amazon does a decent job discounting volumes that cost more than $9.99, too. Right Stuf also seems like a great source of manga. I can’t complain about their service or their available stock, and I REALLY like the catalog they send out.

Some of you might be asking…if you can get chapters scanned why pay for legitimate copies at all!? Some of my ALL TIME favorite series are only partially scanned online, OR not at all. Fan Scans don’t work if the series you love is a big hit in Japan but not so much where you live. Plus, I respect the mangaka too much to not put money in their pockets for their efforts.

Show Us Your Stuff is a regular column in which readers share pictures of their manga collections and discuss their favorite series. If you’d like to see your manga library featured here, please follow the directions on this page.

Pick of the Week: decisions, decisions

March 5, 2012 by Michelle Smith, Sean Gaffney, Katherine Dacey and MJ 5 Comments

We’ve got an embarrassment of riches coming in this week at Midtown Comics. Check out picks from Michelle, Sean, Kate, & MJbelow!

MICHELLE: Decisions, decisions! I am definitely keen to read quite a few of the volumes on this week’s Midtown Comics release list, but ultimately I’m going to have to cast my vote for volume 61 of Eiichiro Oda’s masterful One Piece. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and “they” must be on to something, because I’m really eager to see the rest of the crew again after the past few volumes, which featured Luffy on a solo quest to save his brother, Ace. Not only that, we’re about to embark upon the current arc of the series, which is very exciting indeed!

SEAN: We do indeed have an embarrassment of riches this week. My pick goes to Vol. 9 of Dengeki Daisy. A lot of Betsucomi manga tend to have their heroines in constant peril, and indeed that’s exactly what happens in Dengeki Daisy. What makes it work is that Teru does not whimper and wonder why all this keeps happening to her – she’s a very active Penelope, so to speak. This series has been in the middle of an ongoing very serious arc, which has been disconcerting to those who loved the comedic antics between Teru and Kurosaki. But the action and drama has also been skillfully handled, and you keep hoping that all this intrigue will end well so that the leads can live happily – if abusively – ever after.

KATE: Oh, the dilemma! I’m tempted by the first volume of The Earl and the Fairy, even if it sounds like a forgotten Lawrence Olivier/Marilyn Monroe movie, and I’m delighted to see that VIZ is re-releasing the early volumes of Skip Beat! as an omnibus. The title that most excites me, however, is the King City trade paperback. You may remember King City from the days when TOKYOPOP had a robust line of OEL comics. Though widely praised, Brandon Graham’s sci-fi comedy wasn’t a particularly good fit with the rest of TOKYOPOP’s catalog; the humor was too weird and subversive, and the art didn’t strike readers as particularly “manga-esque.” TOKYOPOP put the series on hiatus in 2007, then allowed Graham to bring the series to Image Comics. The TPB collects the entire series — 400+ pages — in a tidy, economical package. If you missed it the first time around, it’s definitely worth a look.

MJ: Wow, it really is a tough choice this week! It’s hard not to go for the final volume of No Longer Human, Usamaru Furuya’s adaptation of the classic novel, which Michelle & I fawned over in a recent installment of Off the Shelf. There’s also a new installment of Chi’s Sweet Home, and this week’s new omnibus release of Skip Beat! finally gives me a chance to get into that long-running series. In the end, though, I guess I’ll be the one to go for The Earl & the Fairy, artist Ayuko’s adaptation of the light novel by Mizue Tani, out this week from Viz. I’m always a sucker for a new shoujo series, and this one looks intriguing. I haven’t always been a fan of light novel adaptations, but having been so thoroughly won over by last year’s The Story of Saiunkoku, and eager to give this one a try!

Readers, what looks good to you this week?

Recorder and Randsell, Vol. 1

March 3, 2012 by Katherine Dacey 9 Comments

Most of the 4-koma manga I’ve read have been stamped from the same mold. There’s a quartet of teenage girls, each of whom has one personality trait, one talent or obsession, and one distinguishing physical characteristic. They all attend the same cram school, or live in the same dorm, and participate in the same everyday activities: studying for tests, planning trips to the beach, baking cakes. What passes for humor arises mostly from the clash of personalities or interests: the klutz accidentally pours water on the neat freak’s homework, or the brain chastises the compulsive gamer for playing another round of Warcraft instead of hitting the books.

Recorder and Randsell is an interesting variation on this theme, replacing the quartet of girls with mismatched siblings: Atsumi, a high school sophomore who looks eight, and Atsushi, a fifth grader who looks like a college student.

As one might guess from the characters’ appearance, most of the jokes revolve around mistaken identity. Atsumi’s best friend, the well-developed Sayo, pretends that Atsumi is her daughter to keep creepy guys at bay, while Atsushi’s grade-school pals dress him up as a parent so they can attend a cultural festival without a chaperone. Not all of the humor is PG-rated: in one of the series’ many running gags, Atsushi’s pretty young teacher is flustered by her student’s deceptively mature physique, her humiliation compounded by strangers mistakenly assuming that the puppy-like Atsushi is, in fact, her boyfriend.

To be sure, many 4-koma titles are built on the same foundation as Recorder and Randsell: the characters are easy to grasp; they follow clearly established patterns of behavior; and they seldom learn from their mistakes. What makes Recorder and Randsell funny is Higeyashi’s ability to devise new scenarios that yield the same disastrous outcomes; no matter what Atsumi and Atsushi do, or where they go, other people misread their respective ages. Higeyashi is also unconcerned with making her characters lovable, which grants her license to be weird, edgy, and a little mean to them — something that almost never happens in Sunshine Sketch or Ichiroh!!, where the characters’ behavior is carefully calibrated to trigger the reader’s awwwwwwwww reflex.

Also working in Recorder and Randsell‘s favor is the small but well-defined supporting cast. Meme Higeshiya gives each of these characters a clear role to play: Atsushi’s sidekicks, for example, remind us that Atsushi is on the brink of becoming a teenager, as they simultaneously envy the attention Atsushi receives from female classmates and tease him about his size. (“He’s a huge target!” one gleefully declares at the beginning of a dodge ball game.) The best supporting player, however, is Take, the Miyagawa’s next-door neighbor, a thirty-something man who can’t hold a steady job. Though we never see his face, Take is a frequent visitor to the Miyagawa household, unloading unwanted clothing on Atsushi whenever he breaks up with a girlfriend. (“Naoko gave me that shirt… Sachiko picked out those pants… Keiko bought me those shoes,” Take tells a bewildered Atsushi. “Stop or I won’t want to wear them anymore!” Atsushi complains.)

The art, like the script, gets the job done. Higeshiya plays up the physical contrast between the siblings, rendering Atsumi as a tiny, doll-faced girl with enormous eyes and Atsushi as a tall shojo prince. On closer inspection, the reader will see that Higeyashi is skillful enough to capture her characters’ respective ages through their body language and facial expressions; Atsushi clearly comports himself like a child, with wildly exaggerated movements and quicksilver moods, while Atsumi assumes the scolding posture of an adult.

I’d be the first to admit that such a slender premise couldn’t sustain a eight- or ten-volume series; by the fifth time the police arrest Atsushi on suspicion of being a pedophile, the punchline falls flat. Read in short bursts, however, the effect is like a good newspaper strip, offering an agreeable mixture of predictable and not-so-predictable jokes. Recommended.

RECORDER AND RANDSELL, VOL. 1 • BY MEME HIGEYASHI • TAKESHOBO CO., LTD. (JMANGA) • 115 pages • RATING: TEEN PLUS (13+)

Recorder and Randsell

March 3, 2012 by Katherine Dacey

RECORDER AND RANDSELL, VOL. 1 • BY MEME HIGEYASHI • TAKESHOBO CO., LTD. (JMANGA) • 115 pages • RATING: TEEN PLUS (13+)

Show Us Your Stuff: Karen’s Collection

March 1, 2012 by Katherine Dacey 7 Comments

Greetings! After a one-week hiatus, Show Us Your Stuff is back with a new collector: Karen, a professional designer who hails from Northern Ireland. Karen’s library isn’t the largest one we’ve featured on the site, but it’s one of the most carefully curated, as Karen routinely prunes her collection so that she has room for new series and new favorites. Like many of our other featured collectors, Karen’s taste is eclectic: you’ll find Nodame Cantabile and Honey & Clover on her shelves alongside Vagabond, Shadow Star, and X. Here’s what Karen had to say about her manga library. -Katherine Dacey

Hiya. I’m Karen, a 28-year-old digital designer from Belfast, Northern Ireland. I’ve been watching anime from about the age of 13 and collecting manga from around 17. I’m a massive bibliophile and love having so many manga at hand (though at the same time, I’ve very picky about what I buy and like to keep my collection down to just what I really like).

How long have you been collecting manga?
I started sometime during my last two years in high school, so maybe around 11 years. Back then, I lived in a town about 25 miles away from the one shop, as far as I was aware, in the whole of Northern Ireland which sold manga. On the occasional shopping trip to Belfast, I would always visit this comic store in the hopes of having enough money to buy a single volume of manga (back then it would often cost £16/US$25 or more per manga!).

What was the first manga you bought?
I think it was a volume of the Mixx edition of Sailor Moon, shortly followed by Pokemon. As I continued to buy each volume of those series as they were released, I added Shadow Star, No Need for Tenchi (I sold these a few years back), and X/1999 to the list.

How big is your collection?
Around 670 volumes, not including art books, guides, etc. though I’m doing a purge of between 30 and 40 volumes, so that will bring my number down a far bit. But then, in turn, that money is being used to help me catch up on some series that I’m a bit behind with.

What is the rarest item in your collection?
There aren’t that many “rare” items. I do have all of the original Mixx release of Sailor Moon, and the Full Metal Panic! novels seem to be a nightmare to get a hold of.

What is the weirdest item in your collection?
Mmmm, I think the weirdest would be a Japanese volume of Boundary-Scan Moon Night’s Dream (スキャンダリムーンは夜の夢) by Kumi Morikawa. (At least I think that’s the name!) I bought it during a fund-raising sale held by the Japanese Society where I live from one of the older Japanese ladies (the manga was first published in the ’70s, though the volume I have is a more recent reprint). I loved the old-style art, and, along with the other Japanese manga I have, am hoping to use it to practice my Japanese. (Yay for furigana!)

How has your taste in manga evolved since you started your collection?
I’ve gone from buying a lot of shoujo to being more of a josei and seinen fan, and whereas before I would have an interest in some shounen, it’s not something that excites me much any longer, other than some of what I think of as the better series such as Rurouni Kenshin and Full Metal Alchemist.

Who are your favorite comic artists?
At the moment, my favorite manga-ka is Naoki Urasawa. I’ve always been a fan of hardcore sci-fi, so the first one of his works that I read, Pluto, blew me away. Monster was amazing, and out of all the series I’m currently collecting, 20th Century Boys is the one I’m quickest to read when a new volume is released.

I’m also a big fan of Chika Umino, loving her work in Honey and Clover, Eden of the East (one of my favorite anime), and March Comes in Like a Lion (which I’m collecting the Japanese releases of). I hope more of her work is published in English as I would love to be able to read March Comes in Like a Lion without having to try to translate it — I’m still a beginner when it comes to kanji — or looking for other’s translations. Lately I’ve been getting more and more into Fumi Yoshinaga’s works.

I used to be a big CLAMP fan, and Tokyo Babylon is still one of my favorites, but I haven’t been that into their recent stuff, with the exception of xxxHOLiC.

What series are you actively collecting right now?
20th Century Boys, Bride’s Tale, Bunny Drop (though I may drop this after hearing how the series ends…), House of Five Leaves, Kimi ni Todoke, Library Wars: Love & Peace, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya novels, Natsume’s Book of Friends, Ooku, Ouran High School Host Club, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei, Wandering Son, We Were There, xxxHOLiC, and the new X omnibus edition. I’m also playing catch-up with the following: Full Metal Alchemist, Kaze Hikaru, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, and the omnibus editions of both Rurouni Kenshin and Vagabond.

I’m embarrassed to say I still haven’t bought anything by Tezuka! The new version of Adolf in the next few months will probably be my first.

Do you have any tips for fellow collectors (e.g. how to organize a collection, where to find rare books, where to score the best deals on new manga)?
I don’t do anything that special in terms of physical organization. I just break the collection into two sets in terms of height — tall and normal — in order to fit as many shelves as possible into the bookcases. I remember spending a whole weekend working this out, and ended up going from having no room for more manga, to enough for another 100 volumes or so. After that I just arrange them alphabetically, and stack some vertically, to break things up visually a little, as well as help prevent manga from toppling over while set upright.

In terms of non-physical organization, I catalogue everything, both as list (http://www.akaihane.co.uk/lj/collections/manga-collection.php), as well as on Goodreads (http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1680658-karen-murray?shelf=owned-manga). So if I had any advice, I’d recommend people to sign up to Goodreads. When you have a good few series on the go and a largish collection, it’s very easy to lose track, and spend ages sitting looking at your shelves, trying to remember what you still need to read. This site (and to a lesser extent, MyAnimeList), allows me to have a separate list for manga that I own but have not read yet, and to order them in terms of priority. It helps motivate me to get up to date with what I own. Though I still have 50 or so unread volumes! And every time I seem to lessen that number, I end up going on a buying spree.

Bookshelf Briefs 2/27/12

February 27, 2012 by MJ, Michelle Smith, Sean Gaffney and Katherine Dacey 3 Comments

This week, Michelle, MJ, Sean take a look at new releases from the Digital Manga Guild, Viz Media, Dark Horse Manga, and Vertical, Inc., while Kate offers up an unusual Tezuka find as she wraps up this month’s Manga Moveable Feast!

Ata | By Tamaki Fuji | Digital Manga Guild – I’ve reviewed quite a few books now from various groups in the Digital Manga Guild and most have been pretty good. And then there was Ata. It’s an absolute mess, with lousy art and mistakes galore. Releasing a book with an error on practically every page just goes to show that passing DMP’s proficiency tests is not sufficient to guarantee a quality product. But maybe it’s “rediculous” to expect them to be able to spell “speical” words like “fufilling,” especially when it’s “hard to breath” near the tree when it “bares” its fruit. You’ll note that I haven’t said anything yet about Ata‘s story, and that’s because I was so overwhelmed and distracted by the dozens upon dozens of easily preventable mistakes that I was unable to become invested in it. The shoddy work of this group ruined the manga for me. Avoid at all costs. – Michelle Smith

Bleach, Vol. 38 | By Tite Kubo | Viz Media – If there’s one thing Bleach seems determined to remind me, it’s that I’m not its target audience. And while this may seem like an obvious conclusion for a 40-something woman reading a shounen battle manga, the thing about Bleach is that originally I was. Tite Kubo won me over easily in the series’ early volumes, with well-developed relationships, a terrific sense of humor, and an ability to make readers care about a large cast of characters, both friend and foe. Though later volumes have devolved into increasingly tedious fight sequences featuring increasingly disinteresting enemies, he’s won me back, time and again, as recently as volume 36. Sadly, with this volume, he’s lost me again. Despite one short, dramatic scene revolving around the defeat of Ikkaku, the volume overall hinges on the reader’s interest in fights for their own sake. Unfortunately, that’s just not enough for me. – MJ

Gate 7, Vol. 2 | By CLAMP | Dark Horse Manga – Back in December, I described Gate 7 as “my kind of CLAMP,” and while I believe this still may well be the case, the series’ second volume doesn’t put in much effort to prove it. Volume one’s greatest weakness was a glut of exposition, and that trend continues here, as CLAMP introduces us to a whole slew of brand new characters before we’ve had a chance to fall for the ones we already have. The result is shaky pacing and glassy-eyed confusion, exacerbated by an onslaught of historical information likely to send most western readers thumbing their way repeatedly to the book’s (thankfully extensive) endnotes in the hopes of reaching solid ground. Though as a long-time CLAMP fan, I’m willing to grant the artists a few more volumes to create some emotional stakes worthy of my investment, many readers may find their patience waning by the end of this volume, and I’m not yet confident enough to urge them on. Not quite recommended. – MJ

Kamisama Kiss, Vol. 7 | By Julietta Suzuki | Viz Media – There’s a lot of manga cliches going on here, honestly. Which is not always bad, but when I saw Nanami telling Tomoe that he had to stay behind while she went to the meeting of the Gods, I knew it was a classic “if only she’d explained” moment. Sigh. Other than that, this volume introduces a lot of new kami, as we delve into just how much prejudice Nanami has to fight to be accepted as a god herself. Of course, for those who want romance, there’s Chapter 38, which is almost a perfect ‘date’ chapter, and sure to warm the heart. Overall, though, this felt like a transitional volume of Kamisama Kiss, setting up the plots that will be taken care of in the next volume. Still good stuff, though. – Sean Gaffney

No Longer Human, Vol. 3 | By Usamaru Furuya | Vertical, Inc. – After enjoying the first two volumes of No Longer Human more than I’d expected to, I was really looking forward to the final volume, which seems an odd thing to say, given the extent of the extremely grim things that tend to happen in this series. We begin one year into Yozo Oba’s marriage to cheerful and innocent Yoshino. They’re happy together, but shortly after a friend points out that Yozo must eventually pay for his past crimes, something terrible happens to strip Yoshino of her trusting personality, and the change in her destroys Yozo’s happy fantasy. Forced to confront the awfulness of humanity, he spirals into drug abuse and madness. Furuya depicts Yozo’s descent into ruin with creative, effective imagery, which results in some odd moments where readers are admiring the art whilst something profoundly unsettling is actually happening in the panel. Dark and strange, No Longer Human may not be for everyone, but I still recommend it. – Michelle Smith

Nura: Rise Of The Yokai Clan, Vol. 7 | By Hiroshi Shiibashi | Viz Media – This volume of Nura is neatly divided into two parts. The first deals with Yura, who is finding herself confused as to the true nature of the yokai… and is suspecting that Rikuo is involved somehow. What’s worse, her two older brothers show up, and explicitly state that there is no such thing as a good yokai. Anyone who says they see the world only in black and white morality is never going to be a good guy in manga, but these two are surprisingly well handled. And Yura gets some nice bonding with Rikuo (another potential romance? This isn’t getting harem-ey, is it?). The second half is mostly a flashback to how Nura’s grandfather met his grandmother, and interested me mostly for seeing Tsurara’s grandmother, a lot less perky and a lot more sultry in the Yuki-Onna department. As always, recommended for Jump fans. – Sean Gaffney

Otomen, Vol. 12 | By Aya Kanno | Viz Media – The best part of this volume, to me, was seeing the flashback to Asuka’s mother in school, which strikes me as an amazing story… which we don’t see. Indeed, Aya Konno explicitly says she wanted to draw more of it, but didn’t. Oh Otomen, why do you always sidestep my expectations? Instead, we get the expected resolution between Asuka and his father (if you hadn’;t guessed who it was, you weren’t reading hard enough), which is nice and sentimental but not as deep as I’d have liked. I hope we get more of his mother in future. The best part of the book was the final chapter, a terrific side story with Amakashi and a rather stoic high school girl, which did what I wanted the main story to do. Otomen seems to be heading into its endgame, so I hope we’ll see some better resolution of the main plotline. And more Ryo! – Sean Gaffney

Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga | By Philip Brophy | National Gallery of Victoria – This slim, handsomely packaged book is, in fact, the catalog for an exhibition mounted by the National Gallery of Victoria back in 2006. As such, it has all the virtues and faults of a museum product. On the plus side, the book contains immaculate reproductions of Tezuka’s work, from his very earliest stories — Metropolis, Crime and Punishment — to his final manga, Ludwig B. Editor Philip Brophy has paired these images with numerous statements by Tezuka about his characters and creative process — an impressionistic but effective strategy for helping the reader understand Tezuka’s artistry. On the minus side, the contextual essays run the gamut from very good to hopelessly vague; readers looking for biographical information will find Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga a more comprehensive introduction to the master’s life and work. – Katherine Dacey

Pick of the Week: Picks & anti-Picks

February 27, 2012 by Sean Gaffney, Brigid Alverson, MJ, Michelle Smith and Katherine Dacey 5 Comments

This week’s haul at Midtown Comics inspires both some enthusiastic picks (and a couple of emphatic anti-picks) from the Battle Robot. Check them out below!

SEAN: Can I make xxxHOLIC my anti-Pick of the Week? :) Seriously, though, even though Midtown isn’t listing it, my store is getting in the 13th volume of Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei. Over the last several volumes, the manga has found its way, almost ceasing to be about any of the characters at all. I can’t even recall the last time Nozomu tried to kill himself. Instead, it devotes itself to a typical cliched behavior every chapter, and then picks it apart until it explodes. And if that means less attention to character development, well, the characters are exaggerations to begin with, so it’s less about deepening them and more about honing them into sharp, cutting blades. Which is why, in this volume, they proceed to butcher an entire prison full of guards. Want to learn why? Read the book!

BRIGID: Although GTO tempts me, I’m going with vol. 2 of Gate 7 as my first choice. Although the first volume had its flaws—storytelling that managed to be both unclear and repetitive, to be specific—the art is beautiful, and by the end of the book CLAMP had me firmly in their grip with the promise of a historical/supernatural story set in old Kyoto. CLAMP can be really terrible or really good, and I’m hoping that after a stuttering start, this book will fall into the latter group.

MJ: Well, Sean, I’m going to cancel out your anti-Pick by picking it! Yes, I’ve heard the same disheartening things about the ending of xxxHolic as everyone else has (well, without explicit spoilers—so please don’t spoil me now!) but I’ve loved this series for 18 volumes, and I’m longing to read its conclusion for myself. Unlike many readers, I’ve actually quite enjoyed the series’ post-Young coda (see my thoughts on volume 18 here). Watanuki was my reason for reading from the very beginning, and he remains so to this day. I just have to see how his story ends, for better or worse.

MICHELLE: Don’t spoil me on xxxHOLiC, either! I still need to finish Tsubasa! Anyway, I’ve probably picked this series before, and I’ll probably pick it again, but I must cast my vote this week for the seventh volume of Itazura Na Kiss. This series has its ups and downs, with moments both delightful and infuriating, but I still look forward to each double-sized volume. I’m especially keen to see whether Naoki gets any nicer or Kotoko any more competent, but somehow I doubt that will happen any time soon.

KATE: My pick is Tenjo Tenge…. NOT! (I chalk up that feeble joke to the lingering effects of Vicks Vapo-Rub and cough syrup.) While I second Michelle’s enthusiastic endorsement of Itazura na Kiss, I’m casting my vote for volume three of Border. Technically speaking, Border is yaoi, but it reads more like The A-Team than Bad Teacher’s Equation — well, if Murdock occasionally made out with Mr. T. I guess that doesn’t make Border seem very entertaining, but I really enjoyed the first two volumes’ mixture of melodrama, suspense, and teamwork. This is yaoi for readers who like a big dose of plot with their smut. Oh, and lots of handsome men in camouflage.

Readers, what looks good to you this week?

Osamu Tezuka’s Lost World

February 23, 2012 by Katherine Dacey 6 Comments

Reading Osamu Tezuka’s Lost World (1948) reminded me a formative graduate school experience. I was researching George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), when I stumbled across a blistering review of a composition I’d never heard: Blue Monday (1922), a one-act “jazz opera” that Gershwin composed for Paul Whiteman’s Scandals of 1922. After attending its premiere, Charles Darnton, critic for the New York Tribune, pronounced the project a disaster, an ill-advised attempt to transplant the conventions of verismo opera to a Harlem setting. Blue Monday, he opined, was “the most dismal, stupid, and incredible blackface sketch that has probably ever been perpetrated. In it a dusky soprano finally killed her gambling man. She should have shot all her associates the moment they appeared and then turned the pistol on herself.” (Darnton, 11)

Ouch.

The review piqued my interest, however, prompting me to track down a recording of Blue Monday. Judged against Porgy and Bess, it was an inferior work; as Gershwin biographer Charles Schwartz observed, the music was several degrees removed from jazz and ragtime, drawing its cues from Alexander’s Ragtime Band and not The Maple Leaf Rag. (Schwartz, 61) The dramaturgy, too, was weak, conveying little of the Harlem setting. Yet in this early experiment, I could hear glimmerings of Gershwin’s mature style, a conscious effort to bring African-American music to the opera stage. And that excited me.

I had a similar reaction to Lost World, an early, problematic work in the Tezuka canon. First published in 1948, Lost World focuses on a scientific expedition to the fictional planet Mamango, a large, egg-shaped rock that, five million years earlier, had been a part of the Earth. When the scientists arrive on Mamango, they discover a Jurassic landscape carpeted in monstrous ferns, populated by hungry dinosaurs, and littered with powerful “energy stones.” The financial and scientific value of their discoveries, however, soon cause a deadly rift within the expedition party.

The execution of Lost World will come as a shock to readers familiar with Tezuka’s mature style. The profusion of subplots, minor characters, and doppelgangers makes the story hard to follow on a moment-to-moment basis; without frequent narrative interventions from the characters, large stretches of Lost World would be incomprehensible. More frustrating still is Tezuka’s over-reliance on dialogue to resolve plot points and reveal motive, even when that information is readily conveyed by the pictures. (“This is payback for you throwing me into the gorge! You get me?!” one character yells as he pummels the person who pushed him off a cliff in the previous scene.) The biggest disappointment, however, is the artwork; most of the panels consist of talking heads, with a handful of dramatic, but disjointed, action scenes interrupting the steady stream of chatter.

Writing about Lost World in the 1980s, Tezuka conceded Lost World‘s shortcomings, attributing them to his age (he was 20) and the circumstances of its publication. As he explained, the work originally ran in an Osaka newspaper, Kansai Yoron, where the target audience was young adults. The two-volume version published by Fuji Shobo, however, was aimed at the children’s market, necessitating substantial changes to the the script. What had been a romance in the original version, for example, was recast as a brother-sister relationship in the Fuji Shobo edition; anything more explicit would have been “absolutely taboo in children’s comics” of the period. (Tezuka, 248)

At the same time, Tezuka touted Lost World as an important milestone in his artistic development. “I thought that at the very least, there was no other comic book like mine, which was like a novel (albeit a very crude one), and had an unhappy ending,” Tezuka explained. (Tezuka 247) A careful inspection of Lost World supports Tezuka’s claim for its significance; whatever its shortcomings, many of the characters and themes of his mature works appear in embryonic form in Lost World.

On the most basic level, Tezuka employs several of his best-known “stars” in Lost World, arranging them in contrasting pairs. Acetylene Lamp, for example, plays an unscrupulous journalist who stows away aboard the expedition’s spaceship so that he can get an exclusive scoop on Mamango — and profit from the mysterious “energy stones” scattered across its surface. Another Tezuka favorite, Shunsaku Ban (a.k.a. Higeoyaji), plays yang to Lamp’s yin; as in many of his other incarnations, Ban is a middle-aged detective whose blustery demeanor camouflages his basic decency. Both characters are motivated by curiosity, but their curiosity compels them in opposite directions: Lamp towards profit, Ban towards truth.

From left to right: Acetylene Lamp, Shunsaku Ban/Hygeoyaji, Kenichi Shikishima

The story’s two scientists are likewise played by major “stars” from the Tezuka troupe. Kenichi Shikishima, hero of New Treasure Island, leads the Mamango expedition. Dr. Shikishima’s youthful spirit, resolve, and courage are contrasted with that of Dr. Butaru Makeru, a mustachioed villain whose cowardice and opportunism precipitate the disaster on Mamango. While Shikishima resolves to visit Mamango “for the sake of world science,” Makeru hints at his selfish motives for participating in the expedition: “If by some chance we meet with something unexpected on that planet, don’t blame me. Heh, heh, heh!” That contrast is also underscored by their terrestrial research as well: while Shikishima’s experiments are intended to help animals achieve human consciousness, Makeru’s experiments are designed for his own personal benefit, with little regard for their greater social or scientific good.

In later works, Tezuka was less schematic in his representations of good and evil, allowing characters to simultaneously embody both. Father Garai, anti-hero of MW, is a good example of this later tendency: Garai is a good man tormented by dark sexual desires, seeking grace even as he sins repeatedly. Black Jack is another, a character whose misanthropy and greed are counterbalanced by a strong reverence for life. As Helen McCarthy observes in The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga, Black Jack is “sometimes a gentle and compassionate savior, sometimes a cold and unforgiving avenger,” two opposite yet equally human responses to “the inevitability of death.” (McCarthy, 199)

Ayame

Mimio

Lost World also introduces a recurring character type found throughout Tezuka’s work: the artificial life-form. Early in the story, Tezuka introduces us to Mimio, a talking rabbit, and Ayame, a “veggie girl.” Both are the result of scientific experiments: Dr. Shikishima surgically enhanced Mimio’s brain to grant him human intelligence, while Dr. Butamo cultivated Ayame in a laboratory. (Note that Shikishima’s motives seem benevolent; he wants to help animals achieve equal status with humans, whereas Butamo is more interested in making a wife for himself.)

Mimio and Ayame’s quest for humanity is rather baldly presented. In an early chapter, for example, Mimio visits Shikishima’s lab, where a new group of surgically enhanced animals are learning how to think and act like humans. Though the animals’ struggles with language and manners are played for laughs — “Boy, all humans sure do look alike!” exclaims a dog — there’s a definite sense that these creatures’ own desires are being subordinated to Shikishima’s grander mission of animal-human detente. “You’re very being is unique,” one of Shikishima’s colleagues tells his subjects. “Therefore, you should help humans and be a guide to other animals in perpetuum.”

Unlike Mimio, Ayame looks human, even though she is composed entirely of plant material — and that makes her situation more precarious than the rabbit’s. On the one hand, Dr. Butamo wants her to become his wife, threatening to kill her if she refuses to honor his marriage proposal. On the other, some of the characters view Ayame as nothing more than a walking, talking cabbage — and thus a potential food source when the crew’s rations run out. Ayame remains committed to exploring her humanity nonetheless; late in the manga, she and Shikishima have this pointed exchange:

Shikishima: Miss Ayame, surely, you must be surprised to be having so many adventures.You see? The world of humans is full of adventure and wonder!

Ayame: I feel as if I finally understand what things bring the most pleasure and happiness to the hearts of humans!

Shikishima: Well, then, when you return to the laboratory, you should have Mr. Butamo teach you even more, shouldn’t you?

In Mimio and Ayame, it’s not hard to see the inspiration for later characters such as Dororo‘s Hyakkimaru and Black Jack‘s Pinoko, both of whom struggle to reconcile the circumstances of their “birth” with their desire to be fully human.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Lost World is the final act, in which an accident permanently strands Ayame and Shikishima on Mamango. In Tezuka’s original version, Ayame and Shikishima embrace their fate as lovers, but in the Fuji Shobo edition, Tezuka portrayed them as brother and sister. Nonetheless, Tezuka left the final words of the original intact, speculating that in five million years, “when Mamango once again approaches the Earth,” mankind might find a new race of “plant animal people” descended from Ayame and Shikishima.

Similar Adam-and-Eve motifs recur throughout Tezuka’s oeuvre, finding a more sexual and spiritual expression in such mature works as Apollo’s Song and Phoenix: Nostalgia. Nostalgia is a particularly odd and fascinating variation on the theme, as the Adam figure dies early in the story, leaving his pregnant wife alone on a remote space colony. His wife then mates with her own offspring who, in turn, mate with an extraterrestrial life form whose DNA proves essential to rescuing humanity from the brink of extinction. In short, Nostalgia — like Lost World — dares to a imagine a new future for mankind in which other forms of life — terrestrial and extraterrestrial — play an important role in our evolution.

Whether these observations will make Lost World more palatable to a casual reader is debatable; I fully admit that I struggled through its 246 pages, backtracking frequently in a futile effort to understand what was happening. But if you approach Lost World in the same spirit I approached Gershwin’s Blue Monday — as a window into a major artist’s early development — you may find, as I did, a work of astonishing vibrancy, contradiction, and interest.

Works Cited
“Bet Lost on First Opera.” New York Times. 21 July 1935: II1. Print.
Darnton, Charles. “George White’s Scandals’ Lively and Gorgeous.” New York World 29 Aug. 1922: 11. Print.
McCarthy, Helen, and Osamu Tezuka. The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009. Print.
Schwartz, Charles. Gershwin: His Life and Music. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1973. Print.
Tezuka, Osamu, and Kumar Sivasubramanian. Lost World. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse, 2003. Print.

Manga Artifacts: Osamu Tezuka’s Lost World

February 23, 2012 by Katherine Dacey

MMF: An Introduction to Osamu Tezuka

February 19, 2012 by Katherine Dacey 15 Comments

February 9, 2012 marked the twenty-third anniversary of Osamu Tezuka’s death. His career in the manga industry spanned five decades, from the early days of the akahon market to the industry’s zenith, when comics accounted for nearly 40% of all books sold in Japan. Over the course of his life, Tezuka produced more than 150,000 pages of manga; created such iconic characters as Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, and Black Jack; launched a manga magazine and an animation studio; and mentored such artists as Hiroshi Fujimoto and Shotaro Ishimonori. The extent of Tezuka’s influence on Japanese visual culture is hard to understate; few modern creators have had such a profound impact on the medium in which they worked.

In Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (1996), Frederik L. Schodt argues that Tezuka’s most important legacy was the story comic, “an intricate novelistic format” that anticipated the long-running stories in Weekly Shonen Jump, Morning, and Nakayoshi (234). Tezuka’s first story comics — New Treasure Island (1947), Jungle Emperor (1950-54), Astro Boy (1952-68), Princess Knight (1953-56) — were aimed at children, but his later work demonstrated that the format was well-suited to exploring adult themes, too.

Tezuka also pioneered a new way of drawing stories. As Schodt explains, Tezuka borrowed techniques from Walt Disney films “to create a sense of motion with his page layouts” — in essence, to bring the movie-going experience to the printed page (235). Tezuka’s example proved exceptionally powerful; the dynamic, visually-driven storytelling of Astro Boy and New Treasure Island continue to influence contemporary artists, especially in the world of shonen manga.

Tezuka would have been pleased, I think, to see how widely his stories are being read today, both in Japan and throughout Asia, the Americas, and Europe. In the United States alone, eighteen of Tezuka’s manga have been adapted for English-speaking audiences, Astro Boy, Black Jack (1973-83), and Phoenix (1956-89) among them.

Through these translations, I’ve developed a complicated relationship with Tezuka’s work. I love his art: his fluid layouts, his brilliant caricatures, his tripped-out dream sequences, and Freudian sex scenes. I also love his ambition: many of his stories — especially from the later stages of his career — have the sweep and social conscience of a Tolstoy novel, but the lurid, trashy soul of a Brian DePalma thriller.

Whenever I read one of Tezuka’s books, however, I’m reminded of the social, cultural, and temporal distance between his world and mine, even when I’m engrossed in the story and invested in the characters. Reading Swallowing the Earth (1968), for example, I was confronted by images that upset me. As a feminist, I winced at Tezuka’s depiction of Polynesian women as Hottentot Venuses, libidinous monsters with enormous lips and grotesquely rounded bodies. As an American, I struggled through Earth‘s racial warfare subplot with a mixture of dismay and horror: how could someone as fundamentally humane as Tezuka unwittingly tap into white supremacist fantasy when dramatizing the injustice of segregation?

Even when it infuriates me — as passages in Apollo’s Song (1970), Ayako (1972-73), and The Book of Human Insects (1970) have done — I’m still irresistibly drawn to his work. I admire Tezuka’s willingness to wrestle with the dark side of human nature, to create heroes and villains of genuine moral complexity. I also admire Tezuka’s playful side: his tendency to break the fourth wall, write himself into stories, bestow Dickensian names on his characters, and draw elaborate crowd scenes that would have made Busby Berkeley green with envy.

In the last ten years, there’s been an explosion of English-language articles and books aimed at readers like me, fans who recognize Tezuka’s important role in shaping the modern anime and manga industries, but want to learn more about his life, career, and artistic process. Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (2009) is an excellent example of this trend; though she meticulously explains Tezuka’s star system and elucidates recurring themes in his work, she argues that Tezuka was “first and foremost a maker of popular entertainment,” and should be understood as such.

The complexity and size of Tezuka’s oeuvre has inspired American scholars to write about him as well. Flip through a volume of Mechademia, or browse the Asian Studies aisle at your local bookstore, and you’ll find scholars writing about Tezuka’s artistic legacy from a variety of perspectives. Some of these works — such as Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-WWII Manga (2009) — make a conscious effort to bridge the gap between Ivory Tower and fandom, while others are clearly intended for academic audiences.

The goal of this month’s Manga Movable Feast is to create a space where all of Tezuka’s admirers — fans, critics, and scholars — can interact, sharing their reactions to his work, assessing his artistic legacy, reviewing titles new and old, and engaging with the messier, more problematic aspects of his work. Anyone can contribute: all you need to do is send me a link to a Tezuka-themed essay, podcast, or review, and I’ll feature it in one of my daily round-ups. (Email or Twitter are the best way to submit links; Twitter submissions should be directed to @manga_critic.) Note that the feast runs from today (Sunday, February 19th) through Saturday, February 25th. For more information, please visit the Osamu Tezuka MMF archive.

This is an expanded version of an essay that appeared at The Manga Critic on 12/14/10.

An Introduction to Osamu Tezuka

February 19, 2012 by Katherine Dacey

Soulless: The Manga, Vol. 1

February 18, 2012 by Katherine Dacey 17 Comments

Soulless is saucy in the best possible sense of the word: it’s bold and smart, with a heroine so irrepressible you can see why author Gail Carriger couldn’t tell Alexia Tarabotti’s story in just one book.

As fans of Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate novels know, Alexia is a sharp-tongued woman living in Victorian London — or rather, a steampunk version of Victorian London in which vampires and werewolves co-exist with the “daylight” (read: “human”) world. As she would in the real nineteenth-century England, Alexia faces pressure to marry, a prospect complicated by her age — she’s twenty-six — her ethnicity — her father was Italian — and her prodigious intellect. Alexia has one additional strike against her, albeit one that doesn’t affect her marriageability: she’s soulless, a “preternatural” being who can neutralize the vampires and werewolves’ power, temporarily reducing them to mortal form.

Plot-wise, Soulless is an agreeable mishmash of Young Sherlock Holmes, Underworld, and Mansfield Park, with a dash of Jules Verne for good measure. The basic storyline is a whodunnit: Alexia becomes the prime suspect in a string of supernatural disappearances around London, and must collaborate with Lord Collan Maccon, a belligerent werewolf detective, to clear her name. What they discover in the course of their investigation is a grand conspiracy worthy of an Indiana Jones movie, complete with evil scientists, vampire “hives,” sinister-looking laboratories, and a golem; all that’s missing is the Ark of the Covenant and a few Nazi generals.

At the same time, Soulless is a romance. Alexia would make a swell Austen heroine, as she faces the kind of obstacles to marriage that would elicit sympathy from the Dashwood girls and Fanny Price. The greatest of these hurdles isn’t her name or her age, however; it’s Alexia’s firm conviction that marriage should not be a socially or financially expedient union, but a true partnership. Paging Elizabeth Bennett!

Given how many genres are present in the text — it’s a crime procedural, a thriller, an urban fantasy, a comedy of manners, and a bodice ripper — it’s astonishing how well all the tropes mesh. Some of that success can be attributed to the dialogue. The characters’ peppery exchanges are an affectionate parody of British costume dramas; substitute “soulless” for “penniless,” and Alexia could easily be a character in Sense and Sensibility. A few passages strain too hard for effect — would anyone have really chosen “comestibles” over “food” when complaining about a party? — but for the most part, Carriger finds a convincing tone that’s neither faux-archaic nor casually contemporary.

Soulless’ other great strength is its appealing cast of characters. Alexia and Maccon are clearly the stars of this imaginary universe; anyone who’s read Middlemarch or Emma will immediately recognize that Alexia and Maccon are The Main Couple, as they spend most of volume one denying their mutual attraction and trading zingers. (“I may be a werewolf and Scottish, but despite what you may have read about both, we are not cads!” Maccon declares in a fit of Darcy-esque pique.) In the spirit of the best nineteenth-century novels, however, Carriger situates her lovebirds inside a vibrant community, albeit one inhabited by grumpy werewolves and flamboyant vampires in lieu of parsons, baronets, and virtuous maidens. Though these supporting characters don’t always get the screen time they deserve, Lord Akeldama, Professor Lyall, and Ivy Hisselpenny enliven the narrative with sharp observations and sound advice for Alexia and Maccon.

Manga artist Rem, best-known for her work on Vampire Kisses, does a fine job of translating Carriger’s prose into pictures. Though Rem’s attention to period detail is evident in the characters’ sumptuous costumes and lavishly furnished parlors, her meticulousness extends to the action sequences as well. An early fight between Alexia and a vampire is expertly staged, making effective use of dramatic camera angles and overturned furniture to capture the intensity of their struggle. Rem also manages to fold many of Carriger’s steampunk flourishes — zeppelins, steam-powered carriages, “glassicals” — into the story without overwhelming the eye; if anything, I found the subtlety of the steampunk elements an improvement on the novel, where the object descriptions sometimes felt like tangents.

The only drawback to the artwork is Alexia herself. In the novels, Carriger describes her as plain and full-figured; in the manga, however, Rem depicts Alexia as a buxom, wasp-waisted babe with a pouty mouth and a pretty face. That transformation is certainly in keeping with manga aesthetics — even the plainest young characters are usually pleasing to the eye — but not with the source material; as a reader, one of the real pleasures of Soulless is watching the heroine triumph on the strength of her character and brains, not the size of her bust.

On the whole, however, Rem has succeeded in taking a justifiably popular novel and making it work in a different medium on its own terms; readers new to Carriger’s work will be as enchanted with this cheeky, fun adaptation as her hardcore fans. Recommended.

Review copy provided by Yen Press. Volume one of Soulless: The Manga will be released in March 2012.

SOULLESS: THE MANGA, VOL. 1 • STORY BY GAIL CARRIGER, ART AND ADAPTATION BY REM • YEN PRESS • 208 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (VIOLENCE, SEXUAL SITUATIONS, NUDITY)

Soulless: The Manga, Vol. 1

February 18, 2012 by Katherine Dacey

Show Us Your Stuff: Safetygirl’s Otaku Room

February 17, 2012 by Katherine Dacey 14 Comments

Apologies for the late posting this week! Today’s featured collector is Safetygirl, a self-described Shinsengumi fan and avid manga collector who owns over 2,000 volumes. As you’ll see from her drool-worthy photos, her tastes run the gamut from Kaze Hikaru to Golgo 13 to Arata: The Legend. She’s so dedicated to anime and manga, in fact, that she custom designed a room in her house just to hold all her swag — and what a space it is! If anyone from Bravo or TLC is watching, I think Safetygirl’s organizational and decorating skills would make a swell basis for a reality show.

One quick programming note: since I will be hosting the Osamu Tezuka Manga Movable Feast next week, Show Us Your Stuff will be on hiatus until Thursday, March 1st. –Katherine Dacey

Hi, I’m Safetygirl! Welcome to my office, or, as a friend dubbed it, “the otaku room.” When I bought this house, I wanted a room for my computer and small manga collection, and it’s really expanded since then! Besides manga, this room is for my anime, cels, character goods, and doujinshi collections. I also LOVE the Shinsengumi, and collect anything with any version of the guys in baby blue.

Behold the Great Wall of Manga!

How long have you been collecting manga?
I was briefly into manga in the mid-’90s, mostly the stuff available in the old floppies, like Ranma ½, Maison Ikokku and Oh! My Goddess, but at that time I was all Marvel/DC/American superheros. Then I went to college and gave up on comics entirely, due to finances and being annoyed by the frequent rebootings and retconning of American comics.

That changed in 2003. That was when a friend let me borrow the first volumes of Kare Kano and Kindaichi Case Files, and I avoided reading them for a while. Then I finally read them… and I was hooked. I had just gotten a promotion at work and had extra disposable income, so a new hobby came just at the right time.

What was the first manga you bought?
I can’t remember what it was back in the ’90s—that was a long time ago! In more recent times, it was Kare Kano volume two. I was annoyed that the manga cows had been handling it and the spine was dinged, but I bought it anyway—I had to know what happened! It’s still in my collection now, even though my feelings towards the series has cooled appreciably since that time.

Close-ups of Safetygirl’s enormous (and drool-worthy) manga collection.

How big is your collection?
Over 2,100 volumes. Even though I cull and sell pretty aggressively, I’m running out of room! When I bought my house in 2004, I designed the custom-built shelves in my office to fit 1,300-1,400 books, which seemed like a lot—I had maybe 500 at the time, plus some character goods I wanted to display. As you can see, I’ve had to be pretty creative; I’ve found that manga can serve as great cord-hiders on the entertainment center. I bought a shelf at a Borders fixture sale, and it holds my Shinsengumi manga on one side while the other has my Yuu Watase titles (and a great place to display my Watase pin collection!). Recently I had to add another shelving unit; this one has my CLAMP collection (with a little room for expansion!) and Yumi Tamura. In the past couple of years, I’ve started stacking things vertically—I don’t like doing that, but the shelves aren’t deep enough for double rows.

What is the rarest item in your collection?
I wish I could say those super-expensive middle volumes of Basara, but I don’t have those yet. The French copies were an affordable placeholder, and it’ll be a good test of my French when I get there.

Beyond my manga, I also collect cels, and being one-of-a-kind, those are rare. The focus of that collection is Millennium Actress.

Safetygirl’s anime shrine. Bow before it and be humbled!

What is the weirdest item in your collection?
The original run of Golgo 13, as published by LEED here in the US in the mid ’80s. It’s flipped! Featuring strange coloring on the first chapters, where flesh tones are rendered in an Oompa-Loompa-ish orange! I’m not sure if it’s really weird, but it’s certainly early in the history of manga in the US.

How has your taste in manga evolved since you started your collection?
I think I was like a lot of people: I went on what my friends were reading, and things related to the anime I was watching on TV. I didn’t find the manga blogging/tweeting community until much later, and they’ve been an influence. But these days, I don’t do Jump titles like I used to—I’ve not liked one enough in a while to justify the investment of dozens and dozens of volumes. I’d like to say that I’m pickier now, and I use the manga community to help guide me towards things I might have either overlooked or dismissed. But what attracted me to manga was shojo, and that’s still what I love the most. I’ve also discovered that the rest of the world has manga, too, so I’ve been able to improve my rusty high school French AND finish Walkin’ Butterfly at the same time!

Kaze Hikaru artwork.

Who are your favorite comic artists?
Taeko Watanabe (Kaze Hikaru), Shigeru Takao (Teru Teru x Shonen), Yuu Watase, Miyuki Yamaguchi, Kaoru Mori, and my newest favorite is Yumi Tamura. I really wish I knew how to bribe the folks at Viz—brownies, maybe?—so they’d license 7SEEDS. For American comics, the only titles I still have left from my once-extensive collection are the trade paperbacks of Sandman and Astro City.

What series are you actively collecting right now?
I try to keep up to date—I fell behind a bit 2007-2008, which sent me scrambling during the CMX/GoComi shutdown era. Currently: Kaze Hikaru, Twin Spica, Black Bird, Dengeki Daisy, Kimi no Todoke, Oresama Teacher, xxxHolic, Arata, House of Five Leaves, Sayonara Zetsubo-Sensei, Bakuman, Kamisama Kiss, Natsume’s Book of Friends, Vampire Knight, Chi’s Sweet Home, Afterschool Charisma, Kingyo Used Books, Story of Saiunkoku, Ouran, Goong, Bunny Drop, Bride’s Story, Yotsuba, Black Butler, Arisa, Otomen, The Betrayal Knows my Name, Drops of God, Sailor Moon, Dawn of Arcana, A Devil and Her Love Song. There’s a lot of other series I would be buying, if they still were being printed. Looking forward to: The Earl and the Fairy, Sakuran.

I buy stuff from France and Germany, but since I tend to order in bunches on a quarterly basis, I wouldn’t say that I’m following anything. From Japan I buy Kaze Hikaru, and whatever Yamaguchi Miyuki and Shigeru Takao are putting out, and other things as needed. I have a weakness for anything from Hakusensha with a pretty cover. If I lived near a Book-Off, I would need another room. I subscribe to Flowers and Melody.

Manga, anime, and Hello Kitty! swag.

Do you have any tips for fellow collectors (e.g. how to organize a collection, where to find rare books, where to score the best deals on new manga)?
Catalog it, somewhere. I used to use Collectorz, but it no longer met my needs. Now I’m fairly happy on LibraryThing, though I still use Collectorz as my back-up. I once was a big fan of ListerX, but it suddenly closed and ALL of my work was lost. So no matter how much I trust LibraryThing, I *have* to have an offline record of my collection. However, one advantage to an online catalogue—it’s easy to access if you’re out book shopping! I also keep spreadsheets on my pre-orders and things I will pre-order, once RightStuf has a sale!

Manga about the Shinsengumi.

Organize it in a way that makes sense to you. I do alphabetical, but I do keep series together (sometimes there’s a name change, like how GoComi’s Ultimate Venus is Big Bang Venus in French), or file by common name. (Both Codename: Sailor V and Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon are under “Sailor.”)

Deals and rarities—I scour comic book stores. Some bought into manga heavily during the boom, and have a lot of stock from that era. Good if you’re looking for Emma, not so much for something more recent. For new things, I wait for RightStuf studio sales, and I’m a member of their GotAnime? discount club. I buy a lot of manga; getting it 40% off helps a lot!

To see more of Safetygirl’s awesome otaku room, click here.

Show Us Your Stuff is a regular column in which readers share pictures of their manga collections and discuss their favorite series. If you’d like to see your manga library featured here, please follow the directions on this page.

How to Draw Shojo Manga

February 14, 2012 by Katherine Dacey 1 Comment

This slim how-to manual caters to the manga fan who wants to become an artist, but finds the technical aspects of comic creation daunting. “If you’ve ever flipped through a How to Draw Manga book in a bookstore, looked at the pages that explain character design and perspective and thought, ‘I have to learn all this hard stuff to be a manga artist?’ then you are exactly the person who we want to read this book,” the authors cheerfully assert.

The introduction is a little disingenuous, however, as the book assumes a level of artistic fluency on the part of the reader that isn’t reflected in that warmly inviting statement. No novice could use the passages on anatomy or perspective to learn either of these essential drafting skills; the authors don’t break down the process of sketching a body or a three-dimensional space into enough discrete steps for a newcomer to recreate the examples in the book. The same is true for their advice on tools; though the authors provide a detailed catalog of pens, nibs, erasers, templates, blades, and brushes favored by professional artists, the information about how to use these tools presumes that the reader has worked with similar implements.

What How to Draw Shojo Manga does well, however, is introduce novices to the concepts associated with creating sequential art. The authors review the basics, explaining the various types of camera angles and shots, and when they’re most effective; discussing the underlying philosophy behind character designs; and showing how an artist takes a script from words to storyboards to finished product. The book also includes an appendix with practical information about submitting work to contests — obviously less applicable to American readers — as well as strategies for handling criticism; in a thoughtful touch, the authors critique a short story (included in full in the book) so that readers can better appreciate the substance of the editorial comments. Whenever possible, the authors use examples from actual manga to underscore points about character design and layouts; sharp-eyed fans will recognize works from such Hakusensha magazines as Lala, Melody, and Hana to Yume.

The bottom line: How to Draw Shojo Manga won’t turn a greenhorn into Arina Tanemura, but it will help her identify areas of weakness (e.g. poor drafting skills) and provide her with the vocabulary to discuss — and learn more about — the creative process.

Editor’s note: This review was originally included in a Short Takes column from November 2010. When I reorganized my site in January 2012, I created a category for instruction manuals (How to Draw Manga) and decided that this review would be better suited as a stand-alone piece. Look for more how-to reviews in the coming months!

HOW TO DRAW SHOJO MANGA • WRITTEN BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF HANA TO YUME, BESSATSU HANE TO YUME, LALA, AND MELODY MAGAZINES • TOKYOPOP • 176 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)