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Lean week linkblogging

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The ComicList is sufficiently lean that I don’t really have anything to add beyond what was covered in the Pick of the Week over at Manga Bookshelf. If you’re still hankering for something new to try, why not check out the Manga Monday hashtag over on Twitter?

If you’d like to focus your attention on a single title, keep your eyes on the link archive for the current Manga Moveable Feast, featuring Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Last Gasp). It’s being hosted by Sam (A Life in Panels) Kusek.

And if you feel like throwing your favorite titles some love, you’ve got plenty of time to vote in the 2011 About.com Manga Readers’ Choice Awards. Genial host Deb Aoki provides a breakdown of the nominees.

And if you just feel like reading comics instead of reading about them, there’s always Viz’s SigIKKI site with new chapters of a wide range of titles. The most recent chapter of Seimu Yoshizaki’s Kingyo Used Books is all about a series that also inspired a license request.

Update: Just missed this one, but I always enjoy Erica (Okazu) Friedman’s looks at various Japanese magazines for MangaCast. This time around, she considers Shogakukan’s Big Comic and its confidently mature pursuits.

Viz Signature Quick Takes – House of Five Leaves and Biomega

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On the surface House of Five Leaves and Biomega don’t seem to have much in common aside from both of them being published by Viz’s Signature imprint. But both titles rely on distinctive art to create stories that rely more on mood than plot. While House of Five Leaves continues to explore a samurai falling further into a den of thieves in a meandering slice of life style, Biomega’s dystopic world grows even more stylized but still features plenty of decapitations.

House of Five Leaves Volume 2

Hapless samurai grows even more hapless when he’s stricken by illness and starts to lose sensation in his legs. He isn’t adjusting well to living in a brothel with the charismatic House of Five Leaves gang leader Yaichi either. Masa goes to live with Goinkyo in an attempt to recover and begins to learn more about the origins of the group of people he seems to have fallen in with. Very much like Natsume Ono’s series, revelations are made through people talking to each other, sitting in the same room watching the day go by, or sharing a meal. Masa still seems to retain a measure of dangerous naivete as he thinks of his new friends as kind. Goinkyo warns him that his new acquaintances are all criminals and Masa says “those whom you do wish to involve yourself with…those friends and companions with whom you wish to share feelings and experiences…I believe they just are as precious as family.” I’m not sure if the House of Five Leaves feels as deeply towards Masa as he feels towards them.

Even while absolutely debilitated, Masa still attempts to defend Goinkyo when a gang member from his past shows up to his house. But when Masa is feeling better and accidentally bumps into a local tough guy, he starts shaking and runs from battle. Masa’s skill is overpowered by his anxiety, and his weakness makes him an interesting character when thrown into the criminal underworld. Masa encounters a possible mentor, but I think it’ll be a long time before he’s able to summon up the confidence within himself that he admires in Yaichi so much. I think I enjoy this series a little more than Ono’s restaurant centric books like Gente and Ristorante Paradiso, because I enjoy the contrast between Ono’s modern art style and the historic setting. I have more patience for most of the story being expressed through the characters just talking to each other, because the backgrounds and period details like the type of malnutrition that Masa is suffering are a little more interesting to me than her more modern works.

Biomega Volume 5

It wouldn’t be another volume of Biomega without some striking visuals and absolutely insane moments. The visual aspect of this volume that blew me away was the new setting of the cord world. With the organic tendrils and insect-like carapaces covering everything, the background illustrations looked like Nihei’s take on Miyazaki’s ruined world in Nausicaa. The crazy moment came when a disembodied womb gave birth to a tiny doll-like girl named Funipero, who is the heir of evil matriarch Niarudi. So action hero Zoichi is now wandering around yet another alien landscape accompanied by two tiny females his artificial intelligence avatar Fuyu and scarily intelligent Funipero, who seems to be eating a lot and exhibiting strange powers. I always put down Biomega feeling simultaneously bewildered and transported. I might not always understand what’s going on, but it is always interesting to visit the strange world that Nihei creates. There’s probably only one slot in my reading list for “post-apocalyptic insane yet strangely beautiful seinen manga”, but Biomega fills that spot very well.

Review copy provided by the publisher

Pick of the Week: Sci-fi smorgasbord

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It’s slim pickin’s once again this week at Midtown Comics. Check out recommendations from the Manga Bookshelf bloggers and special guest Michelle Smith!

From Kate: This week, I’m going to ignore my triskaidekaphobia and recommend the thirteenth volume of 20th Century Boys. We’re now a little past the midway mark in the series, and I can honestly say I have no idea where it’s headed. With a less capable author than Naoki Urasawa, I might be worried; I was one of those viewers who grew tired of Lost’s bolt-from-the-blue plotting after just two seasons. Urasawa, however, does an excellent job of convincing the reader to stay the course, offering tantalizing clues to the Friend’s identity while gradually revealing what went down on the eve of the millennium. I’m convinced that no matter how the series ends, I will believe in that ending, even if I didn’t forsee it.

From Michelle: This is probably going to be an unpopular choice, but I’m going to go with volume three of Bokurano: Ours. The series features a group of middle-school-aged children taking life-leeching turns piloting a mecha to protect Earth from invaders, and has some serious flaws, most notably the inability to allow readers to really get to know or care about any of these kids before it’s their turn to die. Many would eschew a story like this, and maybe it’s my complete and utter lack of a maternal drive talking, but I find it kind of fascinating. There hasn’t been any reason offered for this invasion, and I suspect that someone, somewhere is merely enjoying a bit of sport at humanity’s expense. We shall see!

From MJ: I’m going to go off the Midtown list this week and turn to the fine folks at Boston’s Comicopia, who say they’ll be seeing volume three of one of my favorite new series of last year, Nobuaki Tadano’s 7 Billion Needles, published in English by Vertical, Inc. This is my second time around with this series as a Pick, but it’s really that good. Check out my review of volume two here. A quote: “Though the story’s horror/sci-fi elements are what keeps its plot going, the real heart of this story is Hikaru’s journey toward becoming a real, living participant in her world, and this is a story Tadano tells very well.” I’m very much looking forward to digging into the newest volume.

From David: I was hoping someone would fudge their source before I had to do so. I’m going to again use the ComicList for my pick, which would be the first omnibus of Yu Aida’s Gunslinger Girl (Seven Seas). Ages ago, when I was still writing the Flipped column for Comic World News, I asked various manga bloggers to share what they felt were overlooked comics. Ed (MangaCast) Chavez, now with Vertical, mentioned Gunslinger Girl, describing it as a “[w]ell drawn primer to pop-culture perversion.” I’ve been curious ever since, and this seems like an economical and convenient way to slake that curiosity, though I may live to regret it.

Amazon.com Widgets

Readers, what are your picks this week?

Manhwa Monday: Review round-up

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Welcome to another Manhwa Monday!

We’ve got a few review links to share today, but first, a quick look at the upcoming film adaptation of Kang Pool’s webtoon series, I Love You, adapted as Late Blossom for film.

The summary according to The Korea Times: “The movie revolves around four senior citizens living in a hillside village. Kim Man-seok, played by veteran actor Lee Soon-jae, is a milkman who wakes the village early each morning with his noisy, battered motorcycle. He meets Song (Yoon So-jung), who scavenges for scrap paper while roaming around the town at daybreak. As they meet again and again, they slowly develop feelings for each other.”

The film opens in Korea this week.

At Panel Patter, Rob McMonigal takes a look at volume one of Time and Again (Yen Press). Chrystal White at Japanator checks out volume 11 of Black God (Yen Press). Todd Douglass of Anime Maki posts some quick reviews of three Yen Press manhwa. In her article, “hunting for yaoi,” at Sequential Tart, Wolfen Moondaughter looks briefly at the BL manhwa Aegis (NETCOMICS). And Bibliophilic Monologues celebrates a manhwa monday of their own, with an overview of Pig Bride (Yen Press).

That’s all for this week!

Is there something I’ve missed? Leave your manhwa-related links in comments!

MMF: Barefoot Gen 1 and 2

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Before preparing for the current Manga Moveable Feast, I’d only read about a chapter of Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Last Gasp), the one reprinted in the back of Frederik Schodt’s Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics.

This wasn’t because I was unimpressed with that sample or thought it was in some way unworthy. I mean, you can’t spend any time talking with people who love manga and not have Barefoot Gen come up in the most enthusiastic, even reverent, terms.

No, the reason is that I tend to compartmentalize things. I generally read comics to be entertained on some level, to distract myself from reality. This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy comics that address dark themes or tragedy. I just prefer a level of distance from the truly hurtful, tragic aspects of life. So an autobiographical comic about the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima… well, it’s a lot, you know?

In the first volume, we meet the Nakaokas, the close stand-ins for Nakazawa’s own family. Beyond the deprivations of being average citizens during wartime, the Nakaokas are enduring persecution from their neighbors. Daikichi, the father, is morally opposed to the war, and he’s becoming increasingly frank about it as the conflict drags on. But he’s got a pregnant wife, Kirie, and five children to support, in spite of efforts of their pro-war acquaintances to isolate them and make their lives difficult.

Second-youngest son Gen doesn’t fully understand the source of his family’s woes, though he tries to ameliorate them in kid-like ways. He schemes to find them food and other comforts, and he resorts to violence when the insults against his father and the persecution of his parents and siblings become too much to stand. In the space of a volume, he does gain a better understanding of his parents’ principles and their cost, and he learns to sacrifice for others. That last skill will be essential, as the atomic bomb is dropped on his home town at the end of the first volume.

His town is destroyed, countless lives are lost, and his family is decimated before his eyes. The trauma triggers Kirie’s labor, so Gen is left with terrible grief, horror everywhere, and a mother and infant sister to support and protect. And he’s just a kid. And he’s a kid wading through a sea of horror and death the likes of which no one on Earth had ever experienced before it happened to these people. The struggle to survive goes from difficult to seemingly impossible, and maybe it’s only Gen’s youth and relative innocence that help him through it. He’s not immune to horror and despair, but his father so forcefully conveyed the importance of survival to Gen that he has at least some functional armor, something to keep him plodding along through the sea of bodies, the stench, and the deprivation.

I thought I had grown accustomed to the juxtaposition of cartoon stylization with serious subject matter during my exposure to the work of Osamu Tezuka. Nakazawa was a great admirer of Tezuka’s work, and you can see the influence. That said, I sometimes found the relationship between content and style uncomfortable. Early chapters are sprinkled with Gen’s more innocent antics, juxtaposed with their father’s simmering rage, his bruised and battered face. That rage infects Gen from time to time, and his physical response to injustices is shocking, even grotesque. There’s casual cartoon violence that escalates into sincere, unsettling violence, and I found it challenging to adjust to the shifts.

Either Nakazawa found surer footing in the second volume (or I did) after relative trivialities are literally blown away. Gen still behaves like a child sometimes, but he is a child, and it’s a relief that those responses still live in him somewhere. Even in the midst of all this horror  and with all of these terrible responsibilities, Gen can still be distracted and follow a generous or curious impulse. The weight of circumstances always reasserts itself, but an innocent part of his nature has survived along with his body.

And he’s not a conventional shônen boy hero: friendship and victory aren’t options; the hard work of living a bit longer and making sure the people he loves and still has do as well is the only thing he has left. Beyond the mechanics of moment-to-moment life, like food and water, there’s still injustice aplenty, and there’s the despair of strangers on all sides.

It’s bleak, and at times it’s exhausting to read, though I don’t mean either of those as a criticism. Much as I hate catchphrases like “sharing his truth,” that’s what Nakazawa is doing here, and the force and specificity of it is overwhelming.

I wish I could claim that these volumes have changed my view on comics that speak these kinds of harsh truths, but I can’t. My interest in them is still the exception rather than the rule and probably always will be. But I will finish Barefoot Gen, if only because I feel like I should for reasons that go beyond merely wanting to because it’s a comic I admire. As I said, it’s a lot.

Human Nature by Paul Cornell: B-

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From the back cover:
“Who’s going to save us this time?”

April, 1914. The inhabitants of the little Norfolk town of Farringham are enjoying an early summer, unaware that war is on the way. Amongst them is Dr. John Smith, a short, middle-aged history teacher from Aberdeen. He’s having a hard time with his new post as house master at Hulton Academy for Boys, a school dedicated to producing military officers.

Bernice Summerfield is enjoying her holiday in the town, getting over the terrible events that befell her in France. But then she meets a future Doctor, and things start to get dangerous very quickly. With the Doctor she knows gone, and only a suffragette and an elderly rake for company, can Benny fight off a vicious alien attack? And will Dr. Smith be able to save the day?

Review:
Despite the fact that I own about ten of The New Adventures novels starring the Seventh Doctor, I’d never read any of them. It took a .pdf of Human Nature hosted on the BBC website (sadly no longer available) to compel me to finally check one out.

Why Human Nature? Because this novel is the basis for a rather emotional two-parter in the third season of the new incarnation of Doctor Who. I was curious to see how the original novel differs from the televised version (for those fortunate enough to snag a copy of the .pdf before its disappearance, author Paul Cornell does devote part of his endnotes to a discussion of the process of adapting the story for the screen) and also eager to read about Bernice (“Benny”) Summerfield, a companion of the Seventh Doctor whom I have previously encountered only in audio dramas.

The basic gist of the plot is the same in both versions. The Doctor has hidden away his Time Lord essence and is living as a human named John Smith, an unconventional teacher at an all-boys’ school in England on the eve of the first World War. As Smith, the Doctor writes fanciful stories and falls in love with fellow teacher, Joan Redfern. Bliss does not ensue, however, due to a family of aliens that has followed The Doctor and ends up attacking the school. It’s up to The Doctor’s companion to remind Smith of his true identity, and up to Smith to decide whether to remain human and pursue a chance at happiness with Joan or don the mantle of the Time Lord once more and save the day.

The differences are in the details. Why The Doctor chooses to live as a human, for instance. The identity of his companion and her relationship to Smith. The reasons the aliens have for pursuing him. These things don’t matter all that much, but in nearly every instance I prefer the televised version. It’s a much more emotional story—largely because it’s more easy to believe David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor as a romantic lead than Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh—and I sympathized with Smith’s dilemma more when I could physically see the agony the decision was causing him.

Too, boiling the story down to its most essential bits results in a tighter, more coherent tale. The book’s well-intentioned but random attempt at a gay romance is excised, for example, as is Benny’s brief and ill-fated friendship with a suffragette. (If you thought I’d pass up this opportunity to make a “Benny and the ‘gettes” joke, you are much mistaken.) Some of the dialogue in the book doesn’t sound natural, either, like this line from Joan when she’s meeting The Doctor for the first time:

‘Oh…’ Joan closed her eyes for a long, hard, instant. Then she opened them. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Doctor. Is there nothing about you that’s like the man to whom I’ve become engaged?’

I mean, I love me some grammar about twelve times as much as the next gal, but I’m pretty sure I would dispense with it in a moment like that! I do like the detail about her eyes, though.

Complaints aside, there is one thing that the book has that the televised version lacks, and it’s for this one thing alone that the book is worth reading: Benny. I positively adore Benny. She’s brilliant, competent, funny, bawdy, and a bit of a lush. Part of why I love her might be because Cornell based her on Harriet Vane, the awesomely independent and intelligent writer of detective fiction from Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. Whenever I snickered whilst reading this book, it was all due to Benny, like this description of a table of women at a beverage tent on some planet’s marketplace:

They looked like they all came from different places, and had clustered together out of the familiar realisation that internal gonads are best, actually.

Her presence gave me something new to look forward to in a story with which I was familiar, and I liked her so much that I am going to try to find time to read Love and War, another New Adventures effort from Cornell that introduces the character. Any other recommendations?

Random weekend question: the classics

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I’m having a very classic-manga weekend. I just finished drafting a post on Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Last Gasp) for this week’s Manga Moveable Feast. I’m due to participate in a podcast on Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako (Vertical) this afternoon. And I’ve been catching up on recent volumes of Tezuka’s excellent Black Jack (Vertical).

So I’m curious: what are your favorite manga classics that have been published in English? My list would probably be topped by Tezuka’s Dororo (Vertical), Susumu Katsumata’s Red Snow (Drawn & Quarterly), and Kyoko Ariyoshi’s Swan (CMX).

And what classics would you like to see published in English? Now that Tezuka’s Princess Knight is in the pipeline courtesy of Vertical, my most feverishly anticipated property would have to be Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles.

Gatcha Gacha Volumes 5 and 6

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Now that the final volume has come out, I’m catching up with the last half of the series. The more I read of Gatcha Gacha, the more I like it. It combines a certain gleeful trashiness with some affecting emotional moments. It also can occasionally be genuinely weird. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this series to someone who feels burnt-out on typical shoujo manga. I can’t imagine myself being so entertained by the worn out storyline of a character coming back from the dead with amnesia in any other series. Yuri and Yabe are dating, and he’s cleaned up his act by transforming into a proper looking Japanese boy. The blond hair is gone, as is the weedy looking goatee. While Yuri might be momentarily blissfully happy with her new love, trouble lurks on the horizon in the person of Kanako, a girl who looks just like Motoko’s deceased crazy sister. Yabe is shaken by his dead girlfriend’s doppelganger. Hirao watches this unfold from the sidelines, and while he’s still nursing feelings for Yuri he tells her that he’ll support her and Yabe however he can.

Kanako is of course Motoko’s sister, but her amnesia has left her unable to remember Yabe. Here is where Tachibana goes for the kill, because seeing Yabe’s conflicted expressions when he looks at her is just gut-wrenching. Kanako was farmed out to some distant relatives who have raised her as a foster daughter. The amnesia has caused her twisted personality to fade, leaving behind a rather sweet girl who still manages to be violent through subconscious reflex actions. Gatcha Gacha being Gatcha Gacha, issues between characters seem to be resolved through gang beat downs that lead to people talking about their feelings instead of non-violent confrontation. Kanako is kidnapped by a bunch of goons, and Motoko and Yabe go to rescue her. Yuri knows that as Yabe leaves, he’s also leaving her. She begs him not to go and he says “I know if I stayed and really learned to love you…I know I could finally be happy. But…I’m sorry. I’m not that good of a man.”

Tachibana does what few manga creators are capable of by making her main female character simultaneously an object of ridicule and sympathy for the reader. Yuri is left alone yet again, crying to the heavens “Will I ever be happy?” She’s absolutely silly and it is hard not to root for her to eventually be happy even though her basic personality is that of a happy cute puppy dog who keeps getting kicked around but still comes back for more.

Volume six starts with a return to the status quo. Kanako has regained her memory and is acting as crazily possessive of her sister and Yabe as ever. She starts to target Yuri but is warned off by Motoko in dramatic fashion. Hirao sees that Yuri may be losing her hair due to stress and he goes to extreme lengths to hide her tiny bald spot, running to a department store to buy a hairstick and devising a new hairstyle for her in an attempt to cover it up so Yuri and other people don’t know about it. He finally tells Yuri his feelings, and she begins to wonder if she can ever be attracted to him. He seems perfect, but she only feels any sort of chemistry with losers and jerks. Is the ultimate bad boy for Yuri actually Motoko? She continues to dress more masculine and rampages around like she always does. Yuri comments to Motoko that she’s physically incapable of being attracted to nice guys and says “What does it say about you that if you were a guy, I’d ask you out in a heartbeat?” Motoko’s face goes absolutely still and then she carries on the conversation with a smile.

The new, forthright Hirao might actually be enough of a loser to inspire feelings of attraction from Yuri when she finally spots him doing something loser-like. Hirao and Yabe begin to act a little more friendly towards each other. I’m not confident that a relationship between Yuri and Hirao will work out, but that’s the way things seem to be headed for now. Even though Gatcha Gacha is very much a shoujo series, Tachibana’s unique and darkly cynical sensibility makes it seem refreshing. With the two main female characters not being afraid to indulge in violence, it is actually fairly entertaining to see just Yuri slap Kanako across the face for being a brat, instead of slinking off to wallow in hurt feelings. When Tachibana’s characters do talk about their feelings, they are amazingly blunt and forthright. There are only two more volumes left for me to read, and I’m a little disappointed that Gatcha Gacha only lasted for eight volumes. I’m looking forward to the end, but I have no idea what to expect. With most shoujo series I pretty much know how the relationships will play out by the end. I’m really not sure what Tachibana is going to do next, and that’s a large part of Gatcha Gacha’s appeal.

Democracy in action

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Deb Aoki has launched the 2011 About.com Manga Readers’ Choice Awards:

The nominees were selected by About.com readers in January 2011. The top five nominees in 10 categories were chosen as finalists, and now it’s your turn to vote for the winner. The voting period runs from Friday, February 11 through Tuesday, March 8, 2011.

You can probably guess where my votes went. Go cast yours!

Follow Friday: Looking for Romance

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Continuing with Manga Bookshelf’s Valentine’s Day theme, today’s Follow Friday will focus on bloggers who prioritize romance manga. In my limited circle, at least, this amounts to shoujo manga blogs, boys’ love blogs, and yuri blogs, though I’m hoping you readers might have more to share! Here are a few of my particular favorites:

I’ve linked to yuri super-blogger Erica Friedman here before, of course, but another less-known yuri blogger well worth following is Yuri no Boke‘s Katherine Hanson. I first met Katherine at my local college nerd convention, Smith College’s Conbust, where her fantastic little yuri panel was nearly the only manga-related offering of the whole weekend. Her blog is another must-read for yuri fans. You can follow Katherine on Twitter @yuriboke.

For BL fans, I recommend Alex Woolfson’s Yaoi 911, where he not only reviews yaoi manga, but also offers up his own BL comics, as well as advice for young writers and artists interested in creating BL comics of their own! Also very valuable is his post on finding English-language bara manga, which we’ve seen very little of over here. Bonus? He’s also just a really nice guy. Follow Alex on Twitter @alexwoolfson.

Fans of shoujo manga should be reading Emily’s Random Shoujo Manga Page, the best source around for reviews and information about untranslated shoujo, divided up into useful categories like “romance,” “smutty romance,” “teacher-student,” and so on. Find Emily on Twitter @MagicalEmi. And if it’s new English-language releases you’re eager to hear about, check out Laura’s Heart of Manga for all shoujo, all the time. Follow Laura on Twitter @Ellesensei.

These are, of course, just a few great bloggers to follow for all your romance needs. Readers, who are your favorites?