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Upcoming 3/2/2011

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This week’s ComicList isn’t as loaded as the Midtown Comics version, the source of my current Pick of the Week. Thankfully, Vertical finds a way to make the trip to the comic shop worthwhile.

Redemption comes in the form of the fifth volume of Konami Kanata’s excellent Chi’s Sweet Home (Vertical). In this volume, Chi discovers that she doesn’t need to leave the house to have an adventure. Along the way, she also grasps the importance of being able to feign innocence. Anyone who’s ever lived with a cat will nod in rueful recognition at this development.

Of course, Chi also manages to spend some time in the great, suburban outdoors, making a new friend and relying on some old ones when she wanders well beyond her familiar boundaries. Fun as Chi’s adventures are, and lovely as it is to think about a protective community keeping her safe, I’m very much a partisan of the indoor-only feline experience. It makes me reflexively uncomfortable to see a kitten given that much liberty, no matter how charming the fictional results. Of course, this is why I would be a terrible parent to a human child; they’d never know a moment’s unsupervised peace.

As is usual, Kanata sneaks in some extremely moving moments where hints of Chi’s past life intrude on the way she lives now. These interludes really balance out the sweet charm of the more antic, observational sequences, and they make the book work better than it might have without them. In slice-of-life storytelling like this, a variety of experiences and emotions are always welcome, even for a kitten.

(Remarks are based on a review copy provided by the publisher.)

What looks good to you?

 

Pick of the Week: Kiss, Taro, Teacher

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It’s a Viz-centric week according to Midtown:

From David: My pick this week is the second volume of Julietta Suzuki’s Kamisama Kiss (Viz). I wasn’t very inspired by the notion of this book until I read some of Suzuki’s Karakuri Odette (Tokyopop) for a recent Manga Moveable Feast and was very taken with Suzuki’s quirky, thoughtful writing. As I noted about the first volume, “It’s got grumpy, likeable leads, a solid premise, and an endearing look to it.” And Kate noted something very central to the appeal of the series and its protagonists in her review of the first two volumes: “Making those tart exchanges more entertaining is the fact that Nanami and Tomoe are equally matched.”

From Kate: Once again, I’m going to wear my Good Comics for Kids hat and recommend a title for the under-ten crowd: Taro and the Terror of Eats Street, which is published by VIZKids. The series focuses on Taro, a young cartoonist, who creates the fictional world of Doodledom. When an eraser-wielding maniac threatens Taro’s characters, he uses a magic pencil to leap into the page and join the fight, drawing weapons and cool getaway vehicles whenever he’s in a pinch. The first volume of the series, Taro and the Magic Pencil, was so imaginative, funny, and fast-paced that I’m willing to bet that Eats Street will be a winner, too. Like the Panda Man books, Taro and the Terror of Eats Street also includes games and puzzles. The fun part: those activities are actually part of the story, not an afterthought, making for a more interactive reading experience for elementary school readers.

From Michelle: Although I am very keen to read the second volume of Kamisama Kiss, I am going to go with Oresama Teacher for my pick this week. It’s a new Shojo Beat series about a girl with a delinquent past who’s been given a chance to start over at a new school. Best of all, she seems inclined to seize the opportunity to change, which reminds me of Very! Very! Sweet, a manhwa I enjoy a lot. Of course, this is by the same author of Magic Touch, about which I heard mixed opinions, but I’m hopeful that it will be as fun as it looks.

From MJ: I’m going to bring this mini-roundtable full circle and agree with David. Volume two of Kamisama Kiss is my Pick of the Week. Here’s a bit from my review of the first volume: “What I especially appreciate about this series, is that regardless of Tomoe’s tremendous superiority complex, he’s far too lazy to be controlling like so many shoujo love interests, and even his surliness is kept staunchly at bay thanks to Nanami’s power of kotodama, which forces him to do her bidding whether he wants to or not. In a way, Kamisama Kiss is everything that Black Bird could have been if not for its heavy misogynist overtones. Like Misao, Nanami’s surrounded by yokai who would just as soon eat her if they had the chance, but unlike Misao, Nanami has agency, and that makes all the difference in the world.”

So, readers, what are your Picks this week?

From the stack: Gunslinger Girl vols. 1-3

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Long ago, in his pre-Vertical days, Ed Chavez helped me out with a roundtable on underrated comics. One of his choices was Yu Aida’s Gunslinger Girl, originally published in English by ADV and recently re-launched in three-book anthologies by Seven Seas. I’m just going to have to repeat Ed’s assessment in full (though I’ll add some links where appropriate):

In a similar way to how the word otaku has a negative connotation in Japan, but is almost embraced in America. Moe has been frowned upon by American otaku while it is clearly the foundation of everything otaku in Japan. Gunslinger Girl fulfills three different unique passions/fetishes:

1- A passion for anything Italian. After the Korean wave came a huge Italy boom, partially supported by Bambino (an Italian cooking manga), the handful of wine manga that are all over the international press, and Sarto Finito – the original Italian suit manga.

2- A Sonoda Kenichi-style obsession with guns. Where building and firing guns take on an almost sexual feel.

3- And the need to raise soulless emotionally damaged bishôjo that so many otaku have.

Gunslinger Girl… Well drawn primer to pop-culture perversion.

The beauty of this is that it could serve as an endorsement or the direst of warnings, depending on your taste. And even after all this time, it’s left me curious about the book, at least enough to invest about $16 for three volumes worth of content. I’m largely immune to the fetishes described above, but I enjoyed Gunslinger Girl.

It’s about a black-ops agency that brings cute girls back from the brink of death and turns them into cute assassins, each assigned to adult male handlers who display varying levels of intimacy with their charges. And no, it’s not that kind of intimacy, though it’s not like that kind of awkward possibility is never broached. It’s just part of a larger jumble of awkwardness that comes with murderous little girls being ruthlessly manipulated and used to fight terrorism and stuff.

To Aida’s credit, the Italian/weaponry/pert troika is contextualized. Even the people who participate in the process of creating these little girl killers recognize that it’s horrible on some level, especially the bits where they brainwash the girls to be loyal to their handlers and erase their memories when things get complicated. That’s undeniably awful, and only the most tone-deaf of mangaka would ignore that. Gunslinger Girl is hardly a moral treatise, but it isn’t shameless, either.

It’s very episodic, focusing on individual cyborg-handler relationships through the prism of missions, down time, medical crises, and the like. Aida gets good mileage out of the premise, at least in these three volumes. I can’t quite picture myself reading ten more, though.

As much violence as there is, and as observant as Aida can be, Gunslinger Girl doesn’t really benefit from being read in bulk. I think I would have liked it better in serialization, where its low-key moodiness would have stood out in contrast to other series. Two volumes of low-key moodiness gets to be a bit lulling, so I was relieved to see the third shift into a longer narrative. It launches a complicated, sometimes messy tale of greed, kidnapping, sabotage, and assassination, and it doesn’t always track very well with Aida’s initial themes. He does try and weave them in from time to time with relative success, but I missed the murderous little girls.

Gunslinger Girl ends up being rather contradictory for me. It was obviously at least partly conceived to pander to certain tastes that I don’t share, but it’s also not content with just successfully pandering. It can be introspective and oblique, and it’s got an impressive level of ambition, even though its ambition isn’t always realized. It’s an odd book. I’m glad I read it, but I don’t know if I really need to read any more.

 

Random weekend question: flicks

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It’s Oscar night! Can you feel the excitement? I can’t, but I’m kind of a bad gay in that respect. Still, I’ll take the occasion of the movie industry’s biggest night of self-adulation to ask the following: what comic would you like to see adapted into a film that could claim Oscar gold? Put aside your memories of Astro Boy and your fears about Akira and emphasize the positive, if you can.

I think Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ichigenme: The First Class Is Civil Law (DMP) could be made into one of those independent sleeper films that draw unexpected commercial and critical acclaim. And it has hot, smart gays getting it on and none of that maudlin, problem-movie nonsense of Brokeback Mountain. Of course, I can also imagine Makoto Yukimura’s Planetes (Tokyopop) getting turned into some overblown James Cameron thing that doesn’t really resemble the source material but still makes a ton of money.

 

Kamisama Kiss, Vols. 1-2

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Has Japan experienced a recent surge in pachinko-related child abandonment? I ask because Kamisama Kiss is, by my count, the fourth manga I’ve read in which a parent (a) racks up gambling debt (b) angers his creditors and (c) skips town, leaving his son or daughter to deal with the consequences. Nanami, Kamisama‘s plucky heroine, comes home from school to discover an eviction notice on the kitchen table alongside a hastily scrawled letter: “I’m going on a trip. Sorry. Don’t look for me. Dad.”

With no place to go — apparently, she has no relatives or friends with a couch — Nanami begins camping out in a local park, where she rescues a nervous man from an aggressive dog. As an expression of gratitude for “saving” him, Mikage offers Nanami a place to stay. What Nanami doesn’t know is that Mikage is the deity of a small, decrepit shrine, and is responsible for maintaining it, hearing visitors’ prayers, and warding off evil spirits — responsibilities he passes on to Nanami by planting a kiss on her forehead.

Once ensconced in the shrine, Nanami meets Mikage’s familiar, a haughty fox demon named Tomoe. You don’t need a PhD in Manga to guess what sort of chap Tomoe is: he’s good-looking, perpetually cranky, and quick to insult his new boss. The two bicker constantly about issues great and small, from Tomoe’s snotty tone of voice to Nanami’s inability to defend herself against demons. Over time, however, the two form a reluctant partnership, pledging to protect the shrine together.

If the story feels a little shopworn, the characterizations are vivid and engaging. Julietta Suzuki does a credible job of showing us how Nanami and Tomoe discover that they’re more alike than different; as their antagonistic banter reveals, both are stubborn, loyal, and concerned with other people’s welfare. Making those tart exchanges more entertaining is the fact that Nanami and Tomoe are equally matched; Nanami isn’t as verbally adroit as Tomoe, but she’s perfectly capable of tricking or browbeating him into following her orders.

Where Kamisama Kiss runs aground is in the predictability of its plotting. Every crisis — a threat to the shrine, the introduction of a romantic rival — builds to a crucial moment in which one character realizes that he or she can’t do without the other. Of course, neither is willing to label those feelings as love, forcing the story into an indefinite holding pattern in which the leads teeter on the brink of romance for dozens of chapters. Even the introduction of demonic rivals doesn’t do much to distract from the obvious plot turns, though it does provide Suzuki a swell excuse to draw fancy kimonos, angel wings, and androgynous boys. (I particularly liked the tengu who hid in plain sight by pretending to be a teen idol. Now I’d read a manga about him.)

I liked Kamisama Kiss, but found it totally forgettable — the umpteenth story in which characters from two very different worlds fall in love in spite of their differences. To be sure, there’s a certain pleasure in seeing an author put her romantic leads through their paces, but Suzuki adheres so strictly to the opposites-attract formula that the story practically writes itself.

Review copies provided by VIZ Media, LLC. Volume two will be released on March 2, 2011.

KAMISAMA KISS, VOLS. 1-2 • BY JULIETTA SUZUKI • VIZ • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Kamisama Kiss, Vols. 1-2

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Has Japan experienced a recent surge in pachinko-related child abandonment? I ask because Kamisama Kiss is, by my count, the fourth manga I’ve read in which a parent (a) racks up gambling debt (b) angers his creditors and (c) skips town, leaving his son or daughter to deal with the consequences. Nanami, Kamisama‘s plucky heroine, comes home from school to discover an eviction notice on the kitchen table alongside a hastily scrawled letter: “I’m going on a trip. Sorry. Don’t look for me. Dad.”

With no place to go — apparently, she has no relatives or friends with a couch — Nanami begins camping out in a local park, where she rescues a nervous man from an aggressive dog. As an expression of gratitude for “saving” him, Mikage offers Nanami a place to stay. What Nanami doesn’t know is that Mikage is the deity of a small, decrepit shrine, and is responsible for maintaining it, hearing visitors’ prayers, and warding off evil spirits — responsibilities he passes on to Nanami by planting a kiss on her forehead.

Once ensconced in the shrine, Nanami meets Mikage’s familiar, a haughty fox demon named Tomoe. You don’t need a PhD in Manga to guess what sort of chap Tomoe is: he’s good-looking, perpetually cranky, and quick to insult his new boss. The two bicker constantly about issues great and small, from Tomoe’s snotty tone of voice to Nanami’s inability to defend herself against demons. Over time, however, the two form a reluctant partnership, pledging to protect the shrine together.

If the story feels a little shopworn, the characterizations are vivid and engaging. Julietta Suzuki does a credible job of showing us how Nanami and Tomoe discover that they’re more alike than different; as their antagonistic banter reveals, both are stubborn, loyal, and concerned with other people’s welfare. Making those tart exchanges more entertaining is the fact that Nanami and Tomoe are equally matched; Nanami isn’t as verbally adroit as Tomoe, but she’s perfectly capable of tricking or browbeating him into following her orders.

Where Kamisama Kiss runs aground is in the predictability of its plotting. Every crisis — a threat to the shrine, the introduction of a romantic rival — builds to a crucial moment in which one character realizes that he or she can’t do without the other. Of course, neither is willing to label those feelings as love, forcing the story into an indefinite holding pattern in which the leads teeter on the brink of romance for dozens of chapters. Even the introduction of demonic rivals doesn’t do much to distract from the obvious plot turns, though it does provide Suzuki a swell excuse to draw fancy kimonos, angel wings, and androgynous boys. (I particularly liked the tengu who hid in plain sight by pretending to be a teen idol. Now I’d read a manga about him.)

I liked Kamisama Kiss, but found it totally forgettable — the umpteenth story in which characters from two very different worlds fall in love in spite of their differences. To be sure, there’s a certain pleasure in seeing an author put her romantic leads through their paces, but Suzuki adheres so strictly to the opposites-attract formula that the story practically writes itself.

Review copies provided by VIZ Media, LLC. Volume two will be released on March 2, 2011.

KAMISAMA KISS, VOLS. 1-2 • BY JULIETTA SUZUKI • VIZ • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Behold the power of emotional peril

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Once again, it’s time for Let’s Get Visual, a monthly column in which Michelle Smith and I take a stab at analyzing manga art.

This month, we look at two scenes with heavy emotional impact, one from Ai Yazawa’s rock n’ roll soap opera, NANA, and another from Eiichiro Oda’s shounen epic, One Piece.

What both of us found extraordinary is just how powerful subtle details like body language can be in conveying the emotional resonance of a scene, even with the author’s dialogue completely stripped away.

“And while one might think that it’s the dialogue that makes it romantic (Nobu does say “I love you” right at the end, of course), I think the real testament to Yazawa’s skill here is that, even if you take all the dialogue away, the scene reads the same.”

Check out this month’s column to see what we have to say, and please let us know how you think we’ve done!

The business end

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Here are some of the week’s links that focus on the business end of manga:

At Robot 6, Brigid (MangaBlog) Alverson speaks to Vertical‘s Ed Chavez about their new investors, Kodansha and Dai Nippon, and Ed reassures Vertical fans that the publisher will be better able to do the things it loves to do:

If there will be any changes, I think it’s that Vertical will hopefully eventually be the Vertical that everybody is familiar with. It wasn’t until last year that Vertical started producing more manga than anything else, and I’d like to bring us back to being the source of Japanese content in English, because as much as you know I obsess over manga, maybe too much sometimes, I enjoy their novels, I enjoy their nonfiction, I’m a huge fan of Kentaro’s cookbooks. I love the versatility, I love being able to present and be a curator to a catalog like that, and I want to get back to that.

At its blog, Tokyopop talks about some of the realities of the market, particularly as they relate to unfinished titles:

This probably comes as a surprise to a lot of manga fans, since you tend to be a very ’net-friendly bunch, but the percentage of our sales that come through Amazon.com and other online retailers is a fraction of that of the brick-and-mortar stores. There are some notable exceptions (BLU titles, mature titles, and some of our back list), but the vast majority of sales come through physical retail stores, and if something disappears from the shelves, it becomes exponentially more difficult to hit our sales targets.

One of those brick-an-mortar retailers, Christopher (Comics212) Butcher, appreciated Tokyopop’s frankness but questioned the tone:

Some of the finer points are disagreeable to me personally (particularly the enthusiasm for print-on-demand, though that at least is somewhat tempered by describing it as an ‘emerging’ technology) but at the core of the article is a very real problem; the combatative attitude between this Tokyopop employee–and really Tokyopop in general–and their fans. You don’t start off an answer to a frequently asked question on your website by complaining about your customers.

Speaking of publisher-consumer interaction, Fantagraphics shared the cover design of the first volume of Shimura Takako’s eagerly anticipated Wandering Son via their Twitter feed and said that their planned release schedule for the series was two volumes a year. This led to some discussion of the format (hardcover) and price ($19.99), which may be a barrier to entry for people used to paying around $10 for an individual volume. I’m irresistibly reminded of the time that Fantagraphics decided to package Love and Rockets reprints like manga (inexpensively and in paperback) to attract its audience to… you know… good comics.

 

License request day: Rough

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Greg (Read About Comics) McElhatton has joined the knot of fervent admirers of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game (Viz). It’s a title that inspires a bit of evangelical fervor among its admirers, or at least I feel like it is, and that enthusiasm must certainly extend to Adachi himself. Whenever the subject of out-of-print manga comes up, his Short Program (Viz) is always among the bemoaned.

There are plenty more volumes of Cross Game still to come (five of the twelve seventeen have been published in Viz’s two volumes so far), but Adachi is so amazing that it’s impossible to resist wondering which treasure from his catalog might be next in line. Many people might vote for Touch, a 26-volume series from Shogakukan’s Shônen Sunday. I would have no objection to this, but it’s another baseball series, and perhaps some variety might be key in building Adachi’s reputation among English-language readers. So, for a change of pace, why not see what he can do with high-school swimmers?

Yes, I’m talking about Rough, a 12-volume series that also ran in Sunday. It’s about a boy who swims and a girl who dives from feuding families that fell out over owl-shaped cookies. Will Yamato and Ninomiya’s shared love of pool-based athletics help them overcome this great cookie schism? I have no idea, and please don’t spoil it for me. I do know that Adachi has demonstrated a real knack for portraying contentious relationships between sporty teens of the opposite sex, and he can draw anything, so I’m not seeing a down side to Rough. It’s even a reasonable length.

Did you even need to ask if Rough is available in French? Of course it is, courtesy of Glénat, who have also published Touch and Niji-Iro Togarashi. (an 11-volume fantasy series that ran in… wait for it… Sunday). The French are basically all over Adachi, and I dream of a day when the audience for manga in English catches up.

But I’m not so selfish that I’ll only accept Rough. I would love to know what tops your Adachi wish list, assuming you have one. And if you haven’t joined the forces of Adachi advancement, well… there’s this little book called Cross Game…

X-Men: Misfits

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X-Men: Misfits Volume One by Raina Telgemeier, Dave Roman, and Anzu

Of all the American manga-style productions, I think X-Men: Misfits must be one of the oddest ones. Why did Marvel lend out one of their franchises for manga treatment? Who had the idea to write a reverse harem shoujo version of the X-Men? What audience was this supposed to appeal to? I think most X-Men fans wouldn’t be fans of the loose way general X-Men continuity was handled in this book, and would manga fans care about the opportunity to look at Quicksilver’s tanned abs? I’ve read plenty of X-Men comics and I’m a big fan of reverse harem shoujo so I found this title incredibly entertaining, if a little flawed.

Kitty Pryde is having a rough year. She keeps accidentally falling through things. Silver Fox Magneto shows up at her house to announce that she has a scholarship to the Xavier Academy. When she gets there, she finds out that she’s the only female teen student in a school full of boy mutants and she’s the object of everyone’s attention. When I realized that this X-Men adaptation was going to be a blatant reverse harem scenario, I thought it was a stroke of genius. The original X-Men comics were essentially reverse harem anyway, with Jean Grey being the only female mutant surrounded by boys. Kitty is torn between FIRE! (Pyro) and ICE! (Iceman). Bobby acts incredibly cold towards her, because he is AS COLD AS ICE! Pyro ensures that Kitty is invited to the Hellfire Club, which turns out to be a separate student faction headed by Angel and including Forge, Havok, Quicksilver, and Longshot.

Anzu’s art is a little overly pretty and occasionally features some stiff poses. I wish she’d spent more time on character design, because there are a few glimmers of enjoyable insanity in the way she depicted some of the older characters. The Beast is a puffy, Totoro-like cat. Colossus switches to his metal form and looks like a cross between one of the Mario Brothers and Tik-Tok of Oz. Sabertooth hangs around the Hellfire club wearing a choker collar and a chain, serving fondue. I think that reverse harem series are generally more effective if there are a manageable number of handsome male characters. X-Men: Misfits has far too many attractive men hanging around Kitty, to the point where they become indistinguishable from each other. I kept getting confused about who Havok and Longshot were, despite the fact that Havok always appears to wear sunglasses pushed back on his head. Gambit is introduced without wearing his customary trench coat, so I didn’t even recognize him. There are amusing cameos from some of the established X-Men characters. Cyclops is a cranky vegan, and Storm appears in her mohawk mode.

Despite some flaws, X-Men: Misfits has a certain loopy charm. I was amused by the endless parade of hot mutant guys and Kitty’s awkward reactions to dealing with her new social environment and her mutant powers. She spends the early portion of the manga wearing a bicycle helmet and skating pads because she can’t really handle her abilities. Kitty does well filling the traditional role of slightly clumsy shoujo heroine, and she discovers that her friends in the Hellfire Club aren’t as benign as they might appear. I’m honestly disappointed that there won’t be a second volume of this series published. As it is, X-Men: Misfits will remain a hilarious artifact of some of the inexplicable aspects of the manga publishing boom.