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Great Graphic Novels for Teens 2011

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They just announced the results of one of my favorite awards programs, the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens list. Here’s the full roster. Here are the top ten from that pool.

The number of Japanese comics in the top ten has dropped from three last year to one this year (Hisae Iwaoka’s Saturn Apartments from Viz), and I suspect this is simply a reflection of the fact that the indigenous young-adult comic market seems to get stronger every year.

I’m very fond of a lot of the Japanese comics on the list: Natsume Ono’s House of Five Leaves and not simple, Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game, Yuki Midorikawa’s Natsume’s Book of Friends (all from Viz), and Nobuaki Tadano’s 7 Billion Needles and Kou Yaginuma’s Twin Spica (both from Vertical), and Kaoru Tada’s Itazura na Kiss (Digital Manga). I’ve also really enjoyed what I’ve read of JiUn Yun’s Time and Again (Yen Press), the only Korean title on the list.

Since I’m always looking for things that give a little structure to blogging, I think I’ll use the top ten list as an impetus. Just for fun, I think I’ll read and review everything on it that I haven’t already read and reviewed. Any suggestions as to where I should start?

And what are your thoughts on the list overall? Are you delighted by any particular inclusions or aghast at any omissions?

The Seinen Alphabet: X

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“X” is for…

xxxHOLic, written and illustrated by CLAMP, originally serialized in Kodansha’s Young, now wrapping up its run in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine, and published in English by Del Rey. It’s a fairly complicated series to describe, but it’s ultimately about a young man who can see troublesome spirits and falls into the circle of a gorgeous witch.

X-Western Flash, written and illustrated by Masashi Tanaka, serialized in Kodansha’s Afternoon and Morning, three volumes total. I can only guess what it’s about, but Tanaka created Gon (CMX), so how can you not at least be curious?

Xavier Yamada no Ai no Izumi, written and illustrated by Yamada Xavier, published in four volumes by Shueisha, though I’m not sure which magazine was home to it. Again, I have no clue what it’s about, but I liked the cover.

Xenos, written and illustrated by Mio Murao, originally serialized in Akita Shoten’s Young Champion, four volumes. It’s a mystery about a reporter whose wife disappears. Murao also did a four-volume sequel, Xenos 2: Room Share, for Young Champion.

What starts with “X” in your seinen alphabet?

Kamisama Kiss Giveaway

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To celebrate the upcoming (Next week! Are you ready and excited to talk about android girls?) Manga Moveable Feast for Julietta Suzuki’s Karakuri Odette, I’m giving away a copy of the first volume of her latest series, Kamisama Kiss. Just leave a comment in this post answering the question:

How would you force your hot fox-spirit familiar to bend to your will?

Snorgles? Bungee cord? Making an excellent moussaka? Leave your comment and I’ll select a random winner, to be announced at the close of the MMF.

Links instead of lists

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It’s a good thing that we use Midtown Comics for our Pick of the Week round robin, as the Diamond-focused ComicList is a barren wasteland this week.  So, instead, I will look back through my Twitter archives to point you at some fun and enlightening things to read online:

PotW Showdown: Cross Game vs. InuYasha

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David leads us off this week, in our second group Pick of the Week with the Manga Bookshelf gang & special guest Michelle Smith! This week comes down to a showdown between a new series and a long-running favorite. Who will come out on top?

From David: I’m very happy to go first this week, because I’m fairly sure I won’t be the only person to choose the second volume of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game (Viz), and I don’t want to seem like a copycat. I was so pleasantly surprised by the first multi-volume collection, with its slice-of-life blend of comedy and drama. If the prospect of a story about sports (baseball, in this case) triggers your fight-or-flight instinct, and I would be very much in sympathy if it does, I urge you to try and suppress the response. Adachi is the real deal as a manga-ka: a versatile original who earns laughs and tears with equal facility and surprising subtlety. Come to think of it, I don’t care if I seem like a copycat. The more people who sing this book’s praises, the merrier. Looking at Cross Game‘s inclusion in Deb Aoki’s round-up of the Critics’ Choice: Best Manga of 2010, it seems like the merriment is off to a great start.

From MJ: I expect you’re right, David, though it won’t be me (only because I haven’t read the first volume!), and in fact, it’s a bit of a difficult week for me, with nothing from ComicList piquing my interest, though I did find an exciting item elsewhere. I took a peek at Comicopia’s list where they claim to be expecting the second volume of Yumemakura Baku and Jiro Taniguchi’s Summit of the Gods from Fanfare-Ponent Mon. The series’ first volume was stunningly beautiful, and despite the fact that it sometimes feels like an illustrated novel rather than a comic (I’ll point to Kate’s review for a thoughtful discussion of the series’ strengths and flaws), it’s definitely a must-read. This volume has been due out for quite a while, so I was surprised to see it on the list. I’ll definitely be looking to pick one up!

From Kate: Cross Game and Summit of the Gods are both on my must-read list, but I’m going with a sentimental favorite this week: InuYasha. The final volume — that’s number 56, for folks who are still keeping track after all these years — arrives in stores on Wednesday. After so many story arcs, villains, and recovered jewel shards, it will be interesting to see how Rumiko Takahashi brings the whole thing to a close. I suspect that many readers have expectations for how and with whom the characters ride off into the sunset, making it a sure bet that someone will be disappointed in the conclusion. (Look for a surge in InuYasha fan-fic in the coming weeks…) I’m confident, however, that Takahashi will deliver a satisfying finale. InuYasha gets kicked around a lot by manga cognescenti– “It’s not as good as Lum or Ranma or Maison Ikkoku,” they insist — but InuYasha represents Takahashi at the top of her game, not least for its terrific cast of characters. There are manga I like more than InuYasha, but there are few fictional characters — in comics, anyway — that have as strong a claim on my loyalty as InuYasha and Sango.

From Michelle: For me it’s a toss-up between Cross Game—the bittersweet first volume of which I truly loved—and the final volume of InuYasha, a series I’ve been following for years. Mitsuru Adachi versus Rumiko Takahashi… who will reign supreme? While I love both equally, I think in the end I’m also going to have to come down on the side of InuYasha. Like Kate, it’s the characters that have earned my loyalty here rather than ingenious plotting—indeed, the series is rather notoriously repetitive—but I am looking forward to the storyline actually coming to a point where the nefarious villain is finally unable to escape. Perhaps the best testament I can make in favor of this series is that, even though it’s 56 volumes long, I can still easily imagine the day when I will undertake a marathon reread and enjoy luxuriating in its comfy goodness.

Readers, what’s your Pick of the Week?

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Blue Spring

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As depicted in most shojo and shonen manga, the Japanese high school is the epitome of order, with students in neat, military-style uniforms diligently studying for exams, tidying up classrooms, staging plays, and participating in cultural festivals. Students who don’t fit into the school’s established pecking order — social, athletic, or academic — quickly find themselves ostracized by their peers for lack of purpose.

Taiyo Matsumoto, however, offers a very different image of the Japanese high school in his anthology Blue Spring. His subjects are the kids with “front teeth rotten from huffing thinner,” who “answer to reason with their fists and never question their excessive passions” — in short, the delinquents. Kitano High School, the milieu these kids inhabit, is a crumbling eyesore with graffiti-covered walls, trash-filled stairwells, and indifferent faculty. Students cut class and fill their after-school hours with girlie magazines, petty crime, and smack-talk at the local diner, marking time until they join the world of adult responsibility.

Gangs, bullies, disaffected teens playing at thug life — it’s familiar territory, yet in Matsumoto’s hands, these potentially cliche stories acquire a new and strange quality. Matsumoto eschews linear narrative in favor of digressions and fragments; as a result, we feel more like we’re living in the characters’ heads than reading a tidy account of their actions. Snatches of daydreams sometimes interrupt the narrative, as do jump cuts and surreal imagery: sharks and puffer fish drift past a classroom window where two teens make out, a UFO languishes above the school campus. Even the graffiti plays an integral part of Matsumoto’s storytelling; the walls are a paean to masturbation, booze, and suicide, cheerfully urging “No more political pacts—sex acts!”

One of the most arresting aspects of Blue Spring is Matsumoto’s ability to manipulate time. In one of the book’s most visually stunning sequences, for example, Matsumoto seamlessly blends two events — a baseball game and a mahjong game — into a single sequence:

Matsumoto makes it seem as if the gambler’s action precipitated the slide into second base. It’s an elegant visual trick that establishes the simultaneity of the two games while suggesting the intensity of the mahjong play; the discarding of a tile is portrayed with the same explosive energy as stealing a base.

Some of Matsumoto’s time-bending sequences are more cinematic, evoking the kind of split-screen technique popularized in the 1960s by filmmakers like John Frankenheimer and Richard Fleischer. The prologue, for example, contains a series of short, vertical strips in which we see unnamed teenagers preparing for a day at school. Matsumoto deliberates re-frames the activity in each panel, drawing back to show the full scene in some, and pulling in close to reveal the blankness of a characters’ face in another:


It’s an effective montage, largely for the way it juxtaposes the banal with the violent; the fist-fight is presented in the same, matter-of-fact fashion as the student eating breakfast, suggesting that conflict is as routine for some of Blue Spring‘s characters as catching the train to school. The transitions, too, are handled deftly; the eye can process these little vignettes in a sequence while the brain grasps the entire prologue as a simultaneous collage of events, a representative cross-section of high school students going about their business on a typical day.

Matsumoto’s stark, black-and-white imagery won’t be to every reader’s taste; I’d be the first admit that many of the kids in Blue Spring look older and wearier than Keith Richards, with their sunken eyes and rotten teeth. But the studied ugliness of the character designs and urban settings suits the material perfectly, hinting at the anger and emptiness of the characters’ lives. Matsumoto offers no easy answers for his characters’ behavior, nor any false hope that they will escape the lives of violence and despair that seem to be their destiny. Rather, he offers a frank, funny and often disturbing look at the years in which most of us were unformed lumps of clay — or, in Matsumoto’s memorable formulation, a time when most of us were blue: “No matter how passionate you were, no matter how much your blood boiled, I believe youth is a blue time. Blue — that indistinct blue that paints the town before the sun rises.”

This is an expanded version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on 4/30/07.

BLUE SPRING • BY TAIYO MATSUMOTO • VIZ • 216 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Blue Spring

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As depicted in most shojo and shonen manga, the Japanese high school is the epitome of order, with students in neat, military-style uniforms diligently studying for exams, tidying up classrooms, staging plays, and participating in cultural festivals. Students who don’t fit into the school’s established pecking order — social, athletic, or academic — quickly find themselves ostracized by their peers for lack of purpose.

Taiyo Matsumoto, however, offers a very different image of the Japanese high school in his anthology Blue Spring. His subjects are the kids with “front teeth rotten from huffing thinner,” who “answer to reason with their fists and never question their excessive passions” — in short, the delinquents. Kitano High School, the milieu these kids inhabit, is a crumbling eyesore with graffiti-covered walls, trash-filled stairwells, and indifferent faculty. Students cut class and fill their after-school hours with girlie magazines, petty crime, and smack-talk at the local diner, marking time until they join the world of adult responsibility.

Gangs, bullies, disaffected teens playing at thug life — it’s familiar territory, yet in Matsumoto’s hands, these potentially cliche stories acquire a new and strange quality. Matsumoto eschews linear narrative in favor of digressions and fragments; as a result, we feel more like we’re living in the characters’ heads than reading a tidy account of their actions. Snatches of daydreams sometimes interrupt the narrative, as do jump cuts and surreal imagery: sharks and puffer fish drift past a classroom window where two teens make out, a UFO languishes above the school campus. Even the graffiti plays an integral part of Matsumoto’s storytelling; the walls are a paean to masturbation, booze, and suicide, cheerfully urging “No more political pacts–sex acts!”

One of the most arresting aspects of Blue Spring is Matsumoto’s ability to manipulate time. In one of the book’s most visually stunning sequences, for example, Matsumoto seamlessly blends two events — a baseball game and a mahjong game — into a single sequence:

Matsumoto makes it seem as if the gambler’s action precipitated the slide into second base. It’s an elegant visual trick that establishes the simultaneity of the two games while suggesting the intensity of the mahjong play; the discarding of a tile is portrayed with the same explosive energy as stealing a base.

Some of Matsumoto’s time-bending sequences are more cinematic, evoking the kind of split-screen technique popularized in the 1960s by filmmakers like John Frankenheimer and Richard Fleischer. The prologue, for example, contains a series of short, vertical strips in which we see unnamed teenagers preparing for a day at school. Matsumoto deliberates re-frames the activity in each panel, drawing back to show the full scene in some, and pulling in close to reveal the blankness of a characters’ face in another:


It’s an effective montage, largely for the way it juxtaposes the banal with the violent; the fist-fight is presented in the same, matter-of-fact fashion as the student eating breakfast, suggesting that conflict is as routine for some of Blue Spring‘s characters as catching the train to school. The transitions, too, are handled deftly; the eye can process these little vignettes in a sequence while the brain grasps the entire prologue as a simultaneous collage of events, a representative cross-section of high school students going about their business on a typical day.

Matsumoto’s stark, black-and-white imagery won’t be to every reader’s taste; I’d be the first admit that many of the kids in Blue Spring look older and wearier than Keith Richards, with their sunken eyes and rotten teeth. But the studied ugliness of the character designs and urban settings suits the material perfectly, hinting at the anger and emptiness of the characters’ lives. Matsumoto offers no easy answers for his characters’ behavior, nor any false hope that they will escape the lives of violence and despair that seem to be their destiny. Rather, he offers a frank, funny and often disturbing look at the years in which most of us were unformed lumps of clay — or, in Matsumoto’s memorable formulation, a time when most of us were blue: “No matter how passionate you were, no matter how much your blood boiled, I believe youth is a blue time. Blue — that indistinct blue that paints the town before the sun rises.”

This is an expanded version of a review that appeared at PopCultureShock on 4/30/07.

BLUE SPRING • BY TAIYO MATSUMOTO • VIZ • 216 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

Biomega Volumes 2 and 3

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Biomega Volume 2 by Tsutomu Nihei

Biomega continues to be one of the most stylish action manga I’ve read. There might not be a whole lot of substance there, but the style is dialed up so high that I find myself not caring so much that Nihei’s vision of a dystopian future seems like it has been cobbled together from a variety of sources. Zoichi is determined to rescue the captured Eon Green. We get a little more background about Zoichi and his world in this volume – Zoichi seems to be a rogue synthetic human developed by Toa Heavy industries, and now we see that he isn’t the only person with those unique abilities as Nishu Mizunoe is shown to be pursing the talking bear Kozlov Grebnev. There’s plenty of zombie splattering action, but my favorite part of this book came relatively early when Nihei displays a spectacular example of manga physics.

Zoichi is on the run from a group of fighter planes. From his motorcycle, he shoots one down with his handgun. He dodges missiles on the highway, then jumps the motorcycle into the air while holding an axe. He then proceeds to pilot the plane, anchored by the axe, as he sends his always helpful computer program into the cockpit to take over the plane. Honestly, I was so happy with the handful of panels in that action sequence the rest of the book could have been a 188 page instruction booklet on mumblety-peg and I still would have found it a satisfying reading experience.

Biomega Volume 3 by Tsutomu Nihei

The third volume doesn’t feature an action sequence as iconic as riding on a plane with an axe, but there’s plenty of action as the synthetic humans from Towa Heavy Industries confront the Data Research Foundation and their plans for transforming the earth. There’s a synthetic compound that dramatically reacts with the infected zombie/drones, giving the DF foundation a chance to remake the earth and ensure their own immortality. There’s mecha fights, fleshy monsters, motorcycles with handy claw tools, and Zoichi finally manages to get to Eon Green.

Part of the reason why I like this manga so much is that it is the only seinen science fiction title I’m actively collecting. So it functions as a nice palate cleanser when I’ve read too much shoujo. I can certainly see why some people might find not very compelling due to the somewhat erratic nature of Nihei’s storytelling. Biomega sometimes seems like a pastiche of many similar manga and anime. I find though that the artwork in Biomega compensates for the storytelling. Nihei’s character designs are sometimes really unsettling, as many of the characters are hidden behind creepy-looking masks to prevent infection. The synthetic humans are the perfect action heroes, the sometimes display some unsettling powers as their bodies react to injuries or extrude biomechanical parts to make climbing up giant mecha that much easier. For all the non-stop action in Biomega, the most memorable images I found in the third volume were a few panels of Zoichi’s dream after he’s been poisoned. He’s standing in an alien landscape in outer space, looking out at the stars when a man with his skull half caved in comments that there are no humans left. Nihei is great at juxtaposing moments of stillness with his inventive action sequences, and that’s why I’m going to be looking for the next few volumes in this series.

Manhwa Monday: 12 Creators & the Milky Way

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Welcome to another Manhwa Monday!

After last week’s whining about the lack of new manhwa licenses, we’ve discovered at least one, though we don’t know for sure whether there are plans to release it in print.

The December issue of Yen Plus advertises an upcoming manhwa series from Sirial (One Fine Day), called Milkyway Hitchhiking, about a cat with a pattern that looks like the Milky Way on his back. The series will be in full color, and is also Yen Press’ first simultaneous serialization. Let’s hope it sees print publication as well! Lori Henderson has some thoughts on the series in her write-up of December’s issue of Yen Plus. (Thanks to Michelle Smith for the tip!)

Robot 6 has an exclusive look at cover art for TOKYOPOP’s new Priest Purgatory series. And on the subject of Priest, 411 mania lists the upcoming film adaptation as one of its Biggest Comic Book Movies of 2011 .

iSeeToon continues their series on different types of manhwa with a look at Korean webtoons in their blog this week.

Blog of Asia attempts to explain the difference between manga and manhwa, drawing some interesting conclusions about both.

Here at Manhwa Bookshelf, Hana Lee translates the list of winners from Korea’s Reader Awards for manhwa in 2010.

This week in reviews, both Ed Sizemore of Manga Worth Reading and Richard of Forbidden Planet International take a look at Korea as Viewed by 12 Creators (Fanfare/Ponent Mon), offering a nice break from our usual cluster of Yen Press titles.

That’s all for this week!

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

Two from Yoshinaga

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One of the fascinating things about Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ôoku: The Inner Chambers (Viz) is watching the core elements of the series refine themselves. The fifth volume brings the level of emotional savagery to new heights, which is saying something.

In Yoshinaga’s gender-reversed imagining of the halls of power of feudal Japan, none of the shoguns have fared well in terms of emotional satisfaction. The demands of power and the palpable unease with societal reversals leave everyone at least a little undone, no matter how assiduously they try to adapt (or pretend that they’ve adapted). This time around, conniving Sir Emonnosuke, Senior Chamberlain of the Inner Chambers, continues his sly but ultimately joyless schemes, while the Shogun, Tsunayoshi, is torn between competing demands.

There’s undeniable cruelty in Tsunayoshi’s plight. She’s forced to choose between the demands of governance and succession, and her internal conflict has dire consequences for the kingdom. She’s also divided between the demands of the next generation and the previous, beholden to an elderly father wrestling with his own traumas. Since Ôoku isn’t about triumphing over adversity, readers are left to watch the spiral and marvel in the ways it spreads out, both in terms of specific character and the culture they inhabit.

By comparison, Emonnosuke’s travails seem trivial, but flashbacks provide context for his functional present. And it all contributes to the notion of the personal and political blurring beyond recognition, which really is the defining concern of the series.

Much as I love the title, it would be dishonest not to acknowledge its flaws. The adaptation is sometimes flowery, though its excesses have leveled off over time. Another issue is Yoshinaga’s sometimes repetitive character design. She definitely has aesthetic types she favors, which can make things confusing in a cast so large. (On the bright side, she favors attractive people, so at least the confusion is easy on the eye.)

On the opposite end of the Yoshinaga spectrum is Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy! (Yen Press). This is Yoshinaga being aimlessly charming and indulging in one of her favorite obsessions, cuisine. It’s a semi-autobiographical restaurant crawl for the readers of Ohta Shuppan’s intriguing Manga Erotics F and features a Yoshinaga avatar, Y-Naga, dragging her friends and colleagues from eatery to eatery.

Reviewing it is kind of like conducting a serious critical evaluation of chatty emails from a particularly funny, endearing friend. The stories benefit from already knowing and liking Yoshinaga, though I’d wager the food obsession would be an independent draw. As someone who’s read everything of Yoshinaga’s that’s available in English and yearns for someone to publish everything that isn’t, I was perfectly delighted with the book, and I find it hard to imagine the kind of person who wouldn’t be a least a little smitten.

Yoshinaga’s self-portrait is hilariously self-deprecating. The contrast between her grubby working persona to her done-up, out-on-the-town self is never not funny, and her shameless exposure of her idiosyncrasies almost certainly made me like her more. She’s unafraid to admit that she’s more than a little selfish and certainly a glutton, but those qualities make her all the more winning, just as the flaws make her entirely fictional characters more absorbing.

And the restaurant guide, while probably useless to most North American readers, is great fun, partly for the things you learn about Japanese food culture and partly for the cast of dining companions Yoshinaga assembles. The gay friend, the depressingly attractive woman friend, the too-close-for-comfort male assistant and roommate, and the rest all bring distinct and engaging qualities to the party.