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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

I Wish I Wrote That!

I Wish I Wrote That!

March 18, 2011 by MJ 1 Comment

Is it really Friday already? Assuming my calendar’s not lying, that means it’s time for new installment of I Wish I Wrote That!, a monthly feature in which I provide links to a articles about comics that I’ve especially envied as a writer.

First off, I’d like to point you to Khursten Santos’ Spotlight on Fumi Yoshinaga at her website, Otaku Champloo. In it, Khursten chronicles Yoshinaga’s career and the evolution of her work, writing from the perspective of both a journalist and a fan.

A quote from Khursten’s introduction to the article:

My journey in writing this spotlight was nothing but enlightening. My rule of thumb is to try to read the artist’s work in sequence and try to see their development as a mangaka, both in art, their themes, their interests, and their stories. Strangely though, I have read Yoshinaga-sensei in various points in my life that when I started to look back, I couldn’t exactly pin-point where she started. When I started asking if she had grown as a writer, in the back of my head, I was thinking… she had always felt mature as a writer.

Khursten’s insights are valuable not only for their personal touch, but for the rich knowledge they reveal. I admire Khursten particularly for her background in manga and her understanding of visual storytelling, both of which are demonstrated in this piece. I wish I had even half her expertise!


There are a couple of pieces I’ve appreciated this month involving Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s shounen series Bakuman, namely this thoughtful review by Chris Mautner at the newly-revamped Comics Journal, and this charming look at the third volume by Manga Curmudgeon David Welsh.

Also from The Comics Journal, Ken Parille offers up a detailed discussion of Moto Hagio’s short manga “Bianca,” as published in A Drunken Dream and Other Stories last year by Fantagraphics. Whether or not I agree with all of Parille’s points, I simply love reading his analysis of the piece. It’s one of the most thought-provoking essays on the subject I’ve seen, and it’s made me anxious to re-read the story as well. I wish I wrote that!

Lastly, Manga Critic Kate Dacey held me in her thrall this month with her write-up of Aki Shimizu’s Quan. Filled with scans of the series’ artwork and Kate’s brilliant prose, this article not only made me envy her skill, but also her manga library!


That’s all from me this month! Readers, what do you wish you wrote?

Filed Under: I WISH I WROTE THAT!, UNSHELVED

I Wish I Wrote That!

January 21, 2011 by MJ 15 Comments

Welcome to the first I Wish I Wrote That of 2011! I’ve got a great batch of writing to share with you this month, which is a pretty great way to start off the year.

First off, today’s main attraction is a wonderful essay posted just last night, the latest in Jason Thompson‘s “House of 1000 Manga,” this time featuring Swan.

Published incompletely in English by the now-defunct CMX, Swan is one of those manga I am trying my hardest to collect before the volumes become so scarce that they all go for $300 apiece from skeevy Amazon sellers. I haven’t yet made it to the double-digits, something that reading Jason’s essay makes me deeply regret. Almost nobody can make me want to read a manga the way that Jason Thompson can (which is why I went immediately broke after the release of Manga: The Complete Guide), and the way he talks about Swan, I expect my bank account will suffer again. A quote:

“I didn’t expect that a shojo manga about ballet would be one of the most fiery-spirited shonen manga I’ve read in the last few years. Blood and sweat, competition, agonizing training sequences — these are things that are more common in boys’ manga, but Swan transfers them to the ballet and somehow makes it a perfect fit. It’s a mixture of rivalry and hard work, art and elegance; a combination of yûjô, doryoku, bigaku … I don’t know if this is just stereotypes, but judging purely from Swan, Japanese girls in 1976 were 10 times more badass than men in most countries today.”

Jason’s maybe not as “quotable” as some snarkier manga critics–I’m not doubled over with laughter when I read even his funniest lines. The beauty of his writing is found in the whole, and the whole is what must be read. I wish I wrote that!


A few other terrific links:

Khursten Santos has a new review up at Otaku Champloo, for est em’s gorgeous BL anthology, Red Blinds the Foolish. “There was a time when I used to dream of Spanish fiestas. La Tomatina. Hogueras de San Juan. San Isidro de Madrid. Corrida de toros. And I did not dream of this because my country, the Philippines, used to be a Spanish colony. My fascination with it lies in the romance of the activity. There was something beautiful and romantic with the order that comes with the chaos of a fiesta.”

At The Manga Critic, Kate Dacey reworked a older review of Taiyo Matsumoto’s Blue Spring, and the result is beautifully descriptive: “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!'”

This one’s going to get super-meta, but in my very first incarnation of this column, I praised Shaenon Garrity’s essay about Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy. Today, Noah Berlatsky did the same at The Hooded Utilitarian, and dammit, his is better than mine. “Ultimately, though, while I appreciate the insight into my own animosities, what really made this perhaps my favorite piece of the year was the insight into Shaenon’s affections … the piece is filled with affection, and indeed love. That love is directed precisely at Cathy’s fans; the Baby Boomer women. Among those women is Shaenon’s mother…and Cathy Guisewite herself.”

And speaking of Shaenon Garrity, her latest post at comiXology, about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman makes me want to finally finish the series, which I had loved until I got too bogged down in the visual overload of its ever-changing artwork. “I dreaded rereading Sandman because it was the comic that got me hooked on comic books, when I was a nerdy teenager who hung out with the goths and followed them to Kent State coffeehouses on Friday nights, and there was no way it could possibly live up to my memories. The Dark Knight Returns didn’t; the art’s still amazing, but all of Batman’s monologues now sound like they’re about butt sex, and the fact that I can’t read them without giggling indicates that I’ve somehow gotten more juvenile since I was sixteen.” Or maybe I just want to read more Shaenon.


That’s what I wish I wrote this month! Readers, what about you?

Filed Under: I WISH I WROTE THAT!, NEWS

I Wish I Wrote That!

December 17, 2010 by MJ 9 Comments

It’s been an interesting month in the manga blogosphere, some of which is due, no doubt, to Noah Berlatsky’s recent, scathing criticism of the manga blogging community’s treatment of Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. Now, my intent is not to bring more attention to that article, which has already gotten too much (from me and many others). It is far from Noah’s finest hour, and certainly not something that would inspire me to say, “I wish I wrote that!”

That said, though the main subject of my writer’s envy this month was not conceived as a direct response to Noah’s article, I’d bet that his article influenced its timing, and perhaps even some of its tone. That would be, of course, Erica Friedman’s wonderful guest review of Hagio’s collection, posted at the beginning of the month at David Welsh’s The Manga Curmudgeon.

A quote:

I think there’s a real risk, though, in over-analyzing this volume. Moto Hagio’s stories are, as I said at the beginning, masterful largely because she did not set out to be so. She wrote from the heart, stories that girls could understand, enjoy, identify with. She was the Stephanie Meyer of her time and only now, when we look back on a body of literature that spans decades, we see that it’s a little silly to dismiss it (or glorify it) because it’s shoujo manga. What A Drunken Dream offers is as much or as little as we want to see. If we stare too hard past the cute girl looking back at us in the mirror, we might in fact see the deathly crone behind her…but why would we want to do that? Can’t we just take the cute girl at face value? Isn’t she “important” enough on her own?

Thank you, Erica, for putting the work into real perspective, and for speaking eloquently without talking down to the stories’ intended audience. I wish I wrote that!


Other writings I’ve loved this month include Kate Dacey’s reworking of her early take on Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack, proving that it’s entirely possible to admire and respect an important artist’s work while still addressing ways in which it may be problematic. Also, Vom Marlowe’s article, The cycle of criticism, filled me with quite a bit of joy and gratitude.

We’ll be taking next Friday off here at Manga Bookshelf, but keep an eye out the week after for our regular features and some exciting news to share! In the meantime, what do you wish you’d written this month?

Filed Under: I WISH I WROTE THAT!

I Wish I Wrote That!

November 19, 2010 by MJ 2 Comments

Time for another installment of I Wish I Wrote That! This month’s roundup will be rather brief, not because there hasn’t been a lot of great writing going on in the manga blogopsphere, but because I’ve had less time than usual to read it!


This month’s centerpiece is about comics, but not manga, and that would be Vom Marlowe’s recent ode to one of my favorite webcomics, Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosch. Here’s a little taste of Vom’s reaction to first reading Allie’s Boyfriend Does Not Have Ebola, Probably and its Better Pain Scale:

“I laughed so hard I made unattractive snorting noises and startled the dog, who looked around for invading postmen or other villains.

Now when I have to rate the pain, I admit fully and upfront that I often ask myself, “Am I being mauled by a bear?”

It never fails to make things a little better.”

Vom’s entire post is delightful, and she points out quite a few of the comic’s most charming moments, particularly posts about Allie’s new dog and her recent cake epic. If I actually had written this, I think the only thing that would be different is that mine would have included maybe a thousand additional words on This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult. “Clean all the things?”


In the category of “Less ‘I Wish I Wrote That’ than ‘I’m So Glad She Did'” I submit Kate Dacey’s recent review of 13th Boy, which fills me with pure joy and reassurance that I’m truly not alone, and also Caddy C.’s Friday Feminism with Fumi Yoshinaga, because everyone should write more about Fumi Yoshinaga, including me.

And lastly, in the category of “Stuff That Resonates With Me in a Weirdly Good Way,” this somewhat ambivalent take on Viz’s March Story by David Welsh. What I enjoyed so much about this is David’s process as he tries to figure out how he feels about the book, and the fact that he displays all of that right there in the review.


That’s all for this month! See you in December for more I Wish I Wrote That!

Filed Under: I WISH I WROTE THAT!

I Wish I Wrote That!

October 22, 2010 by MJ 8 Comments

Welcome to the second of my new, recurring Friday features, “I Wish I Wrote That!” (concept thanks to the awesome Deb Aoki) in which I highlight manga discussion and criticism so awesome I wish I’d written it myself.

Since this is my very first stab at this feature, I’m going to let myself talk about some pieces that aren’t necessarily new, and even one that has nothing to do with manga.


First off, wow, do I wish I’d taken part in the wonderful AXed Twitter roundtable. Besides being great conversation, it was a wonderfully creative use of the medium. Here are links to parts one and two, and a bit of an excerpt:

  MangaCur Let’s start with the stories, in order: “The Watcher,” by Osamu Kanno.

That piece felt very much like a “Chef may use peanuts in some recipes” kind of warning, if that makes sense. Not that every story is going to have kind of ugly art, dogs peeing into skull wounds, and creepy nudity, but some do, so… Or if not precisely set the tone, at least made sure nobody would be surprised that the collection would go weird places.

debaoki Yes, that’s true – like the first song in an soundtrack or concept album, “The Watcher” set a certain tone as the first story in AX. I didn’t really get what Osamu Kanno was going for with The Watcher, other than to make fun of selfish suburbanites

Toukochan Bleah. It seems Japan also has what I dislike about indie comics in its own manga. The art in The Watcher reminded me of Leo and Diane Dillon’s work for Dangerous Visions, for some reason.

factualopinion “The Watcher”: probably one of the best last panels of all the stories available. Little too long, i’d say.


The latest installment of the Manga Moveable Feast, this time hosted by Sean Gaffney, led Manga Curmudgeon David Welsh to repost his older review of Setona Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare. After reading that review, I realized that I never need to move beyond my own first volume review. I’ll simply point people to David’s. An excerpt:

  In a lot of manga aimed at an adolescent audience, the characters’ objectives are sunny and straightforward. Do your best! Be true to yourself! Learn! Grow! Befriend! Love! You can dress those objectives up however you like and contextualize them in sports or sorcery or pop stardom, but the bottom line is basically the pursuit of happiness.

What makes a book like Setona Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare (Go! Comi) so alluring is that it’s about the aversion of unhappiness. The objectives here are just as straightforward, but they’re bleaker and probably more honest. Keep your secrets. Hide your flaws. Try not to hurt anyone more than you can avoid, but a teen’s got to do what a teen’s got to do.


Speaking of be-all and end-all reviews, I made the mistake of reading Kate Dacey’s wonderful review of Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories and it’s stymied me ever since. I can’t imagine being able to write about it so beautifully, and I certainly don’t have the background Kate provides at the beginning of the piece which informs her analysis throughout.

  Perhaps the best compliment I can pay Hagio is praising her ability to make the ineffable speak through pictures, whether she’s documenting the grief that a young woman feels after aborting her baby (“Angel Mimic”) or the intense longing a middle-aged man feels for the college friends who abandoned him (“Marie, Ten Years Later”). Nowhere is this more evident than in the final story, “The Willow Tree.” At first glance, the layout is simple; each page consists of just two large, rectangular panels in which a woman stands beneath a tree, watching a parade of people — a doleful man and a little boy, a group of rambunctious grade-schoolers, a teenager wooing a classmate — as they stroll on the embankment above her. A careful reading of the images, however, reveals a complex story spanning many years; Hagio uses subtle cues — light, weather, and the principal character’s body language — to suggest the woman’s relationship to the people who walk past the tree. The last ten panels are beautifully executed; though the woman never utters a word, her face suddenly registers all the pain, joy, and anxiety she experienced during her decades-long vigil.

Finally, because you know I like to cheat, I’ll throw in one piece of criticism that isn’t about manga at all, but that kept me thinking for days after I’d read it. That would be Shaenon Garrity’s piece on Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy, posted shortly after Guisewite announced her retirement from the strip. “I wish I wrote that” is a sentiment I can apply to nearly everything of Shaenon’s, but this is the section that really stuck with me:

  After decades of mainstream popularity, Cathy is still widely disliked by pop-cult elites like you and me. It whirls eternally between the Scylla and Charybdis of gender essentialism: men don’t like it because it’s about girly stuff, and feminist women don’t like it because it’s about girly stuff. Anti-feminists don’t have reason to like it either, what with the single-career-woman heroine who’s always been as open as newspaper syndication will allow about her casual sex life. That leaves just one demographic: women who are all for liberation and being your own woman and all that, but can’t quite figure out how to reconcile it with their actual lives. Women who never stopped feeling the pressure to cook like Betty Crocker and look like Donna Reed, and just added to it the pressure to change the world like Gloria Steinem. In other words, almost every woman of the Baby Boom generation.

When I think about some of the other, mostly-unflattering sentiments I read about Cathy around that time, like this horrifying essay from Tim Kreider at The Comics Journal (Kreider lets us know where he’s coming from with the title alone), it really highlights everything I’ve come to despise about the way so many men write about women’s comics. If they can’t relate to it, it must be crap, right? That’s the overwhelming message of Kreider’s essay and half the writing I see spewing from the keyboards of male comics critics online (kudos and gratitude to the other half, seriously, you have no idea). Thankfully there are women as brilliant and funny as Shaenon Garrity out there to create some balance.


Filed Under: I WISH I WROTE THAT!

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