Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Features & Reviews

Manhwa Monday: March Preview

by 1 Comment

Welcome to another Manhwa Monday!

With March upon us, it’s time to take a look at the month’s upcoming manhwa releases. First off, we have volume five of Time and Again (Yen Press), JiUn Yun’s story of a pair of ghost hunters in Tang Dynasty-era China. This is the series’ penultimate volume, so it’s likely to be pretty dramatic. Also from Yen Press, we’ll see volume twelve of Japanese-published Korean-created Black God.

From NETCOMICS, March promises volume two of There’s Something About SunYool, one of last year’s few standout new releases.

In this week’s news, Korea JoongAng Daily reports about Korean manhwa making waves in Japan, particularly The Survival series, an educational comic series that “has taken the competitive Japanese comic book market by storm.”

At Seoul Graphics, Managing Director Dr. Jeeyeon Kim and Comic Bits’ Terry Hooper offer to answer your questions about manhwa.

And at Manga Xanadu, Lori Henderson takes us through the latest issue of Yen Plus, including new chapters of manhwa series Aron’s Absurd Armada and Milkyway Hitchhiking.

In a bit of blog news, given the slow nature of the US manhwa industry lately, I’m considering moving Manhwa Monday from a weekly column to bi-weekly or even monthly. It grows increasingly difficult to find enough news to report each week, and less frequent columns could mean those that do get made are a bit more substantial. What say you, readers?

That’s all for this week!

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

From the stack: Dorohedoro vols. 1-3

by

It’s probably silly, but I always feel guilty that I don’t like Q Hayashida’s Dorohedoro (Viz) more than I do. I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what the barrier is for me, since there are so many things to admire about the comic.

Most notable is Hayashida’s sensibility, which she has in abundance. While stories about magic are usually filled with sparkle, she’s set-dressed hers in convincing grime and clutter. Her main setting is a world called The Hole, and the name isn’t ironic. It’s a filthy, often frightening place where average humans live and try and protect themselves from magic-using sorcerers who like to experiment on the non-gifted. But it’s also a strangely homey place. Sure, violence is routine, and you’re living at the whim of powerful beings with next to no conscience, but you can find good dumplings.

Hayashida applies the same gritty-but-not approach to her characters. Our hero, Caiman, is an amnesiac with the head of a lizard. He’s terrifying to look at, but he’s goofy and kind of sweet when he isn’t chomping his jaws down on the heads of sorcerers to see if they’re the one who left him with no memory and a reptilian noggin. He’s very solicitous of Nikaido, the tough girl who makes the dumplings and helps him with his various projects (like the head chomping). They have an appealing rapport, and they’re very protective of each other.

Even the villains have their virtues, mostly because they aren’t entirely focused on villainy. Sorcerer mobster En seems to have a dozen different agendas at once, any of which can be set aside for an adorable (but creepy) new pet. His enforcers, Shin and Noi, are kind of the cloudy, mirror version of Caiman and Nikaido, but with an added level of blithe certainty. They’re endearingly amoral, not even bothering to justify they’re actions. They like their lives, whether they’re eating lunch or slicing and dicing hapless humans.

So, with an interesting cast and a distinct vibe, what’s the problem? I think it’s in the storytelling, which can feel not fully realized. I find it difficult to invest in Caiman’s quest to find out what happened to him. Aside from a general (and justified) sense of being badly used, there isn’t much in the way of specific urgency to Caiman’s search for answers and vengeance. He’s certainly likeable, but his aims seem strangely small. They could represent the overall injustices visited on the denizens of The Hole at the hands of the sorcerers, but Hayashida doesn’t really go there. Keeping things relatively light is an interesting choice that works in a lot of ways, but I keep wishing she’d raise the overall stakes a bit.

On another storytelling front, the staging of certain sequences can be rather confusing, especially when a lot is happening at once. I love the look of the book overall – the environments, the character design, some of the witty ways Hayashida plays around with pacing – but I wish there was a more consistent level of clarity.

Since you can do so for free, at least with chapters that haven’t seen print yet, I’d certainly encourage people to read Dorohedoro. And I certainly wouldn’t recommend a whole lot of things that you can read for free, because time has value. But this series has a lot of strengths, and Hayashida seems to be a remarkable creator in a number of significant ways. Dorohedoro just isn’t as tight as I would hope, and it feels like it could be without losing any of its quirky appeal.

Fanservice Friday: Intimacy porn

by 42 Comments

I’ve had fanservice on the brain quite a bit lately, most recently thanks to this article by comics creator Michael Arthur at The Hooded Utilitarian. In it, Michael discussed his perspective on BL manga as a gay man and an artist, and though reception was mixed (for the record, I have pretty much equal appreciation for both his points and much of the criticism he received from female BL fans) what it really got me thinking about is fanservice for women, which inevitably led to thoughts about fanservice for me.

Pretty guys in shoujo and BL? Sure, I like ’em. I like them (maybe even more) in Korean manhwa as well, where “blond and willowy” also tends to equal “kick-ass,” at least in the stuff we’ve seen imported over here. It’s well established that girls frequently like their male idols to be pretty as, well, girls, and that taste doesn’t necessarily vanish with age, at least when it comes to fiction. The muscle-bound hunk has never done much for me, and while that may lend itself in “real life” to a preference for nerdy guys, I’m perfectly happy with the rail-thin pretty boys offered up to me in girls’ comics.

Pretty boys aren’t my real hook, though, not even if we’re talking porn–and when I use the term “porn” here, it’s in the broadest sense of the word, the sense that includes things like “food porn” and “shelf porn” or basically anything that feeds our inner obsessions with powerful visual stimuli. My real “porn,” what services me as a fan the way eye candy does for many, is emotional porn. Intimacy porn, if we’re going to get specific.

What’s great about intimacy porn, is that it is able to manifest itself in a number of different ways, none of which is exclusive to girls’ and women’s comics, though you’ll find it there in abundance. Some of it is clearly romantic in nature, like this scene from Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss.

Read right-to-left. Click for larger image

The scene takes place in the first volume of the manga, when these characters, George and Yukari, are just barely beginning to explore their attraction. It’s the small bits of physical intimacy that really work for me here… George’s fingers circling Yukari’s, the soft kiss on the back of her hand, the tilt of his head as he leans in to kiss her–not the kiss itself (which doesn’t happen here, as you may know), but the anticipation of it, the electricity in the air between two bodies so clearly attracted to one another. The moment feels intensely intimate, though they’re standing outside where anyone could see them. That’s what I’m talking about here. That’s the way to service me as a fan.

With this in mind, I took another look at this scene from Jeon JinSeok and Han SeungHee’s One Thousand and One Nights. I’d mentioned in my discussion with Michelle that it was a ridiculously obvious image, and that its success in context was a testament to the artists’ skill with romance, but I think its success with me goes even further than that.

Read left-to-right. Click for larger image

Where indeed skill comes into play, is that the characters’ intimacy has been so well-established before this point, without the use of such blatantly erotic imagery, that when this stunning show of emotional and sexual intimacy is played out right in front of enemy Crusaders and the sultan’s court, it actually feels real. Sehera’s expression of devotion here is so honest, so utterly without embarrassment, its public intimacy feels not only appropriate, but genuinely romantic.

Intimacy porn doesn’t have to be romantic, though, and often the best of it isn’t. This scene from Kazuya Minekura’s Wild Adapter for instance:

Read right-to-left. Click for larger images

   

   

Though Wild Adapter is serialized in a BL magazine, the relationship between its two protagonists, Kubota and Tokito, is only subtly romantic. What the two really have is intimacy, and that’s what draws me so strongly to them and to their story. This scene has plenty of elements that might be typically used as fanservice–a shower, slouchy skinny guys, even nudity–but there’s no service here, not unless you count my kind, of which there’s service aplenty. This kind of intimacy–Tokito’s pain, unspoken, but acknowledged and understood between just the two of them–that’s my kind of porn, there.

To stray even further from romance, you can find this kind of intimacy porn far, far outside shoujo, josei, or BL. CLAMP’s xxxHolic, for example, was originally published in Young Magazine, a men’s publication, typically featuring bikini-clad women on its cover. Still, it’s filled with my kind of porn, including this scene:

Read right-to-left. Click for larger images



Here, Watanuki and Doumeki discuss the events of the day, while Doumeki makes his demands regarding the contents of rice balls. Their intimacy is apparent from the start… the verbal shorthand, the way the rice ball conversation weaves itself out of habit around the real issues at hand. At page 139 their surface banter comes to a halt, as Watanuki makes a rare, open statement revealing the true value of their relationship. It’s a gorgeously thick moment–you can just feel the weight of emotion in the air, all the unspoken trust and gratitude that Watanuki is usually unable to express–suspended just briefly in time, before Doumeki quickly swings things back into their comfort zone. The banter continues, no less intimately, but comfortable again for both of them. I probably read this scene ten times when I first picked up the volume. It’s exactly my kind of porn.

Intimacy porn doesn’t have to be between two characters, though. Sometimes an author is able to create this between a character and his/her readers. Going back to Yazawa for a moment, this time with NANA, note here how she’s used narrow close-ups of her characters’ eyes to open them up to the audience.

Read right-to-left. Click for larger image

Though the scene takes place between Reira and Shin, their circumstances make it difficult for them to connect with each other honestly. Instead, though they hide their feelings from each other, they’re sharing them with the reader, as openly and intimately as possible. This kind of intimacy has the effect of not breaking the fourth wall, but expanding it to include the reader, and can be even more powerful than something that’s established between characters. It’s difficult to do well, but Yazawa’s a master, and it most certainly contributes to my love of her work.

Is it fanservice? Maybe not, strictly speaking. But it services me better than a thousand pretty faces ever could on their own.

So, readers… what’s your porn?

License request day: Jin

by

Anime News Network passed along the announcement of the manga nominees for the 15th Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize. You all know what that means, right? We’ve struck a vein of license request ore! It’s an interesting and diverse slate, and I’m sure it will fuel future license requests, but there’s one title that has an unshakable grasp on my imagination and curiosity.

That would be Jin, written and illustrated by Motoka Murakami and serialized in Shueisha’s Super Jump for a total of 20 volumes. Any manga that launches with a modern-day doctor finding a carcinogenic fetus in a patient’s skull, followed by that fetus then sending said doctor back in time is a manga I want to read very, very badly.

It’s being published in French by Tonkam, which makes it much easier for me to figure out details about the book. I’m guessing that the fetus is just a MacGuffin to send our hero, 30-something doctor Jin Minakata, back to the Edo period. He adapts to his new/old world and begins applying his modern medical knowledge to bygone problems.

A cholera epidemic in Yokohama… communicable diseases among the courtesans of the red-light district… “discovering” penicillin centuries ahead of time… a geisha with breast cancer… If you want to be a busy doctor and seem like a miraculous genius whether you are one or not, it seems like all you have to do is go back in time. (How you get there is your own problem. My suggestion would be to randomly x-ray the skulls of your patients for mysterious fetuses. Of course, any fetus you find in someone’s skull is bound to count as “mysterious.”)

Judging by the sample pages from the first volume that Tonkam has shared, the art looks very clean, detailed, and attractive in a seinen sort of way that won’t be unfamiliar to fans of creators like Jiro Taniguchi. And while it’s perhaps a little soon after asking for Zipang to dip into the well of rewritten history, I think Jin sounds different enough in era and focus that they wouldn’t cannibalize each other’s audience, should we see a day when they’re simultaneously published in English.

So that’s my first choice from the current Tezuka nominees. I’ve only chosen one cover image, because they’re all pretty similar, featuring a strangely blank Jin standing with a beautiful woman. I used to work at a local newspaper, and so many submitted wedding photos looked kind of like these covers, with the woman actively engaging the camera and the man staring out of the frame at something shiny.

Which of the Tezuka nominees would you most like to see licensed?

3 Things Thursday: TOKYOPOP

by 33 Comments

It’s been a rough week in the blogosphere for TOKYOPOP, whose latest round of layoffs has inspired quite a bit of talk about the company’s less positive history, including this frank commentary from Brigid Alverson at Robot 6 and this ongoing round-up from Johanna Draper Carlson at Manga Worth Reading. My own history as a reader has been sketchy at times. Though TOKYOPOP’s titles have inspired some of my most passionate fangirling over the years, they’ve occasionally left me baffled, and some of their unfinished business has rendered me truly heartbroken.

For today’s 3 Things, let’s examine that a bit more closely.

3 faces of TOKYOPOP:

1. The Fangirling – From Paradise Kiss to Fruits Basket, from Tokyo Babylon to Wild Adapter, TOKYOPOP has offered up to me some of the most beloved series in my manga library. Read any of those linked reviews, and you’ll understand what I love about manga–that’s how well these series represent my personal feelings about the best of the medium, particularly when it comes to manga written and published for women and girls. Some of their newer shoujo acquisitions (like Demon Sacred and The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko) look to be joining their ranks someday as well.

What can we expect now from a company whose owner has seemingly given up on books? It’s hard to say.

2. The Bafflement – Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m baffled why a series like KimiKiss (pictured to the right) was published, or even why it might be popular. A buxom teen removing her blouse on the cover is, I expect, money in the bank! What was baffling to me in particular about this release, was that it was apparently being marketed as shoujo, according to a little pamphlet I received along with one of the later volumes of Fruits Basket.

From my review summary at the time: “Kouchi and Mao have been friends since childhood, but now that they are in high school, Kouchi is depressed that he hasn’t managed to attract a girlfriend. Mao offers to help him become a “real stud” by teaching him how to be attractive to girls, beginning with lessons in kissing. The lessons start to get a bit steamy, especially after Mao is invited to sleep over with Kouchi’s little sister, resulting in a late-night tryst in Kouchi’s bed.” Sound like shoujo to you?

3. The Heartbreak – Everyone’s got their own tale of woe over a series that TOKYOPOP has canceled, but my broken heart belongs to Off*Beat, an almost finished series by OEL creator Jen Lee Quick. With just one volume remaining of its original 3-volume commission, fans like me were left to weep and weep, never knowing what finally happens to sweet Tory and his revealing obsession.

From my review: “Everything about this comic is a winner–the intriguing plot line, the wonderfully rich characters, the unique, expressive artwork, the subtle treatment of a gay teen’s sexual awakening that is refreshingly not played up or made “sexy” to please its female audience–and the fact that it languishes in cancellation limbo is honestly heartbreaking. This is a comic I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone. It truly deserves to be read.” *snif*

So readers, what are your 3 faces of TOKYOPOP?

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Qwan

by

I have a bad habit of falling in love with commercially doomed series. Satsuma Gishiden was my first great disappointment: Dark Horse published three volumes of this manly-man samurai manga, only to put the series on ice in 2007. Duck Prince was another, with Ai Morinaga’s awesomely weird comedy getting the axe midway through its run, a victim of CPM’s perpetual cash flow problems. But the cancellation that really broke my heart was Qwan, a fantasy-adventure that drew heavily on Chinese history and folklore for its inspiration. Between 2005 and 2007, Tokyopop released four volumes before putting the series on hiatus, leaving Qwan‘s few die-hard fans stranded in the middle of a crucial story arc.

While I’d be the first to admit that reading an unfinished story can be an exercise in frustration, I’m going to recommend Qwan anyway because the four volumes that were published are awesome — Scout’s honor.

The story focuses on Qwan, a child-like figure whose naivete and enthusiasm belie super-human strength and speed. Though Qwan realizes he isn’t human, he’s never questioned his origins or abilities — that is, until he meets Shaga, a courtesan who urges him to seek the Essential Arts of Peace, a sutra that will reveal where Qwan came from and why he was sent to live among humans. He’s not the only one who wants the sutra, however; various political factions vie for the scrolls, hoping to unlock the scrolls’ power and hasten the Han Dynasty’s demise.

Questing boys and magical scrolls are de rigeur in fantasy-adventure stories, but Qwan distinguishes itself in two crucial areas. The first is well-rounded characters. Qwan isn’t a classic Shonen Jump hero, kind-hearted and dedicated to self-improvement, but a more ambiguous figure; he’s guileless and self-centered in the manner of a nine- or ten-year-old, unable to feel genuine sympathy for others. Early in volume one, for example, Qwan encounters a mysterious girl traveling in the company of a demon. Daki proves more a formidable opponent than Qwan anticipates, successfully countering his attack with powerful insect magic. Though it’s clear to the reader that Daki, like Qwan, is a supernatural being, caught between the human and demon worlds, Qwan himself never sees the parallels between their situations, repeatedly attacking Daki until he resigns himself to the futility of his efforts.

The second distinguishing feature of Qwan is Aki Shimizu’s gorgeous artwork, which draws on anime, guo hua (classical Chinese painting), and wuxia films for its aesthetic. Though Shimizu usually blends these different styles into a seamless whole, she occasionally makes explicit, almost self-conscious quotations of her influences. In this panel, which appears in the very first chapter, she gracefully echoes the undulating lines and shapes of Chinese landscape paintings, even adding a delicately stylized pine tree in the foreground:

Her fight scenes, too, are steeped in Chinese influences. Using dramatic angles, she makes her characters look as weightless as the wire-fu acrobats in Curse of the Golden Flower and House of Flying Daggers; her fight scenes are balletic, beautifully choreographed sequences of tumbling bodies and arcing swords. In this sequence, for example, Qwan goes mano-a-mano with a tiger demon, eventually gaining the upper hand by vaulting onto the monster’s back:

Qwan then consumes the demon at the end of their protracted battle, the demon’s body dissolving into an inky swirl:

Oh, and Shimizu draws some pretty nifty monsters, too. This one suggests a Maltese-water buffalo hybrid with prehensile toes:

So why wasn’t Qwan a bigger hit? I think narrative complexity was a factor. Though the story is a rich tapestry of political history and myth, Shimizu refuses to spoon feed information to the reader; we’re just as confused and disoriented as Qwan himself is. That kind of reading experience can be quite rewarding, but the absence of an omniscient narrator demands more of the audience, forcing us to pore over the text and make connections on our own. Shimizu’s artwork and characterizations are up to the task, but impatient readers will easily miss crucial details in their haste to get to the fight scenes.

I also think timing was a factor in Qwan’s cancellation, as Qwan‘s fourth volume appeared in 2007 at the height of the manga boom. If you remember that heady period, publishers were releasing more than 1,200 new volumes of manga per year. Titles that didn’t have an obvious hook — say, a popular anime adaptation or a cast of hot male vampires — faced an uphill battle, with bookstores unwilling to stock series whose first or second volumes sold poorly. With little support from the publisher, and few fans blogging about it, Qwan was all but consigned to the remainder bin.

I’m under no illusion that my paean to Qwan will save it from licensing purgatory; for every Yotsuba&!, there are two Tactics, manga that didn’t gain much traction even after a well-publicized rescue. But Qwan is so good that I can’t help but wish that someone will complete the series. It’s a manga for people who love great stories and vivid characters, who care more about the quality of the storytelling than the coolness of the concepts and costumes.

QWAN, VOLS. 1-4 • BY AKI SHIMIZU • TOKYOPOP • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

From the stack: Kimi ni Todoke vol. 5

by

My recent brush with Bakuman (Viz) helped me realize something (probably after everyone else already got there) about Karuho Shiina’s Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You (also Viz). Shiina is deconstructing shôjo manga as surely as Ohba and Obata are dissecting shônen. Of course, Shiina is telling a proper story with engaging characters at the same time, so she wins.

This became blazingly evident in the fifth volume. It begins with our heroine, socially inept Sawako, deep in conversation with Kurumi, who likes the same boy Sawako does and is trying to manipulate Sawako into stepping aside. In spite of her almost complete innocence in matters interpersonal, Sawako is incredibly hard to manipulate, and she’s just so damned nice. Kurumi is infuriated, at least partly because some part of her recognizes that Sawako is possibly more worthy of kindly Kazehaya’s affection than Kurumi is.

This isn’t an uncommon emotional beat for shôjo manga, but it rarely gets the degree of articulation it receives here. Kurumi must not only admit her resentment of Sawako, she must also explain to this foreign exchange student from Mars exactly why she resents her. And while the experience provides some kind of catharsis for the duplicitous Kurumi, it doesn’t entirely soften her feelings for Sawako. It does clarify them, for both Kurumi and Sawako, and they culminate in a glorious moment when Kurumi, pretense abandoned, beams at Sawako and declares them rivals.

It’s not just Kurumi being argumentative. It’s Kurumi being generous, helping Sawako understand. And it’s Kurumi liberating herself from a stifling public persona. Most of all, it’s Shiina celebrating the construct, the pairing of people who want the same limited resource (a title, a prize, a love interest) who both understand the other’s desire and respect their right to want it but realize that their ultimate happiness is mutually exclusive.

This is what I mean by deconstruction. Most mangaka would just go through the beats of this realization without underlining it so baldly, but the baldness is what makes Shiina’s approach soar. It’s like you’re Sawako, discovering all of these new things, except you already knew them, and yet the rediscovery is as thrilling as the first time you grasped them.

There’s lots of other stuff that happens in this volume, and all of it is charming and good, because Shiina wrote and drew it. But the definition of rivalry, old as shôjo and fresh as now, is the kind of emotional peak that represents the best of this excellent series. Bakuman is most intriguing as an instruction manual, and it’s savvy (but joyless) about what works in a certain type of manga. Kimi ni Todoke both defines and celebrates its own category’s building blocks.

 

Off the Shelf: Billionaires, Babies, & Brides!

by and 17 Comments

Welcome to another edition of Off the Shelf with MJ & Michelle! I’m joined, as always, by Soliloquy in Blue‘s Michelle Smith.

MICHELLE: After spending last week’s column discussing the grim misanthropy of Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako, MJand I decided to go a more frivolous route this time. The idea was actually mine, inspired by a list of new Harlequin titles available on eManga.com. Upon perusing said list, I noticed a pattern. See if you can spot it, too!

Marriage Scandal, Showbiz Baby!
A Date with a Billionaire
Claiming His Pregnant Wife
Royally Bedded, Regally Wedded
Powerful Persuasion
The Millionaire’s Pregnant Mistress
Pilgrim’s Castle
The Billionaire Boss’s Forbidden Mistress
Lovechild

Out of nine titles, three reference pregnancy, three mention weddings or marriages, and two mention billionaires! One mentions a millionaire, but obviously that guy is just not trying hard enough.

Neither one of us was willing to relinquish our claim to the first title on the list, so we both read that one as well as a second choice. (Mine comes from a second, more recent list, which has fewer billionaires but more brides.)

How did you enjoy your foray into romance, MJ?

MJ: Well, Michelle, first off I have to say I was a little disappointed that my first pick, which was listed originally as The Billionaire‘s Boss’s Forbidden Mistress contained a typo, because I was pretty interested in finding out just who the billionaire actually was in a story that was apparently all about his boss’s forbidden mistress. Alas, the mistress indeed belongs to the billionaire, though I’m not sure what makes her forbidden.

Two years ago, Leah was in a car accident that cost her two things, her mother and her husband’s love. Her mother died in the accident, as one might assume, but her husband, the bastard, was driven away by a new scar on Leah’s leg. When a young billionaire, Jason Pollack, buys the company Leah works for, she’s intrigued by him, but too embarrassed by her scar to give in to her feelings. Jason is a widower, still in love with his late wife, but attracted by Leah’s beauty. In the end, the two of them enter into an affair, Leah because she’s just so happy that any man wants her with her scar, and Jason because… well, he just thinks she’s hot. Both claim to be uninterested in love, but what happens when their feelings change?

Though someone could certainly write a really touching romance with these characters–a woman whose self-esteem has been destroyed and a man looking for solace after the death of his wife–author Milanda Lee has not done so, or at least it’s nowhere evident in Megumi Toda’s adaptation. Like much of the Harlequin manga I’ve read, nothing’s given enough time to feel actually real, and as a result, the romance falls flat. Both Leah and Jason’s traumas are too quickly dismissed to gain any kind of traction, rendering the whole thing too sloppy and shallow to be genuinely enjoyed.

MICHELLE: I think a story all about a billionaire obsessed with his boss’s (a trillionaire?) mistress would probably be more interesting than the story you describe. It seems to be a trend that the wrong guy for the heroine in these romances can’t just be a decent person with whom things don’t work out for subtle reasons; he has to be as shitty as possible, like a husband who ditches his wife because of a frickin’ scar.

MJ: Right?? And it’s not like that part isn’t, y’know, poignant, but then when the heroine gets into a loveless relationship just because she’s been so broken by that first, wrong guy, I’d like to see a little more impact. If you’re gonna go for that kind of over-the-top drama, at least use it.

I realize that one of the hardest things to do as a writer is to make a whirlwind romance feel genuine. It’s one of those things that, done well, is plainly exhilarating to read. Unfortunately, if it’s not done well, it just feels empty and not at all romantic.

So, how did you fare with your pick?

MICHELLE: Ai Yazawa could give her lessons on the dramatic potential of choosing the wrong guy! As for my pick, I fared a little better than you did, though I’ve got some of the same complaints.

I had originally intended to read Claiming His Pregnant Wife, but when a second round of Harlequin offerings appeared, containing a book entitled Cowboys, Babies, and Shotgun Vows, I ditched my first choice faster than a chick with a scar. (By the way, I told my husband about the husband in your book and his response was, “What a hosebag!”)

Ashley Bennet, the daughter of a rich oil tycoon, never received love from her father and stepmom. Rather than object when her father proposes an arranged marriage, Ashley is bowled over to have someone actually telling her he loves her. Too bad she catches him boffing someone else on their wedding day. She runs off and ends up drunk in a bar, where she meets an earnest cowboy named Ryder McCall. They enjoy a one-night stand and Ashley goes off to be a waitress in a diner.

Ryder, however, is convinced that he loves her and tracks her down. Ashley is dubious, because Ryder is acting like a presumptuous fool, but then reveals she is pregnant. In Harlequin romances, guys are always happy about this. “Yes! This is awesome!” cries Ryder. Ashley’s not on the marriage bandwagon, but eventually takes an accounting job at the McCall farm. Through proximity to Ryder and silly scenes like watching him be kind to a lost kid in a store for, like, two pages, Ashley decides she loves him. Martin the ex-fiancé returns and expresses a desire to get back together (and also informs Ashley that she’ll be having an abortion), but Ryder punches him. Yay! Now they are in the love.

Seriously, this really tries to be good. Ashley is not a wilting flower, which I appreciate, and there are some attempts at humor. Its biggest flaw is, like you mention, everything just happens too fast to feel genuine! I’m a very slow reader, and when I can blow through a story in twenty minutes, then you know it is pretty flufftastic material.

MJ: I do have to wonder if the original novels delve a little deeper, just because they have more time? I think part of the problem with these manga adaptations is that they almost feel more like summaries than stories. I mean, I assume if I went in and actually read Cowboys, Babies, and Shotgun Vows it would read almost exactly as your description did, without a lot more time taken at any particular point.

MICHELLE: Yeah, this is one where I actually have some interest in reading the original to see how it compares. You make a great point about my description being about as thorough as the book itself is, because that’s true. That scene where Ryder demonstrates his capability to be a good dad, for example, quite literally takes all of two pages. The end result is just too simplistic to be believable.

Should I take a stab at summarizing our tandem pick, Marriage Scandal, Showbiz Baby!?

MJ: Oh, you know I love it when you summarize!

MICHELLE: I will do my best!

Two years ago, when famous Italian actor Mateo D’Arrezo was in England doing Shakespeare, he came across a local actress named Jennifer Wallen starring as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet. He was instantly smitten by her ability to refrain from being instantly smitten by him, and they start dating. Eventually they marry, even though her mother warns that all men are scum. The marriage does wonders for Jennifer’s career, but she’s no longer the wide-eyed girl Mateo originally fell in love with.

Busy schedules and a scheming manager keep them apart, and when a photo of Mateo kissing a co-star is published, Jennifer assumes the worst and initiates divorce proceedings. She still loves him, though, and when they run into each other while in Cannes to promote a film they made together, they end up getting it on in an elevator. Guess what happens next? If your answer is, “They make a showbiz baby,” award yourself a taco!

Mateo, of course, is delighted by this news. He’s being so sweet and solicitous that Jennifer learns to trust him again and even when the vengeful co-star claims to be pregnant herself, Jennifer’s faith in him remains firm. After a little bit of peril for the baby, they apologize to each other and admit their mistakes. The end.

MJ: Excellent summary, m’dear. So. Okay, here are a couple of my particular issues with this story. First, I find the amount of time Mateo spends defending his betrayal as “just a kiss” seriously laughable. I mean, come on. It’s only cheating if he sleeps with her? Making out with other women is totally kosher?

Secondly, what was up with totally dropping the ball on the scheming manager? They make all this fuss about how the guy is keeping Jennifer’s calls from getting through, but then… nothing happens. The manager’s not upset they’re back together. Mateo seems unconcerned that his staff has nearly ruined his marriage. The whole thing is just… dropped. What’s the point of inserting that kind of melodrama if you’re not even going to make anything of it? GIVE ME MRS. DANVERS OR GIVE ME DEATH. Or something like that. You get my point.

MICHELLE: I was sure there was going to be some explanation by which Mateo was not even responsible for the kiss, but at least that didn’t come to pass. And you’re totally right about the asshole manager. Mateo doesn’t even chew him out for his actions. This is the same guy who basically said that Jennifer neglected her husband (how dare she pursue her own career!) and should expect a little infidelity. What specific grudge he has against her isn’t mentioned and, in fact, he’s the one who takes Mateo to see her perform in the first place.

MJ: I have to think that the manager must be a little more deliciously evil in the novel. Or at least I’m going to go on pretending that’s the case, because overall, this story was a least a bit more solidly put together than The Billionaire Boss’s Forbidden Mistress.

People should really be clear on this fact though: we fought over who would get to read this manga. That’s how excited we were over the title alone. I have to say, overall, it wasn’t worth the fight.

MICHELLE: Yeah. Now I regret all that hair-pulling I did. But this does lead to another point on which people should be clear, which is that although neither of us is really a Harlequin reader, we didn’t approach the endeavor with the intent to just make fun of Harlequin or anything. I always want to like whatever it is I’m reading, and I certainly didn’t hate these or anything; they were just disappointing.

MJ: Yes, that’s absolutely the case. I love romance, I really, really do, and I always want to like these when we decide to dig into them. I expect we haven’t quite given up on them yet!

MICHELLE: I expect you’re right. Maybe next time we should try ones with more staid titles, like Pilgrim’s Castle. Though probably it is light on actual pilgrims.

MJ: I suspect that’s actually a blessing.

MICHELLE: I don’t know; at least they probably wouldn’t be accepting pregnancy with a cavalier attitude!

MJ: Perhaps not, but I’d hate to see the outfits. And the dialogue? I think we’re better off in billionaire showbiz boss territory.

MICHELLE: Don’t forget the babies and brides!

Check out more Harlequin manga at eManga.com. And join us again next week for an all new Off the Shelf!

The Josei Alphabet: E

by

“E” is for…

Easy Writer, written and illustrated by Mari Ozawa, originally published by Kodansha, three volumes. It’s about a young woman starting her career as an undercover reporter.

Ebisu-san to Hotei-san, written by Nanki Satou and illustrated by Akira Kizuki (of impending Maid Shokun fame), originally serialized in Houbunsha’s Tsubomi, one volume. It’s about the budding romance between two office ladies that starts from a place of antagonism. It sounds charming, but alas, Erica (Okazu) Friedman doesn’t think very much of it.

Eki Kara Gofun, written and illustrated by Fusako Kuramochi, currently serialized in Shueisha’s Chorus, three volumes so far. Kuramochi seems to be quite prolific, and I like the cover of this one very much. It seems to be an episodic drama about people who live around or pass through Hanazono Station and its surrounding town.

Eve no Nemuri, written and illustrated by Akimi (Banana Fish) Yoshida, originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Flowers, five volumes. Can you feel the fervent gaze of the Banana Fish fans? I certainly can. This one is a supernatural mystery that seems to be perfectly steeped with byzantine family secrets.

Eve no Yuuwaku, written and illustrated by Misao Hoshiai, based on a novel by Candace Schuler, originally published by Ohzora Shuppan, one volume. A conniving soap star and a cynical movie mogul embark on a tumultuous relationship and may or may not accidentally fall in love while promoting their agendas.

Magazines:

Licensed josei:

  • The Embalmer, written and illustrated by Mitsukazu Mihara, originally serialized in Shodensha’s Feel Young, six volumes, four of which have been published in English by Tokyopop.

What starts with “E” in your josei alphabet?

 

From the stack: Gunslinger Girl vols. 1-3

by

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.

 

Kamisama Kiss, Vols. 1-2

by

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+)

License request day: Rough

by

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…

Off the Shelf: Ayako

by and 23 Comments

Welcome to another edition of Off the Shelf with MJ & Michelle! I’m joined, as always, by Soliloquy in Blue‘s Michelle Smith.

This week, Michelle and I take a break from our regular format to focus on a single title, Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako, published in English by Vertical, Inc.

MJ: So, Michelle, read anything incredibly depressing lately?

MICHELLE: Ha! Y’know, I actually found Ayako more confounding than depressing. Perhaps that’s because I just recently read some Barefoot Gen, which is an even bigger downer.

MJ: Oh, interesting. What confounded you so about it? Or are we just getting ahead of ourselves with a question like that?

MICHELLE: I think possibly we are, but in general, I just couldn’t figure out what the whole point of it all was. What exactly was Tezuka trying to say? Perhaps that’s something you can help me with.

MJ: I do have some ideas about that, yes. To make things easier on ourselves and our readers, though, maybe we should start with the basic plot. Want to take a stab at it?

MICHELLE: Somehow I knew my summarizin’ skills would be called upon! :) Spoilers ahead.

The story begins in 1949, when former POW Jiro Tenge returns home after the war to a chilly reception from his father, Sakuemon, who is described as arrogant, lecherous, and “thoroughly contemptible,” and learns that he has a new little sister. The girl, Ayako, is the product of Sakuemon’s liaison with his daughter-in-law Su’e, who has been offered up by her husband (Jiro’s elder brother) in exchange for a larger share of Sakuemon’s inheritance. Jiro is appropriately creeped out.

At first it seems like he’s going to be the sane one amidst his bizarre family, but then it’s revealed that he betrayed many of his countrymen at the POW camp and is currently spying for the occupying American forces. When they instruct him to convey a particular corpse onto railroad tracks, he complies, and when Ayako and a playmate later see him washing blood off his shirt, spirals into desperate attempts to cover up his crime, which ultimately leads to Ayako being imprisoned in a storehouse for 23 years while her family members either abandon or violate her.

Ayako finally escapes in 1972 and flees to Tokyo. Jiro, who has changed his name and is now the boss of what seems to be a crime syndicate, has been sending her money for ages and she mistakenly believes he’s her benefactor. Some dogged investigators won’t let up on Jiro and, finally, he ends up fleeing back home where all the offending family members get trapped in a cave-in and eventually die, except for Ayako. The end.

MJ: I know I was cruel to make you be the one to do that, but somehow I knew that if anyone could summarize 700 pages of human selfishness and degradation into a few short paragraphs, it would be you. :D

MICHELLE: I really don’t know where to begin with describing the depths of the degradation, honestly. Everyone in the Tenge family is guilty of something. You have the men, who are more obviously guilty of crimes like murder and incest, but the women are equally to blame, for allowing Ayako to be imprisoned and abandoning her to her fate. Nearly everyone wants to possess Ayako for some reason—even the policeman’s son, who attempts to acclimate her to the outside world, says, “Ayako is mine!!!”—while she herself equates feelings of affection with physical love, and so tries to put the moves on various inappropriate people.

There’s substantial violence against women, too, and for a while I thought the book was misogynistic. The only slightly strong female character seemed to be the fellow spy Jiro takes up with for a while, but after an absurdly comical seduction scene she becomes clingy. “Just don’t ever ditch me,” she implores him. But then I realized that the men are all portrayed just as horribly, too. They’re all greedy, sleazy, lust-driven cretins. It stopped looking like misogyny and more like outright misanthropy.

MJ: I don’t think misanthropy is a misread, and it’s an interesting viewpoint from Tezuka, who, though never shy about exposing the darkest aspects of humanity, has in the other works of his that I’ve read still found some kind of hope in it all… something of humanity worth treasuring. Yet here, as you say, everyone is contemptible in some way. All the men are morally wretched beasts, and all the women are helpless to stop them, eventually becoming complicit in Ayako’s ongoing abuse by their inaction. Even Shiro, the youngest of Ayako’s “brothers,” who for the longest time appears to be the one member of the family genuinely interested in doing the right thing (even to his own peril), is eventually corrupted by his own lust, to the point of being just as awful as any of them.

Only Ayako, who is not really a person at all in the construct of the story, remains innocent. And it’s a twisted kind of “innocent” that makes her really unfit to interact with anyone (not that this is a huge loss).

MICHELLE: I wonder if part of Tezuka’s intent was to subvert the audience’s expectation that a hero of sorts would appear. At first, Jiro appears the likely candidate, but that falls through. “Okay, Shiro then,” I thought, since he was such an honest little kid, but he succumbs to temptation and beds Ayako. Finally there’s Hanao, the young man Ayako cohabitates with, who remains more virtuous than anyone else, but still thinks of her as an object. Why did everyone want to possess her, anyway? Is it simply that she’s malleable and nubile?

MJ: I wonder if he just thinks a hero is impossible in Japan of that time. He’s obviously got a lot to say about post-war Japan and the American occupation. He illustrates both the sickness of old Japan (evident in the Tenge patriarch’s unchecked urges) and the sickness of the new (Jiro’s treachery, the government’s treatment of its socialist factions), and presents them as pretty much incurable ills. In Kate’s review, she suggests that it isn’t much of a stretch to see Ayako as a symbol for Japan, abused from all sides, and I have to say that makes a lot of sense to me.

MICHELLE: Ooh, that’s very deep. I’m afraid that thought didn’t even come close to occurring to me. Her eventual accommodation to and preference for remaining isolated and confined takes on a whole new meaning now.

MJ: I hadn’t thought of it in terms of a symbol that big, either, so I can’t take credit. But it seems clear that Ayako really is nothing more than a symbol, and Japan in particular makes a lot of sense. Thinking too, of the inappropriate appetites Ayako develops, without even really understanding what they’re about… it really could be seen as a pretty scathing view of western influence on modern Japan.

Grand symbolism aside, though, I think there’s a lot here being said about the insidiousness of moral corruption… the way it seeps into those who touch it until they become embodiments of the corruption around them. No one escapes, really, and Tezuka takes that to a stunningly literal point by having them actually die in a cave. He goes so far with it, it begins to feel clumsy and overstated. I mean, it’s powerful, there’s really no denying that, but more heavy-handed than is usual even for Tezuka.

MICHELLE: Poor Japan. It just wanted to stay happily in the cellar, but then it read a women’s magazine and now it wants to have the sex.

And yes, you’re right. I particularly found Shiro’s about-face very abrupt. There he is, saying, “I’ve let myself get drenched head t’toe in all th’ Tenge sewage” in a way that suggests he regrets what has happened, but then on the next page he’s dismissing the fact that Su’e was murdered by her husband and declaring, “I’m gonna keep violatin’ Ayako.” What? Shouldn’t there be at least more guilt or something first? I get that Tezuka needed to move the story along, since it spans such a long time, but this development definitely felt clunky to me.

MJ: I wonder if Tezuka betrayed himself a little bit here. You know, there he is, working so hard to show that everyone is inevitably corruptible when placed in an environment of such corruption, and he’s created this powerfully honest kid to make his point. Yet here you are, utterly unconvinced. Maybe that’s his own little shred of hope, betraying him in the background. :)

MICHELLE: Well, I am convinced that Shiro has turned into someone just as contemptible as the rest of them. It was just the speed of the progression that made me adopt my dubious face.

But, y’know, as much as we have mixed feelings about the work in general, it’s a testament to Tezuka’s skills that I devoured 700 pages with relative ease, and even though there were really no characters to care about—Ayako, as you mentioned, is largely a cipher—the momentum of the story kept me interested to the end.

MJ: Oh, absolutely. There’s nothing enjoyable about Ayako, and I wouldn’t say it’s Tezuka in his element. It’s too persistently dark, without enough contrast to gracefully make his point. But I listed it as one of the best manga of last year, because even with all that, it’s still masterful. The visual storytelling is incredibly compelling–I was transfixed by Tezuka’s artwork throughout, even in parts of the story I found most distasteful. A scene in which Shiro is having sex with Ayako, for instance, and the two of them are transported through the skylight (Ayako’s only connection with the world outside her prison) into the night sky… it’s really beautiful, and even moving. Yet it’s one of the more sickening sections of the story, which in a story like this is saying quite a bit.

MICHELLE: By contrast, I snickered heartily at the phallic imagery at play in the scene where Jiro seduces the female spy. It reads as ludicrous to me, but who knows, maybe at the time it was scandalous or something.

MJ: Ha! Yes, that’s perhaps an unfortunate side-effect of this having been created in the 1970s. Sort of the sequential art equivalent of the leisure suit.

MICHELLE: One particularly effective visual passage that I recall happens after Ayako has gone to live with Hanao. He’s gone off for some reason and one of Jiro’s goons sneaks in the window and attempts to ravish her, only to be thwarted by Hanao’s dad. There are about six pages in a row where the panel perspective and size is identical—the interior of this small bedroom—and I thought it was pretty effective in showing that even such an ordinary space can be the venue for violence and commotion. Plus, there are several pages broken up into unique panel arrangements the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else.

MJ: Oh, I know exactly the passage you mean! Yes, there is something really effective about that scene, with the bed sitting there looking so normal all the time. Also, the stationary perspective reminds me of watching a play.

One sequence early on I think works really well, is the set of pages in which Jiro’s accessory to murder is carried out. It’s raining throughout, and we see the train come through and run over the victim, segueing into the older sister waiting for her lover to return on the train. There’s almost no dialogue at all, over the course of several pages, and even one of the few bits that’s there, the sister’s, “No one’s gotten off at all,” actually seems unnecessary.

MICHELLE: It’s a very noir kind of feeling.

MJ: Indeed.

MICHELLE: Talking about that first dirty job reminds me that I found the whole “who at GHQ hired me?” part tacked on at the end to be very random and kind of boring. I never could get very interested in that aspect of the story, and I didn’t understand either how Jiro evidently used the bomb provided by Kinjo to kill the female spy (Machiko?) instead of the American officer he was supposed to target, and yet still got to keep the money and be partners with the guy for the next twenty years.

MJ: I agree, that was the least interesting aspect of the story to me. While I can see why Tezuka wanted to let Jiro escape his fate back home and end up even profiting from it–his affluence and lifestyle change allow Ayako to poignantly mistake him for someone good in her life–the trappings of it all seem pretty clumsy.

MICHELLE: So, I guess what we’re getting at is, the story and characters are not the best, but it’s still a really well-made manga with some possibly deep themes that could escape a casual audience. I mean, I personally classify it as a keeper.

MJ: Yes, I think that’s exactly what we’re getting at. Though Ayako is problematic in some ways, it’s also a genuine work of art. I’d consider it an essential part of anyone’s manga library.

MICHELLE: I couldn’t have said it better myself.

3 Things Thursday: Vertical x Kodansha

by 18 Comments

So, any of you following manga industry news have undoubtedly already heard about Kodansha’s new investment in Vertical, Inc., a story that broke last night, but has apparently been in the works for quite some time.

As a big fan of Vertical’s non-Kodansha licenses (Twin Spica, 7 Billion Needles, most of the company’s Tezuka releases) I was grateful to hear that the news would not impact their ability to continue with those licenses. Still, this seems like an appropriate time to reflect on some of the Vertical x Kodansha goodness we’ve already seen, either in print or in the works. Though my understanding is that some of these negotiations took place directly between Vertical and the series’ authors (or their representatives), the fact remains, we have both publishers to thank for their existence in print.

3 series brought to us by Vertical and Kodansha:

1. Chi’s Sweet Home | Konami Kanata – I’ve been a big fan of this sweet (and sometimes bittersweet) tale of human/cat cohabitation since Vertical’s release of its first volume, and those feelings have only grown warmer over time. Though the series is certainly appropriate for children, the advantage of it having been published in a magazine for adults definitely gives it an edge for a reader like me. Both genuinely funny and occasionally dark, there’s a lot more to Chi than meets the eye. And when what meets the eye is as cute as this… well, there’s really no way it can go wrong. Volume 5 is available now!

2. Princess Knight | Osamu Tezuka – Though this license was likely brought forth via Tezuka Productions, we have Kodansha to thank for all of its incarnations in print so far, from Shojo Club, to Nakayoshi, to the bilingual version that up until now (or soon, at least) was the series’ only English-language edition.

In the words of David Welsh, ” It sounds really delightful. It’s only three volumes long. It’s Tezuka. More Tezuka is always better.”

Agreed on all points.

3. The Drops of God | Tadashi Agi – Another one of David’s recently-fulfilled license requests, this manga has me hooked already simply by being about wine. Though I expect it might be hard on my pocketbook (all the wines in the series are real, and can be sought out and purchased by those willing to spend the dough), I honestly can’t wait to dig in.

Deb Aoki has been pushing for some time for this series to be licensed. “The Drops of God tries to capture the romance, the drama, the history, and the sensual joy of drinking wine, the fascinating people who make, sell and collect wine, and the diverse places where wine is grown, bottled and enjoyed all over the world.” Read more at About.com.

An honorable mention must go to Peepo Choo, which I featured in this column just a few weeks ago!

So, readers, what are your thoughts on what we might see now from Vertical and Kodansha?

Better Than Life by Grant Naylor: C

by

From the back cover:
Life just couldn’t have been better—or maybe it couldn’t have gotten worse. Aboard the massive starship Red Dwarf, life was barely happening at all. Holly, the ship’s computer, had gone from super genius to so dumb that even a talking Toaster could hold its own with him. And the only surviving human aboard, David Lister—along with the holographic Arnold Rimmer; Cat, the best-groomed entity in the universe; and the cleaning robot Kryten—was trapped in a game called “Better Than Life.”

At one time Holly could have easily saved them. But right now Holly couldn’t even keep Red Dwarf from colliding with a runaway planet. It looked like Lister might be stuck in the game until he died—or until Red Dwarf was destroyed. Unless, of course, the cheap little Toaster and the cleaning robot could find the way back to reality without killing everyone in the process…

Review:
Every now and then it’s tempting to post a review that consists merely of the word “meh.” This is one of those times.

Better Than Life picks up where the first Red Dwarf book, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, leaves off: all four members of the crew are stuck inside the addictive virtual reality game, Better Than Life, leaving Holly (the computer) alone with only a talking toaster for company.

They do eventually make it out, only to discover that Holly, having followed the toaster’s advice, has increased his IQ to over 12,000 but has decreased his remaining runtime to about two minutes. Oh, and there’s an ice planet headed straight for the stalled ship.

From here on out, the book is basically a sequence of dire perils over which four rather moronic characters must somehow triumph. Lister performs a feat of planetary billiards to knock the incoming planet away, but then ends up stranded on it. As it thaws due to the proximity to its new sun, it’s revealed to be Earth, relegated to garbage planet status by the rest of our solar system literally eons ago. There are flying cockroaches. There is a black hole. There’s a fair amount of scientific explanation for things.

And that’s where the book falters. See, as a show, Red Dwarf is a sci-fi comedy. The science takes such a back seat it’s four cars back. Better Than Life, on the other hand, attempts to be comedic sci-fi, but it doesn’t even manage that, because hardly any of it is actually amusing. Even Chris Barrie’s narration—again, excellent with the voices but a bit dodgy with pronunciation—can’t resuscitate what is essentially an exceedingly dull story. There are a few good moments of characterization, however. I especially enjoyed anything that proved that Rimmer really does care about Lister.

We end on another cliffhanger, with Lister transported to a planet on another universe on which time runs backwards. I can only assume that this is what the later book in the series, Backwards, is about. The only thing is… that one’s not available on unabridged audio and though I did procure myself a used copy, I’m not inclined just yet to expend the effort and time that reading a paper book demands. Maybe someday.