Link Blogging

Tons of great reading today! And it’s not even over! (That’s my way of saying I’ll do one more round-up tomorrow.)

First of all, Laura (Heart of Manga) Mucciarone takes a particularly apt approach to character examination:

Along with the character analyses I’ve seen other bloggers post, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the characters align with their equivalent zodiac personalities. I did some research to find information on Chinese astrology and over-arching personality traits that are supposedly observable in anyone born within a particular year of the zodiac. I thought I’d post them here and let you see if you agree with them matching Takaya’s characters.

Adam (Completely Futile) Stephanides has some questions about Tohru’s idealized mother, Kyoko:

There’s one discordant element from the start, though: Tohru’s constant self-denigration. Even as she’s unselfishly helping everyone, she feels guilty for not being unselfish enough. My favorite example is the time when, after visiting Rin (who doesn’t even like her) in the hospital, she condemns herself for having forgotten for a moment about her goal of lifting the curse. If Kyoko was so wonderful, why was Tohru so bent on punishing herself?

Sometimes, it takes a village to address a book. That’s the approach the citizens of Manga Village took with their roundtable:

Connie: Too many!  Way too many!  I hate hate hate series with a huge cast of characters like this, especially characters that are introduced to fulfill a role (in this case, because there needs to be 14 Sohma family members) and then don’t figure into the story at all later.  Ritsuka is the best example in this series, but that was the worst case scenario.  Takaya does do a good job of juggling all the other characters, but the side effect is that the main story seems to drag on forever.

MJ and Michelle Smith take another bite at the apple with their latest Let’s Get Visual discussion:

MICHELLE: So, we’ve been talking about Fruits Basket all week, but I’m certainly not yet weary of the topic. How about you, MJ?

MJ: I suspect I could discuss Fruits Basket for weeks on end!

I could certainly read their discussions of the series for weeks on end. So it’s nice that MJlooks back on Michelle’s examination of Takaya’s Twinkle Stars.

Again, thanks to everyone who’s linked to or tweeted about this iteration of the Manga Moveable Feast! If you’ve got a link you’d like to share, email me at DavidPWelsh at Yahoo dot Com or post a link in the comments.

 

Lori (Manga Xanadu) Henderson looks at the first four volumes of Fruits Basket. Her verdict?

Fruits Basket is slow to build up, but once you get past them whole “OMG! They turn into animals!” and the “Which zodiac animal will Tohru meet this time?” parts of the story, it really start to have something to say.  The themes of being alone and finding a place to fit in and call home are ones that strike a chord with teens, which is probably one of the reasons it sold so well. This is another series that the MMF has convinced me I want to read, but since it’s OOP, that going to be kind of hard. Wouldn’t it be nice if another company could rescue it and make it available in Omnibuses (3 not 2 volumes) or better yet, digitally?

Oh, man, whoever scores the digital distribution rights to Fruits Basket won’t even need to print money.

Zoe (Manga Kaleidoscope) Alexander takes a good long look at one of her favorite series of all time:

I’m not even going to try to come across as unbiased during this review, because I’m not. I’m totally, completely 100% biased, and I make no apologies for that, because Fruits Basket is just that awesome.

Much as I enjoy a spectrum of opinion on a given work, I fully endorse this sentiment.

Again, thanks to everyone who’s linked to or tweeted about this iteration of the Manga Moveable Feast! If you’ve got a link you’d like to share, email me at DavidPWelsh at Yahoo dot Com or post a link in the comments.

 

 

MJ and Michelle Smith devote this week’s Off the Shelf column to Fruits Basket, much to my delight:

MJ: I think it is pretty early on that the wacky transformations disappear, and by the time we’re getting around to discovering things like Kyo’s true form, if they’d still been happening I think they would have seriously damaged the story. Though some of the later, softer transformations are favorite moments for me. Pretty much every time Momiji hugs Tohru, it’s the sweetest thing in the world (even when it’s very sad), and Tohru’s reaction to Hatori’s transformation will always be hilarious and charming.

MICHELLE: Momiji’s hugs are indeed both adorable and heartbreaking. He just wants to hug her so bad, he doesn’t even care what will happen as a result. I think, though, that I probably prefer older Momiji, whose method of choice for breaking hearts is his sad smile.

CRYING BUNNY! CRYING BUNNY! Must… maintain… composure…

Michelle and MJalso use 3 Things Thursday to contemplate their favorite Fruits Basket characters. I support all of their choices, but I’m increasingly suspicious that MJand I were possibly separated at birth.

Going solo, Michelle reviews the final three volumes of the series at Soliloquy in Blue.

Sean Gaffney gives Fruits Basket fan extraordinaire Ysabet MacFarlane the keys to A Case Suitable for Treatment so she can ponder the relationship between Rin and Hiro:

As a reader, what I look for in a series is great characters, and Fruits Basket has them in spades. I’m generally happy to talk about any of them, including the few I dislike, but when I’m starting a conversation it almost always starts or ends with Rin, and usually has a lot to do with her relationship with one of the other characters.

Over at Manga Therapy, Tony Yao looks at Rin from another angle:

The fact that Rin was able to go through so much physical & emotional abuse from her parents (who faked their happiness around her when she was a child) & Akito and still comes out with a lot of determination says a lot about her.

Again, thanks to everyone who’s linked to or tweeted about this iteration of the Manga Moveable Feast! If you’ve got a link you’d like to share, email me at DavidPWelsh at Yahoo dot Com or post a link in the comments.

 

 

At Comic Attack, Kristin Bomba delivers a thoughtful look at the roles of Tohru Honda and Akito Sohma for the Fruits Basket Manga Moveable Feast:

I decided, rather than go all fangirl all over the place (which I could do, trust me, for HOURS), that I would take a more serious approach to the series. One of the things that really fascinated me about Fruits Basket was the relationship between Akito and Tohru, separately and together (meaning their literal relationship with each other, and how they otherwise affect each other throughout the story). While Tohru is very easy to read, Akito is a bit more complicated to understand.

Tons of ink has been spilled on compare-and-contrast between a certain boy wizard and another who apparently must not be named, and I think there’s a similar dynamic to be examined between Tohru and Akito, so thanks to Kristin for digging into that territory!

And thanks to everyone who’s thrown some links this way, like Johanna Draper Carlson of Manga Worth Reading, who has already contributed quite a bit to critical discourse on the subject of Fruits Basket.

Feel free to send me your own links via email to DavidPWelsh at Yahoo dot Com, or post them in the comments here. And thanks for reading!

 

There isn’t a ton of material shipping via Diamond this week. Highlights are Natsume Ono’s professional debut, La Quinta Camera (Viz), which I reviewed here, and my current Pick of the Week, the sixth volume of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ôoku: The Inner Chambers (also from Viz).

Another book on my radar is the third volume of Natsumi (Kitchen Princess) Ando’s Arisa from Kodansha. I quite enjoyed the first volume of this mystery series back when Del Rey released it, and it’s always been my intention to continue with it, but I haven’t had any luck finding it on bookstore shelves, so I guess I’m just going to have to buck up and order the second and third online. (I sometimes get fixated on the notion that I should be able to find a given series in a brick-and-mortar shop. I should probably never assume that about anything, should I?)

Speaking of books that aren’t all that easy to find, this week also sees release of the sixth and final volume of Time and Again by JiUn Yun (Yen Press). I really wish Yen would add this series to its iPad application, as I would happily pay to read it by those means.

I did read the ninth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! via the app, and I found the experience entirely equivalent in terms of delight to the dead-tree approach, with the slight advantage that I didn’t have to kill any trees to do so. I wrote a (belated) blurb about the book for this week’s Bookshelf Briefs, also discussing the fourth book in Viz’s release of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game, which collects the eighth and ninth volumes of the series. Someone else sharing the Adachi love this week is Christopher (Comics212) Butcher for Robot 6’s latest round of What Are You Reading?

Elsewhere in the world, The Japan Times unveils a rich vein of Osamu Tezuka manga made available to iPad users.

And for those of you wondering what Bryan Lee O’Malley would do next now that Scott Pilgrim (Oni) has reached its conclusion, we at least know (courtesy of Publishers Weekly Comics Week) that he’ll be publishing it through Villard.

I had a great time discussing the first volume of Takako Shimura’s Wandering Son (Fantagraphics) for the latest Manga Out Loud podcast, though I bailed before the talk switched to the anime, as I’m avoiding spoilers. Speaking of that marvelous book, Glen Weldon includes it on his list of “Five Recent Graphic Novels You Really Shouldn’t Miss” for NPR’s Monkey See blog.

In other news, Viz triggered mild panic when it listed the fourth volume of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game as the final volume on its Facebook page. After panicked inquiries from overly invested geeks like me, a Viz rep hastened to reassure us that it was a typo and that they will publish the series in its entirety. PHEW!

 

I generally like to highlight different titles in the Manga Bookshelf Pick of the Week and in these trawls through the ComicList, but sometimes I just have to repeat myself.

Even if this week didn’t mark the inaugural Pick of the Week contribution of Sean (A Case Suitable for Treatment) Gaffney, I’d still be in lockstep with his choice, the fourth collection (containing the eighth and ninth volumes) of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game from Viz Media. Viz is publishing some other perfectly likeable manga this week, but it’s hard for anything not to pale in comparison to Cross Game. To avoid repeating myself, I’ll simply link to myself: here are my reviews of the first, second, and third collections, and here’s my contribution to the Cross Game Manga Moveable Feast.

Speaking of Manga Moveable Feasts, you all know that I’m hosting the July installment on Natsuki Takaya’s transcendent Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), right? The feast will start on Sunday, July 24, and end on Saturday, July 30. I’d be happy to host pieces here, if that would work better for you. Just drop me a line.

And, speaking of critical examination of manga, there’s a jam-packed edition of Bookshelf Briefs for your perusal. I take an look at Natsume Ono’s La Quinta Camera and a feels-belated look at the second Kekkaishi 3-in-1 collection by Yellow Tanabe. Most importantly, Kate (The Manga Critic) Dacey reads the second volume of Ai Ore! so I don’t have to. EVER.

 

It’s a big ComicList this week, so let’s get right to it:

I just have to restate my Pick of the Week, Takako Shimura’s Wandering Son (Fantagraphics). After a few delays, we finally get our hands on this acclaimed series about two transgendered kids navigating early adolescence. This debut has already earned a bunch of pre-release acclaim, and I’m really eager to read it.

Kodansha USA kindly continues publication of Koji Kumeta’s Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei with the ninth volume, where Del Rey left off. As things stand, this dense, often scathing satire is probably the most off-kilter thing that Kodansha is publishing, so it’s great to see it return. Now, how about picking up Masayuki Ishikawa’s Moyasimon to continue the trend? I thought the second volume was a significant improvement on the first, which was okay enough in its own right, and I’d love to read more.

Speaking of funny manga from Kodansha, Vertical releases the sixth volume of Kanata Konami’s Chi’s Sweet Home. I reviewed it for the latest round of Bookshelf Briefs. I’m glad to have that venue for shorter reviews, especially when all I basically have to say about a series is that it’s still really good.

I have two highlights from the rather long list of Viz Media releases:

First up is the second volume of Yellow Tanabe’s Kekkaishi 3-in-1 collections. I enjoyed the heck out of the first three volumes, and I felt much the same out of the stories collected this time around. It’s just a super-solid, emotionally satisfying shônen fantasy-adventure.

Second is the ninth volume of Karuho Shiina’s Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You. I’m a bit behind on this series, but I’m determined to catch up soon, because I love the combination of postmodern and utterly sincere application of shôjo romantic tropes.

What looks good to you?

 

Ed (Manga Out Loud) Sizemore and Johanna (Manga Worth Reading) Draper Carlson were kind enough to invite MJ(Manga Bookshelf)  and I to participate in a podcast on the subject of manga for women. Johanna has also posted a handy timeline describing josei’s start-and-stop presence in the licensed manga market. I believe this is the first time I’ve participated in a podcast when you can’t hear my dogs barking in the background. I think they were napping.

 

Yes, I admit that the Manga Bookshelf crew took a look at the Midtown Comics list and abstained from voting, but the ComicList is always at least somewhat different, and there are two items I wanted to mention.

Isn’t it nice to have a publisher you can blindly trust to publish books that are always worth your scrutiny? I find Fanfare/Ponent Mon to fall into that category, so I ordered Galit and Gilad Seliktar’s Farm 54 without really knowing a single thing about it. It’s an autobiographically informed coming-of-age story set in Israel in the 1970s.

Nobody would ever accuse me of blindly trusting Tokyopop, and the use of the word “maid” in the title of a manga is usually enough to send me running in the other direction, but the readers spoke, so I dutifully ordered the first (and possibly only) volume of Maid Shokun, written by Nanki Satou and illustrated by Akira Kiduki. While I haven’t allowed myself to read his full review, so as not to color anything I may write about the book, I’m relieved to hear that Sean (A Case Suitable for Treatment) Gaffney found the book much better than he had expected it would be. This is one of the two preferred outcomes of crowd-sourced comic ordering: a pleasant surprise, or something much worse than even my fevered imagination could predict.

In other Manga Bookshelf news, we’ve offered our views on a variety of relatively recent releases in the latest installment of Bookshelf Briefs. Is anyone else ready for the Straw Hats to come back, or is it just me?

Let’s take a quick pass through the current ComicList, then move on to some linkblogging! Diamond’s primary source of goodness this week is Viz, which offers a combination of Signature and Shonen Sunday titles:

I can’t believe we’ve hit the next-to penultimate volume of Hiromu Arakawa’s excellent Fullmetal Alchemist, but that’s the simple fact of the matter. This is probably the best shônen series to be published in English in the last five years, and I’m going to miss it when it’s done. (Update: Sorry about the false alarm. I transposed volume numbers on the list in my head.)

Other appealing Viz arrivals include:

• 20^th Century Boys vol. 15 by Naoki Urasawa
• Afterschool Charisma vol. 3 by Kumiko Suekane
• Arata: The Legend vol. 6 by Yuu Watase

One appalling Viz arrival is their debut of oh!great’s Tenjo Tenge. I detested what I read of it when it was being published by CMX, so I can’t imagine how a more faithful production could change that. Of all of the CMX titles to rescue, I ask you, why this one?

For a look at what’s due at a non-Diamond-dependent comic shop, check out the latest Pick of the Week over at Manga Bookshelf. For the battle robot’s verdicts on some recent releases, click on over to this week’s collection of Bookshelf Briefs. And to learn more about the truly awesome manga that is the subject of the current Manga Moveable Feast, take a peek at MJand Michelle’s introductory post.