One of the things about “failure” when it comes to something like fiction is, that to a pretty significant extent, whether or not something fails is influenced by the taste of the individual. Sure, there are particular standards we set up–ways we believe we can measure skill and craft–but so much of what makes a story work (or not) really comes down to taste, no more, no less.
As a critic, it’s part of my job to evaluate things against the standards set by history, the industry, and my peers, and as a blogger, it’s my job to give readers a reason to care about my conclusions. With so many manga blogs out there, what do I have to offer that’s unique? My background, perhaps, my personality… and a slew of similar items that mainly come around to “taste.” And in a genre like boys’ love, my taste is pretty specific.
Why the long introduction? Before I begin to discuss what makes a BL manga fail for me, I want to be clear that “failure” here means “failure to satisfy my tastes.” I’m specifying this, because I’m going to be making a lot of sweeping points about failures in BL manga, and since this genre lives and breathes on its readers’ private fantasies, I want to be very clear that I’m judging these manga against my own, not passing judgement on anyone else’s.
Part of the impetus behind writing a BL edition of Failure Friday was a visit to my old post My thoughts on yaoi (no, really), written quite a long time ago, when I’d read very little BL manga and had limited vocabulary for discussing what I found problematic. I’ve read quite a bit between then and now, and my tastes have refined themselves accordingly. I’ve also found books that defied my taste, by making me love them regardless of some of their content. So, now that I’ve disclaimed, here we go!
Four common BL failures (and some manga that overcome them):
1. Non-con: Rape fantasy is probably my most common deal-breaker when it comes to BL manga, most likely because it is so common in the genre. Even as a casual BL fan, it’s pretty much impossible to escape. And though it’s obviously a popular fantasy among readers, it’s definitely not mine. While rape as a plot element is something I don’t eschew (witness my love for Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish), as a precursor to romance, I find it personally abhorrent and far from romantic.
Successes: Some BL manga (and manhwa) I’ve found worthwhile despite the presence of non-con include U Don’t Know Me (Rakun/NETCOMICS), Gerard & Jacques (Fumi Yoshinaga/BLU), Ludwig II (You Higuri/Juné), and the second volume of The Tyrant Falls in Love (Hinako Takanaga/Juné).
2. Split focus: As evident by the range of works we’ve seen imported to the west, sexual content in BL manga runs the gamut from sweet, chaste romance to outright pornography. Now, any reader of romance knows that a believable relationship takes time to develop, and with so many BL anthologies and one-shots out there, it’s no surprise that many of them are unable to achieve that goal. There’s nothing wrong with plain ol’ porn, after all, and it certainly has its place in any grown-up demographic. Where BL writers frequently fail, however, is with story-killing indecision. One of the complaints I find myself frequently making when I review short BL is that, within a limited number of pages, and without a clear commitment to either story or porn, many manga simply fail at both. Mangaka, please choose! Tell a great story or give us some great porn, but please don’t do either half-heartedly.
Successes: A notable exception to this rule is Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ichigenme… The First Class is Civil Law (801 Media), which in just two short volumes manages to excel at both.
3. Identity white-out: While it’s understood that BL manga has nothing at all to do with queer identity, more and more BL appearing in English is managing to at least address the concept, while keeping its fantasy space intact. Books like Future Lovers (Saika Kunieda/Deux Press) and No Touching At All have proven that you can make your gay characters actually gay without causing a riot amongst female readers. And even among the usual identity-free BL, there’s still a difference between glossing over the characters’ sexuality and actively stamping it out. Even worse, are stories that cross into real homophobia, emphasizing the “shamefulness” of the characters’ sex lives, or trivializing them altogether by making all characters gay at random, like a lusty caricature of an English boys’ school.
Successes: Among series that deftly avoid queer identity, there are some that still manage to project a sense of positivity on the subject, like Eiki Eiki & Taishi Zaou’s Color (DokiDoki) and any book by est em (Deux Press, NETCOMICS).
4. Crack overload: I love cracktastic storytelling as much as anyone (and probably more than most), but when it comes to romance, I nearly always prefer believability over hilarity, if I have to make a choice. Even in a single chapter or one-shot, if the sex isn’t moving the story forward or, at the very least, really hot, it’s difficult for me to be interested. And anything that bothers to take up an entire volume without giving me something real, is pretty much a complete failure. Outrageous antics? Sexual humor? Pretty boys romping around? All of that is pretty much lost on me as a reader, and when I encounter a manga of that kind I mainly wish I could get my twenty minutes back.
Successes: This is probably the toughest kind of story to sell me on, as I’ve discovered very few of its ilk that have managed to woo me. Notable exceptions include Blood Honey (Sakyou Yozukura/BLU) and Deeply Loving a Maniac (You Higashino/801 Media).
It’s been quite a pleasure over the past few years to discover how many BL manga don’t fail for me as a reader, quite a few of which I’ve taken the opportunity to mention above. Whether there’s more BL being released today that suits my tastes, or whether I’ve simply discovered how to find it, I can’t quite say.
So, readers, what makes a BL story fail or succeed for you?
Onwards and upwards with Vertical
There’s some fabulous news from Vertical via Anime News Network. They’ve announced three new licenses, two of which are some of the most eagerly awaited of them all. (Coincidentally, both of those are license requests.)
First up is Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight, originally published in Kodansha’s Shôjo Club and to be released in two volumes here. Kodansha published bilingual editions ages ago, though they’re long out of print and very expensive. Viz published a sample chapter in its defunct Shojo Beat magazine, which raised hopes that a license might be imminent, but it took Tezuka specialists Vertical to make it happen. It was published in French by Soleil. (Update: It’s been suggested to me that Vertical is most likely to publish Tezuka’s second take on the series, which ran in Kodansha’s Nakayoshi roughly a decade after the original.) (Update 2: But they aren’t, and are, in fact, going with the original version. I’m delighted either way.)
Next is Drops of God, or Kami no Shizuku, written by Tadashi Agi (the pseudonym for wine-loving siblings Yuko and Shin Kibayashi) and illustrated by Shu Okimoto and serialized in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning. I don’t think there’s ever been a Japanese comic that’s received as much ink in English-language media, in spite of the fact that it had yet to be published in English. There was some indication in April of 2010 that the book’s licensing was imminent. It’s being published in French by Glénat.
Last up is No Longer Human, Usumaru Furuya’s adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s novel of the same name. It’s currently running in Shinchosha’s Comic Bunch. It’s about a troubled man who hides his true nature from the people around him.
Aside from a perfectly understandable level of excitement about these titles for their own merits, it’s nice to see that Kodansha is still working with other publishers to release titles that help express the breadth of their catalog, and it’s great that they chose Vertical, a company with a strong track record of publishing both classic and unique contemporary titles.
Kamisama Kiss Volume 2
Kamisama Kiss Volume 2 by Julietta Suzuki
One of the things I liked about the first volume of this series was the way Nanami still continued to be a normal teenage girl even after achieving accidental godhood and taking up residence at a shrine. I liked the way Nanami journeyed back to the real world briefly, so I was happy to see that she makes the attempt to return to high school. What prompts her to return is a combination of boredom and a typical teen girl crush, when it is announced that the popular goth rock idol Kurama has just enrolled at her high school. He’s known as “a fallen angel with black wings” but he’s actually another yokai after Nanami’s power. Suzuki continues to have witty character designs for her yokai characters. Kurama is drawn almost as a parody of visual kei artists with heavy eyeliner, pointed fingernails, and black feathers floating in the air around him. While Tomoe sends Nanami to school wearing a goofy cat-head scarf in order to hide her mark of godhood, Kurama soon finds her out. He finds Nanami fascinating because after her initial meeting, she doesn’t immediately fawn over him like the other girls. She’s able to quickly perceive that Kurama has a stuck-up personality and her crush promptly fades. It seems like Kurama is going to stick around for awhile so it looks like Kamisama Kiss is going to be more conventionally shoujo than Karakuri Odette, with the normal girl being the crush object of two cute non-human guys.
Nanami’s high school classmates are almost uniformly obnoxious. The annoying boy from the first volume shows up again, and everyone makes fun of Nanami for being poor, until Tomoe makes a dramatic appearance to defend her. The other main storyline in this volume had many of the yokai of the week qualities of the first volume, but it ended up being in service of Nanami and Tomoe’s relationship developing further. A bright and powerful goddess with a shrine in the sky is dismayed to find out that Tomoe is in service to a human, so she announces that she’s taking over Nanami’s shrine, striking Tomoe with a cartoonish hammer to regress him into a child-like body. Nanami is soon placed in the role of Tomoe’s caretaker even though she’s lost her mystical powers. Nanami is determined to stick with Tomoe because she thinks he’s her only family. Seeing the power dynamic between Nanami completely reverse was interesting. Now Tomoe is helpless without his powers and unable to be intimidating because he looks like a three-year-old. He becomes dependent on Nanami to help him survive in the human world.
Overall, while Kamisama Kiss doesn’t quite have the quirky qualities I enjoy so much about Karakuri Odette, it is still a better than average shoujo series. There are fewer funny moments, but Kurama’s parodic goth appearance shows that Suzuki’s sense of humor is still intact.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Snowductivity
The horrible weather and terrifying prospect of driving in it have left me with some unexpected leisure time, so I’ve been playing around with some minor navigation issues, mostly in response to people’s excellent suggestions. If you’ll look at the top of the sidebar on the right of the page, you’ll see a new “Features” header with three pages under it:
- License Requests: an index of the shockingly large number of titles that have yet to be published in English but sound good to me
- Seinen A to Z: a one-stop shop for all of the entries in The Seinen Alphabet
- Shôjo-Sunjeong A to Z: a one-stop shop for all of the entries in The Shôjo-Sunjeong Alphabet
I’m definitely open to tweaking those pages and have already, so if you have thoughts on how these could be better organized or more useful, please pass them along.
It also struck me that I almost never explore a blog through its Archives function, just because I’m usually searching by subject rather than date. So I moved the Archive widget to the bottom, just in case there are people who find it useful.
And if you’d like to offer your two cents to the Manga Bookshelf empire as a whole, click here and toss them into the fountain.
V.B. Rose Volume #11
V.B. Rose Volume 11 Banri Hidaka
My first impulse is to steer clear of long running series, just because I’ve long since entered double-stacking territory on the bookshelves that house my manga collection. But VB Rose #11 reminded me of some of the rewards for the reader that come with sticking it out for a multi-volume series. This volume shows the middle school adventures of Yukari and Mitsuya, and if I hadn’t read the previous volumes to see the ways they banter back and forth as adults I probably wouldn’t have appreciated this manga origin story so much.
Ageha asks the friends how long they’ve known each other and Mitsuya enthusiastically announces that it has been 10 years since they first met, “We’ve almost made it to our diamond anniversary!” What follows is an extended flashback as Mitsuya describes the beginning of their friendship to an enthusiastic Ageha. Mitsuya uses his charm to always be the center of attention at school. One day he notices Yukari sitting alone, and assumes that he hasn’t notices Yukari before because he is so unremarkable. When Mitsuya takes a closer look at Yukari he realizes that “He’s criminally cute!” Mitsuya promptly develops a strong man-crush but all of his attempts to get to know Yukari are mercilessly rebuffed until he finds a fashion pattern book that Yukari left at school. Mitsuya spends the evening reading the book and goes to V.B. Rose to return it because Yukari’s been out of school due to an illness. It turns out that the sickness was helping his father with an important order for the wedding dress business. Yukari’s sewing at a professional level, but his pattern making still needs a lot of work. It turns out that Mitsuya’s drawing abilities give him the talent to be a great pattern maker. Yukari and Mitsuya develop a friendship, and Mitsuya is brought into the V.B. Rose family.
There’s always been a slightly manic quality to Mitsuya’s flirting and joking personality. It turns out that this is a carefully crafted facade, as he was horribly disappointed in love many years before and has deliberately shut off his feelings. Being needed at the shop and developing a deeper friendship with Yukari allows him to come out of his shell a little bit, but the revelation about the true object of Mitsuya’s affections sets up a storyline that I’m very eager to see resolved in the next volume. Hidaka’s middle school versions of Mitsuya and Yukari are extra adorable, and the emotional arc of this volume will make fans of the series fall in love with it all over again.
Gussying up
As part of settling in to our new multi-blog format, we’ve been rearranging the furniture a bit over the past week at Manga Bookshelf, with a view towards improving navigation and making more recent content easily accessible from the front page. We’ve also picked up a brand new logo (thanks to Kuriousity‘s Lissa Pattillo), replacing the old, me-centric design with something that better represents the network as a whole.
Content is falling into place as well, including a new, collaborative incarnation of my old Pick of the Week, offering a more diverse selection of new manga for readers to choose from. Regular weekly and monthly features from each of the network’s blogs remain as they always have been, ensuring that there’s plenty new to read on pretty much any day of the week.
A couple of special features I’m aware of coming up in February:
2/12: Breaking Down Banana Fish, the next Banana Fish roundtable, covering volumes 11-13
2/23: A special edition of Off the Shelf, featuring Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako
So, readers, my question for you today: What would you most like to see from the new Manga Bookshelf?
More reviews? Roundtables? Collaborative features? Flame-inducing essays? We can’t make promises, but we’d really like to know!
Upcoming 1/26/2011
There are some truly terrifying titles on this week’s ComicList, though I think I found a promising Pick of the Week. My home blog choice is probably a result of weird shipping schedules, but for whatever reason, the second volume of Jiro Taniguchi’s The Summit of the Gods (Fanfare/Ponent Mon) is arriving at the local comic shop, and I’m delighted. Here’s a bit of my review of the first volume:
“Taniguchi is the ideal illustrator for this kind of material that has both epic scale and intimacy. If the crux of your story is the estimation of landscapes and people, it behooves you to find an artist that can capture the menace and nuance of both, and a writer is unlikely to find anyone better at that than Taniguchi. (As absent as women are from the narrative, it’s nice to read in a text piece that a woman made the collaboration possible, playing matchmaker for Baku and Taniguchi.) Taniguchi is probably the foremost renderer of the middle-aged man that I can think of. They wear their experiences, which is even more evident in a story like this that tracks Habu through the years. Just watching the ways that Habu ages is fascinating. And as far as landscapes and the physicality they demand of puny humans, do I even need to bother praising Taniguchi on that front? Icy cliff faces, Nepalese back alleys, Tokyo urbanity, leafy mountain trails… there’s no setting Taniguchi can’t conquer.”
Other than that, I’m intrigued by a light novel from Yen Press, Mizuki Nomura’s Book Girl and the Famished Spirit. I’m not a big follower of light novels, but Erica (Okazu) Friedman made a very persuasive case for Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime in her guest review.
What looks good to you?
A look at the Shogakukan winners
Anime News Network lists the winners of the 56th Shogakukan Manga Awards. Only one of the slate is available in English, Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ôoku: The Inner Chambers (Viz), which won in the Girls’ Category and has also previously shared the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize with Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life (Drawn & Quarteroy), won the Tiptree Award, and made the top 10 in 2010’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens list.
Natsumi Matsumoto’s Yumeiro Pâtissière won in the Children’s Category. It’s about an enthusiastic young baker who enters an elite pastry school in spite of her clumsiness. She meets cute boys and is helped by a magical spirit named Vanilla. You can’t make a good dessert without a little Vanilla. It’s running in Shueisha’s Ribon. Viz has published Matsumoto’s St. Dragon Girl.
Takeshi Sasaki’s King Golf won in the Boys’ Category. It’s about a delinquent whose life changes when he takes up golf. I’m now picturing its chances for commercial success in the United States, which conjures images of middle-aged white men discussing the latest volume over highballs at the country club. Yeah. It’s being serialized in Shogakukan’s Shonen Sunday.
The General Category is split between two titles, the first being Shohei Manabe’s Ushijima the Loan Shark. Unsurprisingly, it’s a manga about the seedy criminal underbelly of loan sharks, the black market, and other unsavory activities, and I’d guess that it’s somewhat episodic in nature. It’s running in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Spirits. Tokyopop published some of Manabe’s Smuggler and all of Dead End, though it lost the licenses when Kodansha reclaimed their properties.
It tied with Chûya Koyama’s Uchû Kyôdai, which was nominated for a Manga Taisho Award last year. It looks very promising.
But which of the unlicensed titles look good to you?
Kamisama Kiss Winner
The winner of the giveaway according to random.org, is commenter #4, JRB. I hope you enjoy this cute manga!
I asked How would you force your hot fox-spirit familiar to bend to your will? in my Kamisama Kiss Giveaway and got many entertaining responses:
From Celeste:
I would find out what its weakness is (food, drink, comics…) and dangle it in front of them. If that doesn’t work then I’ll use blackmail, seems to work in some manga.
JRB:
Puppy dog eyes. Very shoujo.
#
Sesame:
I’d probably just get it drunk on sake or whatever its preferred drink is. I feel like I see depictions of Japanese spirits drinking all the time so I wouldn’t feel too bad about it.
Delicious food! (It works on me, anyway.) Of course, while I like my cooking the feeling isn’t universal. So, I would probably have to convince my housemates to make something for me first, ’cause they’re awesome when it comes to good food.
Tungwene:
I would threaten to make him eat my cooking for a week because I happen to be a terrible cook.
From Manga Critic:
Flossies: no self-respecting canid can do without them! My dog looks positively stoned when she chews one, I doubt that a fox spirit could resist them, either. (It’s like catnip for dogs.) As an added bonus, the fox spirit would have greatly improved breath as well.
From Jacob:
Cold iron. Fair folk can’t stand that ol’ col’ iron.
Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy
Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy by Fumi Yoshinaga
I’m willing to try any manga by Fumi Yoshinaga, and I was curious about Not Love But Delicious Foods, because it is obvious from her other manga that Yoshinaga is an unapologetic foodie. This volume detailing the restaurant visits of Yoshinaga and her friends and co-workers feels a little more like omake (the extra author notes or side stories included in a manga) than a full-fledged volume, but if I had to read a volume of nothing but food omake, I’d expect Yoshinaga’s to be very entertaining. I wasn’t disappointed by the love of food on display here, but I was more interested in the ways Yoshinaga portrayed herself as she ate.
More than anything else, Not Love But Delicious Foods functions as a food diary from a restaurant enthusiast. Yoshinaga goes to eat with her assistants and friends, visiting different restaurants and including detailed descriptions of the meals eaten at each one. There isn’t the historical background or information about preparation included that you’d see in a series like Oshinbo, instead you get recitations of what’s great about a particular dish, with a map to the restaurants visited after each chapter. The food descriptions sometimes seemed to blur together a little bit, but I read the book in one sitting. It might be better sampled a chapter or two at a time. I did put down the book feeling a wave of nostalgia for Japanese bakeries (they put so many different things inside bread) and Yoshinaga changed my dismissive attitude towards eel.
Yoshinaga portrays herself as a middle aged man, unsightly hag, and dolled-up drag queen. She introduces her character as “F-mi Y-naga, a thirty-one year old female who makes her living by drawing men engaged in anal sex.” She has a wide circle of friends she goes out to eat with, but her mainstay is her hopeless assistant S-hara. She lives with S-hara, and he works on her manga but he’s not very good. She keeps trying to lend him out to other manga artists in the futile hope that he’ll come back with better skills. Yoshinaga portrays her attitude towards food as very proprietorial. She’s delighted to talk about food, take people out to eat, and if someone likes a dish that she recommends she is as proud as if she made it herself. She frightens away potential dates, but thrills inside when she sees a well-fed man. One of the stories that I thought was interesting coming from a yaoi author is when Y-naga discovers that one of her acquaintances is gay. She takes him out to eat and apologizes to him, saying “I’ve been paying my rent drawing manga with gay themes, but none of them are real gay themes!”
Y-naga’s capacity for food is almost endless, as shown when the staff of an all you can eat restaurant gathers and bows to Y-naga and her friend when they finally place their last order. The lecturing tone is fairly consistent throughout the whole manga, but it is something Yoshinaga is very aware of, making comments like “Imparting boring trivia to young female meal companions is one of Y-naga’s old-man like traits.” Yoshinaga is obviously exaggerating her quirks for comedic effect, but if was fun reading about her adventures in restaurants and seeing the way she enjoys sharing food with her friends. I think this manga is probably best suited to someone who is already a Yoshinaga fan, and who has already read several of her series. While Not Love But Delicious Foods is funny and entertaining I imagine it would be less captivating for someone who isn’t very familiar with her previous works. As a companion piece to Yoshinaga’s other series providing an exaggerated look at the life of a talented manga creator, Not Love But Delicious Foods functions very well. It does make me dearly wish that someone would pick up and translate her series “What Did You Eat Yesterday” about the culinary adventures of a gay couple.
Random weekend question: blogita
I’m thrilled to be a part of the Manga Bookshelf consortium, and just looking at the front page makes me happy. The only down side is that the nicely organized home site makes my individual blog feel kind of dowdy and difficult to navigate. It feels like I should find some better way to display regular features and new content. So for this random weekend question, I’d love to get your suggestions on how my blog can be improved from a design perspective. I’m leaning towards a magazine-style layout, but I’m absolutely open to any ideas you may offer.
Karakuri Odette Wrap Up
We’re ending the Manga Moveable Feast for Karakuri Odette with a bunch of links!
I recorded a Manga Out Loud Podcast with Ed and Johanna, take a listen.
Over at Panel Patter, a look at volume one and how Odette isn’t the stereotypical teen girl robot we’ve come to expect from manga.
Reverse Thieves takes another look at the first volume
In Karakuri Odette: A Movable Feast’s rare delicacy Jason Yadao describes how he was able to get past the pink covers and enjoy the series.
Comics Worth Reading has a post on volumes 4 and 5 of the series.
Remember, you have until the end of the day today to enter the giveaway for Julietta Suzuki’s other series, Kamasama Kiss. I’ll announce the winner on Monday.
I hope everybody’s enjoyed the Karakuri Odette Manga Moveable Feast! I was happy to see so many bloggers picking up the first volume and trying the series out, which is what I think the Manga Moveable Feast is all about. I’ve always thought of Karakuri Odette as a bit of a hidden gem, but I hope that changes with all the increased attention from manga blogs this week. If I’ve missed any posts, please let me know, and I’ll do an additional wrap-up post and add the links to the archive page.
Take a look at the Karakuri Odette Manga Moveable Feast page for links to all the posts.
The next Manga Moveable Feast is going to focus on the classic Barefoot Gen from Feb 13th-19th, hosted by Sam Kusek.
Immortal Rain 3-5 by Kaori Ozaki: A-
It’s been a year since I read the first two volumes of Immortal Rain, and though I was initially somewhat lost when I started the third, the heartbreaking nature of Rain’s backstory immediately pulled me back in.
Hints had been sprinkled through the first two volumes, but here we get the whole, terrible story. We learn about Rain’s relationship with Freya—the woman he once loved—and with Yuca, the friend with a dark secret that would ultimately lead to Freya’s death and Rain being cursed with immortality. Yuca is similarly cursed himself, being reborn over and over again while conscious of the memories of all his past lives. He’s ready for this cycle to end—ready for the whole world to end, in fact—and so has chosen Rain to be his perpetual executioner.
It’s Rain’s task to wait for Yuca’s rebirth, which he’s been doing for 600 years so far. If Rain feels like humanity is worth saving, then he must kill Yuca to protect them. If he should weary of humanity and the way they treat him, he can join forces with Yuca and work to end the world. Gentle soul that he is, Rain detests this duty but is resigned to it.
But then Machika comes along to complicate things, saving Rain from his loneliness but promising future sorrow. “Being with you hurts,” he tells her. “It hurts. Because you remind me of sadness.” Later he says, “You’ll disappear so quickly.” It’s one of those doomed immortal-mortal romances all over again, like Buffy and Angel or The Doctor and Rose, and I love it to bits. It’s especially satisfying that they confess their love for each other in the fourth volume, without playing any of those delaying games shoujo series often employ. In this world, loving each other isn’t enough to guarantee a happy ending.
In fact, it’s his love for Machika that weakens Rain’s resolve. He was prepared to kill Yuca—and his own heart—over and over again forever if not for her, but now he has found love. At the same time, if he doesn’t fulfill his duty and Yuca is allowed to run free, what does this mean for the world? When Yuca actually does return and Rain is unable to defeat him, Machika roams the world for a year, refusing to believe all evidence that Rain is dead and determined to find him.
It’s all very dramatic and poignant, and I enjoy it quite a lot, but sometimes it seems a little… surface-y. I can’t really explain it better than that. It’s such a quick read, and while everything seems to make sense while it’s happening, upon reflection one wonders, “Well, why does Rain love Machika?” It just doesn’t feel like we’ve had enough time with these characters when they weren’t running for their lives. This isn’t to say that their romance feels unbelievable, just that I wish this story were unfolding somewhat more slowly. The fact that some of Rain’s foes are kids is also an unwelcome note of silly in a series that otherwise has a serious, almost seinen, kind of feeling to it.
In the year since my first review, there’s been nary a peep from TOKYOPOP regarding the future of this series. The series doesn’t come out too quickly in Japan—the latest is still the tenth volume, which was released in October 2009—so it’s frustrating being so close to having all of what’s currently available. I hope that, even if these volumes never merit a print release, they’ll be available via the publisher’s new print-on-demand feature. We shall see!
Laws of Odette
Today’s links provide a varied look at Karakuri Odette:
At Experiments In Manga, muse about Odette and Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.
A license request for one of Julietta Suzuki’s other series, Akuma To Dolce
A look at the most human elements of the android girl on Okazu.
And a quick reminder that I’m giving away Julietta Suzuki’s Kamisama Kiss Volume One in celebration of the Manga Moveable Feast. I’ll keep the giveaway open until Sunday. Thanks to everyone who has participated so far! I think sometimes the MMF has weekend posts, so I’ll keep updating if anyone has more posts about Karakuri Odette. I’ve had a lot of fun reading everyone’s contributions.
I Wish I Wrote That!
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?