Manga Bookshelf

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Saturday Spotlight

Saturday Spotlight: Webtoons

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Today’s Off the Shelf column featuring the Korean webcomic, or “webtoon,” Aron’s Absurd Armada has put webtoons in general on my mind. With only a handful licensed for North American release (mainly from online publisher NETCOMICS and iOS publisher iSeeToon), Korean webtoons represent a huge untapped source of East Asian comics.

So, this week’s Saturday Spotlight shines on Hana Lee’s An introduction to Korean webcomics, written for Manhwa Bookshelf in the summer of 2010.

Read and dream of what we could be reading!

Saturday Spotlight: The Jibblies

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Before Halloween week is officially over, it seems prudent to take advantage of this last opportunity to get our creep on. To that end, this week’s Saturday Spotlight archive post comes from Soliloquy in Blue’s Let’s Get Visual column, in which Michelle and I talk about what gives us “the jibblies,” featuring pages and panels from After School Nightmare, Tokyo Babylon, Pandora Hearts, and Junji Ito’s short manga story “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.”

Come take a look at what scares us!

Saturday Spotlight: “There is this fish.”

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As we here on the east coast prepare for the arrival of Sandy, my mind turns to visions of water, water, and more water. And being an obsessive fan of 80s shoujo manga, thoughts of water lead to Moon Child.

Today’s Saturday Spotlight archive post comes from March of this year, when Michelle Smith and I sat down to discuss mermaids, aliens, giant fish, Broadway dancers, Chernobyl, environmentalism, Vaslav Nijinsky, and the epic weirdness awesomeness of Reiko Shimizu’s Moon Child.

Come reminisce with us, and if you’re on the east coast, get some batteries in those flashlights!

Saturday Spotlight: Fullmetal Alchemist

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As Sean reported earlier this week, we’re coming up on the penultimate volume of, Fullmetal Alchemist. Though the series was a bit slow to grab me in its first couple of volumes, since then, it’s become one of my very favorite manga of all time, even making it on to my questionably accurate top ten.

Back in 2008, I started what I hoped would be a group adventure in FMA, the “Fullmetal Alchemist Read-a-Long,” originally posted in my LiveJournal, and eventually shared here as well. Interest was low at the time, and I bogged down after four volumes, but I still look back at them now and then.

With the series nearing its close here in the US, and Viz’s new 3-volume omnibuses hitting the streets, the time seems ripe for new readers to join in. And so, for this week’s Saturday Spotlight, I offer up my original Read-a-Longs for any of you out there just beginning the series:

Fullmetal Alchemist Read-a-Long, Vols. 1-2
Fullmetal Alchemist Read-a-Long, Vols. 3-4

Join me!

Saturday Spotlight: Working

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As has often been the case lately, this week was all about work for me. And by “work,” I don’t mean the self-assigned variety like running Manga Bookshelf. I’m talking about the work that forces me out of the house daily, actually pays my bills, and occasionally stretches my mind and body to the limit.

Whenever I ponder “work” and manga at the same time, my thoughts tend to wander to David and his particular love for workplace manga. They also wanders to Suppli, one of the few manga about a woman in the workplace I can think of that’s been translated (partially) into English. So for this week’s Saturday Spotlight, I shall combine the two together, by pointing you to David’s article on Suppli, originally published for his “Flipped” column at The Comics Reporter, and later reprinted at The Manga Curmudgeon.

Fellow office ladies everywhere, please enjoy David’s thoughts on Suppli.

Saturday Spotlight: Stormy Sea

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It’s a tense weekend here on the east coast, but an impending storm provides a great excuse to stay inside and read manga, or at least read about manga, as long as the electricity holds. For my part, stormy seas put me in mind of Daisuke Igarashi’s melancholy beauty, Children of the Sea, published here in English on Viz’s SigIKKI imprint.

I’m a big fan of Children of the Sea, my first impressions of which can be found here, but my favorite discussion of the series’ first volume came from our own Kate Dacey, whose review is consistently the first thing to spring to my mind whenever I think of this title.

From her review:

The ocean occupies a special place in the artistic imagination, inspiring a mixture of awe, terror, and fascination. Watson and the Shark, for example, depicts the ocean as the mouth of Hell, a dark void filled with demons and tormented souls, while The Birth of Venus offers a more benign vision of the ocean as a life-giving force. In Children of the Sea, Daisuke Igarashi imagines the ocean as a giant portal between the terrestrial world and deep space, as is suggested by a refrain that echoes throughout volume one:

From the star.
From the stars.
The sea is the mother.
The people are the breasts
Heaven is the playground.

If you happened to miss this the first time around, do yourself a favor and check out this week’s Saturday Spotlight: Children of the Sea, Vol. 1 at The Manga Critic!

Saturday Spotlight: Yoshinaga

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The Manga Moveable Feast is nearly upon us once again, this time co-hosted by Comic Attack!‘s Kristin Bomba and Animemiz Linda Yau. The subject this month is the ever-glorious Fumi Yoshinaga, which brings us to this week’s Saturday Spotlight!

Just over a year ago, I hosted a week-long celebration of Yoshinaga’s work here at Manga Bookshelf, including reviews, essays, and roundtables on series like Flower of Life, Antique Bakery, and Ooku: The Inner Chambers. So, in the spirit of next week’s Yoshinaga MMF, I offer you the index to that celebration.

Also, within that week, I’d like to direct special attention to both the Yoshinaga edition of BL Bookrack, co-written by me and the lovely Michelle Smith, and a roundtable on Gerard & Jacques, again featuring Michelle and me, along with David Welsh, Robin Brenner, Danielle Leigh, and Eva Volin. As someone who is often critical of some of the genre’s most pervasive tropes, I think it’s worth noting that Yoshinaga is the kind of writer who can make even my least favorite of these work, proving that there’s almost no hurdle good writing can’t overcome.

Please enjoy these year-old thoughts on Yoshinaga, and keep your eyes peeled for new ones as the Yoshinaga MMF gets underway!

Saturday Spotlight: revisiting NANA

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There are a couple of factors influencing my choice for this week’s Saturday Spotlight. First, following last week’s news regarding the return of Wild Adapter and today’s announcement that CLAMP is resuming Legal Drug, Michelle asks on Twitter, Can we hope for NANA?

Secondly, as some of you may know, I moonlight as a singing/acting coach, and this week I had the unique pleasure of experimenting with some cross-discipline learning while coaching a group of very talented young women. As part of a week-long acting intensive, we spent a day working with scripts pulled from some of my favorite manga—beginning with dialogue only, and then later studying the ways in which the mangaka used the artwork to “direct” the scenes, from one emotional beat to the next, emphasizing the importance of body language and the spaces between the dialogue.

One of these scenes came from the fourth volume of NANA, reawakening my love for the series, and inspiring me to recommend it, at least to the 17+ crowd. Of course, even today, the best tool I have for this is an older post from 2008, Why you should read NANA.

Still the most-viewed post on the site, this “persuasion post” was responsible for my introduction to quite a number of folks in the manga blogosphere, and my feelings for the series have remained mostly unchanged since that time. If you’ve never been sold on NANA, check it out!

Saturday Spotlight 7/30/11

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Welcome again to Saturday Spotlight, a new weekend feature dedicated to exploring the depths of the Manga Bookshelf archives.

This week’s choice is a fairly recent addition to our archives, but also especially relevant today. In the spirit of our currently-running Manga Moveable Feast, featuring Natsuki Takaya’s shoujo epic Fruits Basket it seems appropriate to shine this week’s Saturday Spotlight on Michelle’s recent review of another Takaya series, Twinkle Stars. Though Twinkle Stars has yet to be licensed in the US, it is available in English from Chuang Yi Publishing in Singapore, distributed by Madman Entertainment (Australia).

From Michelle’s review, “I thought I might be disappointed by this series. There’s no shortage of complaining Takaya fans online, after all, and it’s not like her other series Tsubasa: Those With Wings or Phantom Dream really knocked my socks off, though I did come to like the latter by the end. After having read these two volumes, however, I am left to conclude that the chief complaint of unhappy fans is that Twinkle Stars is nothing like Fruits Basket.”

Read the rest of Michelle’s review here!

Saturday Spotlight

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Though maintaining a blog is all about producing new content, day after day, sometimes it’s nice to reach into the archives and revisit something a bit older. An article’s shelf life can be tragically brief in the fast-paced comics blogosphere, despite its ongoing relevance.

With that in mind, welcome to Saturday Spotlight, a new weekly feature here at Manga Bookshelf dedicated to digging up these treasures from the gloomy depths of our database and bringing them back into the light.

Before I get to this week’s spotlight, however, a bit of sad news. With the English-language manhwa market having slowed to something slightly more lethargic than a crawl, I’ve decided to fold Manhwa Bookshelf back into the main site. This is heartbreaking for me, given that my intent in creating Manhwa Bookshelf was to help establish English-translated manhwa as a distinct entity. But with too little going on to provide regular content on even a monthly basis, whatever manhwa content Hana and I are able to muster in this climate is more likely to receive the attention it deserves in a higher-traffic venue. All existing Manhwa Bookshelf posts have now been redirected here to Manga Bookshelf, and can be accessed as a category here.

That said, it should be no surprise that this week’s subject of our Saturday Spotlight comes originally from Manhwa Bookshelf, now reformatted for and reposted here at the main blog.

Back in June of last year, Manhwa Bookshelf contributor Hana Lee wrote a wonderful article, An Introduction to Korean Webcomics. With Korean publisher iSeeToon (who adapt Korean webcomics for the iPhone) emerging as the most active publisher of new manhwa series in the English-language market, it seems especially appropriate to bring Hana’s article into the spotlight once more.

So please enjoy An Introduction to Korean Webcomics!