Friday fun

In her latest “All the Comics in the World” column at comiXology, Shaenon K. Garrity asks comics professionals the all-important question, “If you could take only one comic to a desert island, what would it be?”

During the small handful of acting classes I took in college, I was always accused of “playwriting” during improvisational exercises… needlessly complicating the task with lots of self-indulgent extrapolation. Nothing has changed, obviously, since I immediately asked myself, “Well, okay, but will I be using it for recreational reading to distract me from my plight? A possible source of fuel? A weapon?”

Of course, the obvious answer for all three purposes is Jeff Smith’s Bone: One Volume Edition (Cartoon Books). I can read it over and over again, it’s heavy enough to use as a cudgel against wild boars (though a hardcover edition would probably hold up better), and, should the situation become really dire, there’s plenty of pulp in there to use as a starter when I try and fire up the driftwood, though I would be extremely reluctant to use it in that manner.

From the stack: Agents of Atlas

Not too long ago, writer Dan Slott mused on fun in super-hero comics. I have to give Slott credit for endorsing the concept, and he certainly does try. I found his first issue of Mighty Avengers more queasy-quasi-nostalgic than actually fun, but I appreciated the attempt. (I buy maybe two super-hero floppies a year, mostly out of morbid curiosity. In this case, it was to see if someone would actually write my longtime favorite super-heroine, the Scarlet With, without any post-partum, crazed-with-power drool running down her chin.) The intent for fun is there, though it reads more like an all-star season of a competitive reality show where you spend more time remembering the previous seasons you enjoyed and wondering how the producers defined “all-star.” (The comic did make me realize that I’ve never much cared about Hank Pym one way or the other, from his moments of sanity and competence to his stretches of toxic neurosis.)

But it did trigger a bit more desire to see if there was any actual fun to be found in Marvel Comics. After weighing the preponderance of critical evidence, I settled on a comic written by Jeff Parker as a likely vein of this rare and mysterious substance.

Agents of Atlas (Marvel) has a good beat and you could conceivably dance to it. It’s about a group of 1950s super-heroes reunited in the current day to help their former secret-agent leader. Writer Jeff Parker declines the premise’s invitation to ruefully ponder How Things Have Changed, and Not for the Better. (One character even tactfully neglects to tell another about her former protégé’s gruesome demise, not wanting to spoil the genial mood.)

Parker decides to let the cast bring their period’s offbeat sense of play with it. He tells a lightweight, fast-paced story about likeable characters doing reasonably interesting things, letting lots of throw-away fun compensate for an only serviceable plot.

The book strongly resembles The Umbrella Academy (Dark Horse), but The Umbrella Academy (which I liked a lot) resembles a lot of things. There’s less baggage in Agents of Atlas; there was no gruesome catalyst for the cast’s original separation, and they all view their reunion as fortuitous. Their lives didn’t stop when they were apart, but they fondly remember their brief time together, and their easy, amiable camaraderie clicks back into place without much fuss. Even their old arch-nemesis seems delighted at the turn of events.

If Parker doesn’t do a whole lot to move the characters past archetypes (the lug trapped in a monster’s body, the space orphan, the love goddess, etc.), he certainly knows how to orchestrate their familiar voices in endearing ways. Even the Marilyn Munster character, Wakandan S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Derek Kanata, is a pleasant, contributing presence, though the role of “the normal one” is almost always thankless.

Art by Leonard Kirk (inked by Kris Justice with Terry Pallot, colors by Michelle Madsen) is very much to my tastes. Staging is generally clear, there are some nifty page compositions, and there’s nothing egregiously cheesy. (Venus, the love goddess, is actually beautiful instead of tawdry, even when she’s walking around topless.) Kirk’s pencils remind me of those of Stuart Immonen, and Immonen was one of my favorite contemporary super-hero artists when I still read them regularly.

Marvel adds a fair amount of value to the collection, which comes in at a seems-high price tag of $24.99. In addition to the six issues of the original mini-series, there are lots of text pieces and some classic reprints of the character’s first appearances. (There’s also the deeply awful issue of What If that provided the inspiration for Agents of Atlas, which is oddly about a thousand times more meta-textual than the contemporary mini-series.)

I think the advantage here is that, instead of cherry-picking from any actual continuity, or at least any continuity that anyone knows offhand, Parker is inventing it as he goes along. He can control the tone and maintain a level of coherence with the narrative. Since nothing’s really happened with these characters in five decades, Parker can re-imagine them in a few contemporary ways while sticking with their original weirdness and charm. And he can do it without sneering at any of his neighbors. Instead of reading as a retaliatory measure or a satire, it’s just a pleasant, stand-alone alternative.

The godfathers

Via Vertical comes pointers to a neat site called Worlds Without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature. Click through to see…

A chapter from Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack (Vertical)

A chapter of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life (on Drawn & Quarterly’s slate for later this year), featurning Tatsumi’s first meeting with Tezuka

A blog entry on the manga market and the job outlook for Japanese-to-English translators from Vertical’s own Editorial Director Yani Mentzas

And, as they say, much, much more. Neat stuff, and an intriguing site.

Upcoming 2/4/2009

Let’s take a quick look at this week’s ComicList, shall we?

The undisputed pick of the week is obviously the fifth volume of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series, Scott Pilgrim Versus the Universe. It just is. In this penultimate volume, “Scott’s band is in total turmoil, his own exes have all boarded the train to crazy town, and Ramona’s evil exes have started appearing in pairs!”

During last week’s trip to the comic shop, I found myself without much in the way of purchases, so I wandered around looking for something out of the ordinary (for me, at least). Having heard so many good things about Jeff Parker’s writing on super-hero comics, I decided it was safe to pick up the collection of his Agents of Atlas (Marvel) mini-series, and it was a lot of fun. (I’ll post a longer review in a couple of days.) This week, Marvel launches an ongoing series with the characters, also called Agents of Atlas, and while I’ll pass on the monthly version, I’d imagine that, next year at this time, I’ll probably pick up the first trade. These things work in cycles.

My manga pick of the week is the 14th volume of Hikaru No Go (Viz), written by Yumi Yotta and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. This series was included in the recent Great Graphic Novels for Teens list for any number of good reasons – engaging story, well-developed characters, and terrific art.

Viz also releases two promising-sounding titles in its Shojo Beat imprint. Having read complimentary copies provided by the publisher, I’m forced to conclude that one of them should be meaner and the other should be smuttier.

Aya Kanno’s Otomen is about a sturdy young man with a secret. Under his sports-champion façade, his heart that beats only for the feminine things in life. He cooks, he sews, he devours shôjo manga, but he feels the need to hide these hobbies and be more traditionally masculine. When he falls for a pretty classmate, his girlish inclinations stage an all-out assault. Complicating matters is a third party who may have designs on the girl and who knows his rival’s secret passions. It’s a smart premise, but the characters are bland, and the story begs for some of the nasty edge that a creator like Takako Shigematsu might bring to it.

How delightfully bizarre is the idea of a high-school massage club? Much more delightfully bizarre than the reality of Isumi Tsubaki’s The Magic Touch, unfortunately. Maybe I just have stereotypical western ideas, but shouldn’t there be a few dirty jokes in a comic about a roomful of high-school students giving each other rubdowns? Or at least a few jokes about the utter absence of dirty jokes? Alas, there are none. Worse still, the narrative is all over the place, like the publication schedule for the series rapidly outstripped Tsubaki’s plans for it. And while the art is competent for the most part, if one of your plot points hangs on identical twins, shouldn’t they resemble each other? Imagine if this series had been done by Ai Morinaga.

Con Jobs II: This time, it’s personal

If you only do one thing at NYCC this year, buy a copy of My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill at the Fanfare/Ponent Mon booth. If you only do two things at NYCC this year, attend “News Flash: Teen Girls Read Comics” on Friday morning, then score a copy of Buffalo Bill. Here’s the official description from the NYCC program:

The wider media still seems to be amazed that female readers are a huge part of the boom in the manga market, but while the stereotypical manga and anime fan has long been the male otaku, we know that women are making massive contributions to fandom, the industry, and beyond. This panel will discuss the state of women in the manga industry, female fans within the manga community, and just where we might go from here in supporting and advocating for the media we–both women and men–love.

I realize that this is old news for most manga fans, given the robust sales of Fruits Basket, Kitchen Princess, and Vampire Knight. But I still encourage you to attend, as I think the panel will be fun and thought-provoking, and will feature three of the smartest manga lovers I know: Brigid Alverson, Robin Brenner, and Tricia Narwani. The details:

Newsflash: Teen Girls Read Comics!
Friday, February 6th
10:15 – 11:15 AM
Room 1A24, Jacob Javits Center
Hosted by Brigid Alverson, Robin Brenner, Katherine Dacey, and Tricia Narwani

For a complete list of panels, screenings, and events at NYCC 2009, click here. Special thanks to Robin Brenner for organizing the panel and inviting me to participate–this is a genuine honor!

From the “Belated” section

For this week’s Flipped, I finally get around to taking a look at Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s The Push Man and Other Stories (Drawn & Quarterly), which is the most entertaining bummer comic you’re ever likely to read.

Manwha 100

As a reviewer, I’ve found Manga: The Complete Guide (Del Rey), Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Stonebridge Press), and Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics (Laurence King Publishing) indispensable references, whether I’m searching for information about a series’ publication history or looking for insight into a particular artist’s style. I hoped that Manhwa 100: The New Era for Korean Comics would provide a similar perspective on the Korean comics industry. Unfortunately, Manhwa 100 turned out to be an ambitious but poorly executed attempt to highlight the medium’s most popular, influential series.

In terms of organization and metholodgy, Manhwa 100 falls somewhere between Manga: The Complete Guide and Dreamland Japan, offering summaries of one hundred books, some of which have been translated into English. Each entry includes basic information about the series’ print run (e.g. number of volumes, magazine of serialization), its author, and its crossover into other media (e.g. videogames, television programs), as well as a plot summary and an assessment of the work’s artistic merit. Entries are grouped according to audience, with sections devoted to sunjeong (girls’) comics, boys’ comics, adult comics, and “webtoons,” comics that debuted online but were later anthologized in print.

We learn in the introduction that a committee of thirty industry professionals chose the books featured in Manhwa 100. The exact selection criteria are never satisfactorily explained, though it’s obvious the committee made a concerted effort to represent a broad spectrum of styles and subjects; no artist has more than one entry devoted to her work. Most books are of recent vintage, with only a smattering of titles released in the 1970s and 1980s.

And here I have a confession to make: I was sorely tempted to call my review “Manhwa 100: Cultural Learnings of Comics for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Korea.” Why? The text is comically awful, awash in awkward phrases, grammatical errors, egregious typos, and ill-advised attempts to keep it real with slangy, conversational phrases that clash violently with the prevailing tone. The entry for Blue, a title by Lee Eun-hye, is typical of the book:

Comic book characters are used in many character merchandises now, but it was [sic] not very actively used in the 1990s. However, the comics of Lee Eun-hye were widely used in character merchandises, even in the 1990s. This is because the author has the knack of using colors as one of her main themes. As she said in her own words, “color in itself is a story.”

As she proclaims in Jump Tree A+, her previous work to Blue, the teenage years are the “Green Age.” Her new story, Blue, represents the young adult age. The color blue in the comic has two sides. It represents a bright fresh side of youth, and it also represents sadness and gloom. The twenty-somethings in the comic are both fresh and youthful, but at the same time lonely and nostalgic.

A rich man’s illigitemate [sic] son Seung-pyo, passionate dancer Hae-joon, his faithful follower Yeon-woo, smart but cold Hyun-bin, and strong charismatic rocker Ha-yun: Blue revolves around these five characters. The loneliness in Blue was sprouted from self-pity and narcissism. Like in many of her other comics, author Lee Eun-hye pushes her characters into their own narcissistic world disconnected from each other.

That is why Blue is beautiful. The earnest characters express their life honestly. And the poetic narration and symbolic monologues add to its beauty. In 1997, an OST disc, inspired by the comic, was…

Yes, the entry really does end with an incomplete sentence.

If I’m reading the text correctly, this confusing verbiage could be boiled down to three talking points: (1) Lee’s manhwa was among the first to inspire “character goods” (phone cards, figurines, stationery, keychains, etc.); (2) her books feature beautifully drawn, emotionally stunted characters; and (3) her books are popular enough to be adapted into TV shows, CD dramas, and the like. Though it’s obvious she views color as a metaphor for age and mood, it’s not clear how or if she uses color in her work–a crucial point, given the increasingly important role that color is beginning to play in manhwa. It’s also unclear what distinguishes Lee’s work from other sunjeong titles, as symbolism, emotionally-charged conversation, and interior monologues are staples of the medium, not personal idiosyncrasies.

If the book synopses are frustrating, the contextual essays are downright obtuse. With titles such as “Open a Manhwa Book, Become a Friend of Korea” and “Manhwa in America: The New World of Charms Yet to be Discovered,” their stilted language and boastful claims for manhwa’s international importance make them sound like Pravda articles. Anyone hoping for insight into the differences between manhwa and manga (or other sequential art traditions, for that matter) will be frustrated by the maddeningly vague, jingoistic text which acknowledges stylistic similarities between manhwa and manga while arguing for significant differences in subject and approach. As manhwaga Lee Hyun-se explains:

While the Japanese samurai pulls out his sword for the completion of his skill, the Korean warrior draws his sword in revenge of his family or to fight against his or her sworn enemy. The Japanese hero walks the glorified path of the hero, which is as clear as the blood he spills, but the Korean hero trudges, stumbling upon his own defects.

Lee attributes the difference in approach to Korea’s lengthy history of occupation, contrasting it with Japan’s long period of isolationism and political intrigue. “The endless internal strife of the Japanese builds up a sense of hubris and elitism,” he argues, “while being on the defense instills a sense of humility and compassion for others… The hero of Japanese manga is ‘I’ while the hero in Korean manhwa is ‘We.’” It’s an interesting but flawed thesis, akin to suggesting that Howard’s End and Finnegan’s Wake are utterly different because one was written by a British imperialist and the other by a downtrodden Irishman. Lee seems to forget that avenging one’s family (or village, or sweetheart, or mentor) is one of the most basic manga plotlines, transcending genre and time period. He also overlooks the important role of community in manga; for every Lone Wolf, there are just as many characters who discover their purpose when they join a particular group, whether it be the school council (a la Love Master A) or the Shinsengumi (a la Kaze Hikaru).

Given Manhwa 100‘s limitations, I’m reluctant to recommend it; anyone hoping for an indispensable reference or an introduction to Korean comics will find this book baffling. For those already enchanted with manhwa, however, I’d suggest reading Manhwa 100 in the same spirit that our grandparents and parents flipped through the Sears Roebuck catalog: as a book of possibilities, a wish list for readers who enjoyed Shaman Warrior, One Thousand and One Nights, Bride of the Water God, or Dokebi Bride. I’ve already spotted dozens of great candidates for licensing, from Be Good, a comedy about a gangster who goes back to high school at 40, to Buddy, a sports drama set inside the ultra-competitive world of women’s golf.

POSTSCRIPT, 2/3/09: I corresponded with the editorial staff at NETCOMICS, who explained that they had a contract with the Korea Culture and Content Agency (KOCCA) to distribute Manhwa 100 in North America. The book was written and produced by C&C Revolution, a private company. (No individuals are named as authors.) NETCOMICS is not responsible for the book’s editorial content, just for its distribution.