Previews review May 2009

I was looking through the new Previews and thinking, “Y’know, there isn’t really a whole lot of new stuff here.” Then I got to page 292 and HOLY CRAP, THE FIRST VOLUME OF FUMI YOSHINAGA’S ÔOKU SHIPS FROM VIZ, HOLY CRAP, HOLY CRAP, HOLY CRAP.

It was exactly like that, I swear to you. The cats still think I’ve gone insane.

Anyway, if you aren’t familiar with Yoshinaga, she’s the insanely gifted creator of smart, funny, sexy stories like Antique Bakery, Flower of Life, Ichigenme: The First Class Is Civil Law, and a bunch of other stuff that’s already available in English. If anything can convince you of how awesome she is, it’s the fact that Ôoku tied with Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life for this year’s Grand Prize in the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prizes. Tezuka… Tatsumi… Yoshinaga… Convinced?

In other new-stuff news, Raw Junior LLC offers a new hardcover book by Jeff Smith called Little Mouse Gets Ready (page 278). “A new book by Jeff Smith” of Bone and Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil fame would be enough for both people, but this one sounds adorable.

And okay, not a ton of new product is on display, but there are plenty of new volumes of appealing continuing series to enjoy:

20th Century Boys volume 4, written and illustrated by Naoki Urasawa (Viz): Kenji is wearing a pink bunny suit on the cover. MUST… KNOW… WHY… (Page 292.)

Astral Project volume 4, written by marginal and illustrated by Syuji Takeya (CMX): The final volume of this intriguing metaphysical mystery. (Page 124.)

Bride of the Water God volume 4, written and illustrated by Mi-Kyung Yun (Drak Horse): Another episode of “Gossip Gods,” gorgeously illustrated. (Page 54.)

Kitchen Princess volume 10, written by Miyuki Kobayashi and illustrated by Natsumi Ando (Del Rey): Baked goods and heartbreak. (Page 240.)

Nodame Cantabile volume 16, written and illustrated by Tomoko Hayakawa (Del Rey): Funky, funny josei about music students. (Page 242.)

Parasyte volume 8, written and illustrated by Hitoshi Iwaaki (Del Rey): I think this is the last volume. Aww, look! Shinichi and Migi are waving goodbye! (Page 242.)

Ultimate Venus volume 6, written and illustrated by Takako Shigematsu (Go! Comi): Cute orphan navigates the shark-infested waters of her cougar grandma’s plush empire. (Page 249.)

Wednesday poll

Over at Comics Worth Reading, Ed Sizemore takes a look at the The Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation Industry Awards Ballot and makes some interesting, genre-centered suggestions on what a manga awards could look like. Over at About.Com, Deb Aoki rounds up a nice list of titles that could have fit in nicely in a number of Eisner Award categories.

Since the notion has been in the back of my mind lately, I thought I would throw out a quick poll on one structural aspect of a possible manga awards program.

Upcoming 5/6/2009

You know what’s dangerous about Twitter? Ardent comics fans can recommend more titles more quickly. The 140-character cap is no barrier to persuasiveness or enthusiasm. It’s turning my “Oh, I should read that sometime” list into a freaking tome. Fun, though. I bring this up because it’s time to look at this week’s ComicList.

One of the books that’s gotten a lot of tweets lately is CMX’s Fire Investigator Nanase, written by Izo Hashimoto and illustrated by Tomoshige Ichikawa. Kate Dacey describes it as being “like Silence of the Lambs, CSI, and Firefighter Daigo rolled into one!” That’s a very difficult recommendation to resist. The second volume comes out Wednesday, and I imagine I’ll be putting both on a book order shortly before that happens. Happy now, Twitter? Life was so much simpler when I could take my marching orders from blogs and NPR.

Lots of stuff is due out from Del Rey this week, and I’m surprising myself by pointing you towards the first volume of RAN’s Maid War Chronicle. It’s about a group of maids who receive magical weapons to help their bratty prince reclaim his kingdom, and it’s not nearly as fan-service gross as it could be. (Their skirts are long, so I guess it’s difficult to draw up them. That phrase didn’t come out quite right, but you know what I mean.) I mentioned it in Kate’s “What to Read Now” Roundtable.

What do you get when you combine the talents of two unquestionably fine comics creators? I’m not sure, but we’ll find out when we get a look at Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim’s The Eternal Smile from First Second.

Oh, and pretty much everything I pointed to on Viz’s list last week is actually coming out this week. Terms and conditions still apply, though I’ll add that I’ll be catching up on Yuki Obata’s We Were There at my earliest convenience. (The bookstore only had the first and fourth volumes the other day.)

Urasawarama

I told myself to wait until two volumes of the new Naoki Urasawa series were out until I wrote about them at any length, and I’m glad I did, as I thought 20th Century Boys improved dramatically in the second volume. (Not that the first was weak, just that there seemed to be more of a voice and a style in the second.) Pluto I pretty much loved from the beginning.

But I’m giving away the shocking secrets of this week’s Flipped.

From the stack: We Were There

I love a lot of shôjo for its embrace of emotional ambivalence, but even I can admit that a lot of that ambivalence can come in a fairly narrow flavor profile. How many times can I be asked to care which generically attractive, somewhat condescending boy is the right boy for the heroine? Now, some series execute that conundrum beautifully, and I really care, but books that go a different route always catch my eye.

Yuki Obata’s We Were There (Viz) seems to be one of those welcome alternatives to triangular angst. The first volume demonstrates a sharp appreciation for ambivalence of the internal variety.

Like many of the sisterhood, protagonist Nanami is starting high school and hoping to make friends and have fun. She isn’t yet engaged in the boyfriend hunt, which is a nice change of pace. Of course, active engagement isn’t always required for the boyfriend hunt to begin. Nanami finds herself evenly divided between irritation and infatuation when she meets Yano, a cute classmate. Circumstances conspire to bring them closer. Her heart races and she doesn’t know why. And the school festival looks like it’s going to be a disaster! Slide your Scantron sheet into the Shôjomatic 3000X, right? Well, not quite.

Obata uses a couple of approaches that make We Were There distinct. The first is what I can only call a kind of flatness of affect. It’s like she’s minimized the stylistic extremes that have become shôjo stereotypes to get back to the emotions that inspired those stereotypes in the first place. Second is the fact that she does the hard work of translating stereotypes into actual characters. Yano actually is half irritating, half admirable.

The core question of the book is whether Nanami really knows Yano at all. His first love has died, and Obata examines the messy emotional fallout of that scenario with intelligence and restraint. What exactly is lurking under Yano’s shôjo-prince façade, and why is he giving Nanami peeks under the veil? Does he actually like her, or is he trying to appear normal? Is he in touch with his own feelings at all, and how can Nanami sort her own feelings out with so many questions?

That’s a really meaty, emotional foundation for a story. We Were There doesn’t wallow in emotional lows or titter through shrill comedic highs, and I think it’s more interesting for that. I like wallowing, and I like tittering, but introspection can be engrossing too.

Free Comic Book Month underway at YACB

Dave (Yet Another Comics Blog) Carter is holding his fifth Free Comic Book Month giveaway! What’s it all about?

“Each day of May [Dave will] pick someone to receive a free comic, taken from [his] personal collection: duplicates, things [he has] in trades, and other stuff. [His] goal is to match up people with a comic that they haven’t read but that they may like. [His] tastes are wide and varied, so chances are [he has] a comic for you.”

It’s like the twelve days of Christmas, but longer and with comics instead of disease-ridden birds and high-maintenance performers!

Yaoi Press hit by flooding

Yaoi Press has lost a lot of stock to flooding just prior to Anime Central. Tina Anderson has the details, and points to an auction that can help the publisher out during a really tough time. You can also check out Yaoi Press titles on the Netcomics site for a quarter a chapter, and you can keep up with the situation on the publisher’s Twitter feed.