License Request Day: Prix Asie

Earlier this week, The Comics Reporter noted this year’s Prix Asie award winner and runners-up. The Prix Asie is presented each year by Association des Critiques et journalistes de Bande Dessinee (ACBD) to a worthy Asian comic that’s been published in French. So for this week’s License Request Day, I thought I’d run down the contenders and reinforce of our envy of the comic-reading French. Again, I’ve probably taken some serious liberties with the translation of the publishers’ solicitation text, so feel free to correct me if you spot something soul-crushingly egregious or just garden-variety wrong.

The prize went to Undercurrent, which is the title that I’m most interested in seeing published in English. It was written and illustrated by Tetsuya Toyoda and published in French by Kana and originally serialized in Kodansha’s Afternoon magazine:

“Kanae manages a public bathhouse with her husband, Satoru. Both are helped in their task by Kanae’s aunt. When Satoru disappears mysteriously, the rumours swirl: accident, escape, secret liaison… Many judge Kanae to be too authoritative, too independent. Unable to manage the business without her husband, Kanae takes in a young man, Hori, sent by the trade union of the public baths to help her. Presented in a manga with clear graphics is the story of a meeting place and separations where tragedy crosses comedy, where feelings of gratitude mix with major regrets.”

The other nominees were:

Enfant Soldat by Akira Fuyaka and Aki Ra, published in French by Delcourt, originally serialized in Shueisha’s Business Jump magazine:

“A ten-year-old boy, whose mother was killed by the Khmer Rouges, must take up weapons to survive the massacres. He lives then in total unconsciousness of his actions, ignorant that of other ways of life than that of the soldiers. Shifting between the forces of Pol Pot, those of Vietnam and Kampuchea, it delivers testimony to us; a drama that humanity should not forget.”

Gringo by Osamu Tezuka, published in French by Kana, originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Big Comic magazine:

“In 1982, in a world where competition is fierce, a large Japanese company names Hitoshi Himoto, 35, to a high position in its South American subsidiary company. Hitoshi has to give up his dream of being a sumo wrestler, but he’s conscious of this exceptional promotion and determined to make his way! The difficulty is that these duties are in a zone controlled by guerrillas directed by the terrible Jose Garcia. Hitoshi lands in the banana republic of Santa Luna. He discovers another world there: dictatorship, misery, corruption, insurrection. By chance, Hitoshi discovers the existence of rare metals for electronics. From now on regarded as the “gringo,” Hitoshi will have to face multiple obstacles to negotiate with the rebels for access, the purchase and export of the invaluable ores while navigating the local politics and their hierarchy! Gringo immerses us in political-financial intrigue always with the inimitable style of the Master of manga.”

Intermezzo by Tori Miki, published in French by IMHO, originally published by Kawade:

“An explosive mix of Monthy Python and the absurd humour of Gary Larson, Intermezzo looks at the chaotic and surrealist life of a bookseller who spends his days lost in parallel universes. Extraterrestrial nuttiness, divergent realities, impromptu modifications of the laws of physics, this worldess comic strip plays with the conventions of the form with humour and intelligence. Intermezzo is composed of different stand-alone comic strips and is part of a cycle of four albums (each one being able to be read separately).”

Update: In the comments, José Filipe notes that an English-language version of Intermezzo, titled Anywhere But Here, has already been published by Fantagraphics. And, I suppose I should have noticed that translations probably don’t matter that much with a wordless comic, do they? Here’s their solicitation text for the book:

“The American debut of one of Japan’s most distinctive humorous voices. Tori Miki has won awards for his essays, screenplays and manga, including the prestigious Bunshun Manga Award. With four best-selling volumes released to date, the comic strip series Anywhere But Here is one of his greatest successes. Running weekly in Japan’s TV Bros, a respected magazine of television and media criticism, Anywhere But Here is a wordless comic strip that could perhaps best be described as ‘Monty Python meets The Far Side meets Zen humor.’ Miki’s unnamed lead character (modelled after himself) works as a bookstore owner but somehow finds himself entangled with aliens, alternate realities, and other mysterious disturbances in the space-time continuum. Like Gary Larson’s The Far Side, Anywhere But Here can leave you scratching your head in bemusement almost as often as it makes you laugh, but we’ve selected the very best of his first two volumes for this special collection, printed in an elegant two-color edition.”

Une vie chinoise by P. Ôtié and Li Kunwu, published in French by Kana:

“A completely new manga told from the inside by a Chinese author who lived through the vertiginous rise of the Communism of Mao Zedong. This autobiography makes us share the insane destiny of the Chinese given birth to by Mao Zedong in the 1950s, to today’s revolutions in counter-revolutions under the reins of modern China. It is an enthralling voyage in time, mixing nostalgia and awakening, accurately respecting the historical facts and references with an almost clinical approach to the subject.”

Birthday book: Zatanna’s Search

The Comics Reporter notes that today is the 83rd birthday of Murphy Anderson, one of the great Silver Age illustrators and inkers whose work I associate most closely with DC. My favorite comics drawn by Anderson, or at least the ones that jump immediately to mind, are The Brave and the Bold 61 and 62, which featured a team-up between Earth 2 stalwarts Starman and Black Canary (or “Black Canary I,” I guess). I remember reading them at a friend’s house; he was much more of a DC guy than I was, but I vaguely knew and liked Black Canary and had enjoyed the JLA-JSA team-ups that I’d read.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find any indication that these comics have ever been collected anywhere. I do remember a reference to them in James Robinson’s Starman comic, where the author revealed that the heroes were teaming up in the chicka-bamp sense as well as in the crime-fighting sense. Anyway, they Brave and Bold issues were wonderfully drawn and featured an unlikely but successful pairing of B-list heroes, so I was naturally inclined to like them.

Never fear, though. DC has collected at least one example of Anderson drawing a second-tier, fishnet-wearing heroine in its JLA: Zatanna’s Search trade paperback. (For bonus points, the collection also includes comics drawn by Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino and other luminaries.) The story is fairly simple: Zatanna’s father, Zatara, is missing. In the process of looking for him, she guest-stars in a bunch of other heroes’ comics, and they help her.

I should note that my first encounter with Zatanna was during the ponytail-and-elf-shoes period when she joined the Justice League, and it was many years before I actually encountered the fishnet-wearing version of the character. Maybe it was the elf boots, but I really didn’t care for Zatanna during her early JLA days. Had I been reading DC comics when these stories originally appeared, I might have been more enthusiastic about her admission to the League, if only to hope that she’d return to her original costume.

Anderson’s work has also been collected in a number of those too-rich-for-my-blood DC Archives books and probably in some of the cheaper, black-and-white Showcase Presents… paperbacks.

Sunday on the web with Viz

I’m guessing that the recent flurry of press releases from Viz is some kind of pre-San Diego warm-up routine to prevent cramping during panels. The one that’s really caught my eye is the announcement of another imprint, Shonen Sunday. The full release is below, but here’s the nut paragraph:

“[Viz] has announced the launch of a brand new imprint, SHONEN SUNDAY. Featuring the works of some of the top shonen manga creators in the world today, the Shonen Sunday magazine in Japan provides the content for this imprint. The magazine recently celebrated its 50th anniversary since its first issue arrived on newsstands in March of 1959.”

Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the parent magazine from Shogakukan, and here’s the magazine’s Japanese web site. It joins Viz’s Shonen Jump imprint, which features manga from Shueisha, which co-owns Viz with Shogakukan and probably wanted its own brand. It also allows Viz to brand some of its homeless shônen titles.

With the demise of Viz’s Shojo Beat magazine, speculation and wishful thinking have turned once again towards the possibility of Viz creating an online presence or anthology featuring manga for girls. I think that would be great, and while Viz still as the Shojo Beat imprint, the prospect motivated me to throw together a quick poll.

Edited: Posted too early, as I meant to add links to the listed magazines: Ribon (official), Margaret (official), Cookie (official), Betsucomi (official), Ciao (official). If you have another choice, please note it in the comments, and I’ll add related links.

Edited again to add other anthologies of choice, without regard to whether or not they’re published by either of Viz’s co-owners: Hana to Yume from Hakusensha (official), LaLa from Hakusensha (official), Princess from Akita Shoten (official), flowers from Shogakukan…

And, as promised, here’s the release:

From the stack: Astral Project vol. 3

The thing I like best about Astral Project (CMX) is that it’s only kind of about any of the things it’s purportedly about. The first two volumes introduced the mystery of the death of the protagonist’s sister, the protagonist’s newfound ability to leave his body behind to float above the city, the fellow astral travelers he meets there, and his budding romance with one of them. In the third volume, author marginal (also known as Garon Tsuchiya of Old Boy fame) sustains all of those elements while adding new ones in the form of deeply cynical conspiracy theories and, better still, deeply cynical conspiracies.

This addition might lead you to suspect that the series is building in momentum. I’m happy to report that Astral Project has maintained its feeling of apparent aimlessness. It’s one of the least aggressive stories I’ve read, particularly in the suspense genre. It’s more absorbing than arresting, and the pleasure of it is in seeing marginal drop a new bit of absurdity or outrage without really raising the narrative’s volume. That’s an awfully neat trick.

Though we learn a bit more about the characters, they still aren’t especially sympathetic. Mashiko, the lead, is still no closer to figuring out the cause of his sister’s death. His romance with another young traveler garners investment without that visceral feeling of wanting them to be happy together so much as the vague sense that it would be nice if they could be less unhappy. And while astral travel may have been the story’s trigger, it’s telling and a little perverse that Mashiko’s most trusted astral advisers encourage him to give it up to focus on his equally aimless earthbound existence.

Writing about Astral Project is strange. The things I want to praise about it – its ambling storytelling, increasingly bleak world view, and generally flat emotional affect – aren’t things I’d automatically consider praise-worthy. They cohere into something very intriguing here, though, and I’d really recommend this odd, offbeat series.

Upcoming 7/8/2009

I’ll begin my look at this week’s ComicList with a request. If you’ve never actually read a volume of Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), which concludes with its 23rd volume, I beg you to refrain from writing about the mega-hit in condescending, reductive terms. It’s not a cutesy romantic fantasy about people who turn into animals, or at least it hasn’t been since maybe its second or third volume. It’s actually a crushingly effective drama about breaking a generational cycle of emotional abuse and neglect, and it’s one of a very small handful of comics that has ever made me cry. It’s also a rare example of an extremely popular comic also being an absolutely brilliant comic, so in deference to the people who are going to miss new volumes rather terribly, please don’t call it “fluffy” or something equally inane.

With that off my chest, I can look to the future, which includes a new series from Yuji Iwahara, Cat Paradise (Yen Press). CMX published Iwahara’s three-volume Chikyu Misaki, which still ranks for me as one of the most underappreciated manga ever to be published in English. It’s a terrific blend of fantasy and mystery with wonderful characters and unusual, eye-catching illustrations. Iwahara’s King of Thorn (Tokyopop), was less successful for me, though I found it to be a very competent survival drama. Of course, it was coming out at roughly the same time as Minetaro Mochizuki’s utterly genius survival drama, Dragon Head (Tokyopop), so it was bound to suffer in comparison. Anyway, Cat Paradise seems to be about students and their pets fighting against demonic forces or something like that, but describing Iwahara’s comics never really does them justice, and his work is always worth a look.

I suspect the impact of its conclusion will be washed away in a sea of Fruits Basket tears, but I’ll also miss Kitchen Princess (Del Rey), written by Miyuki Kobayashi and illustrated by Natsumi Ando. It’s a cooking manga, which is enough to put it on my “read automatically” list, but it also became an increasingly effective melodrama as the series progressed. And there are recipes in the back. Try the Madeleine recipe. On the shônen front, Del Rey also offers a new volume of Hiro Mashima’s very entertaining Fairy Tail.

It’s also Viz’s week to remind me that I really need to hunker down and catch up with some series that I like very much: Hideaki Sorachi’s Gin Tama, Kazune Kawahara’s High School Debut, Ai Yazawa’s Nana, and Yuki Obata’s We Were There. In my defense, Viz keeps publishing great new manga, particularly in its Signature line, so it’s becoming increasingly impractical to keep up with ongoing series.

I agree, Sasaki

There’s a new Flipped column up over at The Comics Reporter. I thought Tom would like that panel at the top.

License Request Day: Otherworld Barbara

Many, many people wish that manga publishers would license more work from the Year 24 Group of pioneering shôjo creators. Unfortunately, the market doesn’t always seem receptive to classic works. No, it seems more commercially sensible to license recent works, especially award-winning recent works. But what if there was a way to give readers like myself more work from that august body of creators while working within the recent/award-winning subset? What’s that you say? There is a way? Well, heck, then, I’ll just dedicate this column to Moto Hagio’s Otherworld Barbara.

Hagio, as you likely very well know, is one of the high priestesses of the Year 24 Group. Some of her work has been published in English by Viz (They Were Eleven in Four Shojo Stories and A, A-Prime), but it’s all out of print. The Comics Journal ran a lengthy and fascinating interview with Hagio conducted by none other than Matt Thorn and even used Hagio’s art for the cover of its issue dedicated to shôjo manga. Inexplicably (all right, all right, maybe commercially explicably), publishers have not yet tripped over one another to get Hagio’s work on the bookstore shelves.

Fortunately, there’s Otherworld Barbara, which completed its four-volume run in Shogakukan’s Flowers anthology in 2005. (That was only four years ago! It’s practically new!) Otherworld Barbara, or Barbara Ikai, won the 2006 Nihon Science Fiction Taisho Award, which is presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan. The award is open to prose, comics, animation and movies, so Hagio’s win seems particularly impressive.

But what’s Otherworld Barbara about? For that, I was lucky to have the translation assistance of Erica (ALC) Friedman:

“2052 CE. The ability to step into another person’s dream exists, ‘Yumesaki Guide’ Watari Tokio has been asleep since something happened 7 years ago, when he undertook the job of entering a girl’s, Juujou (maybe Toujo) Aaoba’s, dream. And, living happily inside Aoba’s dream on the island of Barbara, a keyword unexpectedly materializes the real world.

“Watarai wants to return once again to the world inside Aoba’s dream. To procure eternal life living happily on the Island of Barbara, he conducts a strange ceremony upon himself. On the one side, a vision of Aoba’s appears, on the other an abundant ocean known as the ‘Beach of Mars’ as the story begins….”

I’ve also heard that the (catatonic? Comatose?) Aaoba was found next to her dead parents with their hearts in her stomach.

Now, it’s josei, and many publishers won’t touch that category with tongs, but it’s also award-winning, relatively recent science fiction. Just keep repeating that last part to yourselves. Plus, it’s Moto Hagio, which is reason enough to license it ASAP, in my book.

I can’t decide

Oh, Kaoru Mori, what is it that I love best about your cartooning? Is it your elegant and understated way of rendering emotion?

Or is it your richly evocative images of a bygone era, so lush and detailed?

Would you think less of me if I admitted that it was probably your shameless autobiographical notes?

Whatever the reason, you really can’t go wrong with Mori manga. There are the first seven volumes of Emma (CMX), which trace the love story between a shy maid and a wealthy (but not aristocratic) young man (which I reviewed here). Or you could get a taste of Mori’s style and sensibility in the one-volume Shirley (also CMX). Or you could get some stand-alone glimpses of what Mori calls the “Emmaverse” in volumes eight and nine of Emma.

For those of you who haven’t yet read the first seven volumes of the series, don’t worry about being lost if you decide to sample volume eight or nine. They feature stand-alone stories of supporting characters from the main story, but they don’t depend on any previous knowledge. They’re simply charming, moving stories of people from across the Victorian social spectrum. I would imagine that they’d be slightly more moving if you’d seen the characters in their original context, but I think they’d still read beautifully without any prior knowledge.

I’m not giving you excuses not to read all of Emma, though.

(The images above are from the eighth volume of Kaoru Mori’s Emma.)

From the stack: Empowered vol. 5

Trying to review a new installment of Adam Warren’s Empowered series (Dark Horse) is exactly like trying to review a new installment of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series (Oni). The fifth volume of Warren’s saga of a (sometimes literally) struggling super-heroine is good in exactly the same ways as the previous four, but with a slightly higher level of poise and complexity. It’s meatier and moodier, but it achieves those effects without sacrificing the core charm and wit of the series.

Basically, a review of the fifth Empowered book would constitute an attempt to get new readers to pick up the first volume of the book. I figure that people who have read the first volume either gave up on the book for its salacious content (which is perfectly fair), stuck around for more of that same content (also dandy), or stuck around like I did for the endearing characters, great jokes, and slowly building subplots. Providing a summary of events of the fifth volume would be meaningless to people who’ve never read the series at all while irritating readers who’ve stuck around and haven’t yet read book five.
All that said, it’s such a terrific book that I can’t pass up the opportunity to sing its praises, even if I’ve sung them so often that you know the lyrics by heart.

What need to know: Empowered, the book, is about Empowered, the heroine, who has the best of intentions and the most unreliable of super-suits. It’s embarrassingly form-fitting and shreds at the slightest provocation, often leaving her at the mercy of bondage-happy opponents. Her fellow super-heroes (an obnoxious and entitled herd) treat her with undisguised contempt, but she keeps trying to make a difference, scoring small victories amidst all of the humiliation. Her greatest sources of comfort and confidence come from her smoking hot, super-supportive boyfriend, a reformed super-villain minion known as Thugboy, and her best friend, the hard-partying, ass-kicking Ninjette. When things get crappy, they’ve got her back.

How the series has evolved: Earlier volumes traded in short, astutely satirical pieces mocking everything from spandex tropes to the bizarre idiosyncrasies of fandom to whatever else crossed Warren’s field of vision as he worked on the comics. As the series has progressed, Warren has incrementally developed all of the characters, revealing their back stories and allowing them and their relationships to evolve. Individual chapters have become longer, and subplots have become more intricate and moved closer to the surface. The level of menace and the feeling of consequence have risen over time, but Warren has maintained the sweetness and sense of humor of the series, which is quite an accomplishment.

Why I like it: Super-hero parody has become a category unto itself, and a lot of examples aren’t any more interesting or insightful than their targets. Empowered succeeds for me because Warren manages to juggle so many elements at once – the pointed satire, the unapologetic (but sly) cheesecake, and the fact that he bothers to tell a proper story with fully realized characters in the process. That last element is what I often find lacking in meta-commentary books; they sometimes read like an Andy Rooney monologue, with lots of trite “Don’t you hate it when…” observations. Empowered is as smart and sharp as you could hope, but it’s also got a lot of heart. It manages to comment on super-hero comics while also actually being one of the better ones you’re likely to read.