Audience development: Sand Chronicles

I’m always glad to see shôjo titles rank in the manga section of The New York Times Graphic Book Best Sellers list. After a fairly long period where Natsuki Takaya’s near-perfect Fruits Basket (Tokyopop) seemed to carry that banner alone, other series have made regular appearances on the roster. And if they’re not precisely the titles I would wish were leading the sales pack, well, I’m glad all the same.

Still, if I had my way, Hinako Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles (Viz) would be earning sales that match its quality. It’s about a girl named Ann who moves to a small town with her unstable mother at the age of 12, then follows Ann and her friends through happiness, tears and all of the stuff in between those two extremes. It’s both precisely observed and effectively melodramatic, and the characters are wonderfully sympathetic, largely because Ashihara respects them enough to let them be jerks from time to time.

It was serialized in Viz’s late, lamented Shojo Beat, and its first three volumes were included in last year’s list of Great Graphic Novels for Teens, even earning a spot among the Top Ten. So it’s obviously well regarded. I mean, look at these reviews:

“Manga-ka Hinako Ashihara dares to believe that even children and teens have complicated lives that are riddled with anxiety as much as, if not more than, it is filled with carefree fun. Anything but a downer, however, Sand Chronicles is rich storytelling about the drama of life.” Leroy Douresseaux at Comic Book Bin

“Sand Chronicles continues to be a very strong story, showing off both the simplicity and complexity of ordinary teenagers trying to find their places in the world. It’s still one of the best titles I’ve read this year.” Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane at Manga Life

“Sand Chronicles isn’t about saving the world…or destroying it. These teenagers don’t have superpowers; their adolescent angst isn’t going to knock the planet from its orbit or reshape the destiny of humanity. That is not the sort of story Hinako Ashihara won a Shogakukan Manga Award for. No, rather, she was recognized for writing an affective story about realistic teenaged troubles and triumphs. In their little world of Tokyo and Shimane, what happens matters—it matters a lot—and best of all, it will matter to this series’ faithful readers as well.” Casey Brienza at Anime News Network

“Oh, the emotional turmoil is so hard-hitting! This series has gone from a wonderful bit of recognition at the complexities of relationships to a painful observation of the things people do that can hurt themselves and others when they aren’t willing to move on from traumatic moments.” Matthew Brady at Warren Peace Sings the Blues

“Granted, the usual romantic ups and downs provide plenty of tears and jeers, but the thoughtful slice-of-life framing and an eye for humanistic details floats this series to the top of the shojo tank. No one feels overly like a character trope, and Ashihara’s sense for the minute highs and lows of adolescence is a blessing in a series that could have been destined for average shelf status.” Chloe Ferguson at Manga Recon

If you like comics about real people with real problems that are executed with tremendous skill and sensitivity, you should give Sand Chronicles a try.

(Got a book you feel deserves some audience development? Like to write a guest column about it? E-mail me and we’ll see what we can do.)

Upcoming 9/16/2009

It’s a quality-over-quantity week for manga in the new ComicList: not a ton of arrivals, but each is welcome.

CMX releases the second and concluding volume of Natsuna Kawase’s The Lapis Lazuli Crown. It’s one of those charming romances where you can readily understand why the protagonists like each other. Here’s my review of the first volume. I’m less smitten with CMX’s other Kawase offering, A Tale of an Unknown Country, but it’s still a solid earlier work from the creator. And if you look at how far Kawase progressed as a storyteller between Tale and Crown, Kawase certainly seems like a manga-ka to watch.

In other CMX news, I really need to catch up with Yuki Nakaji’s Venus in Love, a charming story of love among the co-eds. It’s up to its seventh volume.

The rest of the week’s heavy lifting is performed by Viz, which offers new volumes of a couple of always-welcome series. Writer Tetsu Kariya and illustrator Akira Hanasaki continue to build the food pyramid with Oishinbo: Vegetables, the fifth volume in Viz’s reprinting of the A la Carte excerpts of the long-running series.

The fourth volume of Pluto: (Naoki) Urasawa x (Osamu) Tezuka was packed with shocking twists and a surprising amount of very effective tear-jerking. As Urasawa’s works always seem to get better as they progress, I’m predicting more of the same with the fifth volume. Oh, and for a preview of Urasawa’s current project, Billy Bat, check out this piece by Adam Stephanides at Completely Futile. It’s being serialized in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning, so don’t expect it to end up in Viz’s Signature line when it’s licensed.

Wait, Erica is a grandmother?

Last week’s blessed arrival got me thinking of the subject of publisher-hopping, manga rescues, and the dark realm of licensing limbo. This week’s Flipped is a (by no means comprehensive) survey of the phenomena.

Who will buy…

This has been a topic of conversation in the manga-oriented corner of Twitter lately, so I thought I’d run a poll. Note that I said “buy” instead of “read” in the poll’s title.

Also on the subject of classics, or maybe not, if you’re looking for a meaty read on the subject as it relates to the possibilities and perils of establishing a manga canon, click right over to this piece by Kate Dacey at The Manga Critic.

License request day: Poe no Ichizoku

I think I’ve got the hook for a commercially successful attempt to license classic shôjo manga. After careful perusal of the past month’s worth of Graphic Book Best Seller lists at The New York Times, a trend has emerged: people seem to like reading about angst-ridden, young-looking vampires. And while this is not an identifier at the top of my must-buy list, more licensed manga by Moto Hagio does hover around the top of that list.

You know, just because moody blood-suckers are one of the current big things doesn’t mean this is the first time they’ve enjoyed that pride of place. Back in the day, Hagio was rocking out the vamps with her nine-volume series, Poe no Ichizoku (sometimes translated as “The Poe Clan”). It was originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Flower Comics in the early 1970s.

It’s apparently about a pair of abandoned human children who are taken in by a family of vampires, or “Vampanellas.” Now, vampire fiction makes me giggle to begin with, and “Vampanellas” sounds like some kind of Italian breakfast pastry filled with ox-bone marrow and possibly dried fruit, but I could get over that. It’s Moto Hagio, and she could call them “Bloodsuckeronis” and I wouldn’t care.

From what I can discern, there’s lots of angst about whether or not one actually becomes a vampire and, one presumes, tons of sexual tension between vampire and non-vampire cast members. Since it’s Hagio, I would assume that this sexual tension is not limited to mixed-gender couplings. Of course, I also would assume that, if the book featured moody boy vampires making cow-eyes at each other, somebody would already have licensed it.

Poe no Ichizoku won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1976. It, along with Hagio’s They Were Eleven, took the shônen category, presumably because they were awesome and the program did not yet have a shôjo category. (They Were Eleven ran in Shôjo Comic, and it was included in Viz’s out-of-print Four Shôjo Stories.)

From the stack: Stitches

Stitches, David Small’s autobiographical debut graphic novel from W.W. Norton, makes me want to use reviewer words like “searing” and “unforgettable.” It makes me want to use those words without irony. It’s just that good.

At the age of fourteen, Small checked into the hospital to have an apparently benign cyst removed. After two surgeries, he’s left with ravaged vocal cords and a ragged scar running down his neck. That’s the nut paragraph, but it isn’t what the book is really about. Like the growth on his neck, it’s a symptom of something much more insidious and destructive.

With an almost unnerving degree of understatement and precision, Small describes the parental failings that led him to that unfortunate state. He gradually reveals the depths of his mother’s dysfunction and his father’s ineffectuality, though he doesn’t reduce them to ridiculous monsters. They’re realistic people who are damaged in distressingly recognizable ways, and Small is left to try and escape the generational cycle.

Drawing is young David’s primary source of solace, and Small visually extrapolates on what that means to the child version of himself. In his private or reflective moments, the boy remakes the world and views it in ridiculous and sometimes grotesque ways. Small renders these moments well; they have the feel of a child’s gruesome imagination and, later, a teen-ager’s derisive dismissal of the adults around him. These flights of not-quite fancy fold in well with the more straightforward illustrations, and I feel that makes them more effective.

But honestly, I find just about everything effective about Stitches. It’s as focused and shaped a work of autobiography as I can remember reading. Small has taken pains to craft a narrative that’s effective in the same ways as fiction, and if the reader didn’t know it was based on actual events, I believe it would be viewed as a sterling example of a made-up story.

There’s no self-indulgence or waste evident here, but it’s not skeletal, either. There’s resonance to the characters and impact to the way events are sequenced and facts are revealed. And most of all, there is the sympathetic distance Small the grown-up cartoonist maintains from the angry, bewildered child he was. I cringe a little to say it just on general principle, but Stitches really is a searing and unforgettable book.

(This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.)

Upcoming 9/10/2009

Looking through this week’s ComicList, it’s fairly obvious which book gets my strongest recommendation. Heck, if I had the programming skills and no aesthetic conscience, I’d make the cover image above spin and fire sparkly rainbows. Yes, the long-awaited sixth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma’s exercise in pure delight, Yotsuba&! (Yen Press). Yen rescued the much-loved title from ADV, and Yen is also republishing the first five volumes, also due out this week. I briefly contemplated re-buying those first five as a show of appreciation to Yen, but someone wisely suggested I dabble in as-yet-untried Yen titles instead, which is an excellent idea. I think I’ll start with Hyouta Fujiyama’s Tale of the Waning Moon, which seems to promise funny boys’-love fantasy.

I have to admit that I have been unable to resist the lure of Marvel’s recent spate of quirky, off-brand titles featuring Patsy Walker, also known as Hellcat. This week’s example is Models, Inc., written by Marc Sumerac and Paul Tobin and illustrated by Jorge Molina and Vincent Villagrasa, along with assistance from three inkers and five colorists. Dave Sharpe shoulders the lettering duties all on his own. Anyway, it’s Marvel’s model characters gathered to solve a murder during Fashion Week. For bonus irresistibility, it’s got a back-up story featuring the dapper, saintly, and adorable Tim Gunn. And neither of the promised covers look like sexist nightmares.

Oh, and just as a reminder, the new chapters keep coming at Viz’s SIGIKKI site. I think that Kumiko Suekane’s Afterschool Charisma, a loopy tale of teen-aged clones of famous historical figures, is emerging as one of the year’s great guilty pleasures. I could read a hundred pages of Clone Freud maliciously working the word “daddy” into every conversation.

From the stack: Ikigami vol. 2

Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit (Viz) is about a governmental experiment in social engineering where random young people are killed to encourage the remainder of the citizenry a greater appreciation for life. The condemned are given 24 hours notice by the bureaucracy. You’d think the most engrossing material would come from how they spend their last day. In the second volume, as with the first, I was much more intrigued by the framing-device functionary who delivers the bad news and tries to make sure the people he notifies don’t do anything drastic.

This time around, our young bearer of bad news is finding that the grind of the job, the minute-to-minute demands and stresses, is blurring his underlying moral concerns. He’s becoming callous to his charges, a soulless paper pusher.

Scenes like the one above are chilling and very effective. They constitute a small fraction of the book as a whole, but they’re far and away the best reasons to read the book. These scant pages of context say more about a repugnant initiative than the portrayals of its victims.

That isn’t to say that those portrayals are bad, exactly. Creator Motoro Mase certainly has a penchant for melodrama and a reasonable enough aptitude for portraying it, but there’s a bluntness to these sequences that’s much less interesting than the sly, layered glimpses of the system’s operational details.

This time around, we get two contrasting stories. The first strains to teach a valuable lesson about drug abuse in a thoroughly by-the-numbers fashion. In my opinion, Nancy Reagan left addiction narratives dead on the side of the road before I could even drive a car, and Mase isn’t storyteller enough to resuscitate them. Is anybody?

The second is potentially more interesting, as Mase is daring enough to show the end of a life with real potential. In the abstract, it highlights the dreadful arbitrariness of the program and how harmful it can be to society, or at least a corner of it. Moment to moment, Mase is more concerned with the sentiment of the experience, which mutes the story’s potential to condemn.

But I keep coming back to those creepy, bureaucratic moments and the deft handling of tone and undercurrent they display. For now, they’re enough to carry me through the only average majority of the comic for the spikes of sneaky, economical subplot.

Working for a living

Among my various comics partialities, I really like stories that rely heavily on specific workplaces or careers. From advertising agencies to cafés to bakeries to afterlife bureaucracies to manor houses to airlines to quasi-legal think tanks to voice-over studios off-the-books medical clinics, I find it hard to resist comics characters who are on the job. Since there are so many comics about them, I tend not to count teachers or officers of law enforcement in this category; they virtually have categories of their own.

So in honor of Labor Day and in hopes of finding more careerist manga, here are some jobs that I feel are underrepresented in comics:

Realtors: Thanks to HGTV, there aren’t many untold aspects of the real-estate profession, so I’m thinking of a weirder take on the topic. It occurs to me that fictional vampires and demons and sorcerers always have great old money pits in which to reside, but how do they acquire them? It then occurs to me that there must be specialists in finding just the right dilapidated pile of stone for just the right supernatural or other-dimensional buyers. They might even have interior designers on staff to make sure the cobwebs are just so and the wallpaper is suitably stained and peeling. And they certainly track the crime reports to find properties with the kind of history that might make them unattractive to the average mortal. (Stubborn bloodstains lower resale value!)

Park Rangers: I just love national parks. They’re beautiful and varied settings, and all kinds of things happen there, from sentimental moments to dangerous moments to teachable moments. Take your pick.

Travel writers: This is basically the urban version of the previous entry, but with a focus on cityscapes rather than canyons or forests. If I were forced to pick, I’d probably go with a murder mystery angle since the setting would change frequently. Then you could avoid the whole question of why everyone didn’t move away from Cabot Cove since it had such an astonishingly high homicide rate for a small town in Maine.

Wedding planners: This actually triggered this train of thought. I went to a wedding over the weekend, and I have to say that I always find them weird, whether high-end or on the cheap. The subject seems like an endless source of episodic story fodder, what with all the bridezillas and groomalons, and the flowers, gowns, food and décor seem like a veritable buffet of illustrative possibilities. In my dream version, it’s a smutty, subversive take on the subject with a decided yaoi bent, starring gay wedding planners to agitate for marriage equality in their spare time. As for the smut, few settings inspire ill-advised trysting like celebrations of undying fidelity.

That should do for a start. I promise not to sue if you decide to make a comic about any of the above.

Despair is in the details

Would I use a three-day weekend as an excuse to slack off on a new Flipped column? Well, of course I would, but I didn’t in this instance. In fact, it’s even a day early. If Joyce Aurino can do all of that homework translating and adapting Koji Kumeta’s Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (Del Rey), then the least I can do is say nice things about her work.