The Shôjo-Sunjeong Alphabet: A

“A” is for…

What are some of your favorite shôjo titles that start with the letter “A”?

Audience development: Mail

I’m just not feeling the ComicList this week. When the big manga releases have been in print in English for years, I just can’t get all that excited. I’ve also got to say that the publisher’s utter lack of anything resembling even minimal marketing efforts bothers me. They seem to understand how competitive the market is for translated manga, but they’ve never sent out a press release, haven’t built even a rudimentary web site, and have given only a single interview barely a week before the release of their first round books.

Listen, I’m not saying I want more press releases in my inbox, but I am saying that even successful, high-profile publishers with good bookstore saturation work hard to spread the word about their products. It’s not encouraging to see the much-anticipated direct entry of a major Japanese publisher into the translated-manga market be conducted with a caution and reticence that seems to verge on agoraphobia.

So forget the new stuff. I’ll take the occasion and the fast-approaching Halloween to recommend a really entertaining but neglected horror comic:

You may know Housui Yamazaki as the illustrator of the very entertaining The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, written by Eiji (MPD Psycho) Otsuka. Or you may not; it’s got a devoted following, but it’s never exactly set the sales charts on fire. That’s obviously a shame too, but today we’re talking about Yamazaki’s solo effort, the three-volume Mail.

If Kurosagi can be described as an older-skewing Scooby Doo with actual ghosts, Mail is more in the line of The Twilight Zone hosted by Richie Brockelman, also with ghosts.

Master of ceremonies Reiji Akiba can see ghosts. (Exactly how that came to be is explained in an origin story in the third volume.) They’re definitely on the malevolent end of the spiritual spectrum, but not to worry. He’s got just the means of dealing with them.

Yes, it’s exorcism at gunpoint. The majority of the three volumes are a collection of stand-alone stories, with generally innocent people running afoul of nasty ghosts and Akiba coming to their rescue. I’m not going to claim that it’s a wildly novel concept, but Yamazaki executes it very well. I could have read more volumes of the series, but I’m happy to revisit the three I have, especially at this time of year.

Yamazaki is a sharp and imaginative illustrator, and he really has a handle on episodic storytelling. He’s got a sly sense of humor and a knack for building suspense in a relatively small number of pages. If you’re looking for some stylish shivers in a series that doesn’t demand a big investment of time or dollars, Mail is an excellent choice.

There are a number of series that fall into the category of engaging, episodic horror. What are some of your favorites?

Out and about

Oh, to be 14 again and able to drink like that! Ah, nostalgia. Anyway, just a reminder that I’m giving away a copy of the first volume of Jiro Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood (Fanfare/Ponent Mon). Click here for details, or… y’know… scroll down a little bit.

In other Taniguchi news, Kate Dacey has posted a thoughtful review of Taniguchi’s other recent release, The Summit of the Gods. Over at About.Com, Deb Aoki offers a manga-rich preview of this weekend’s Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco. Fanfare will be there, along with other providers of high-quality comics from Japan. And you should buy a copy of the new hardcover of Fumiyo Kouno’s Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms from Last Gasp, because it’s one of the most beautiful comics ever made.

If you knew then what you know now…

This week’s Flipped looks at A Distant Neighborhood and considers the various sides of Jiro Taniguchi. (I bet he has more than five; that’s just based on his works that are available in English.)

As I suspected I would, I’ve wound up with an extra copy of the first volume of the book. I’m kind of like one of those animals that shouldn’t be allowed to free feed, at least on Fanfare/Ponent Mon titles. If I see one, I feel a panicky compulsion to buy it. So I picked it up at SPX strongly suspecting that I’d pre-ordered it through Diamond as well, which I had. (And let’s face it, pre-ordering through Diamond doesn’t always guarantee that you’ll get the book as a result.)

But my poor impulse control is your free manga. In this blog’s grand tradition of chintzy giveaways, I’m offering up the unread copy of the first volume of A Distant Neighborhood. All you need to do is fire me an email at DavidPWelsh at yahoo dot com that includes a year of your life you might revisit if you could do so with present knowledge intact. You don’t have to over-share; just a year will be fine.

I’ll arbitrarily set the deadline at midnight Friday, Oct. 16, 2009, and randomly draw the winner from the entries.

Bizarro world

Today’s object lesson on the perils of single-source journalism comes from the The York Post. Richard Wilner interviews Wizard’s Gareb Shamus.

Happy National Coming Out Day!

Just in case I haven’t mentioned it lately, I’m gay.

Even more apparent is the fact that I’ll use any excuse to post panels from Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery (DMP). I am clearly without shame.

New initiative linkblogging

Deb Aoki talks to Eric Searleman about Viz’s original comics initiative:

“Eric Searleman: ‘We’re considering everything. The format will suit the material. For example, there’s no law that says our original comics need to mirror our manga trim size. Let’s mix it up.’

“‘We want to do something fun and fresh. Why bother otherwise? We want our books to be an alternative to what’s already out there. It’ll be hard work, but we are confident we can get it done. The bottom line is this: the quality of the comic takes precedent over everything else.’”

And update your bookmarks and news feeds: Brigid Alverson has launched another sure-to-be-invaluable blog, Paperless Comics:

“My goal is to cover the world of webcomics and do it objectively. Rants (editorials) will be clearly marked as such, but mostly, I want to connect people, keep them informed about what is going on in the world of webcomics, and help good comics and readers find each other.”

Final thought for Friday

Dear cartoonists: Please draw an Archie cover where Betty accepts Veronica’s marriage proposal and Archie sobs in the background. Thank you in advance.

Update: An email correspondent points me to this cover:

And I appreciate it, but it’s sort of a “close, but no cigar” kind of thing. This reads more to me like Archie is horrified that both of the girls he’s inexplicably able to string along might have the notion of long-term commitment somewhere on their minds. Or, judging simply by his line of sight, Betty has carelessly neglected to button up the back of her gown, revealing otherwise concealed reptilian skin, or something like that.

License request day: Vinland Saga

In honor of the fact that NASA tried to blow up the moon this morning and the fact that Kodansha staged its own Groundhog Day this week, I was going to pick Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon for today’s license request. I’ve reconsidered because it seems like such a foregone conclusion that Kodansha will reprint it at some point.

But there is a lunar connection to today’s targeted title. Makoto Yukimura is the creator of Planetes, published in English by Tokyopop though effectively out of print as it was among the titles Kodansha retrieved from the publisher. I hope it doesn’t stay out of print long, as it’s still one of the best comics from Japan I’ve ever read. It’s an introspective, character-driven science-fiction story about space exploration, focusing on a group of orbital garbage haulers to take dangerous debris out of the spaceways. If you haven’t read it and can find copies, I strongly urge you to do so.

Now, Yukimura has also done evidently exemplary work in a category that I’ve somewhat neglected: action seinen. It’s called Vinland Saga, a look at Viking conquest in the early 1000s. It combines actual history with some fictionalized additions, examining the Viking invasion of England and the early years of King Canute the Great.

Let’s turn back the calendar and see what Ed Chavez had to say about the first volume:

“One of the first things you notice when reading Vinland Saga is that it’s violent. Limbs, heads, and the like fly, arrows pierce men through their skulls, eyeballs are skewered like shish kebab, chains rip the hair and flesh from a man’s head. The action is plentiful, and its frenetic pace aids the feeling of barbaric combat that makes up much of the first volume. Having nothing like this to previously judge him by, Yukimura has shown that he is adept at scripting and executing action sequences. His drawings are fluid, and the staging and panel work is top-notch. He’s even included little touches that add to a sense of atmosphere, such as Frankish women collecting arrows from the dead bodies of the foes during a break in battle.”

Now, fact-based head bashing doesn’t always fly off the shelves, but I have this suspicion that Vikings might be the next big thing in testosterone-driven docudrama. I could be wrong, and usually am, but if the Spartans could pull it off, who’s to say the Vikings can’t?

The Vinland Saga was originally published in Kodansha’s Weekly Shônen Magazine but shifted to the monthly Afternoon, offering Yukimura a less arduous schedule and a slightly older audience. It’s still ongoing and has amassed eight volumes so far. There’s a slow-to-load but great-looking preview here. It’s being published in French by Kurokawa.

What properties from Kodansha’s copious back catalog would you like to see licensed?

Birthday book: Paris

I didn’t even have to check The Comics Reporter to find a birthday book. Via Twitter, I note that it’s the birthday of gifted illustrator Simon Gane. I’ve mentioned this particular title, and I’ll probably mention it a million more, because it’s gorgeous and I love it and I’ll never be entirely convinced that enough people have read it.

It’s Paris (SLG), illustrated by Gane and written by Andi Watson, and it tells the story of a romance between a bohemian artist and a society girl who meet in the titular city. Instead of repeating myself, I’ll point you to nice things that other people have said about this lovely book:

“Andi Watson and Simon Gane have crafted something unmistakably cool, elegantly beautiful and full of the romance and mystery of the place. Setting the book in a Paris of the 50s automatically makes the whole place redolent in the style of the time, all bohemian chic grooving to a jazz soundtrack.” Richard Bruton, Forbidden Planet International

“As wonderfully as Andi Watson builds these characters though, it’s Simon Gane’s art that completes the book. Without a single word of dialogue, we get the sense of these characters through Gane’s depictions: Juliet’s weary longing, Deborah’s innocent beauty, Chap’s stiff unfriendliness, Gerard’s arrogant awkwardness, Paulette’s naughty wit. You know these characters and what they’re thinking as soon as you see them. And the city Gane draws for them to inhabit…” Michael May, Robot 6

“I think I would have enjoyed Paris no matter what Gane had brought to the book, but I was surprised by how much more versatile, visually pleasing and attentive to narrative detail his art had become. His art ended up a perfect match for what’s essentially an old-fashioned romance of the kind they keep telling us need to be made more often.” Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter

Click on any of those links, and you’ll see lots of samples of Gane’s gorgeous, gorgeous work.