The Shôjo-Sunjeong Alphabet: E

“E” is for…

“E” is also clearly for “exigent circumstances,” as there just aren’t a lot of strictly shôjo-sunjeong titles that start with this letter that I really like. And yes, I know that two of these titles are technically seinen, though I don’t think anyone at CMX would mind if you decided that Emma was shôjo. And while ES is also seinen, Fuyumi Soryo is also a highly regarded shôjo creator.

All that said, what are some of your favorite shôjo and sunjeong titles that start with the letter “E”?

The year isn’t over yet

As if to provide additional evidence that “Best of…” lists might be a wee bit premature before Thanksgiving or, you know, New Year’s Day, Viz sent out the following press release:

VIZ MEDIA OFFERS AN EMOTIONAL MIX OF THE REAL AND IMAGINARY IN THE DEBUT OF TAIYO MATSUMOTO’S GOGO MONSTER

New Manga Release Blends Bold Art And A Clever Story Of A Young Boy Who Tries To Balance His Own Lonely World With a Fantastic Supernatural Realm Only He Can See

San Francisco, CA, November 10, 2009 – VIZ Media, LLC (VIZ Media), one of the entertainment industry’s most innovative and comprehensive publishing, animation and licensing companies, has announced the upcoming release of Taiyo Matsumoto’s celebrated manga GOGO MONSTER on November 17th. GOGO MONSTER will be published by the company’s VIZ Signature imprint, rated ‘T’ for Teens, and will carry an MSRP of $27.99 U.S. / $36.00 CAN.

Third grader Yuki Tachibana lives in two worlds. In one world, he is a loner ridiculed by his classmates and reprimanded by his teachers for telling stories of supernatural beings that only he can see. In the other world, the supernatural beings vie for power with malevolent spirits who bring chaos into the school, the students’ lives, and even nature itself.

“Taiyo Matsumoto’s clever stories and striking art have placed him among the best of a new generation of influential manga artists and we are privileged to present GOGO MONSTER to U.S. audiences,” says Gonzalo Ferreyra, Vice President Sales & Marketing, VIZ Media. “This story continues to show Matsumoto’s fascination with youth as he seamlessly blends themes of alienation with the paranormal. For anyone with an overactive imagination or has even just daydreamed during class, GOGO MONSTER offers an emotional tale that shows how what we see and imagine, whether real or imaginary, shapes our personality in profound ways.”

Taiyo Matsumoto made his manga debut in the Japanese magazine Comic Afternoon with the short story STRAIGHT. He went on to travel throughout France and became heavily influenced by the French comics he studied there including those created by pioneering European artists like Moebius and Enki Bilal. Matsumoto has become internationally acclaimed for stories that capture the essence of disaffected youth and adolescent alienation. His other notable works include BLUE SPRING, NO. 5 and TEKKONKINKREET: BLACK & WHITE, which are all published in North America by VIZ Media. TEKKONKINKREET won a prestigious Will Eisner Award in 2008 and was also adapted for an animated feature film. Another Matsumoto manga story, PING PONG, was turned into an award-winning live action film that is available from VIZ Pictures.

Upcoming 11/11/2009

In her look at this week’s comics, Kate Dacey delivers a succinct takedown of the latest example of that just-won’t-die-or-evolve artifact, the list of recommendations to help comics fans convince the ladies in their lives to share their hobby. I don’t really have anything to add, but I will just note that most of the women I know online who read manga are omnivores. They greet new romantic shôjo and new blood-and-guts seinen with equal enthusiasm. To my way of thinking, this makes the frequent exclusion of manga from these chick-bait graphic novel guides even more baffling.

Anyway, here’s what looks good to me on the latest ComicList:

I read a review copy of Tamio Baba’s Deka Kyoshi (CMX), about a detective going undercover as a teacher, joining forces with a mildly psychic student, and helping kids with their often dangerous problems. My reaction to the book tracks pretty much exactly with Brigid Alverson’s: “The stories are nice little self-contained dramas, but they never veer far from the predictable.”

It seems to be a week where publishers who’ve had something of a low profile lately deliver some new goods. There are new volumes from DrMaster, Seven Seas, and Go! Comi. I’m most enthusiastic about the Go! Comi offering, the fifth volume of Takako Shigematsu’s Ultimate Venus. It’s about an orphan who learns that she’s the granddaughter of a very wealthy, very formidable woman, and must prove her worth to inherit the family fortune. I can’t say I yet love it in the way that I loved Shigematsu’s Tenshi Ja Nai!!, but I loved that series a lot and heartily recommend it to people who like wacky, mean-spirited romantic comedy. Ultimate Venus is a bit tamer, but it’s still very enjoyable.

Viz finally rolls out a VizBig version of Rumiko Takahashi’s long-running, much-loved InuYasha, which is a welcome development for people who might enjoy the anime but be a bit daunted by the 42 existing volumes of the manga.

Of more specific interest to me is the third volume of Motoro Mase’s Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit, from Viz’s Signature line. Though I’m ambivalent about the series overall, I’ve liked it enough to review the first and second volumes of this series about a draconian government program that targets random people for death to help the remainder of the citizenry better appreciate life. A government functionary must notify these unlucky learning tools of their fate, and readers get to watch the victims flip out during their last hours. I still feel like it needs to go somewhere beyond episodic individual drama, but I’m intrigued enough to stick around. And the third volume has an awesome tag line: “Sometimes people do shoot the messenger.”

What if you could bring your cat to school? What if you and your cat were given amazing powers, and all you had to do in exchange was keep horrible demons at bay? These are the central questions addressed by Yuji Iwahara’s Cat Paradise (Yen Press). The second volume is due out on Wednesday and promises more mystery and adventure at a purportedly feline-friendly institute of learning.

Campus life

The imminent comic-shop arrival of Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture (which has been in bookstores for a few weeks now) inspired me to devote this week’s Flipped to some fine manga comedies set on college and university campuses. It also inspired me to run this poll as an alternative to actual content development.

Please feel free to mention any titles I missed, licensed or otherwise, in the comments. (I should explain that I excluded The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service from the column because I tend to categorize it with “helpers of the dead” manga instead of “campus comedy” manga.)

Sunday sleuth

I have a new fictional sleuth that I like very much. Her name is Flavia de Luce, she’s an amateur chemist, and she’s eleven years old. In inter-war Britain, she keeps her head about her when a dead body is found in the cucumber patch. She’s the undisputed star of Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, which is very, very accomplished for a first novel. Flavia has charisma and a voice, which is pretty much all you need to sustain an at least readable mystery series. Heck, some people manage to crank out a dozen whodunits without crafting a remotely interesting or sympathetic protagonist.

I must note that Bradley falls into a very common trap for mystery authors in that, when the culprit is revealed, the air goes out of the narrative. Bradley resorts to fairly standard time-wasting tactics that allow Flavia time to run through the hows and whys of the crime, and I found myself growing increasingly impatient during that stretch. This failing is in no way specific to Bradley, and I’m having trouble thinking of more than a handful authors that evade it with regularity. Elizabeth Peters comes to mind, but she has an ensemble of quirky talkers in her Amelia Peabody novels, and I find that she never tries my patience with drawn-out, sleuth-in-peril vamping.

Still, Flavia, with her fascination with poisons and impatience with adult condescension, seems like she has real staying power. She could probably use an entourage of her own, as with Peabody, but she seems able to do a lot of heavy lifting on her own.

License request day: Pyu to Fuku! Jaguar

As I’d hoped, the wish list of worthy, unlicensed shônen is coming along nicely, and an early contribution from Brack of Awesome Engine has really caught my eye. How often can you reasonably expect to come across satirical comic books about recorder students? (Do they still make elementary school students play those charming hybrids of flute, clarinet and kazoo?)

So today’s request is for someone to license Kyosuke Usuta’s Pyu to Fuku! Jaguar, serialized in Shueisha’s Weekly Shônen Jump since sometime in 2000. Per Brack, the series “does a … number on idol manga, though it’s a lot more biting in its satire which is specifically aimed at the idol industry and the exploitation therein.” As I may have mentioned, I find the weird hothouse that is Japan’s idol industry somewhat unsettling, so I’ll happily support any attempt to satirize it.

It stars a young man with a dream of pop stardom, Kyohiko Saketome, whose plans to become a guitarist are derailed by the mysterious Jaguar Junichi, recorder instructor and savant. These two are joined by a number of other would-be and almost-are idols, including a “hip hip ninja” named Hammer. It promises poetry showdowns, foul-mouthed robots, brainwashing schemes, and a hyper-defensive internet “star.”

The reason this one in particular speaks to me is because of its evident satirical intent. There’s plenty of goofy shônen on the shelves featuring motley casts in ridiculous scenarios, but this one seems to have that extra layer of barbed self-awareness. In other words, I’m getting a Gin Tama vibe off of it, and that’s a good thing. Also, something about the idea of would-be recorder-playing pop idols tickles me sight unseen.

I’m honestly a little shocked that it hasn’t been made into a musical, but I guess these things take time. It has been adapted into a motion picture, video games, and an animated series. The manga is up to its 17th volume.

Affirmative action

Looking back through the license requests to date, I realize that I’ve neglected the shônen category almost entirely. I could defend myself on this front by noting that there’s no shortage of shônen readily available, and that would certainly be true. But let’s be honest: it’s just not where my primary interests reside. There are plenty of shônen titles that I really like, but given the choice between a young man with a dream and a young woman with a scheme, you know which I’ll end up plonking down at the checkout counter, don’t you?

But balance is a good thing, so please recommend some as-yet-unlicensed shônen titles for future installments of License Request Day. Please don’t restrict yourself based on the length, vintage, taste level, narrative coherence, or marketability of the title, because you know I try not to be hindered by such paltry concerns. Fire away!

The Shôjo-Sunjeong Alphabet: D

“D” is for…

“D” is a rather dicey letter, at least commercially speaking. What are some of your favorite shôjo and sunjeong titles that start with the letter “D”?

Upcoming 11/4/2009

It looks to be a manageable lot on this week’s ComicList, at least for me. That’s just as well, as I used a Borders buy-four-get-the-fifth-free deal as an excuse to overspend on manga last weekend.

Fire Investigator Nanasd (CMX), story by Izo Hashimoto and art by Tomoshige Ichikawa, is the kind of book that makes me happy for a handful of reasons. It’s not brilliant, but it’s entertaining, and it combines mystery and adventure in pleasing ways. It’s got an appealing, highly competent female lead and puts her through the arson version of The Silence of the Lambs as she fights fires and looks into their origins with the aid of a serial arsonist. And, unrelated to the book’s quality but still welcome, the first search result for the series actually takes you to the publisher of the book, which almost never happens. I know. Weird things make me happy.

One of my Borders purchases this weekend was the first volume of You Higuri’s Ludwig II (Juné), which is… well… weird. As Kate Dacey noted in her review, it contains the holy trinity of Higuri historical fantasy: “beautiful people in beautiful clothes, political intrigue, and darkly handsome protagonists who are touched by madness.” The titular protagonist is one of those rulers every citizen of a monarchy should dread: a delusional opera queen. As is usually the case with Higuri yaoi (or near-yaoi), the gorgeous art and weird nuances are carrying me past the sordid but strangely listless seme-uke shenanigans between Ludwig and his devoted manservant. We’ll see if those features continue to offer sufficient compensation to make me want to track down volume two.

Do you miss the days when Greg Rucka did creator-owned work? Well, there’s good news for you, as he returns to Oni (home to his Queen and Country and Whiteout) with a new detective series, Stumptown, illustrated by Matthew Southworth. Once again, he seems to be following the gritty misadventures of a strong female protagonist, a private investigator named Dex in the midst of a high-stakes missing-person case. The art looks terrific, and Rucka certainly has a strong track record with undiluted noir.

Viz unleashes a thundering herd of titles, many of which I like very much, but I’ll fixate on one because it’s great and I feel like I’ve been neglecting it: Hikaru no Go, written by Yumi Hotta and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, which reaches its 17th volume. This looks to be a particularly eventful installment. Protagonist Hikaru has lost his ghostly go mentor Sai, and he faces off with his rival, gifted prodigy Akira. It’s a great series, smartly written by Hotta and beautifully drawn by Obata.

’tis the season, apparently

Robot 6 has pointed to some early “Best of 2009″ lists, one from Publishers Weekly and another from Amazon. Just like Christmas advertisements, it feels like best-of season is starting too early.

And just because it’s Monday and I’m in something of a grumpy fog (because one of my dogs marked our return from a weekend away by waking us up every hour on the hour), I feel the need to make a provocative remark. As much as I admire Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life and recommend it, 2009 was (in my opinion) a spectacular year for new and ongoing series. So while I would certainly put A Drifting Life in my top ten, I don’t think it would rank first.

Update: Over on Twitter, Danielle (Manga Before Flowers) Leigh says what I meant: “I think Drifting Life is the most *significant* manga published, but not the all-round “best”"

Update #2: The final roster of nominees for the 2010 Great Graphic Novels for Teens list is up over at the Young Adult Library Services Association’s web site.