Free to a good home: Japan

Fanfare/Ponent Mon has re-offered Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators, a marvelous anthology of short works by Japanese and European comic artists. To observe the occasion, I’m going to give away a copy of this great book.

Here’s what Tom (The Comics Reporter) Spurgeon had to say about Japan in his weekly “This Isn’t a Library” round-up:

“I don’t know why this is being offered again now, and don’t know of any length of time that this anthology of nouvelle manga wasn’t available, but it’s a killer line-up, a nice concept (manga creators doing places they live; French creators doing places they visit), it’s consistently attractive, and has to be one of the seminal books of the last decade. Like if you wanted to portray 2006 in shorthand, this is one of the comics you put beside your character’s bed.”

And here’s Jog’s take over at Comics Comics:

“I don’t usually mention items Diamond happens to be ‘offering again’ on a given week, since I probably somehow covered them the first time, but I think I’ll make a big, big exception for this excellent 2006 Fanfare/Ponent Mon anthology, unfortunately somewhat notorious for being hard to track down. No more! Probably the most expansive example of participant/co-editor Frédéric Boilet’s notion of nouvelle manga, the project devotes its 256 b&w pages to eight stories from residents of Japan about the area in which they live or come from, and eight stories from French visitors about areas they are assigned to visit. A big storm happens to arrive while the French artists are traveling, affording their contributions an extra linkage.”

So here’s the drill: to enter, simply send me an e-mail mentioning a comic or graphic novel from anywhere in the world that you’d like to see published in English. Nation of origin doesn’t matter, just the desire to be able to hold a translated version in your hands. Of course, not everybody’s first language is English, so if you’d like to see a comic or graphic novel translated from English (or any other language) to your language of choice, that’s obviously fair game.

You must be 18 or older to enter. I’m perfectly willing to ship internationally, though it will be cheap, and it will be slow, so I’m just warning you right now. Deadline for entries is 12 noon Eastern Standard Time Sunday, May 9, 2010, and entries should be sent to DavidPWelsh at Yahoo dot Com. The winner will be chosen at random and receive a copy of Japan.

After the jump is a Flipped column I wrote on the book for Comic World News in March of 2006.

The Seinen Alphabet: B

The inaugural installment of The Seinen Alphabet taught me that I’ll almost always forget something essential, so I’ll note right now that I reserve the right to update these posts within an inch of their lives. Now, let’s move on to the letter “B.”

We’ll start with Shogakukan’s BIG COMIC family of seinen magazines. Launched in 1968, they’ve provided a showcase for a lot of Osamu Tezuka’s comics for grown-ups including Ayako and MW. Takao Saito’s Golgo 13 is still going strong almost 150 volumes later. It was also the magazine home of Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkonkinkreet, originally published in English and still subtitled as BLACK AND WHITE. Another member of this magazine family, BIG COMIC SPIRITS, is the home of series like Oishinbo and Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit.

Shogakukan’s partner in Viz but rival otherwise, Shueisha, offers BUSINESS JUMP. Shueisha also published a magazine named BART during the 1990s. There’s not a lot of Business Jump manga available in English, is there? What am I missing?

I don’t know a lot about the publisher known as BUNGEISHUNJÛ, except that they publish a seinen magazine called Shukan Bunshun and that they’ve been offering a manga award since the 1950s.

On the license request front, I’ve already discussed the apparently pasta-riffic manga BAMBINO! and BAMBINO! SECONDO, written and illustrated by Tetsuji Sekiya. What’s food without drink, one must wonder? That’s why I’ve asked for someone to license Araki Joh’s BARTENDER. And since there can never be enough Tezuka in English, I’ll renew my call for a licensed translation of BARBARA.

Moving onto the license requests that have lived only in my secret heart, there’s Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki’s BILLY BAT, which is currently being serialized in Kodansha’s Morning magazine. It’s a period thriller about a comic creator who realizes he may have unintentionally plagiarized a similar manga. It’s also Urasawa, so it has to be good, right?

On the list of unfinished series that I would love to see start up again, Atsushi Kaneko’s BAMBI AND HER PINK GUN would be somewhere near the very top. It originally ran in Enterbrain’s Comic Beam, which we all know is a source of joy and wonder.

BATTLE ROYALE, Koushun Takami and Masayuki Taguchi’s tale of teens forced to murder each other, was originally serialized in Akita Publishing’s Young Champion. It’s received regular and prestige printings in English from Tokyopop, though I recall not everyone being happy with the translation and adaptation. It’s perennially popular, though, and I seem to recall it doing well in comic shops, which tend to be seinen-friendly settings.

Dark Horse ensures that we have no shortage of starts-with-“B” bloodbath titles. There’s BERSERK, written and illustrated by Kentaro Miura and originally serialized in Hakusensha’s Young Animal. There’s also Hiroku Samura’s BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL, still going strong in Kodansha’s Afternoon.

But what if you’re in a more philosophical place? Worry not, as Vertical has published handsome hardcover and paperback editions of Osamu Tezuka’s masterful BUDDHA, originally serialized in a few magazines from Ushio Shuppansha and later collected by Kodansha, I believe.

It’s difficult to imagine, but what if your needs for hilarious pirate violence aren’t entirely met by One Piece? If that’s the case, or if you want your hilarious pirate violence to have a more adult edge, then look no farther than Rei Hiroe’s BLACK LAGOON (Viz), originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Sunday GX.

The aforementioned Taiyo Matsumoto may be consistently critically acclaimed, but his commercial record is a bit more inconsistent. Take BLUE SPRING, originally published by Shogakukan and later licensed and translated by Viz. It was not, I gather, a sales blockbuster.

But Viz keeps trying to sell seinen. Their SigIKKI site, featuring titles from Shogakukan’s IKKI magazine, is an excellent example. One of those titles is BOKURANO: OURS, written and illustrated by Mohiro Kitoh. It’s a grim-and-gritty take on giant fighting robots filled with plucky kids, and I can’t say it’s my favorite in the SigIKKI rotation, running a little too Mark Millar for my tastes. I’ve only seen one chapter of Puncho Kondoh’s BOB & HIS FUNKY CREW on the same site, and let’s just say that I don’t exactly feel the void from the absence of subsequent installments.

So, what starts with the letter “B” in your seinen alphabet?

Done in one

The good folks at Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations asked if I’d like to contribute a list, and after some routine indecisiveness and procrastination, I decided to focus on single-volume manga. I tried to list books that are widely available (“In Stock” being the magic phrase) and that covered a lot of ground in terms of style and content and might have some good hooks for prose readers.

So that’s probably why I ruthlessly ignored your favorite stand-alone manga.

Upcoming 5/5/2010

It’s time for our weekly look at the ComicList.

Topping the list is the eighth volume of Hinako Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles (Viz). This installment marks the conclusion of the main story, which began with our heroine, Ann, as an 11-year-old moving to the countryside and ends with her as a 20-something working woman making tough life choices and evaluating the highs and lows of the years that have passed. That long-view approach to a character’s development would be reason enough to spark interest in Sand Chronicles, but it’s Ashihara’s sensitive approach to sometimes melodramatic material that really makes this series a treasure. I’m assuming that Viz will publish the ninth and tenth volumes, which apparently feature side stories about the supporting cast. I can’t wait to read them.

Sensitivity is generally kept to a minimum in Koji Kumeta’s Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (Del Rey), when it isn’t actually called out as a target for mockery. That’s part of the charm. And really, everything is a target for mockery in this rapid-fire satire of contemporary culture, now up to its sixth volume.

The eighth issue of Brandon Graham’s King City arrives courtesy of Image and Tokyopop. We’re into the previously unpublished material at this point, and it’s very enjoyable stuff. The twelfth issue will be the last, at least according to the solicitation in the new Previews.

I can’t say enough good things about the first volume of Kou Yaginuma’s Twin Spica (Vertical), so I’ll point you to someone who says them better. That would be Kate (The Manga Critic) Dacey, who offers a lovely assessment of the volume here.

Back with Viz, we have the debut of Flower in a Storm, written and illustrated by Shigeyoshi Takaka. It’s about a super-rich guy who falls in love with a super-athletic girl and tries to hound her into falling in love with him. She can hold her own, and he’s lovable in a stupid sort of way (as opposed to a princely, know-it-all way), so the dynamic isn’t as gross as it could be (and has been). I read a review copy courtesy of Viz, and it’s not bad. I’ll probably read the second volume, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of title that will reside forever in my shôjo-geek heart. This is in spite of the fact that it was originally published in Hakusensha’s LaLa and LaLa DX, which almost always generate titles I love.

And it’s time for another tidal wave of One Piece (Viz), written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda. We get volumes 44 through 48 and the omnibus collecting volumes 10 through 12. I plan on writing a full entry on the omnibus sometime in the next week, because I’m tragic that way, so I’ll just note that lots of important things happen in this omnibus. This being Oda, the milestones pass much more efficiently than they would in other shônen series so that he can fixate on what seems like a side story and turn it into an epic. I’ll also note about the series in general that it reminds me of a really good Avengers run. The cast is a great mix of heavy hitters and try hard-ers, each with their own moving, consequential back story, and they’re together because they want to be. Unlike even the best Avengers runs, the cast of One Piece actually helps people rather than just responding to attacks from people who hate them. (There’s plenty of that kind of material too.)

Pod people

Ed Sizemore, gracious master of ceremonies for the recent Manga Moveable Feast on Mushishi, hosted a podcast round-table on the book that’s now available at Manga Out Loud. I’m not going to lie. I find it nearly impossible to listen to recordings of my own voice. But don’t let that stop you.

From the stack: Satsuma Gishiden vol. 1

I don’t know if thoughtful ultra-violence happens as often as its creators think it does. In fact, I generally think that imposing deep-think-y stuff on splatter usually has the effect of making the think-y stuff look dumb while taking the air out of the splatter. When I do run across brainy splatter, it tends to have come from Japan.

The latest example in this (for me) narrow field is Satsuma Gishiden (Dark Horse), written and illustrated by Hiroshi Hirata. It opens with a group of samurai playing some feudal version of rugby that involves trying to extract the liver from a criminal. It’s a morale-building exercise, you see. And while it’s muscularly drawn – snorting horses, thrusting spears, blood splatter that would keep the casts of five hour-long crime procedurals busy for a week – it’s also got a purposeful grimness that suggests to me that Hirata isn’t going to be blindly celebrating the samurai’s path.

The orgy of violence is part of a social studies lesson, you see, illustrating a strangling caste system and its consequences on individuals and their culture. The full-time samurai look down on the citizen soldiers, who can barely eke out a living. The citizen soldiers resent their apparent betters, and the highest tiers are oblivious to the strife. The system of education is designed to prop up the caste system and promote a dehumanizing form of patriotism.

Hirata shifts between displays of physical prowess and the ways it can be brutally applied and less moist passages that provide the context – the whys and wherefores of how liver soccer became a sport. The history and sociology lack the sleekness and force of the bloodshed even more than you might normally expect, but they serve the useful purpose of making that bloodshed seem less like an end in and of itself. I say “less like” because there’s too much relish in those sequences and they’re too protracted for anyone to believe that they’re entirely essential to the plot.

Still, evident as the relish for a well-drawn impaling can be, choppy as the political maneuverings can read, there’s genuine feeling here. These things matter intensely to the characters, as they should. And sometimes the pondering and the splatter work in perfect conjunction. In one sequence, the lower-class samurai take ruthless revenge on their oppressors. To call these pages beautiful is probably deeply wrong, but they work like you would not believe. They have gruesome visual fascination and substantial narrative force.

Unfortunately, Dark Horse has published only three of the six volumes of Satsuma Gishiden. They’re keeping it in print, as I picked this up via an “offered again” listing in Previews. Maybe a second bite at the apple will generate enough interest to get the rest into our hands. I know I’m going to read as much of it as I can.

Previews review May 2010

There aren’t very many debuting titles in the May 2010 edition of the Previews catalog, but there are lots of new volumes of slow-to-arrive titles that are worth noting.

First up would have to be the omnibus collection of Yuki Urushibara’s Mushishi (Del Rey), offering volumes eight through ten. (It seems appropriate, since this is the title’s week in the Manga Moveable Feast spotlight.) These volumes were fairly meaty individually, and getting three in one for $24.99 seems like a really good value. (Page 292.) Edit: The tenth volume is the final one of the series, so this will conclude Mushishi in English.

Also on the “good manga for relatively cheap” front is the third volume of Kaoru Tada’s Itazura Na Kiss (Digital Manga). What mishaps will befall our dumb heroine Kotoko in pursuit of the smart boy of her dreams? (Page 295.)

I’m just going to come out and say that A Distant Neighborhood was my second favorite Jiro Taniguchi title of 2009. Topping that category was The Summit of the Gods, written by Yumemakura Baku. The second volume is due from Fanfare/Ponent Mon. (Page 304.)

A new volume of Adam Warren’s super-smart, addictive satire, Empowered (Dark Horse), is always good news. It seems like Warren gets around to dealing with the rather loose definition of mortality among the spandex set, and I’d much rather read his take than something like Blackest Night. (Page 35.)

Is it ungrateful of me to be really eager to see what Bryan Lee O’Malley does next? It’s not that I’m indifferent to the conclusion of the Scott Pilgrim saga (which arrives in the form of the sixth volume, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour from Oni Press), which I’m sure I’ll love as much as the previous five. But O’Malley’s been working on Scott for a long time. (Page 233.)

Before we jump fully into the “all-new stuff” department, I’ll bypass quickly to Dark Horse’s release of an omnibus edition of CLAMP’s Magic Knight Rayearth. You can get all three volumes of this magic-girl shôjo classic from the manga superstars. (Page 53.)

CMX publishes a lot of excellent shôjo from Hakusensha, but they branch out this month with Rika Suzuki’s Tableau Gate. It originally ran in Akita Shoten’s Princess Gold, and it’s about a guy who must help a girl capture some escaped tarot cards. I’m sort of a sucker for comics with tarot imagery, and I trust CMX’s taste in shôjo. (Page 129.)

I’m always game for a new graphic novel drawn by Faith Erin Hicks, and First Second is kind enough to provide one. It’s called Brain Camp, and it’s about oddballs dealing with mysterious forces, which is right in Hicks’s wheelhouse. The script is by Susan Kim and Laurence Klavan. (Page 305.)

It’s coming! It’s coming! Top Shelf’s 400-page collection of alternative manga, AX, finally hits the solicitation phase, and it should be very exciting to see. (Page 342.)

Vertical continues to branch out of classic manga mode with the English-language debut of Felibe Smith’s Peepo Choo. For those who’ve forgotten, Smith has been creating the series for Kodansha’s Morning Two magazine. It’s about a kid from Chicago who gets mixed up with a model from Tokyo and a lot of underworld mayhem. (Page 346.)

I don’t get a particularly good vibe off of Kaneyoshi Izumi’s Seiho Boys’ High School!, due out from Viz. It’s about the student body of an isolated, all-boys’ high school. Anyone who’s read more than one boys’-love title would know how these lads could deal with their isolation, but Izumi apparently decided to take a different approach. The series originally ran in Shogakukan’s Betsucomi.