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.)

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.

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.

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!

And here’s the running tally with some links:

“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”?

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.

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.

I don’t necessarily apply this rule in my own life, but it’s often said that accessories make the outfit. And this credo is rarely as true elsewhere as it is in shôjo manga. Those little touches that can add polish and sparkle to an otherwise drab ensemble also sometimes contain tremendous (and potentially disastrous) power. So as many of us contemplate how we’ll dress up for Halloween, I’ll devote today’s license request to that versatile wardrobe enhancer, the ribbon.

I’m speaking specifically of Hime-chan’s Ribbon, a ten-volume series written and illustrated by Megumi Mizusawa for Shueisha’s Ribon magazine (appropriately enough). It stars teen-aged tomboy Himeko Nonohara, who aspires to be more ladylike. She accesses a shortcut to achieving this goal when she meets her counterpart from a parallel Magical Kingdom, Princess Erika.

The princess must prove her royal worth by creating a magical object, giving it to a human, and proving that the object is useful. Erika’s creation is a ribbon that allows Hime to transform into anyone she likes for an hour. There are rules and pitfalls to the transformation, as there must be if you’re heading down the path of wacky, supernatural comedy. There’s also a talking stuffed animal that’s got Hime’s back, and may I just say that talking stuffed animals almost always make things better.

This all sounds like fairly standard magic-girl fare, but all indications that it’s really well-executed standard magic-girl fare. This likelihood is boosted by the company Mizusawa keeps: she’s apparently close friends with the gifted Ai (Paradise Kiss, Nana) Yazawa and Wataru (the desperately-in-need-of-license-rescue Marmalade Boy, Ultra Maniac) Yoshizumi. If you can at least superficially judge people by the company they keep, Mizusawa is at least superficially awesome.

Supplementing the evidence in the title’s favor is the fact that it’s been adapted into a stage musical. I think that there should be some kind of gentleperson’s agreement that every comic book that gets adapted in this fashion must be licensed and translated for English-language release just because. The Hime-chan musical apparently featured pop-idol group SMAP. I admit that I find Japan’s idol-manufacture industry positively terrifying, even scarier than Disney’s, and SMAP does nothing to reassure me, but I’m asking for the comic, not the original cast album.

So in the spirit of lighthearted disguise that Halloween engenders, I submit Hime-chan’s Ribbon for publisher consideration. If someone starts now, we could have a couple of volumes in print by next Halloween. Shueisha has a sample chapter posted here, and it looks really, really cute.

I thought I’d take a quick look at second volumes whose first installments I basically praised to the skies. Let’s see how they hold up, shall we?

The second volume of Karuho Shiina’s Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You (Viz) is as good as the first but in a somewhat different way. I could have been perfectly happy to read several volumes that were nothing but Shiina’s sly comedy of overturned expectations, watching spooky sweetheart Sawako try and win friends and influence people. That undercurrent remains, but Shiina focuses mainly on two of Sawako’s early converts. Rumors are circulating that Yano is a tramp and Yoshida’s a juvenile delinquent, and fingers are pointed to Sawako as the source. Yano and Yoshida rightly spot the absurdity in the notion of Sawako as a malicious gossip, but questions arise all the same. And they’re interesting questions about the nature of the girls’ friendship, if friendship indeed it is.

I can’t lie. The volume basically consists of the reader waiting for goodness to triumph and our heroines to recognize the truth of what’s in their hearts, but it’s a good kind of waiting. It’s anticipation rather than impatience, and the payoff is lovely, endearing and funny. Kimi ni Todoke is a quirky comedy, certainly, but it’s got heart. This is one of the most enjoyable new shôjo titles of the year.

The second volume of Kiminori Wakasugi’s Detroit Metal City (also Viz) is slightly more problematic, only because I had to factor out the revelatory experience of reading the first. Beyond being shockingly profane and subversively hilarious, there was the shock that someone actually licensed this thing. Add to that the shock that Viz – Viz! – licensed this wildly vulgar manga and translated it with apparent faithfulness, and that ups the ante even more. So a certain amount of letdown between the first and second installments seems inevitable.

But after factoring that out, and even though I missed the “I can’t believe I just read that” shocks from the first time around, it’s still very, very funny stuff. It’s still cruelly amusing to watch sweet, chic Soichi Negishi fail in all the things that actually matter to him and thrive in ways he finds repulsive. It’s like if Clark Kent hated Superman. Negishi’s death-metal alter ego Lord Krauser continues his ascent (descent?) into shock-rock stardom as Negishi’s dreams of Swedish pop stardom recede further and further. Add take-downs of rap, punk, and magical-realist independent film, and I’m a very happy reader. Nothing will ever match the first time, but that’s no reason to stop.

“C” is for…

I have to say that “C” is a pretty impressive letter. Lots of variety here. What are some of your favorite shôjo and sunjeong titles that start with the letter “C”?