You know what yôkai are, right? Mysterious, morally ambiguous sort-of-demons that crop up all over Japanese folklore? Chances are you do, even if you don’t automatically identify them by that term, because they’re all over manga. One of the reasons for that ubiquity is the subject of today’s license request, suggested by Kate Dacey.

According to Wikipedia, Shigeru Mizuki’s GeGeGe no Kitaro gets the credit for pushing yôkai into the pop-culture spotlight, at least in terms of manga. It was originally created for the manga rental market in 1959, then serialized in the late 1960s in some of Kodansha’s shônen magazines. It ended up being nine volumes long, and it’s been republished in other formats, as will happen with really popular series.

Our hero, Kitaro, is one of those supernatural types that just want everyone to be friends, Casper the friendly yôkai, if you will. He uses a wild arsenal of weapons and body parts to protect humans from the schemes of his kinfolk, aided by his father, a disembodied eyeball. There’s also his rat-like companion who hasn’t bathed in over 300 years and, for balance, a cat girl, plus lots of other yôkai, including an elderly landlady type. Among the things that almost always make comics better are elderly landlady types.

Three volumes of the series were published as a part of the defunct, possibly cursed Kodansha Bilingual Comics initiative. I say “possibly cursed” because, well-intentioned as the effort may have been, it’s left some really terrific-sounding comics in licensing limbo. Doraemon, Sazae-San, Section Chief Kôsaku Shima, and others are hanging out in this foreboding realm, so it’s hard not to view Kodansha Bilingual Comics with some superstition. (Of course, it’s also handy to trawl through their catalog and find entries for this feature.)

The series has been published in French as Kitaro le repoussant by Editions Cornélius. Pika Edition has published Mizuki’s two-volume Yôkai : Dictionnaire des monstres japonais. This is not to be confused with Kodansha International’s Yôkai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide, by Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda, but if you can’t read French or Japanese, it might be a good starting point. (It shows up as a result for Mizuki when you search on Amazon.)

I’m glad The New York Times is devoting more coverage to comics and graphic novels, I really am. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that their reportage consisted of recycled, rah-rah press releases from Marvel and DC. Now we get a weekly graphic book best seller list (which, say what you will, is no more opaque or arcane in its methodology than most of the other ones) and a fair number of meaty pieces from George Gene Gustines.

What we don’t get, at least not yet, is much qualitative discussion of comics from Japan. When you walk into the average bookstore and see at least half of the graphic-novel shelf space devoted to these comics, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect at least some coverage of the category beyond sales figures supplemented by sometimes carelessly written plot summaries (which are better than no content descriptions at all, obviously, but only just). At the same time, I don’t really want to force anyone to write about something that doesn’t interest them, because the outcome from that sort of thing never serves anyone very well.

But I must admit to a certain degree of irritation when I saw this Gift Guide of 2009 Graphic Novels and didn’t see a single comic from Japan. After venting on Twitter, Erica Friedman (@Yuricon) sagely suggested that manga bloggers just do it themselves. I’ll be posting mine on Thanksgiving Day (just in time for Black Friday), and I would be happy to link to anyone else’s suggestions or host yours if you don’t have a blog of your own. Just drop me a line at davidpwelsh at yahoo dot com if you’d like to throw out some recommended manga for the nerds (or non-nerds) in all of our lives.

“Eve’s cleavage and measurements also concern her.”

(From an article in the Fond du Lac Reporter on wary response to graphic-novel renderings of scripture, one recent example in particular.)

During last week’s round of perfectly justified disdain over the latest list of comics you can use to convert your female significant other to the one true hobby, Neil Gaiman also turned a year older, and I almost posted something in the Birthday Book category about how people who like comics should really read his Sandman series (Vertigo) when they get a chance, but is it really the first comic you’d hand to someone who’s never read a comic before? (Sandman almost always shows up on these lists, and it could be a good choice with the right victim. If the unwashed is into prose fantasy, chances are that person may have read one of Gaiman’s novels, and noting that Gaiman has also written a highly regarded, widely available comic book that covers many of his usual themes seems like one of the fairer conversion gambits out there.) I decided not to write it, because it seemed like too much work and not in the spirit of the Birthday Book shout-out, but I remained sorely tempted to simultaneously sing the title’s praises and express skepticism about comics evangelism, because how often do you get to do both at once?

Over at NPR’s excellent Monkey See blog, Glen Weldon has done precisely what I’d kind of thought about doing last week, but with much more rigor than I would have managed:

“But here’s the thing you don’t often hear about Gaiman’s series, which ran for 75 issues, helped establish and grow the marketplace for comics aimed at adults, and remains one of the most literate, imaginative and intricately plotted accomplishments in long-form comics storytelling out there:

“Its barrier-to-entry is remarkably high.”

Good stuff.

“F” is for…

Is there a finer letter in the Shôjo-Sunjeong Alphabet than the letter “F”? I can’t think of one at the moment.

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

Chris Mautner published an appreciative primer on the great Osamu Tezuka over at Robot 6, and it’s nicely timed. This week’s ComicList offers new volumes of one of Tezuka’s enduring classics and a series based on another of his icons.

Vertical keeps the medical madness coming with the eighth volume of Tezuka’s Black Jack. Mautner notes that the comic is “not for the squeamish, and like Astro Boy it’s very episodic, with Jack pulling off one fantastic operation after another. Those who can handle the occasionally bit of surgically sliced organs and flesh will find this to be a worth their time however.” I tend to fall into the squeamish category, and I find Black Jack to be a continuing source of delight, so take that for whatever it’s worth.

The very talented Naoki (Monster, 20th Century Boys) Urasawa’s re-imagining of Tezuka’s Astro Boy classic, “The Greatest Robot on Earth,” continues in the sixth volume of Pluto. It’s a nifty blend of science fiction and murder mystery, and it’s my second-favorite Urasawa series currently being published by Viz.

Of course, it’s not all Tezuka this week. There’s also Oishinbo: The Joy of Rice, written by Tetsu Kariya and illustrated by Akira Hanasaki. I’ve really been looking forward to this volume, since I’ve never been able to consistently cook rice well, and I’m hoping it has some good advice mixed in with the toxic father-son posturing. Even if it doesn’t help me with my rice issues, I’m sure I’ll enjoy reading it.

Speaking of things I’ve been enjoying, it’s nice to be able to get in on the ground floor of Yellow Tanabe’s Kekkeishi over at Viz’s Shonen Sunday site. The print version of the series is up to its 19th volume. The Shonen Sunday site has added some other fun series like Yakitate!! Japan (over-the-top bread-baking battles) and Case Closed (teen sleuth trapped in the body of a little kid).

The cheap among us will rejoice at the arrival of the softcover version of Rick Geary’s Treasury of XXth Century Murder: Famous Players, the Mysterious Death of William Desmond Taylor. I read a prose version of the story a long time ago, so it will be interesting to see Geary’s telling. Of course, it’s always interesting to see Geary’s telling of anything.

This week’s Flipped is up, examining Inio Asano’s perfectly likable, accomplished What a Wonderful World!, a two-volume set of loosely interconnected stories about the kind of people pictured above.

In Tuesday’s Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Kai-Ming Cha spoke to CMX’s Jim Chadwick about the imminent conclusion of Kaoru Mori’s lovely Emma. It’s a nice appreciation of the series, and I’m pleased to hear that the title “has been CMX’s most popular seller, having gone back to print numerous times, almost more than any other.”

Equally pleasing is the news that “Mori is currently at work on another series, Otoyomegatari, which takes place along the Silk Road trade routes. Chadwick described the series as ‘absolutely stunning. The artworks looks even more detailed than Emma, which is saying a lot.’”

When one is handed the object of a license request, even an obvious, inevitable one, it’s best not to ask questions and just plow forward, you know? Because, based on Emma, I would read a Mori-penned primer on oral hygiene, especially if she included some omake strips. (Mori does the best omake strips. Or at least she does my favorite omake strips.) And I would especially love to read another lavish Mori period piece like Otoyomegatari.

Otoyomegatari is currently being serialized in Enterbrain’s Fellows! magazine, about which I know next to nothing except that it’s seinen and that Otoyomegatari seems to be the big hit in rotation at the moment, just based on what’s to be seen on the magazine’s web site. There are some amazing videos of Mori drawing and inking pages from the book here. (That will hopefully make up for the fact that I can’t find many page scans to illustrate this request.)

There’s only one volume available to date, but I think fans of Mori’s Emma would probably be willing to tolerate a rather slow release schedule, if it meant getting more Mori. So will CMX manage to nab this one and have a matched Mori set?

“As to whether CMX has plans to acquire the license to Otoyomegatari, Chadwick says that he’d love for the company to continue their association with the artist, but have no comment outside of that. ‘We’ll just have to see what happens,’ He said.”

I hope CMX gets Otoyomegatari, as they were the ones who gave us Emma (and Shirley) in the first place, which is some excellent manga karma that should be rewarded.

There aren’t very many debuts in the November 2009 Previews catalog, but there are plenty of new volumes of excellent ongoing series. Let’s start with the new arrivals, though:

Dark Horse releases Okimono Kimoni, written and illustrated by Mokona with assistance from the rest of CLAMP. “a fun and lavishly illustrated book full of drawings and illustrations, interviews (including an interview with Ami of the J-pop duo Puffy AmiYumi!), and even short manga stories from the CLAMP artists.” So that’s your “eye-popping-ly pretty” alert for the month. (Page 43.)

I like Greek Mythology, and I thought George O’Connor’s Journey Into Mohawk Country had a lot of strong points. So I’ll definitely give O’Connor’s Olympians Volume 1: Zeus, King of the Gods (First Second) a look. “In OLYMPIANS, O’Connor draws from primary documents to reconstruct and retell classic Greek myths. But these stories aren’t sedate, scholarly works. They’re action-packed, fast-paced, high-drama adventures, with monsters, romance, and not a few huge explosions.” (Page 232.)

Alice in the Country of Hearts (Tokyopop), written by QuinRose and illustrated by Hoshino Soumei (Tokyopop) is triggering my “weird but crack-y” sensors: “Alice, who has fallen asleep in her garden, wakes up to find a white rabbit wearing clothes?! The rabbit forcefully drags Alice into the rabbit hole, where he turns into a young man with rabbit ears and leads her into a frightful world where the fairytale-like citizens wield dangerous weapons for an insidious cause… Unable to return home, will she be able to find happiness in a world full of danger and beautiful young men?” (Page 263.)

I can’t say that Mohiro Kitoh’s Bokurano: Ours is my favorite title in Viz’s SIGIKKI initiative, or even in the top five, but I’m always glad to see these titles see print, since it reassures me that the ones I really enjoy will follow sooner or later. “One summer, fifteen kids innocently wander into a nearby seaside cave. There they meet a strange man who invites them to play an exciting new video game. This game, he explains, pits one lone giant robot against a horde of alien invaders. To play the game, all they have to do is sign a simple contract. The game stops being fun when the kids find out the true purpose of their pact.” (Page 273.)

And now for the new volumes and new editions:

Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella

“The one-page cartoons illustrating Trondheim’s everyday observations and encounters are really delightful – witty, astute, low-key, sweet, and polished, but never fussy. He doesn’t seem to be in love with the sound of his own voice, and he doesn’t abandon his instincts as a storyteller because the content is casual and unstructured. It’s just so perfectly in scale, and the ultimate effect is one of effortlessness.”

Chris Butcher is understandably pleased that a third volume is on the way and points to the announcement at NBM’s blog. I’m a little surprised; NBM usually drops a really good book during the last week of December to mess up everyone’s hastily posted “Best of…” lists, but it looks like they’re getting a jump on 2010’s editions instead.