So here’s a cool thing! To celebrate The Louvre (the renowned Museum in France), the Louvre and a French Publisher co-published a series of graphic novels with The Louvre as the subject. Comics / bande desinee / graphic novels / manga, calll them what you will, these works have been fascinating to read and enjoy and have to date included Nicolas DeCrecy’s Glacial Period, Marc-Antonie Matthieu’s The Museum Vaults, Yslaire’s Sky Over the Louvre, abd Liberge’s On the Odd Hours.

Now NBM brings us the first Japanese co-production, and it’s got a hell of a pedigree. Created by Hirohiko Araki, author of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, comes Rohan at the Louvre, featuring ‘Rohan,’ a super-powered manga creator from the Jojo’s series in a stand-alone, spin-off volume. Araki is known across Japan and Europe for the Jojo’s series as well as for his fashion and art works, including a 2011 collaboration with Gucci to celebrate the brand’s 90th Anniversary this year.

This is kind of a big deal! The solicitation text for the book, as well as a preview of the volume, follows.

More at http://nbmpub.com/

–

ROHAN AT THE LOUVRE
Hirohiko Araki

After Glacial Period and The Sky Over the Louvre comes another completely original story with stunning art by a leading mangaka. Rohan, a young mangaka, meets a beautiful mysterious young woman with a dramatic story. Seeing him draw, she tells him of a cursed 200 year old painting using the blackest ink ever known from a 1000 year old tree the painter had brought down without approval from the Emperor who had him executed for doing so. The painting meanwhile had been saved from destruction by a curator of the Louvre. Rohan forgets this story as he becomes famous but ten years later, visiting Paris, he takes the occasion to try and locate the painting. Little does he know how violently powerful the curse of it is until he has the museum unearth it from deep within its archival bowels?

7 ¼ x 10 3/8, 128pp. full color hardcover, $19.99 ISBN 978-1-56163-615-0

–

Preview Page One (read right-to-left):

Preview Page Two:

See the complete 4-page preview at http://www.nbmpub.com/comicslit/rohan/pre1.html.

- Chris @ The Beguiling

The first issue of Shonen Jump in North America.

I like Viz a lot and so this totally pains me to say, but I’m actually pretty bummed about the move to digital-only on Shonen Jump [ref].

Yes, I absolutely think it is a good move to combat piracy. Yes, I think it will significantly improve the reading experience of thousands of die hard fans. I think it being successful will pave the way for other digital partnerships and initiatives at Viz, another good thing. There are a lot of up-sides to this move, and I don’t want to take away from them, but there’s a huge downside to this move that I haven’t seen discussed yet.

The move to digital pulls cheap, accessible comics off of the newsstands of huge parts of North America, where there might not otherwise be comics or manga. Shonen Jump sold in Walmart. It sold in corner stores, it sold (probably terribly but still) in comic stores, it sold to people without Very Expensive pieces of digital technology. It’s read by kids–and teens, and adults too–but it’s $5 and 300 pages of action, adventure, and even romance, and it has all sorts of articles, free Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and more, it is perfect for kids. I know kids read it, and I’m going to come right out and say that it is the single best way that the medium of comics reaches younger readers–100-200,000 copies of Shonen Jump available on magazine racks across North America.

Some kids don’t have credit cards or Apple digital devices or much more than $5 to spend on a comic, and Shonen Jump is how we as a medium get that $5.  $5 at Marvel buys you about 1.25 issues of Ultimate Spider-Man. It’ll get you 1.66 issues of Teen Titans over at DC. But at Viz $5 gets you 300 pages of new comics every month. There’s just nothing else like Shonen Jump.

The folks at Viz are smart and passionate people and they love manga, I have no doubt they’ve explored every angle and come to the conclusion that this is the best move on a number of levels. I’m not second-guessing them here. They published this anthology, aimed at kids and tweens and teens, this wonderful ambassador of manga and of comics, of visual storytelling, and they’ve done so for round-about 10 years now. That is a longer and more sustained commitment to comics outreach than Marvel or DC have managed, combined, since Crisis. Viz deserve a huge round of applause for that, and I hope those last few print issues of Shonen Jump will be appropriately celebratory for their fantastic accomplishment.

I just wish it didn’t have to end, because frankly, comics needs Shonen Jump in print every month.

- Christopher

Students from Carlton University at the Manga Wall we donated from The Beguiling. Photo from here.

The time has really, really flown by. It’s already October 7th, and that means just 3 days left for the exhibit JAPAN/JAPON at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa (actually, in Gatineau, just across the river from Ottawa).

I spent a few years going back and forth with Alan Elder and Claire Champ from the Museum, and they were delightful, passionate people, interested in painting a broad and varied picture of Japanese culture, past and present. I was delighted to provide curatorial assistance to this project, and to work with The Beguiling to help provide this fantastic wall of manga, both showcasing contemporary Japanese culture and encouraging visitors to interact with it themselves.

It was just about a year ago that I was in Japan, scouting and sourcing some of the material–manga, anime cels, books, scripts, etc.–that would eventually make its way into the exhibition. It was such a great trip, and I have to say I learned a lot about the early days of manga through the dedicated acquisition of time-period specific works. I’ve been hit with a wave of nostalgia for that trip, now that I’m just a few weeks away from taking my next one.

Anyhow, if you’re in the area this weekend, I hope you’ll give one last look at the exhibition before it disappears. I’m also hoping that it proved popular enough to warrant touring, as there are a number of fantastic pieces of art and design history in that collection that should be seen by Japanophiles everywhere.

Thanks again to Alan, Claire, and everyone at the CMC of the opportunity.

- Chris

“It was going to be an adventure action story starring attractive superheroes. But that is when 9-11 and the war broke out, and that made me think about violence and justice. The story changed…”
- Taiyo Matsumoto, on the genesis of No. 5, from the app-exclusive interview

Read my interview with Taiyo Matsumoto

Get the iPad app for No. 5 complete (bilingual English/Japanese)

Thank you to Deb Aoki and M.K. for the wonderful opportunity.

- Christopher

“I don’t really care for sports, and yet, this manga isriveting! This is about a high school baseball team. It has love triangles, fully-fleshed out characters, a story that subverts shonen manga tropes. It’s a really naturalistic, slice of life story.

“It’s so rare to find a book that just breathes like this one does. It’s a wonder to spend time in the world that Adachi has created — a suburban Japan of endless spring and summer. If you hate baseball, if you love baseball, even if you’re indifferent about the sport, so long as you like great comics then Cross Game is for you.”

Over at manga.about.com, Deb Aoki recaps our Best and Worst Manga of 2011 Panel from the San Diego Comic Con, apparently minus the ‘worst’ choices. I personally didn’t read enough manga last year to have a ‘worst’, maybe Bakuman would have been my pick for most frustrating, but even then it’s incredibly well-crafted and interesting.

I really like Adachi’s Cross Game (as you can see above), and me and my fellow panelists go over a bunch of our pics. Go check it out!

- Christopher

Do you realize we live in an era of manga publication where we got a pre-war manga collection by a master creator that mostly no one even knew the name of* 10 years ago? And it’s 300 pages in a colour HC for $30? That’s fucking crazy. Tell me of 10 years ago that, and I would’ve called you an asshole for lying to me.

We are blessed with quality material. Please support it with your dollars as the book hits stores over the next few weeks. Tank Tankuro from Press Pop Inc., distributed by Last Gasp.

- Chris
* In North America, obvs.

THE BEST AND WORST MANGA OF 2011

at the San Diego Comic Con (or, more properly, Comic-Con International: San Diego). I will be catching right-the-hell-up on all of my manga reading in order to be as informed as possible, but will clearly be schooled by my fellow panelists. It should be fun! And it would be delightful to see you there. Here are the deets:

Best and Worst of Manga 2011
Friday, July 22nd
Room: 26AB
6:30p.m. – 7:30p.m.

- Christopher

Tekkonkinkreet Screenwriter Anthony Weintraub alerted me to the amazing fact that Taiyo Matsumoto is auctioning off an original piece of Tekkon Kinkreet artwork, in support of Tsunami and Quake Relief in Japan. It’s a Japanese auction site, but Google Translate should be able to give you the jist of it:

http://page3.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/c291243779

This double page-splash of Black and White (the leads of the book) was originally drawn in 1997, and looks to be made of pastels or something? Pencil crayon? It’s just awesome. As of writing, the auction is up to 211,000 yen, or about $2423 Canadian. I cannot afford this, sadly, but maybe some of you out there can. Bidding ends on Sunday.

Incidentally, if you’ve got the Viz All-in-one edition…

Take off the dust jacket and flip it over, and you can see your very-own copy of this illustration :)

- Christopher

Early Yoshihiro Tatsumi! More cool stuff coming later.

- Chris

TANK TANKURO: PERWAR WORKS
by GAJO SAKAMOTO

Japanese Manga Classic Masterpiece!
Roots of Astro Boy!
The Pioneering Robot Manga from Pre-World War II Japan.
COVER DESIGN BY: CHRIS WARE
Language: English

$29.99. This Spring.

http://presspop.blogspot.com/

- Chris

“One of the things I most hate to see on manga-related forums are comments like, “I’m interested in this series, but I don’t know if they’re going to cancel it, so I’ll wait a bit and see if it continues.”

“You know what practically GUARANTEES that something will get dropped from publication? Not putting your money where your mouth is and picking up volume 1.

“This sounds snarky, and I know everyone has to prioritize his or her budget, especially in tight times, but seriously—this is a business that relies heavily on perceived demand, and how do we know there’s a demand for a title if no one is picking it up?  I think there’s an idea in the fandom that the manga market is a lot bigger than it actually is, and if you pass on a volume for now, enough people will still buy it that it’ll stick around for a while. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case–Manga is a hit-driven business, and most series only get one chance to get out there and succeed.”

- Tokyopop Representative “TPHENSHU” on the realities of manga publishing

Someone named “TPHENSHU” on the Tokyopop website addresses the question of why certain series “go on hiatus”, by turning the practice around and blaming it on the fans.

See, here’s the thing. The rest of that article (http://www.tokyopop.com/TPHenshu/tp_article/3180353.html) is actually a really straight-forward, plainly spoken explanation of how book publication, distribution, and sales works. It’s a smart explanation, and incredibly helpful. Some of the finer points are disagreeable to me personally (particularly the enthusiasm for print-on-demand, though that at least is somewhat tempered by describing it as an ‘emerging’ technology) but at the core of the article is a very real problem; the combatative attitude between this Tokyopop employee–and really Tokyopop in general–and their fans. You don’t start off an answer to a frequently asked question on your website by complaining about your customers. You don’t do any one of dozens of weird aggressive things Tokyopop has done over the past 10 years or so (running Sailor Moon in the same magazine as Parasyte? Really?), but that’s a big one.

And the thing is I don’t disagree with the frustration expressed by the TP staffer. Standing behind the counter at the store, it can be brutal to hear customers say things like “I really like that series but I’m not going to buy it because they might drop it half way through.” Hell, it’s even more angering to hear a customer (or potential customer) say “I’m not going to buy that because I already read it online.” But if I responded to such comments with, say, “People like you saying things like that is what’s killing manga!” I would get creeped-out, blank looks as the once-potential-customers backed out of the store, never to return.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is unacceptable.

If you want to be “that guy” who attempts to treat every uninformed statement by a potential customer as a “teachable moment,” go ahead. His name is Jeff Anderson. (Admittedly I do pick my battles on this front, only engaging folks on the subject of piracy who, after saying something dumb, twig to the fact that saying something like that out loud was at least slightly socially inappropriate in a store dedicated to selling such material.)

But look at the history of manga publishing in North America and you can see it’s filled with unexpected and unfair treatment of customers, particularly in regards to series dropped in the middle of runs. Even putting aside the incredibly poor business decision of randomly insulting your customers, how can you really blame anyone who’s had their heart broken when it comes to a favourite manga series for being cautious on future series? A reader who has 14 volumes of a never-to-be-completed 26 volume series looks at those books on their shelf and feels personally and financially betrayed, a loss of hundreds of dollars, dozens of hours, all from a company who won’t even acknowledge the fact that they’re cancelling the series publicly, or the reasons for it. Manga publishers’ behaviour regarding series cancellation (“going on hiatus”), and Tokyopop’s in particular, have been absolutely abhorrent. For them to criticize their fans for ill feelings that they created?

Poor form.

- Christopher

Censoring Manga for Fun and Profit
Featuring Christopher Butcher from The Beguiling
Wed Feb 23, 2011, 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
@ Lillian H. Smith Library, 239 College Street (just east of Spadina)
FREE, Registration required

There are the changes you know about, when Japanese manga (comics and graphic novels) make their way across the Pacific to North America–translation, localization, touch-ups–and the changes you might not. Beguiling Bookstore manager Christopher Butcher talks about the many surprising and unfortunate ways manga are censored in North America, as artistic integrity is sacrificed out of fear and a desire to maximize profit–and what you can do about it! The presentation includes ideas and images intended for a mature audience. Register in person or call 416-393-7746. A Freedom to Read week event.

–

Hi everybody! Chris here. As you can see above, I’m going to be doing a talk on manga censorship, why it’s done, and what you as readers can do about it (hint: the answer isn’t scanlations). I actually gave a short interview about the talk to Vit Wagner at The Toronto Star yesterday, and you can see it online (and theoretically in the paper–though I missed my chance to grab a copy) at thestar.com.

I just wanted to point out (as I will in the talk) that this event owes a huge debt to Jason Thompson, who has really pioneered this discussion and whose presentation I’m using as a springboard for my own. Jason has very kindly allowed me use of his research and images, and I’m extremely grateful. I highly recommend that you check out what he’s had to say on the matter of censorship at these links:

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/editorial/2008-12-11/christopher-handley/jason-thompson
http://www.tcj.com/manga/sakura-con-2010-censorship-in-manga/
http://khyungbird.livejournal.com/ – His Livejournal

…and to check out his weekly column House Of 1000 Manga every week at:

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/house-of-1000-manga/

As for my talk, it’s going to go after particularly heinous examples of censorship, get into some of the reasons behind the changes, and into a larger discussion about censorship and manga in regards to the new laws in Tokyo and with our own beloved Canada Customs. It should be a lively discussion. Oh, and there will be adult images shown, so get parental permission before coming out kids!

- Chris

Hi there! My name is Christopher Butcher and in addition to running this fine blog, I’m also the Director of the 2011 Toronto Comic Arts Festival, or TCAF as we call it. TCAF is an annual comics event held in Toronto, Canada, inside the massive Toronto Reference Library. It attracts about 12,000 people over two days, and features readings, panel discussions, interviews, gallery exhibitions, and a massive exhibition of talented cartoonists from around the world, selling and displaying their wares. The next Festival is May 7th and 8th, 2011, and you can find out more about it at http://www.torontocomics.com.

Earlier this week, it was my great pleasure to announce that TCAF will be welcoming acclaimed Japanese manga creator Usamaru Furuya to the 2011 Festival. Furuya-san will be on hand to support his brand new English-language manga Lychee Light Club, published by Vertical Inc. and which will be debuting at TCAF. Furuya-san’s series for VIZ Media‘s Shonen Jump Advanced line, Genkaku Picasso, will also be finishing its three-volume serialization in May with the third volume possibly making an early appearance at the show. We appreciate the support of Vertical Inc., VIZ Media, and Japanese publisher Ohta Books in making this appearance happen–it’s a rare and unique thing to have one manga creator at a North American event–last week we announced the fabulous Natsume Ono as a Featured Guest–but to have two such talented and Japanese cartoonists is frankly unprecedented.

I want to talk a little bit about Furuya-san’s work. First and foremost, he’s one of my personal favourite cartoonists. He’s a unique, compelling, and incredibly talented creator with a vivid back-catalogue of work. His manga is incredibly varied, first appearing in North America in the cutting edge manga magazine Pulp with the series Short Cuts, published by VIZ Media. This humourous exploration of Japanese youth culture, and where it intersects with the ‘adult’ world, moved rapidly between strips, and sometimes in the same strip, from outré to shocking to laugh-out-loud funny to bizarrely touching, and is fondly remembered amongst alt-manga fans… myself included. Quite honestly much of the deeper appreciation for Japanese culture that I’ve developed came out of Short Cuts and its serialization in Pulp, a fact which is doubtlessly horrifying several of the people who read this. It shouldn’t be so surprising though–Short Cuts engaged an emerging Japanese youth culture and also explained it to a larger Japanese audience, and to have something like that translated for a North American audience was about as ‘inside’ and ‘authentic’ as you could get. Floppy-socked Japanese school girls, taking paid dates and listening to the hottest visual rock bands, all of this is taken for granted as a staple of Japanese culture from a North American vantage point here in 2011; in 2000 it was revelatory for me. The serialization in Pulp and the two-volume collection published by VIZ Media were enormously affecting; I’ve read and lent the series out many times.

An excerpt from Short Cuts. © Usamaru Furuya

A page from Palepoli. © Usamaru Furuya. Click for full size.

His debut manga Palepoli ran in the seminal underground manga magazine Garo, and has been lightly excerpted in North America in the sadly out of print works Secret Comics Japan (an amazing anthology of alternative Japanese comcis featuring the likes of Junko Mizuno and others) and Tokyo Edge (a mostly-text guide to Japanese underground culture written by the Editors of Pulp). Furuya’s mix of surrealism, superior craft, and an unwillingness to be bound by social mores in Palepoli was instantly appealing to me, and repeated rereadings of those precious few pages have revealed even greater depth, meaning, and humour. I wish, one day, that the series would be translated into English.

And that was it for a while.

Pulp sadly folded, taking with it the majority of alt- and underground manga releases for a little while, and seriously stalled manga-for-grownups for a little while, and the industry became very focused on boys adventure comics and girls romance comics for a little while. Not a bad thing, but not generally where my interests lie. Luckily Furuya’s career continued unabated in Japan, and surprisingly, in France. Owing to our bilingual heritage we stock French comics (including manga) at The Beguiling where I work, and new works from Furuya would appear from time to time. His manga are championed by Nouvelle Manga movement originator Frederic Boilet (whose own comics have been published in English by Fanfare/Ponent-Mon), and consequently where anglophones had a 9 year gap between Furuya projects, popular series like La Musique de Marie, Le Cercle du Suicide, and the recent Tokyo Magnitude 8 have continued to impress French audiences. His work is also very popular amongst scanlators and the grey market, it must be said, though I feel like popularizing that fact will hinder future releases of his work.

On that note, it was on my trips to Japan starting in 2007 that I started picking up Japanese editions of Furuya’s manga. By Japanese language skill is still almost non-existent, but anyone who’s looked at one of Furuya’s manga will agree that you can get a lot out of the drawings. I own 10 or 11 of his works in Japanese, and I’d love for them all to be replaced one day with English editions. His 51 Ways To Save Her was one of the announced but unreleased works from the doomed CMX manga line. Will we see it one day?

Recently, surprisingly… almost bizarrely, Furuya showed up again at VIZ with Genkaku Picasso, a gloriously demented short manga series about the inner lives of teenagers, and a boy tasked by God with helping the lives of those around him using his profound artistic talent. One element of Furuya’s work I haven’t touched on is his incredible draftsmanship. His work has a clarity and skill that is above average even in Japan, and he’s an expert at the human figure (especially cute girls…). He’s also incredibly creative, drawing objects and situations that most people couldn’t conceive of… and when you’re drawing the dreamish, nightmarish inner worlds of teenagers, that is a skill that will serve you very well. The series looks great, and is hilarious and disturbing and entertaining… of much more interest to an older audience than the “Shonen Jump Advanced” tag might imply.

Which brings us to Lychee Light Club, debuting at TCAF from Vertical Inc. I’ve got the Japanese version, and while gorgeous it’s certainly bizarre–learning that the series is actually a comedy (a dark comedy), set against the beautifully rendered violence and gore of the original? Well that’s going to add a lot I feel. But really, let me say again, the book is gorgeous. I’m really looking forward to reading it in English.

It was also just announced that Vertical has picked up another 3 volume series from Furuya, debuting this September and being released every two months, so I have that to look forward to too! And quite honestly, so do you. I feel incredibly lucky to share the work of one of my favourite manga-ka with all of you, and for those of us who’ll be in Toronto this May getting to meet him will be an additional thrill. Even if you can’t come, make sure to check out Genkaku Picasso, track down the two trade paperbacks of Short Cuts, and pick up Lychee Light Club when it appears in stores this spring.

And learn French. Musique de Marie and Suicide Circle are highly unlikely to be released in English.

For more on Furuya, check out:

- Unofficial Website: http://www4.airnet.ne.jp/mikami/UsamaruFuruya/en/index.html

- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Usamaru-Furuya/204452936604

- Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usamaru_Furuya

- Lambiek (Short Cuts era): http://lambiek.net/artists/f/furuya_u.htm

- Anime News Network: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/people.php?id=7174

- Future Shipwreck’s Appreciation: http://futureshipwreck.com/2010/07/usamaru-furuya/

- Christopher

So, surprising no one (I guess) I am heading back to Tokyo today for a business trip with as much ‘pleasure’ as I can cram in there as well. Buying more stuff for The Beguiling, hopefully doing a bit of TCAF business, that sort of thing. As always it’s going to be a hoot.

The big change is that all of my photo-taking, and subsequent photo-blogging, will now be done with this beauty of a camera–the Olympus PEN E-PL1–which I am test-driving for the trip. Thanks to various folks for helping me set that one up, I should have some great photos to share this week and next.

Meanwhile, before I had a chance to break out the Olympus (shot with my Fuji Finepix), I spotted this rack at the exceptionally well-stocked-for-graphic-novels airport bookstore. Archie Marries…, Bone and Amulet on the bottom shelf, and… is that?

…yes! This is an airport bookstore that actually stocks Jason Shiga’s MEANWHILE…. That is awesome! I mean, it’s on a shelf with “Herman Classics”, which is less awesome, but still! And just around the corner on the same display…

Scott Pilgrim! Pokemon! And… THE NEW CHARLES BURNS!? This airport bookstore has more copies of these books in-stock and displayed than _most comic book stores_, which is why _most comic book stores_ make me incredibly sad. But wait there’s more!

The staff picks! Since they’re 95% DC, I’m tempted to say that DC’s Cdn distributor bought and paid for this section, but either way, that’s some great, prominent display for these books! That’s pretty incredible and an auspicious start to this trip…

On that note, let me share a couple more pics with you.

These are two pictures that I took of the Taiyo Matsumoto section of my bookshelf, just so they’d be on the camera when I was out shopping and I’d know what I already had!

Top photo (l to r): TekkonKinkreet Animation Book 2-pack, PEN magazine with comic article, 5-issues “Black and WHite” mini-series, Tekkon Kinkreet All-In-One Edition, GoGo Monster, Black & White 1-3, ZERO 1-2, “Brothers of Japan”, a novel Matsumoto did the cover for, Hana-Otoko 1-3 Special box set, Hana-Otoko v1, Blue Spring, Le Samurai Bambou 1-2 (French), Number 5 Omnibus Editions 1-2 & 4, No. 5 v3 (French), No. 5 1-2 (English), No. 5 volume 1 Gift-box edition with figure (Japanese), Cosmic Comix Magazine with Matsumoto interview, 100 & 101 Matsumoto art books, Something(?), French colour comics album.

Bottom photo (l to r): PING PONG Film book box-set edition with Paddle & Rubik’s Cube, Ping Pong 1-2 & 5, Ping Pong Special Edition Oversized version 1-3, and then a bunch of other stuff. Oh, and Bambook Samurai Volume 7 is on the top there, laying on it’s side.

Click for larger!

Alright, I’ve got a plane to catch. Expect lots of blogging this week! Take care!

- Christopher

I realize that this is a harsh statement, and I’ve refrained from making it for a while now in the hopes that the bumpy path they’ve had would smooth out, and that they might acknowledge and visibly attempt to fix some of their many, many problems. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case as of yet, and today’s announcement of an increase in their responsibilities is, at best, baffling.

The problems with Kodansha USA (also known as Kodansha Comics), as I see them:

1. Every single one of their releases to date have missed their shipping date, and they’re already on a _very_ generous shipping schedule. The result is that some of the bestselling perennials in manga publishing–AKIRA and GHOST IN THE SHELL have been unavailable for nearly 2 years now, and there are no answers to customer concerns why this is so.

2. The pricing on their work seems woefully out of touch with both the realities of the market, the popularity of the material, and their own Japanese pricing strategies. (Part of the blame on this goes to Dark Horse, who set those prices… nearly 10 years ago.)

3. Their reprints of AKIRA and GHOST IN THE SHELL are inferior to the Dark Horse versions in terms of print quality (smearing, reproduction) and paper stock (thinner paper). For the same price.

4. They went back and released an older, less-complete version of Ghost In The Shell, hurting saleability of the title.

5. They’ve been utterly and completely uncommunicative to the press. They don’t even seem to have a website.

So the news this morning that Kodansha USA will take over publishing all of Del Rey Manga’s many bestselling titles? Disappointment bordering on dread. Del Rey’s Tsubasa, XXX-Holic, and Negima, continue to be some of our bestselling manga at the store, and the high-degree of care in preparation that goes into fan-favourite and critically acclaimed titles like Moyasimon, and Mushishi is phenomenal. I have my issues with their publishing set-up (mostly around their scheduling of less profitable titles) but in short, they’re a solid, professional publisher producing great work in a timely fashion and with a great deal of thought about the market and industry–everything Kodansha-USA has shown themselves not to be.

The only thing that gives me hope is this quote:

“In an e-mail interview with Irie, he said that while Kodansha USA Publishing will now directly oversee the publishing of Kodansha-originated English-language manga licenses, Kodansha still plans to “to work with local partners in foreign territories.” He said that Random House will continue, “handling much of the publishing side, such as editorial, production, sales and marketing.” Irie will be based in New York along with KUP general manager Kumi Shimizu.” - From Publisher’s Weekly

To me, that reads as though Random House will be packaging the books for Kodansha USA, which is very different, monetarily, than their current set-up. See, publishers generally absorb the costs of “editing, producing, selling and marketing” manga. If they’re producing that work for someone else, they get _paid_ for it, which is a real reversal! Also, if Del Rey is going to continue marketing, I’m curious as to why Ali Kokmen was let go…

Elsewhere in that interview it is mentioned that the head of Del Rey Manga, Dallas Middaugh, will be moving over to Random House Publisher Services to handle distribution of the line (and I’m glad they’re keeping Dallas Middaugh, he’s very good at his job). So in effect, things will continue more-or-less as they are, except:

- Kodansha USA will be making the publisher-type decisions, like which series get released and how often
- Del Rey no longer has to pay for licenses
- Del Rey is now likely getting paid to package the books for Kodansha
- Del Rey is making a cut on the distribution of the books but the majority of the money’s going to Kodansha.

It looks like Del Rey has divested themselves of _all_ of the risk of manga publishing, moving into a packaging and distribution relationship. Smart move for the bean-counters at Del Rey! And I guess Kodansha USA gets to call themselves a publisher, which I assume will impress someone back in Japan, but they’re not really doing anything other than putting their logo on the book, so far as I can tell.

On paper this looks like it could work out… but then on paper communism looks like a viable option on paper too–it all falls apart when you get to the real world. As I’ve shown, Kodansha USA has a terrible record at absorbing existing licenses and shepherding them to the market. Will Del Rey Manga’s professionalism counteract Kodansha USA’s track record? I honestly don’t know.

But going by that track record, it could be as long as a year before current titles resume their serialization, if AKIRA’s re-publication schedule is anything to go by. I guess all involved have got lots and lots of time to figure it all out?

- Christopher

Cover Detail from the September 2010 issue of Japanese Gay Men's Magazine "Badi", a special spotlight issue on Gengoroh Tagame. Art by Gengoroh Tagame.

"Deiri" illustration by Gengoroh Tagame. ©2010.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised this week to discover that the insanely talented gay manga artist Gengoroh Tagame has a blog, and one in English at that! You can find it online at http://www.tagame.org/enews/. This is pretty great as it’s a rare thing for a mangaka to have an English language blog, and Tagame is one of the most talented and easily the most famous mangaka producing gay-themed work (real gay, as opposed to yaoi-gay).

For those of you who not in the know, Tagame is best recognized for the muscular physique he gives his characters, which echoes the North American “Bear” gay subculture and the Japanese “Gachi Muchi” gay subculture, and is generally referred to as “Bara”. The majority of Tagame’s work is marked by strong themes of B&D and S&M, even leading into some verrrrry extreme situations. I heartily recommend checking out his website at http://www.tagame.org/frame_new.html and for the strong-willed and strong-stomached, check out his galleries.

Tagame is a bit of a trailblazer in that his web-presence has been English-friendly for years and years now, much moreso than any other gay manga artist (or almost any manga artist in general). While one of these days I’m really going to have to learn Japanese, for now I’m very happy that Tagame-san has made himself more accessible to his English-speaking fans.

Page from "Virtus" by Gengoroh Tagame. ©2010.

On that note, one of the most interesting posts about his accessibility came a few months back on his English-language blog, entitled “The Groundless Rumour About Publishing of English version of my comics:”

A little while ago, my friend told me the groundless rumor about me and my works.
It was a big surprise for me, so I think that I must correct them officially.

[the rumor]
Tagame does not want to publish his works in English.
In fact, he had refused the offer to publish his book from Tom of Finland foundation.

[the truth]
The rumor is false. I’ve been always wanting that my comics will be translated into English and will be published on magazines or books.And I’ve never been proposed such publishing program directory from Tom of Finland foundation.

Then, why my books have not been published in English? The reason is simple. If a proven publisher offers to me to publish my books in English, I welcome it. In fact, until now, French, Italian and Spanish publishers had contacted to me to publish my comic book in their language. I welcomed them, so my books in these three languages are being published now. But I’ve never been contacted from American, UK’s and Canadian publishers who want to publish my book in English. That is an only reason of why my comic books in English have been never published before.

For your more questions about that, I open the comment form of this post.
(But please write with very plain and easy English! I’m not so good at your language!)

- Gengoroh Tagame [link]

So there you go folks. Which one of you forward-thinking publishers is going to step up to the plate?

- Chris

Update: An English translation of Satoshi Kon’s final words–a note he wrote to the public in his final days whilst dying of cancer–has been posted. It is heart-breaking, and honestly beautiful. Go read it: http://makikoitoh.com/journal/satoshi-kons-last-words

Amazing Director. Of the films he’s contributed to, I’ve seen and enjoyed Roujin-Z, Millennium Actress, Memories (The “Magnetic Rose” short), and Paprika. I own most everything else but haven’t gotten around to watching it just yet… no time like the present eh? He’s also a very strong manga creator, it’s a real shame none of his work has been released in English as of yet. Sad day.

Had the sad news first: http://twitter.com/AkiYanagi

http://board.otakon.com/index.php?showtopic=20122

http://www.uk-anime.net/newsitem/Director_Satoshi_Kon_passes_away.html

http://www.japanator.com/paprika-director-satoshi-kon-dies-at-age-47-16279.phtml

- Christopher

Drawn & Quarterly has acquired North American English rights to two graphic novel memoirs,Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and NonNonB?, by one of Japan’s most acclaimed and legendary manga-kas, Shigeru Mizuki, it was announced today by Chris Oliveros, Editor-in-Chief, Acquiring Editor and Publisher of Drawn & Quarterly. – Drawn & Quarterly Blog, http://bit.ly/9idG4m

Best news of the show so far!

- Chris

I want to write about it first and foremost because I thought the first two volumes (now available in better comic and book stores everywhere) are really wonderful stuff. They’re inspiring and strange–a mix of magical realism and science-fiction that’s rare in North American publishing. Essentially, the story is about a group of teenagers that are vying to be a part of Japan’s revamped space program. They enter a highschool set to train young people to go into space (or become support crew) and have trials and tribulations, but it’s set against an awful disaster in the space program that cost hundreds of lives. It’s got drama and pathos, there’s a lot of great research into space and astronaut training that’s evident in the stories, and the lead character’s wistful optimism and is-he-real/isn’t-he-real imaginary friend keeps you guessing at the whole thing. I’m eagerly anticipating the third volume, and the fourth, and the rest of the series really. :)

Now, unfortunately just liking a book isn’t really enough to get me to blog lately (as it is I am late for work typing this out). Yesterday in mentioning this book on twitter, I couldn’t help but mention that people should try it despite it’s cover… And I felt I should elaborate on that a little. As a retailer, I’ve attemped to share my enthusiasm with many customers, but I’ve been thwarted somewhat because… well… you can see that cover right?

The audience for the book in North America is probably older teens and people in their 20s (at least I hope so because the teen market is saturated and full of thieves…). But more importantly, as part of Vertical’s line (folks who have heretofore only published work intended for adults, primarily by Osamu Tezuka) there’s a natural adult crossover. As a bookseller, I look at the people who enjoy Sci-Fi and Drama, people who might’ve really loved the critical-hit / sales-flop PLANETES and want something new to read. But every time I put a copy of Twin Spica in someone’s hands, they take one look at the cover and go “that’s not really my thing”. Why? Well it’s got a moe little girl on a magical background holding glowing orbs… It’s precious, and awkward, and looks verrrrry young by North American standards.

But the book is great.

So I’ve been offering up a money-back guarantee and at that point most people “bite” because I’ve got a good track record with recommendations and there’s almost no risk. But I’m not in every store. I mean, I heard about the book months and months ago through a licensing announcement, and I got excited, and then I saw the art and was convinced that there were two series in Japan called Twin Spica. I’m on board and even I have reservations.

Of course, none of this is to admonish Vertical–far from it. They produced a version very faithful to the Japanese edition, and seeing as this series has a large fan-base they might’ve ended up in a situation similar to the one with Yen Press and the Spice & Wolf novels. Hardcore fans don’t really care if the cover of a book makes it difficult to sell, they want it to be as close to the Japanese as possible without bothering to learn Japanese. They don’t really get that making something a success in the marketplace means that more of that thing can keep coming out in the marketplace, for the most part, and from what I can tell Twin Spica has some very hardcore fans. I don’t think it was in anyone’s best interests to alter the cover design if it meant alienating the people most likely to buy it, but at the same time, I’m kind of in a pickle because that book? Tough sell to the casual manga fan, the 20+ year old manga fan, the non-manga-fan who’d probably enjoy it. Hell, it doesn’t look like any other book Vertical has ever published. Which isn’t even a bad thing. But it does make it pretty difficult to give it a retail context.

Anyway, the point of all of this is: Read Twin Spica. It’s a delightful series that’s off to a great start, and like Vertical’s other recent releases Peepo Choo and Chi’s Sweet Home it’s an interesting step for the company to take, and one they should be rewarded for with sales. Because you really can’t judge this book by its cover.

(You knew that was coming, right?)

- Christopher

An international coalition of Japanese and American-based manga publishers have joined together to combat what they call the “rampant and growing problem” of scanlations, the practice of posting scanned and translated editions of Japanese comics online without permission of the copyright holders. The group is threatening legal action against 30 scanlation sites.

The effort brings together the 36 member Japanese Digital Comic Association—which includes such major Japanese houses as Kodansha, Shogakukan and Shueisha—as well as manga publisher Square Enix, the Tuttle-Mori Agency and U.S.-based manga publishers Vertical Inc, Viz Media, Tokyopop and Yen Press, the manga/graphic novel imprint of the Hachette Book Group.

A spokesperson for the coalition said the effort shows that Japanese publishers—who license the majority of manga sold in the U.S.—are taking an aggressive interest in combating manga piracy outside of Japan as well as inside the country.

- From the article at Publishers Weekly

Well that’s pretty good news, I’d say…! I’ll probably have thoughts on this later.

- Chris

So, here’s the deal:

CMX wasn’t, at its inception, a particularly well-run company. There are a lot of excuses out there, but bluntly DC didn’t know a thing about the manga market, and the person they hired to start the imprint wasn’t good at his job. DC offered a deep-discount offer to retailers to stock some of the initial titles, MADARA in particular, an older-Seinen action adventure title at the height of the shoujo boom. (Their sole shoujo title was from the 1970s.) I can’t stress enough, their initial licenses were very strange and generally weak with no cohesion as a line.

Sales tanked, comics retailers who were encouraged to buy BIG were left with unsold stock, and comics retailers have long and ‘specific’ memories and if they’re ever burned by anything they never forget and hold a grudge indefinitely. (Except for superheroes of course; Marvel and DC are putting out lit cigarettes on the foreheads of comics retailers every month, and they keep coming back for more. But say something nasty about Carol Kalish in an obituary and I WILL NEVER BUY YOUR FUCKING BOOKS FOREVER I HATE YOU. Comics are kinda lame sometimes.)

So with retailers burnt, the publisher upped the ante and censored one of their second wave of titles, when the _only_ thing it had going for it was the dirty bits. Manga fans hold STUPID grudges too, and they only need the thinest whisper of an excuse to steal their shit forever. “CMX censored Tenjho Tenge! That’s why I’ll download all the books they publish and never give them any money ever!” Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. You’re awful, flat out awful.

But that’s besides the point; fans were burned too.

So no retailer support, little fan support, reported difficulties getting press coverage/convention coverage, and the books were barely ever in bookstores. All of it added up to…? What? Surprise? It wasn’t a matter of if CMX was going to get closed but when, and bad news at Viz provides the perfect cover doesn’t it? “See! Economic downturn! We can’t publish manga if Viz can’t!” Except of course Viz are publishing manga, just tightening their belts. Feh and bah.

This all smells very much like someone got some early July DC solicitations, noticed there were no CMX books, and started asking questions. This seems exceptionally poorly handled, from a company who’s doing a great job at poorly handling this imprint.

So to summarize: It was a line that was poorly conceived, poorly run for the first half of its life and then barely run at all for the last half. Then it was unceremoniously killed. The end.

I’m not saying the whole thing isn’t utterly depressing, it is, but only because it’s just a monumental waste of time and resources and talent and opportunity, not because I’m particularly sad to see it go. Maybe that’s mercenary of me–a lot of other people liked the line and I should probably shut up–but yeah. DC evidenced quite clearly that they have no idea how to run a manga line so if they weren’t going to _try_ then it’s best they stopped wasting my time clogging up my shelves.

- Chris

Top entry by Jake Forbes right now. An open-letter style blog post about the future of the manga industry, and why Japanese Publishers, American Publishers, and Fandom, are all failing hard.  Fascinating read, if lengthy.

In a perfect world I would be able to write a blog post responding to the issues Forbes raises. We’ll see :)

- Christopher

Reportedly four years in the making, the line is currently very vaguely defined as simply “a manga line” (no brand either), but the early titles and Thorn’s involvement with Fantagraphics seems to hint at a primarily shoujo-oriented line comprised of mature and sophisticated works, or at least early and groundbreaking ones. The four year date also hints that the development of this line began even before the release of Fantagraphics’ The Comics Journal #269 in 2007, the special shoujo issue which featured a short story by and interview with Hagio. Edit: I got the date wrong, TCJ #269 shipped in July 2005.

When Dirk Deppey broke the news at Journalista this afternoon, the confirmation drew immediate, elated results across the blogosphere… and this was before there was even an official press release. Even editor Matt Thorn seems to have found out about it from the online kerfuffle. But now that the cat is out of the bag, here are all the details I’ve been able to round up.

Cover to A Drunken Dream, by Moto Hagio. Fantagraphics Edition, September 2010.

According to the Press Release from Fantagraphics, the line will officially launch in September 2010 with Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream, a best-of collection featuring a number of short stories from across Hagio’s career. Fantagraphics also announced that Hagio would be a Guest of Honor at the 2010 San Diego Comic Con (coming in late July), so it seems likely that the book will actually debut there along with her appearance (though this is entirely supposition on my part). Over at his blog, Matt Thorn filled in a little more information about the line-up of the short stories in A Drunken Dream:

• “Bianca” (1970, 16 pages)
• “Girl on Porch with Puppy” (1971, 12 pages)
• “Autumn Journey” (1971, 24 pages)
• “Marié, Ten Years Later” (1977, 16 pages)
• “A Drunken Dream” (1980, 21 pages)
• “Hanshin” (1984, 16 pages) [previously published in The Comics Journal #269]
• “Angel Mimic” (1984, 50 pages)
• “Iguana Girl” (1991, 50 pages)
• “The Child Who Comes Home” (1998, 24 pages)
• “The Willow Tree” (2007, 20 pages)

The book is currently set at 228 pages, in a hardcover measuring 7″ x 9″ and in the original Japanese right-to-left orientation. No price has been announced. All of the stories seem to have been published by licensing partner Shogakukan, who as you may know is also one of the partner-owners of American manga publisher Viz LLC.

Hagio is an incredibly important manga creator though to date only a few pieces of her work have been released in English, including A,A’, They Were Eleven, and the short story “Hanshin”. As a founding member of “The Magnificent 24″ group of female creators, she revolutionized manga for girls and pioneered the shoujo manga genre in the 1970s, drawing from influences like the radical youth culture of the 60s, rock and roll music, and European cinema. Hagio is the winner of a number of prestigious manga prizes, including the Tezuka Cultural Prize. The interview with Hagio and career overview in TCJ #269 is really outstanding, and I strongly recommend tracking down an issue if you’re a manga fan.

Cover to Wandering Son Book One. Fantagraphics Edition, December 2010.

In December 2010, Fantagraphics will release the second work in the line, the transgender-centric manga Wandering Son by mangaka Shimura Takako. Originally called Hourou Musuko in the Japanese, the series follows two young friends; Shuichi is a boy who wants to be a girl, and Yoshino is a girl who wants to be a boy. Far from the comedy antics of gender-bending series like Ranma 1/2, the series is apparently a straight-forward exploration of the two characters as they struggle with puberty, gender identity, and growing up.

The first book is also in a 7″ x 9″ hardcover format, Japanese right-to-left orientation, with no announced price.

Interestingly, Wandering Son is currently ongoing in Japan with a tenth volume scheduled for release later this month, making it a radical departure for Fantagraphics and “art manga” publishing in general, which has yet to tackle an ongoing series. Even more interesting, the series is currently serialized in the magazine “Comic Beam”, a seinen (young men’s) manga magazine which runs all kinds of series–from Kaouru Mori’s Emma (published in the U.S. by CMX), to Junko Mizuno’s Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu (Last Gasp), to the dark/sexy adventure series King of Thorn by Yuji Iwahara (Tokyopop)–a far cry from straight-ahead shoujo. The strangest bit? While Dirk Deppey announced Matt Thorn’s manga line as a partnership with Shogakukan, Wandering Son and “Comic Beam” are published by Japanese publisher Enterbrain, showing that the line will not be entirely populated with Shogakukan titles.

In conclusion: Great day to be a manga fan.

- Chris

Sources:
Fantagraphics Official PR
Dirk Deppey’s Announcement at Journalista
Matt Thorn’s Announcement
Anime News Network Announcement
David Welsh, Manga Curmudgeon
Horo Musuko (Wandering Son) at Wikipedia
Anime Vice, the first site to spot the books at Amazon

Very, very good news.

Edit: Much longer post (by me) here: http://comics212.net/2010/03/09/matt-thorn-to-edit-curate-new-manga-line-for-fantagraphics/

- Chris

Deb Aoki spent the night asking difficult questions on Twitter, about the difference between what Simmons did and what thousands of anime-convention artist alley kids do every year, when they sell their own illustrations and stories based on the work of famous manga creators like Tite Kubo. The short answer is that anime fandom sat up and said “NO! We do what we do out of love and have very strict rules about that sort of thing!” and blah blah blah, which basically ammounted to “It’s us doing it so it’s okay, but Nick Simmons is them, so he’s a pariah we’re all going to tear our garments over.”

Got news for you, champs.

When you sell illustrations, or short stories, featuring your favourite characters, you’re entering into exactly the same dirty world of “commerce” that poor Nick Simmons did. You may be, in your head, doing it in ‘tribute’ to the manga or the creator, but out in the real world? You’re ripping him off, just like Nick Simmons did. You’re more honest about your sources, but you’re less creative. You may even have a much higher degree of craft, but as soon as you violate someone’s copyright or IP in that way, making money based on (legally and artistically) derivative works? You’re all just a batch of Nick Simmons, building your careers on the backs of others creators.

Are there lots (lots) of people who do it? Yes. Is their a “community” of like minded people all telling each other that what they do is okay? Fuck yeah! Does it make a lick of difference…?

Here’s the thing: I’ve got infinitely more respect for obvious thief Nick Simmons than I do for the legions of artist-alley dwellers selling mass-produced copies of their fanart for characters. Nick Simmons is (badly) taking his influences and turning them into something (horribly derivative but at least nominally) “new”. It’s not original, it may not even be good, but every artist or writer is comprised mainly of the sum of their influences and experiences. But at least Simmons on his first shot out of the gate managed to synthesize all that shit into something other than “Here is a terribly drawn portrait of two BLEACH characters making out, in tribute to an author who clearly never wanted this to happen or he’d have done it himself. I am charging $10 for this colour photocopy.”

Paying “tribute” to an author like Kubo by selling work based on his creations is about the same as “building his popularity” by distributing illegal scans and fansubs of his work, I personally put the two in exactly the same category: complete fucking fiction.

What I’m saying is Nick Simmons’ behaviour is embarrassing and the work is getting the smackdown it deserves. But North American anime “fandom” for their legion of sins have no reason to be so comfortable in their condemnation, particularly because the behaviour they condone–and celebrate–is worse.

- Chris
P.S.: I love fan creations, I am happy that people legitimately pay tribute to artists they love on DeviantArt and in the myriad of Fanfic communities. Sell that work and you cross a line.

Edit Sat Feb27: Normally, I wouldn’t bother approving some of the stuff in the comments section, because there’s a combination of wrong-headedness and pomposity from a bunch of alias’d anime fans that’s off-putting at best, but I decided this time out to let the comments ride. Mostly because I think that the more ridiculous comments speak for themselves, but I also kind of knew that this would be a contentious one going in. As such, I don’t particularly recommend reading the comments here, but instead would recommend that the most compelling rebuttal to my ideas comes from Simon Jones at Icarus Comics, http://www.icaruscomics.com/wp_web/?p=4319, and you should check those out if you’re interested in more on the subject.

For my part, I do understand that plagiarism is bad news, but then I didn’t think that need to be stated. Instead my position was (and still is) that the culture of complacency and all of the mealy-mouthed defence for selling unauthorized work based on a creator’s IP that permeates anime fandom? Far, far worse than any individual instance of plagiarism, no matter how famous the plagiarist is. Seriously, the general attitude of North American Anime & Manga Fandom with its fansubs, it’s scanlations, it’s complete disregard for intellectual property, ethics, or fairness in the face of what they want (everything) and what they want to pay for it (nothing) is so much more utterly damaging to Tite Kubo, to manga and anime, and to Art and Artists hoping to make a living from their Art, than Nick Simmons could ever hope to be. Get your own house in order before crucifying this guy.

Thanks for reading!

- Christopher

ITEM! I was once again invited to be a guest on the SPACE Podcast, on February 12th. For those of you not in the know, SPACE is Canada’s science fiction and fantasy television network, sort of like Syfy in the states. Host Mark Askwith and I spent about 30 minutes talking about Sci-Fi manga series and what might appeal to SPACE viewers. I covered the history of Sci-Fi manga in English as best I could (including the awesome PHOENIX by Osamu Tezuka), and then recommended four contemporary series: Naoki Urasawa’s PLUTO and 20TH CENTURY BOYS, Tsutomu Nihei’s BIOMEGA (all from Viz), and the upcoming TWIN SPICA from Kou Yaginuma (Vertical) to appease the increasingly cranky Ed Chavez. Please go listen! :)

ITEM! Jim Rugg is having an AFRODISIAC ART CONTEST, in support of the spectacular new hardcover release of AFRODISIAC, from AdHouse Books. Basically, great an art object that features (or references?) Afrodisiac, and you could win prizes! Like that neat piece of art there!

ITEM! Ryan Sands from SAME HAT! is building a list of the first manga published in English. So far he’s received input and assistance from tons of smart folks, and the list is pretty surprising too. The first-ever manga in English, a fan-translation of Barefoot Gen, is excerpted above.

BONUS ITEM! SAME HAT! also has news of a massive exhibit of GARO, the influential alternative Japanese manga anthology from the 60s and 70s, to take place in New York City just following MoCCA. Go check it out.

- Christopher

–

SEXY VOICE AND ROBO GN
By Iou Kuroda
Adapted by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Yuji Oniki
US$19.99, 400 pages, 8″ x 10″
Winner of the Grand Prize for manga from Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Media Arts Festival in 2002.

Published by Viz LLC

Right in the final stages of planning and preparation for The Toronto Comic Arts Festival (a comics event I co-chaired earlier this spring), I received a mysterious package in the mail from Viz. I didn’t recognize the name on the attached business card, and the project, a strangely crude manga I was only vaguely familiar with the solicitation for, weighed in at a whopping 400 pages (with an angry legal warning on the front that this wasn’t the final version anyway!!!). This was inopportune timing to say the least.

The person who forwarded it my way probably didn’t know that I was planning a large comics event at the time. The Festival was great though, 8,000 people came and everyone sold lots of comics. It is, however, now September and more than 6 months since I received my preview copy, and more than 3 months since the book came out.

So, to make up for lost time (and a two-paragraph introduction…), run out and buy SEXY VOICE AND ROBO right now.

SEXY VOICE AND ROBO sounds almost like a prototypical anime-cum-manga title; a cute high school girl gets into adventures on the streets of Tokyo aided by a mysterious old man and a dumb-but-well-meaning lunk of a guy. But really all you have to do is flip open the book and you’ll be able to tell that this isn’t really very typical at all. Hell, it’s not even a twist on or elbow-to-the-ribs of typical romance manga, instead it’s an astoundingly realistic piece of contemporary fiction, so grounded in the sights, smells, and actions of Tokyo that even the more fantastic elements that enter the narrative as the book progresses seem utterly plausible (both in the writing and the art as well; it only takes a few pages for the realistically proportioned and rendered bodies with hastily-drawn doe-anime eyes to seem perfectly normal). SEXY VOICE AND ROBO successfully transports the reader to the Tokyo you don’t see in Sophia Coppola’s Lost In Translation, or any one of a hundred ‘realistic’ shoujo tales. You get, as Viz Editor Marc Weidenbaum writes in the afterword, a “modern Tokyo [connected] with it’s past… A Manhattan as wide as it is tall, with many many West Villages.”

Nico is a schoolgirl making money on the side by engaging in phone sex with the lonely, bored, and desperate men of Tokyo. As Codename: Sexy Voice, she uses her uniquely intimate position with these men to profile them, and then to apply that profiling to the people around her. As soon as she hears the sound of your voice, she’s got you all figured out. Her unique abilities draw the attention of an elderly Yakuza boss who has her undertake special ‘assignments’ for him: Finding his lost son, tracking down an employee who has absconded with money, a lost love… The jobs get more and more serious, and dangerous, with Nico reaping rewards and always walking the line between being impressed with and aware of her abilities, and potentially misjudging her situation. Through a combination of forthrightness and light blackmail, she gains the assistance of one of her former callers (Codename: Robo), a hapless nerd whose usefulness tends to begin and end with his being old enough to drive. It is the maturity and complexity of the relationships between these three characters, as well as the meta-commentary on the nature of relationships, that makes SEXY VOICE AND ROBO an engrossing read.

SEXY VOICE AND ROBO is the characterization, thoughtfulness, and James Kochalka-esque ‘play’ of art-comix put in the service of action-movie tropes, to create a unique reading experience. The dialogue and drawing are both intensely naturalistic, with only a few stylistic flourishes that give away the book’s country of origin (the afformentioned anime-eyes, for example). For anyone used to the crisp, measured lines of contemporary commercial manga, SEXY VOICE AND ROBO will undoubtedly seem sloppy, perhaps even amateurish. This is because we’re trained to think that all manga looks the same by the vast wave of manga being imported that all looks the same… But as ‘sloppy’ or amateurish as it may seem, the rhythm of the story, the movement of the characters and their relation to their surroundings is entirely realistic and quite obviously the product of a talented hand; the entire book looks to be drawn panel-by-panel from life, in the sketchbook of someone who is probably painting masterpieces for his day-job.

I’ve been recommending this book steadily at work for a month, and the one comment I hear (after “I really enjoyed that!”) is “I wanted more!”, a sentiment I echoed upon my first read-through of the graphic novel. However, upon re-reading the path that Nico undertakes becomes clearer, the later stories subtly inferring the larger direction of her future. While I would love to see more and more of manga-ka Iou Kuroda’s Tokyo, the four-page epilogue says more than enough about what would follow. Every reading leaves me more impressed, and satisfied, with the book we have received, and more eager to recommend it to folks everywhere.

That means you, by the way.

Highly Recommended

SEXY VOICE AND ROBO is available at better comic book stores everywhere, perhaps a chain bookstore or two, and most-assuredly on the internet.

Buy this book from The Beguiling, in Canada
Buy this book from The Publisher, Viz
Buy this book from Amazon.com

Other Reviews:
- http://www.eclipsemagazine.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1472
- http://www.kellysue.com/professional/archives/2005_07.html#001543
- http://forums.animeondvd.com/showflat.php?Cat=2&Number=1078804&page=1&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1

8. The Push Man, and Other Stories, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Published by Drawn and Quarterly, September 2005.

Alternative Comics: The purveyors and creators of that material generally don’t prefer the work to be called “Alternative Comics.” It’s a term that necessarily sets the work in a context outside of mainstream acceptance–an alternative to what? Which means that, if you’re it’s an ”alternative” comic, you can’t discuss it without discussing what it’s also an alternative to, which at least in the context of North American comics, means “Superheroes”. “Indy” generally doesn’t fly either, except for the very young. “Indy Comics” automatically conjures up notions of, again, working outside mainstream notions of form, or too-often, quality. Not-ready-for-prime-time. It also necessarily excludes “indy” work that comes from major financial backing. Is Dash Shaw or David Heatley “indy” when they’re self-published? When they’re pub’d by Fantagraphics? How about when those self-published comics are the collected by a division of mega-publisher Random House, are they “indy” then? It’s a weird label.

Most creators prefer, simply, to say that they make “comics”. No adjective necessary. But when pressed, the phrase that tends to cause the least bristling, to have found the most adherents amongst discerning comics connoisseurs, is “Art Comics.” Comics that are, and/or aspire to be, art, rather than merely existing as illustration, or commercial product. Comics are a mass-produced medium (for the most part), there’s always a tricky and prickly balance between art and commerce in every single book. Few authors have the luxury of their work appearing in print exactly the way they’d intended. Ware, Seth, Clowes, Spiegelman… Probably a dozen others working in the medium, in total. I hadn’t really heard the phrase “Art Comics” before I started working at The Beguiling, much like before I met my husband I hadn’t heard the phrase “Art Music” to refer to music that was not “pop” or, in the common vernacular, popular. Music as art, rather than music for an audience. Sometimes both. But I’ve grown to like the idea of it, all of us as readers forced to consider the intentions of the artist in the creation of work; the mere naming of the type of book a cause for critical examination. Art Comics. Ask for them by name.

So then in 2005, after successfully releasing 15 years of art comics, Drawn & Quarterly released their first, and possibly the first, Art-Manga. Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s The Push Man and Other Stories is a collection of short works about everyday life in postwar Japan, and the heartbreaking and often horrifying mundaneness of living. It is “Gekiga,” a close-cousin to manga that came from the same place that the phrase Art Comics must: What if there’s a better way to tell better stories with words and pictures? What if instead of ‘irresponsible pictures’, as is one of the translations of the word manga, what if they made dramatic pictures (gekiga)? What if they strove for realism, maturity, experimentation, seriousness, and to touch the human soul? What if all of this ended up in direct contrast to the popular work of the time, but wasn’t a reaction to the work so much as simply being dissatisfied with artificial borders of the medium? What if manga could also be art?

Yoshihiro Tatsumi had been beaten to America’s shores twice before the arrival of The Push Man, and both times, by himself. Drawn & Quarterly had published one of Tatsumi’s shorts from The Push Man period, called “Kept” in 2003, in their fifth (and final) Drawn & Quarterly Anthology volume. Going back even further, an unauthorized English-language translation of a Spanish edition of Tatsumi short stories was published in 1988 by Catlan Communications. It was entitled Good-Bye and Other Stories, and until his first visit to North America, Tatsumi himself did not know it had been published.

The Push Man came to North America because of Optic Nerve creator Adrian Tomine. He’d owned some of the material, and ‘read’ some of the material, despite his inability to read Japanese. The storytelling in the work is marvelous, with layouts and framing designed to move you effortlessly through the story, except when it’s designed to give you pause. Tomine admitted to learning a lot from the work, declared that the books had reignited his interest in comics when he lost interest in superheroes, and that Tatsumi’s comics informed his own. Tomine pushed for years for material to be translated and brought to a wider English-language audience. That immediately set the context of the work for the readers who were going to encounter it for the first time; one of the most lauded art-comics creators in North America thinks that this guy, and this work, is the best in all of Japan. That’s a hell of a context to have the work released into, not just as a reader, but as a critic, as a bookstore buyer, as a bookseller. As a fan of Adrian’s.

Context is important, too. Labels like “Art-Comics” give a context to work, as I mentioned, but format gives a context too. If you’ve read a lot of manga, then you tend to think of manga not just as a collection of storytelling tics, or as work from a country of origin, or big eyes and small mouths, but also as a format. Tokyopop revolutionized format–book size and price point–and made the industry follow along. If you’re manga, then you’re 5.5″ x 7.5″, 200 pages, and $10, give-or-take. The book chains had further solidified that format, where covers needed to feature characters (no more than 2), and the characters needed to be looking right at the reader, and the logos had to be big and bold and easy-to-read from across the store. In 2005, manga was as much a product, a commodity, as it was a medium. But if you’re a Japanese comic and you come out in a 6″ x 9″ Hardcover, with a taped binding, monochrome covers, at $20? What are you then? Are you manga? Or something else? Are you gekiga? Art-manga? Or is just being “other” good enough for a first shot across the bow?

It’s important to note that the idea of art-manga had been tried before, and had even found measured success. Fantagraphics had released the excellent and inventive Anywhere But Here by Tori Miki earlier in 2005, and the alt-manga anthology Sake Jock in the 80s. Small publishers like BLAST! books had tried “alternative” manga in their anthologies like Comics Underground Japan. Viz had probably the most sustained success with their Pulp magazine and line of manga in the mid 90s and early 2000s, with a great selection of seinen (men-in-their-late-teens-and-early-20s manga) titles, and the occasional truly “mature” work like the early Jiro Taniguchi noir thriller Benkei in New York, or their groundbreaking release of Tezuka’s late-period masterwork Phoenix. 2005 had already seen Vertical’s Buddha from Tezuka, and the Nouvelle Manga movement that Fanfare was slowly rolling out on our shores, all around the same time, more or less. It should be said that the time was ripe for one big work to come out, to catch really pull the idea of Manga For Adults out of the ether and make it whole. Tomine put his reputation on the line to say that that book would be Tatsumi’s, and convinced D&Q to do the same.

I was incredibly excited at the prospect of its release, and in between the announcement of The Push Man and it arriving in stores, I even managed to track down a copy of the illicit Good Bye and other stories from Catlan. Reading those stories, I pretty much knew Push Man would be a hit.

Now I’d like to share a photograph with you. I took it while I was at the Osamu Tezuka Museum in the summer of 2009. They have a little English-language hand-out guide that explains and translates each of the permanent exhibits. Here’s the section on Tezuka moving to Men’s Manga Magazines.

Cover image of the Tezuka Museum Guide I pulled this image from.

So let me parse that out for you. Gekiga, or gekiga-style comics, were the mature style of comics that the single-most-popular creator of manga adapted his style to, in order to tell his most mature and important works (including, as mentioned, Ode to Kirihito, which was serialized in Japan from 1970-1971). Tezuka started adapting Gekiga into his work in 1968, more than 10 years after Yoshihiro Tatsumi had worked with a couple of other authors to develop it. While the stories collected in The Push Man are all from 1969, Tatsumi had started telling these short, sharp, pictures of everyday Japanese life years earlier, and their success and innovation caused Tezuka to reinvent himself and create some of his finest works, including Ode to Kirihito, MW, and the later Phoenix stories. Tatsumi really was Capital-I important, with an enormous pedigree. All of this was either intimated or stated outright in the build-up to the release of The Push Man, but if the work hadn’t been any good, it wouldn’t really have mattered.

The September 2005 publication of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s The Push Man and Other Stories was when Art-Manga arrived in North America. It elicited a strong critical reaction, but more importantly a sustained one, with reviews of the work coming all through 2005 and into 2006, when a second volume of Tatsumi shorts was released. The book was a sales success too; it’s currently in its third printing in hardcover. It found an audience.

The work was not fantastical in any way, in fact the stories seemed to be entirely without genre trappings or manga shorthand or idioms at all. Tatsumi’s 8-page shorts seemed to consciously reject what we would normally associate with manga in any way it could, Tatsumi telling his stories inspired by police reports or the daily news delivered with a brutal realism, an unflinching eye into the stark realities of urban living. Violent tableaux. But the craft! The craft of these stories is so, so high. They’re not just affecting but effective, with art that’s been developed and then paired down again to the most essential lines, shadows, and ideas. It’s manga that reads like It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken or Louis Riel or Sleepwalking. It’s Drawn & Quarterly manga. It’s Gekiga. It’s Art-Manga.

Manga Milestone #5, the release of Tezuka’s Buddha, showed the world that manga could be for Grown-ups, and that it could tackle mature ideas. But it was still, at best, a hybrid book, created not just to engage an adult audience but also to stay friendly to a young one. It didn’t wholly succeed as a work for grown-ups because of its humourous asides and stretch-and-squash cartoon-influenced art. It used a fantastical storytelling style to tell a fantastical, epic story. What was so important about The Push Man is that it showed that manga did tell stories for adults, using realistic art, and straightforward storytelling. It showed that in addition to whatever we thought about manga, it was also about every day life, and it could be bleak and mean and gritty and funny just like life is. It showed that, beyond just being for grown-ups, manga could be literature too. But maybe most importantly, and this was right on the spine, it showed that some artists in Japan were treating comics like a mature, sophisticated venue for telling important stories, in 1969. Context.

To date Drawn & Quarterly have released 3 short-story collections by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, including The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon The Old In Tokyo, and Good-Bye. Their most recent release is Tatsumi’s 845-page autobiography in comics A Drifting Life, which chronicles the birth of the manga industry, the creation of Gekiga, and Tatsumi’s development as a person and creator. Drawn & Quarterly plans to release one of Tatsumi’s earliest genre graphic novels, Black Blizzard, in spring 2010. There have been numerous other wonderful art-manga releases since The Push Man, that I am personally convinced have found a wider and more ready audience because of its release and its success.

-o+O+o-

- Christopher

7. Antique Bakery Volume 1, by Fumi Yoshinaga. Published by Digital Manga Publishing, July 2005.

Much like Cardcaptor Sakura wasn’t the first shoujo title published in North America, nor the most popular, neither was Fumi Yoshinaga’s lovely, attractively-drawn episodic comedy/drama Antique Bakery the first yaoi title to make it to our shores or make it big. Actually, a very good case could be made by hardcore fans that, despite being created by an author known for her immensely popular yaoi titles and having come up through the doujinshi circuit and having gotten her start in yaoi, Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery isn’t yaoi at all; just a male-centric shoujo romance story with a couple of gay characters. These people are, for my purposes, entirely wrong. Because however tightly you want to focus labels like yaoi, BL, ML, whatever, Antique Bakery was at the forefront of the then-exploding yaoi manga scene in 2005-2006, and Yoshinaga’s was the first book to cross over into mainstream comics and manga readership, and that makes it more notable and important than any series that could be considered a more authentic example of the genre. Antique Bakery made everyone sit up and take notice.

So lets get some terminology out of the way. I’m just going to copy the first couple of paragraphs of the definition from Wikipedia in here, because that way if anyone’s got a problem with the definition they can head over and edit it there, instead of bothering me about it:

Yaoi (???^?)^{[nb 1]} (aka Boys’ Love) is a popular term for female-oriented fictional media that focus on homoerotic or homoromantic male relationships, usually created by female authors. Originally referring to a specific type of d?jinshi (self-published works) parody of mainstream anime and manga works, yaoi came to be used as a generic term for female-oriented manga, anime, dating sims, novels and d?jinshi featuring idealized homosexual male relationships. The main characters in yaoi usually conform to the formula of the seme (literally: attacker) who pursues the uke (literally: receiver).

In Japan, the term has largely been replaced by the rubric Boys’ Love (?????? B?izu Rabu^?), which subsumes both parodies and original works, and commercial as well as d?jinshi works. Although the genre is called Boys’ Love (commonly abbreviated as “BL“), the males featured are pubescent or older. Works featuring prepubescent boys are labeled shotacon, and seen as a distinct genre. Yaoi (as it continues to be known among English-speaking fans) has spread beyond Japan: both translated and original yaoi is now available in many countries and languages.

Yaoi began in the d?jinshi markets of Japan in the late 1970s/early 1980s as an outgrowth of sh?nen-ai (???^?) (also known as “Juné” or “tanbi”), but whereas sh?nen-ai (both commercial and d?jinshi) were original works, yaoi were parodies of popular “straight” sh?nen anime and manga, such as Captain Tsubasa and Saint Seiya.

Excerpted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi

So there you go. Yaoi, “Boy’s Love” (or BL for short), or shonen-ai. It all means about the same thing these days.

You may notice a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the definitions of yaoi, BL, shonen-ai, and what is or isn’t a representative of these genres, and that’s because the fans of these works tend to be the most intense and zealous out of any subgroup of fandom that I’ve ever personally run across. Yaoi is explicitly a fan-created culture, coming up out of the amateur-comics networks and meetings in the 1980s and in a very male-dominated society, and producers and proponents of this genre had to fight very hard to get taken seriously and treated fairly. I respect that, it’s hard not to, but considering its 2010 and the battles of yaoi and BL have been fought and won, here’s hoping that all involved can let their hair down a little.

One of the earliest manga to be released in North America that featured overt themes of same-sex attraction between male characters was the afformentioned Cardcaptor Sakura. The series featured several characters of near-deity status, and regular humans spending time with these deities would feel strange around them, a “tickle in their stomach” that was never explicitly refered to as romantic affection, but through context it was clear that characters would be in the initial stages of falling in love, and that happened a few times between male characters. The attraction was explained away (and of course those sorts of scenes were cut entirely from the anime release) and was never explicit, but it was quite surprising for fans at the time and it die-hard fans were wondering, from the moment it was announced as being licensed for North America in manga and anime format, if the homosexual overtones would be kept in. Tokyopop did, mostly. Nelvana didn’t, at all.

As near as I can tell, the first yaoi titles published in North America actually came courtesy of ComicsOne all the way back in 2000. As part of their massive launch of titles, ComicsOne broke ground by not only offering the first real yaoi/BL/shonen-ai titles in English, but also by offering digital downloads of their work in Adobe E-Book format. They did that for all of their print manga, and also produced numerous titles that were download-only, including the yaoi titles, Lucky Star by Shimoi Kouhara, and Horizon Line by Ikue Ishida [2]. Personally, as a gay guy down on the availability of gay or even gay-themed comics in North America, and having heard the occasional rumour about Japan’s plethora of “gay” comics, coming across these unpromoted, strange-format (e-book only) books on the ComicsOne website was a little like finding gold in them-thar hills. Explicit gay romance comics, where unlike the works available at the time with gay themes like Banana Fish or X/1999 from Viz, no one was the victim of terrible violence or child molestation! Win-win! Of course, not having a credit card (nor trusting ebooks, really) I never got to read those works. But knowing that they were out there was enough, for me, at the time.

According to an article published by Marc McClelland, yaoi started to be licensed and published in North America in 2003, but he doesn’t cite any publishers or titles. Off the top of my head, I’m going to go ahead and say Tokyopop’s Fake, a buddy-cop drama with a frustratingly vague gay edge was first out of the gate. A quick Amazon search shows 4 volumes of Fake published in 2003, with the first out in May. Tokyopop would later release the other mega-popular fan-demanded yaoi hit Gravitation in August of that year, and between those two series would rule-the-roost, until 2004 when DMP would begin releasing their Yaoi Books line with Desire, Selfish Love, and my favourite Only The Ring Finger Knows, and CPM/BeBeautiful would explore the darker, S/M side of yaoi and BL releases with Golden Cain and Kizuna. From there, it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to Tokyopop’s dedicated yaoi line Blu, DMP’s dedicated “mature” line 801 and a rebranding of their titles to more closely associate themselves with the Japanese publishers, with the line switching from “Yaoi Manga” to “June Manga” (after the famous Japanese BL anthology). The success of yaoi in the marketplace, an honest-to-goodness phenomenon in a decade full of them (GAY PORN COMICS FOR WOMEN!) inspired a huge rush of publishers eager to make some money in this new market. Best of all, most Japanese yaoi publishers were smaller organizations, and much more independent, so while you could have industry leaders like Libre (who licensed to CPM) or June (who licensed to DMP), fledgling English-language manga publishers like DramaQueen, the Boysenberry Books arm of Broccoli Books, or the yaoi-arm of an established publisher like Media Blasters could still find great licenses to release. And that’s before you even scratched the surface of doujinshi.

By the time Antique Bakery was published by mid 2005, there were likely about 100 yaoi releases already. By the time Antique Bakery finished its 4-volume run in 2006, there were more than 200. That release schedule ballooned to, at it’s height, more than 20 yaoi releases in a month, every month. That segment of the industry was growing by leaps and bounds, and I’m gonna be honest, as alien as manga in general and the Toykopop revolution in particular may have seemed to most retailers, it didn’t have a patch on how out there even the idea of yaoi seemed, let alone the contents which were often out-and-out pornographic. (As an interesting side-note, there’s never been a controversy or freak-out over the contents of yaoi titles, despite some pretty explicit and questionable publications… I honestly expected one to come up by now.) But the most important thing was, yaoi sold. It sold like gangbusters. But with so much of it coming out, and so many of the series only a volume or two long (with almost no-effort on the part of the publishers to build a following for individual authors), most retailers, even bookstore buyers, had no idea how to buy the stuff past “give me everything” and putting it out on the shelves. Much like the first part of the manga boom though, that strategy only works when “everything” isn’t dozens and dozens of new titles each month.

What makes Antique Bakery important is that it’s a gateway book, and one that broke out of and above the crowd. It’s a gateway into yaoi, sure, but also into shoujo manga, and into manga in general. It’s about food and it’s about love, two very universal subjects that can hook even the most reluctant or unlikely of readers, and it did. It’s also a book that ended up, and I can’t figure out how, with the author at the forefront of the promotion. It may be that “Fumi Yoshinaga” is an easier name for North Americans to parse and remember, or it might’ve been the fan community that, through illicit scans and distribution, knew that Yoshinaga had a huge body of work and big career ahead of her, of which Antique Bakery was only the beginning. Or it might just be that it’s a great series, and her name is worth remembering for that alone. At any rate, when Antique Bakery was solicited somehow I’d been made aware that the author was Kind Of A Big Deal, and it seemed like DMP was doing a lot to push the series. For example, it was the first comic book since Ren & Stimpy #1 more than 10 years earlier, to feature a scratch-and-sniff cover. Each volume would have a new scratch-and-sniff, strawberries, chocolate, all meant to entice you into the baking world within. No manga publisher had done something that clever, to that point. It was pretty cool, and got people talking.

It occurs to me I haven’t described the series in much detail. Simply, it’s about a bakery run by an attractive, scruffy jerk who knows everything about pastries and cakes, and owns a bakery. The lead chef has been in love with him for 15 years, but the owner brutally turned him down. Throw in a reformed street-tough learning about baking, and a clumsy childhood bodyguard trained to become a waiter, and you’ve got a series of highly episodic chapters that extole the virtues of love, friendship, and delicious food. It’s light material (until the surprisingly intense final volume), a comedy-of-errors with romantic tension (gay and straight), shocking twists, and page after page of delicious-sounding and gorgeously drawn cakes and pastries. In short, it’s a fluffy, guiltly-pleasure of a book, incredibly easy and comforting to read, with genuinely deep characters and relationships. It’s like a network dramedy, crossed with a Food-Network special. It’s fun stuff.

From its description I can imagine many of you who haven’t read it (or any yaoi/BL/shoujo for that matter) couldn’t imagine how this could be good, or important. Well the pedigree of the book might convince you. The series won the 2002 Kodansha Manga Award for shoujo manga upon its original release, and the English edition of Antique Bakery was nominated for a 2007 Eisner Award for “Best U.S. Edition of International Material – Japan,” the award’s inaugural year. This book connected with people, and as the Eisner nom evidences, not just the small, vocal yaoi fanbase. It’s a highly-crafted work that received tons of reviews and great word-of-mouth attention online and in the fan press. The last three volumes of the series were short-listed for the inaugural 2007 list of Great Graphic Novels For Teens, put together by the Young-Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). The books received multiple printings, though unfortunately later editions were no longer Scratch ‘n’ Sniff. Almost from the month it was released, Antique Bakery became the poster-book for the Yaoi boom in bookstores and forward-looking comic shops across North America. It was a book you could hold up and say “This is yaoi! And it’s GREAT!” and not have anyone who flipped through it after you said that call you a liar and/or blush. Sure, in the end it might not be 100% accurate, it might not fall under the very stringent ‘rules’ of what constitutes a ‘yaoi’ or ‘BL’ title, but it acted as many readers’ first exposure to the genre, it got wide acclaim, and its really really good. It’s important to have gateway books, particularly for audiences that had been completely ignored by comic publishing for more than 30 years–women and gay men. I know more than a couple of each who hold Antique Bakery amongst the favourite comics of all time, and in the big picture I think that’s a lot more important than labels.

Since Antique Bakery, DMP have published a number of additional books by Yoshinaga including Solfege, Ichigenme… The First Class Is Civil Law Volume 1 & 2, Garden Dreams, Flower of Life Volumes 1, 2, 3, & 4, The Moon and Sandals Volume 1 & 2, and Don’t Say Anymore Darling, with All My Darling Daughters scheduled to arrive in 2010 Edit: AMDD will be coming from Viz, not DMP. Tokyopop added Yoshinaga to their roster via their BLU yaoi line, with her series Gerard and Jacques Volumes 1 & 2 and the short story collections Truly Kindly and Lovers in the Night. Yoshinaga’s highest-profile release in North America came late in 2009, with the release of Ooku: The Inner Chambers Volumes 1 & 2 published by Viz. Ooku is an alternate-history series about early Japan, where women become the ruling class after a plague wipes out most men. The series is Yoshinaga’s most popular and best-received to date, winning numerous prizes including the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for manga, 2007, shared with Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life. FWIW my favourite of Yoshinaga’s works so far is Ichigenme…, a sexy series that really rings true as both a yaoi series and contemporary gay fiction. It’s filthy, too.

Images Top-to-Bottom: Antique Bakery Volumes 1-4, by Fumi Yoshinaga, published by Digital Manga Publishing.

-o+O+o-

- Chris

#6: Raijin Comics #46, by various. Published by Gutsoon Entertainment, July 2004

Upon the publication of the last issue of Raijin Comics, issue #46, in July of 2004, publisher Gutsoon Entertainment posted the following message to their website:

Dear RAIJIN COMICS readers,

Thank you for your enthusiastic support of RAIJIN COMICS. Over the past 18 months, we have tested the market to see how well a weekly and monthly manga magazine would fare with an American audience. Based on our research with readers, retailers and distributors, we have come to a conclusion – our publications, though appreciated by hard-core manga fans, are not penetrating a larger market.

In order for us to reach a broader market, RAIJIN COMICS, RAIJIN GRAPHIC NOVELS, and MASTER EDITION will be placed on hiatus for the time being. We will be taking time out to come up with ways to broaden the appeal of our publications, retooling stories and overall editorial content. RAIJIN COMICS Issue 46 and the June GRAPHIC NOVELS will be the last issue you will be printing.

All of our subscribers will be recieving a refund for the remainder of your balance with in the next few weeks. We are refunding you $3.95 for each issue owed after issue 46. For example, our charter members will receive a total of $7.90 for issues 47 & 48. You can see how many issues you had left by going to www.raijincomics.com and clicking on “my accounts”. Should you have have any questions and/or concerns with the amount, please contact our customer service department by e-mailing reimbursement@gutsoon.com or by calling 1.877.GUTSOON M~F from 10:00~ 7:00 PST.

Please note that the phone number and e-mail listed above are for orders and reimbursements only. To contact / comment regarding RAIJIN COMICS going on hiatus please e-mail raijinreaders@gutsoon.com

Again, we want to thank you for your support over the last 18 months, and look forward to the possibility of bringing you a more powerful, exciting RAIJIN COMICS in the near future.

Sincerely,

Horie Nobuhiko
Publisher

Michael Andres Palmieri
Executive Vice President

But there would be no reprieve or relaunch, the possibility of Raijin Comics or publisher Gutsoon returning never occurred. To anyone involved or anyone in the know, this was not surprising at all… but it did mark the first real failure of the manga boom of the 2000s.

Let’s go back about 2 years from that date, to the summer of 2002. Thanks to Tokyopop’s phenomenal bookstore success and some agressive moves by Viz, the field for translated Japanese comics–manga–began to open up considerably in North America. Sure, stalwarts like Tokyopop, Viz, and CPM had been producing material solidly for years at that point. But the rising awareness and success of manga, coupled with the virtually limitless supply of material that was available in Japan–literally MILLIONS of different series–inspired a number of new start-up companies and organizations. ComicsOne, a California-based publisher licensed a broad array of different manga, possibly one of the most eclectic line-ups of material in the business, including comedy works like Crayon Shin-Chan, Horror from Junji Ito and his three Tomie collections, historical fiction in the form of the full-colour Joan of Arc manga Joan, and then balanced it all by rescuing the licenses for popular Hong Kong action manhua. Studio Ironcat had been around for… a while (I honestly have no idea how long) and were just soliciting the first collection of the popular webcomics trip Megatokyo.  Popular anime publisher ADV was about 6 months away from the start of their manga line with titles that either inspired or were based on their popular anime, and had started making very obvious rumblings in that direction, with early titles already solicited. The success of manga had not gone unnoticed, and things were really starting to heat up.

Raijin Comics #0, Featuring City Hunter. A promotional issue with tens of thousands of copies distributed across North America in the months leading up to the first issue solicitation.

That summer of 2002 saw the press release in Japan about Shueisha partnering with Viz to do an American version of Shonen Jump. Shortly thereafter, a company largely comprised of ex-Shonen Jump cartoonists named COAMIX announced their intention to do a magazine in North America as well.  Led by former Shonen Jump Editor in Chief Nobuhiko Horie and City Hunter creator Tsukasa Hojo, COAMIX got some funding together from both sides of the pacfic, and formed the company GUTSOON, to publish manga in North America. Like the Japanese Shonen Jump, their magazine would be weekly, and include a little bit of lifestyle content, and because the titles that they contained were popular in Japan, of COURSE they’d be popular in North America. They’d beat Shonen Jump at their own game! Out of this came Raijin Comix. A 200 page weekly manga anthology with cutting edge weekly video game news of japan, 16 pages in full colour. A big part of the initial investment in the magazine came from video game system manufacturer and game publisher SEGA, who were looking for an “in” to North American culture to give them an advantage in the video game console wars (Between Sega’s Dreamcast, Nintendo’s N64, and Sony’s Playstation). Already you can see that Raijin, as much as it attempted to sell the product, it also was trying to very ambitiously sell the lifestyle that went along with it. It’s important to note that this is the exact tactic that Shonen Jump used as well, though they employed many more partnerships, and their ace-in-the-hole was getting on TV in a prime spot, right from the get-go.

The solicitation image for FUJIN #1, which became RGA (Raijin Game & Anime) between solicitation and its arrival in stores.

Once it was announced that Raijin was launching in North America, well, I have to admit I was personally pretty excited. A weekly manga magazine! It was everything I wanted from the manga boom–mature titles delivered at a fast pace, at a decent price-point. What gave me pause even then, though, was that the magazine was undergoing significant format changes after its announcement, and it seems like all of the format changes came at the request of one of their biggest partners, Diamond Comics Distributors. Between their initial announcement and solicitation, Diamond managed to talk them into a massive format change, with the video-game content being spun off into a separate magazine, known initially as “Fujin” but then retitled “RGA” (Raijin Game & Anime) between solicitation and its arrival in stores. RGA ran a buck an issue, came out on the same weekly schedule as Raijin, and was sold in bundles of 10 that direct market retailers could buy separately. This would get the price of the weekly magazine down to $4.95 (the same price as Shonen Jump) from its initially planned price of $6.95. They also begged–BEGGED-Raijin not to do a weekly magazine, as Diamond, frankly, isn’t very good at distributing weekly product. But when the core fundamental of your business plan is “be there every week”, well, there are some things you can’t change. I think the first missed-ship week came 17 weeks in, with 2 issues shipping on the following week. All of it Diamond’s fault of course, but when you’re not a big front-of-catalogue publisher, there’s only so much attention that they can give your work.

I had been retailing comics, more-or-less constantly, for about 6 or 7 years by the time Raijin was almost ready to drop in North America. I had ordered and sold the very first Tokyopop products, and seen the steady rise of interest and sales in manga. I was as much of a retail expert on manga as anyone could be, at that point, at least in the direct market, the network of comic book specialty stores where (then) the vast majority of comics sales were made. And I was mouthy on the internet, particularly the extremely popular Warren Ellis Forum, and so I was sought out by a good, well-meaning dude from Raijin to bounce some stuff off of me. I was flattered (who wouldn’t be?) and I gave my advice freely and openly. Not all of it was listened to, but in the end (and almost entirely uncredited) there’s a lot of me in Raijin magazine.

Raijin Comics #1 Solicitation Image, Featuring Slam Dunk.

As I mentioned during the entry on Shonen Jump, the initial chapters of manga are often much longer than the standard chapters, and so it took the first 3 issues of the magazine to serialize all of the “launch” titles of the work. So on that note, the titles that “launched” in Raijin were: The hyper-violent The Fist Of The Blue Sky by Tetsuo Hara, the sequel to The Fist Of The North Star; the first sports-manga translated into English, Slam Dunk, by Takehiko Inoue; the ultra-80s action/sex/comedy police series City Hunter by Hojo Tsukasa; the over-the-top violent action/ecchi series Bomber Girl by Makoto Niwano, a series so borderline-porn that its sequel was just all-out actual porn (and thus never released in North America); the ultra-violent underground fight-comic Baki The Grappler by Itagaki Keisuke; the surprising and mature contemporary political fiction series The First President Of Japan by Yoshiki Hidaka and Ryuji Tsugihara; and Guardian Angel Getten by Minene Sakurano, about a boy and a guardian angel that’s could charitably be described as “regurgitated”. The slogan on the first issue said, The Dream Team Has Come!, which I hope helps you understand the massive hubris and ego involved in this project… These guys really thought they were bringing the greatest manga in the medium to North America, and that success would greet them warmly.

The Dream Team, by the way, was very very manly, from the manliest period in manga history (the mid 80s and early 90s), and The Dream Team arrived at a time when the most popular manga in the industry were 1. Pokemon, 2. Sailor Moon, 3. Dragon Ball, and 4. Cardcaptor Sakura. Right off the bat, you can see that this unique, innovative, product was going to be swimming upstream, right? Well compound that with the fact that the magazine was going to be printed (much like Shonen Jump USA) entirely right-to-left in the Japanese orientation. A handy rule of thumb that we’ve learned in manga, particularly in publishing, is that the older the intended audience of a translated work, the more likely it should be “flipped” into the North American orientation, because old people hate learning new things. Raijin was a pretty-firm 16-and-up kinda magazine (and frequently even a little bit more violent/sexy than that), at a time when manga was finding a new, YOUNG audience. Even amongst the most popular fighting manga, the differences between Raijin and its competitors would be pronounced; in Dragonball Z when one character punched another, they’d go flying through the air, maybe knock down a mountain, maybe even spit a little blood, but then get back up and give as good as they got. In The Fist of the Blue Sky when a character got punched, his head exploded. It was for grown-ups, grown-ups who were going to have to essentially learn another language. American grown-ups.

Fist of the North Star Master Edition Volume 1, by Buronson and Tetsuo Hara. Published by Gutsoon Entertainment.

That’s the other big thing about the magazine: It was called Raijin Comics. Not Raijin Manga. Or even just “Raijin”. Raijin was not aimed at manga fans in North America. It was aimed at “comics” fans, the folks reading superheroes primarily. It took the message of Tokyopop–that Western fans are more open to manga now–and decided that meant publishing manga explicitly for existing comics fans, who were male, 18-49, and white. Don’t believe me? I’ve got a great anecdote for you: Fist Of The North Star co-creator Tetsuo Hara was (and is) convinced that his landmark series is one of the greatest of all time. All. Time. It’s a post-apocalyptic fantasy epic where dudes hit each other until they explode, and women are cann0n-fodder… at best. It’s not without its over-the-top, head-punchy charms, but… But Hara isn’t hearing that of course. He was (reportedly) very unhappy by the series’ first sojourns to North America, where the anime tv series was cut to hell and repackaged as a movie, and where the manga was released small, and flipped, and incomplete. He became convinced that the hideously violent and misogynistic series could be a success in North America if only it were printed bigger, and in colour. So at a time when manga was finding massive, massive success by going as small and cheap as possible, Hara decreed that North Star would be big, bigger even than North American comics (that was an important part, bigger because his work was better), with brand new digital colour and  on nice paper, in the original Japanese reading method… at a cover price of $18 a volume. He had produced a classic, and he wanted it to compete with American classics, despite the fact that American Superhero Fans are more-or-less finding what they want out of American Superhero Comics, and that the entire industry was going a different way, building a new audience and not relying on selling more product to the old one. They managed to crank out 9 volumes of the remastered North Star in the 18 months they were in business, but it’s safe to say it did not set the manga world on fire. Neither fish-nor-fowl, the series didn’t look like popular manga, it was in colour and expensive making it weird and inauthentic for the die-hard manga fan, and superhero fans? Well, let’s just say that they’re still not entirely sold on buying “original graphic novels” almost 10 years later. This is just an anecdote, like I said, but its emblematic of the entire problem with Raijin; it was a grand, important vision for specific manga works appearing in North America, that absolutely could not see the forest for the trees.

The magazine failed. Slowly, surely, it failed. The calls from the folks at Raijin asking for advice got longer, and especially towards the end, my suggestions for the magazine were being incorporated fast and furious! The addition, at the end, of Japanese language lessons via manga? Me. With cheap trades coming out right on the heels of the serialization, they needed a reason, any reason, for folks to pick up the magazine, and material that wouldn’t be collected was it. I might’ve even been the one to suggest more short, one-shot manga that would be a satisfying read for someone picking up the magazine and not just getting stories mid-way through their serialization, which they did with the mountain-climbing manga they had…. But anyway, the magazine flailed, mixing manly manga with vague pseudo-porn, a couple of strong features, and then in a last-ditch-effort to attract the still-burgeoning audience for much younger shonen and shoujo manga, adding the treacly-sweet “Bow Wow Wata”  shoujo series into the magazine… right next to hyper-violent Baki The Grappler and the terrorist action manga Revenge of Mouflon. I’d ask, rhetorically, “What the hell were they thinking?” but I know what they were thinking: “Make the magazine more attractive to the new manga fans, so that they’ll discover that the manga we’re publishing is SO MUCH BETTER!” Seriously. 20-year old action manga was simply waiting for fans of Fruits Basket to discover it.

Raijin Game and Anime #20 Solicitation Cover. Final Issue. Printed cover may vary.

Oh, I should fill in some of the gaps for you here. In addition to a weekly magazine, Raijin Comics, the 16-page videogame and anime suppliment RGA, and the bimonthly release of Fist of the North Star in colour, publisher Gutsoon began to release Tokyopop-sized, black and white collections of the manga serialized in Raijin Comics for just $9.95 a book. They were, unsurprisingly, pretty popular, fitting in nicely with the masses and masses of other manga being released at the time. Solid, respectable sales in the bookstores, by my recollection, and we did fairly well with them at The Beguiling. In individual collected form, the diversity (and honestly, the strangeness) of a line comprised of older-shonen and seinen manga on a variety of subjects? Well that was a strength, as new audiences that weren’t being served by the onslaught of contemporary shonen and shoujo material could find something more to their tastes, whether that was over-the-top action manga or a political thriller, without being subjected to Getten, Bow Wow Wata, or Bomber Girl. Or vice versa, I suppose? It was no Tokyopop revolution, or anywhere near the staggering sales and tie-in popularity Viz was receiving from Shonen Jump magazine, but it was their first real success.

Raijin Comics #1 Cover, Featuring Slam Dunk. This is the cover that saw print.

I will say that the most realistic part of their business plan was that they anticipated a weekly circulation of approximately 15,000 copies, which was not unreasonable, particularly in hindsight when Shonen Jump launched with a circulation of over 300,000 copies of the first issue. 15,000 copy sales would’ve placed them in the same neighbourhood as CrossGen. Presumably at least, they had worked out a way that they would be profitable on a weekly circulation of 15k. According to the sales that I can find, issues 5-8 of the series averaged a sell-in of about 2100 copies through Diamond, coming in very near to the bottom of the top 300 sales chart that Diamond publishes every month. Shonen Jump’s first issue came in at around 8500 copies through the direct market, a far, far cry from its total sales. Raijin’s staff at the time touted their victory over SJ during their respective first months, because the combined sales of all 4 weekly issues beat the first-issue sales of Shonen Jump. Spin is a powerful thing, and at that point, they needed whatever they could get. I should be fair and say that they did have a newstand presence and a subscription base, but as evidenced by their going-out-of-business letter at the top, apparently neither of those numbers were anything to crow about.

Sales declined as the months wore on. RGA lasted 20 issues (and 20 weeks) before being folded back into Raijin. In October of 2003, the magazine went from a weekly to a monthly (with no commensurate increase in size but a new cover price of $5.95, a buck more than its closest competition or its previous pricepoint). The last weekly issue of the magazine, #36, seemed to come in at about 1500 copies through Diamond, and from #37 it didn’t appear to chart in the top 300 whatsoever.

The last year of Raijin, I honestly don’t know that much about it. I’d lost touch with most of the people involved, and it was clear that no one was having a good time of it there. Worse, it became pretty clear that they really didn’t seem to know what to do, and despite a huge launch budget and lots of bravado, maybe they never really did. Their perceived strengths when launching became hindrances, particularly being tied to a monthly magazine format that hamstrung their graphic novel program, that needed material released quickly in order to solicit the (to my knowledge) profitable trade program. I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone involved with the magazine that it wouldn’t be a huge success, given the stunning popularity of the core titles Fist, City Hunter, and Slam Dunk. Raijin and Gutsoon’s greatest failings, aside from hubris, was an inability to adapt to a marketplace undergoing a massive change and, considering how much _they’d_ changed their plans in the 6 months between announcing the book and the first issues arriving on stands, you woulda thought that change would be one of their biggest strengths.

The serialization of Raijin Comics ended with the 46th issue. It came out a few weeks late, and then the company disappeared. While a few trade paperbacks did manage to make it to store shelves past the end of the monthly magazine (basically, anything that was already at the printers), Raijin Comics #46 marked the end of Gutsoon, and was the first real casualty of the manga boom. True to their word though, they behaved honourably towards their subscribers and sent them cheques for the remainders of their subscriptions, and did their best to close up shop neatly and cleanly.

In the years that followed, many [overly] ambitious publishers would crash and burn. The biggest was probably ADV Manga, a subsidiary of anime publisher AD Vision. With a stunning amount of hubris, the company which had, to then, released a number of moderately-successful titles tying-into their anime line decided to up the ante considerably in 2004, releasing dozens of brand-new and largely mediocre anime-tie-ins and various manwha titles, all in the space of just a few short months. Tokyopop and Viz had ramped up their lines considerably, releasing over a dozen manga a month, each. ADV emulated their output but not any of their acumen (or years of gradual building), and basically dumped tons of product onto the market with no support or foresight. They were convinced, somehow, that manga was a license to print money. It didn’t matter if it was a good manga, like Tactics, or a bad manga, like First King Adventure, it was just dozens of first and second volumes dumped on already straining-at-the-seams bookstore and comic shop manga sections, and something had to give. Most of their line was cancelled after 1 or 2 volumes at the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005; ADV re-launched in 2006, only to stop publishing entirely by the end of 2008. Companies like Be Beautiful, DramaQueen, Broccoli, Dr. Master, Infinity, and more splashed onto the scene and then disappeared completely in the past decade, and industry stalwarts like Tokyopop suffered through some tough times, with Every Single Person I Know In The Industry predicting their imminent demise, monthly, if they offered any opinion at all.

In writing this I tried to remove myself a little from the proceedings, and view the history of Raijin through press releases, reviews, message board chatter, and more, as much as from my own remembrances of the time. But I’ll own up to the fact that, despite everything, I was pretty close to the situation and didn’t have the warmest feelings for Raijin Editor Jake Tarbox towards the end (or afterwards), and that this entry out of all of them could be the closest to flat-out wrong. But until proven otherwise, this is what went down with North America’s first and only weekly manga magazine 7 years ago, one of the biggest launches I’ve ever seen, and one of the most spectacular publishing failures I’ve ever witnessed. To Raijin: It would’ve been nice if more publishers had learned from your mistakes.

Other Resources:

Raijin Archive at AnimeNewsNetwork: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/manga.php?id=2016
Raijin Comics Website (Wayback Machine): http://web.archive.org/web/20040626023411/http://www.raijincomics.com/

-o+O+0-

Coming soon! Parts 7, 8, 9, and 10.

- Christopher

When I think of how and why Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha was a milestone of the last decade, I come up with a laundry list of ideas. It’s incredibly tempting to just jot them down, point form, and let it wash over you. But I am a writer, and so I will write about it a little.

In the summer of 2003, my mind was quite happily blown by a book called Yukiko’s Spinach, a French/Japanese hybrid graphic novel by Frederic Boilet, published in English by the UK outfit Fanfare. Yukiko’s Spinach is either autobiography or drawn so closely from events true-to-life that it doesn’t matter if it’s not; it’s about a French comics artist in a doomed relationship with a Japanese girl as they both live together in Tokyo. It is heavily photo referenced, with strong black lines and shadows over top of blurred-out photographs and greytones, giving the entire effort an ethereal quality. It was printed on heavy, glossy paper, and weighed in at a little over 200 pages. The cover was on thick, coated-matte stock, and it had French Flaps! It cost like $28 or something (Canadian). It was manga, but also not manga, and it dealt with an adult relationship that slowly unraveled over its length, in a matter-of-fact way. It, as an object, and as a story, was revelatory to me. Fanfare had introduced the world to “Nouvelle Manga”, a movement of work that sought to blend French, Japanese, and American comics ideals to create something unique, exemplifying the strengths of all three, for a more mature and sophisticated audience. Fanfare would follow Yukiko’s Spinach up over the next 7 years by producing, book-for-book, the single strongest line of material out of any publisher working in English. I mean, it helps if you only do a book (or occasionally two) a year, but they’ve got maybe one book in their library that I’d consider mediocre, and everything else is either above-average or outright excellent. Drop as much money as you can acquiring their backlist.

That said, the impact of Buddha blows it all away.

Osamu Tezuka is called “The God of Manga”. Sure, that’s over-the-top, and particularly coming from a western point of view, particularly in 2003 when the sum-total of his work in English was a handful of volumes of Astro Boy, the may-as-well-be-out-of-print Adolf and a couple of the early volumes of Phoenix. The title just seemed… quaint. Like “Oh, yeah, the Japanese really love this Tezuka guy, he made all those kids comics like Astro Boy and Kimba, but whatever.” And you’d hear from people that he had drawn tens of thousands of pages of manga, had over 700 different works, and it was like “yeah, we get it, he’s popular in Japan” and that was that. You couldn’t tell people, and the material wasn’t available to show them either. I mean, I accepted it on faith, but that’s all it was. Astro Boy‘s great, but…

When it was announced that a young publisher from outside of the comics market would be releasing an 8 volume hardcover series comprising well over 2000 pages of adult-focussed material by Tezuka, it was jaw-dropping. First and foremost, it was a ‘real’ publisher doing the publishing. Vertical was known for producing English-language translations of Japanese novels, with striking cover designs by graphic design superstar Chip Kidd. They were not Tokyopop, or Viz, or even Marvel or DC. These were people in the business of putting out great looking English editions of foreign work, and they decided that was going to include manga as well. They also decided that it would include the most important manga they could find, and that meant Tezuka. But how do you choose which Tezuka manga out of tens of thousands of pages and over 700 different works…? You go for the one with the grandest scope of course, and that’s the one that details the life story of The Buddha. Now that’s a deity with name-recognition!

So the whole summer, the industry (and manga fans like myself) are buzzing. Buddha! Buddha! Buddha! Chip Kidd! Buddha! It was exciting. Not just because it was a ‘real’ publisher publishing manga (and thereby giving the whole medium of comics recognition), not just because Chip Kidd had designed beautiful books, more beautiful than any other manga title (or almost any non-manga title) published to date. Not even because this was the first major comics biography of a religious figure, and the book would doubtless find an audience far otuside the standard confines of the comics industry, acting as a spearhead into the little-travelled world of Comics For Grown-Ups. I mean, sure, every single one of those things happened. But that wasn’t why we were buzzing… It was because now we (manga fans) could finally prove the worth of Osamu Tezuka to the doubters, to our friends, to anyone who would listen (whether they cared or not).

Buddha is not Tezuka’s strongest work, nor is it my favourite by him. I’m partial to Phoenix Volume 4. My friend Jason (and the rest of the world) seems to think it’s Phoenix Volume 5 that’s the pinnacle of English-language Tezuka work. A few Johnny-come-latelys even prefer Ode To Kirihito or MW. But Buddha? Buddha was more than ‘enough’. It’s epic.

The first volume of Buddha does not contain The Buddha, except as a baby, born in the last 10 pages of the volume. The entire first volume of the book is prologue; developing the setting, the characters, the tone, hinting at the plot. A number of fictional characters are created to explain the caste system that gripped India and South Asia, to create sympathy and understanding, to ease readers into an unfamiliar world. Lots happens of course, wars, love, betrayal. It’s a great book all on its own with a complete narrative arc, fully-developed characters, a tear-jerker ending, the whole thing.  250 pages. Prologue.

The most important thing about Buddha, the switch it flipped in the minds of everyone who read it, or even heard about it? It had a larger scope, a higher ambition, than 99% of comics released before it. And it was by Osamu Tezuka. And it was originally published in 1972.

Buddha cemented the name of Tezuka in the minds of the denizens of the North American comics industry, but also the wider literary world, which was just beginning to dabble in reviewing and discussing these grown-up comic books. Buddha was irresistible in that regard, as the subject (Buddhism!) was hot! Buddha was touted as a great “way in” to understanding Buddhism, and with the review came the attendant praise and acclaim for Tezuka, further raising his profile. Best of all? North America loves memoir and biography, and looking at the graphic critical darlings of the last 10 years like Persepolis, Fun Home, Blankets, etc., it’s easy to see how something like Buddha would fit in nicely.

There were drawbacks of course, weaknesses in the work. The biggest is that, despite being far ahead of its time in 1972, social mores had changed in 30 years (and Japan and America never quite had the same social mores to begin with…), and while the work wasn’t as problematic in that regard as other earlier Tezuka works, even as a historical work some of its depictions were dated and off-putting. Buddha was also one of Tezuka’s earliest attempts to do work for grownups, and although it does have a depth and maturity Tezuka as an author was still preoccupied with the idea of his audience of young children discovering this work, and so he would constantly diffuse scenes that got too dark, depressing, or serious with slapstick humour or deformed characters, occasionally deflating a scene entirely. The length of the work, one of its most monumental assets, was also considered a detriment by many. 8 volumes at $24.95 is $200! That’s a lot of scratch to drop to get one comic book story. And The Buddha isn’t even in the first one!

The series did well though. It sold out in hardcover, multiple printings on the first 6 volumes too. It was a critical darling. And it was the first high-profile, successful, mature manga. Fanfare UK was already moving to publish more mature works, and mature, outsider, and underground manga had been published by Viz, Blast Books, and Fantagraphics, for years at that point. But none of it was able to break through, out of the indifference of the general market who wanted their manga shonen (or shoujo) and exciting and pretty, or else were completely disinterested in manga altogether (often with prejudice). Buddha created a market for manga for grown-ups, when nothing else to that point had worked. That’s pretty goddamned amazing.

It almost didn’t get finished, by the way. Right around volume 5 or 6 there was a pretty big delay in the publishing. Vertical was having severe cashflow problems, it was all over the book industry trade papers, and it was joked (meanly!) that we might never find out if The Buddha would attain enlightenment or not! Vertical had another mis-step when they solicited and began promoting inexpensive softcover editions of the series–in the middle of the hardcover release! Nothing kills a serialization faster than being told “Hey there’s a cheaper version coming out in a few months! Less than half the price!” In Vertical’s defence, the $9.95 paperback editions were going to be differently broken-up than the HCs, 12 volumes total instead of 8, I think (matching one of the Japanese releases). And they were in a cash crunch, one that some quick paperback money would have helped to alleviate. But yeah, let’s just say it’s a very good thing indeed that they decided to hold off on that release entirely, opting to do the series in an 8 volume softcover edition beginning in 2006… after the end of the hardcover releases.

Since then, Vertical has released a dozen more books by Osamu Tezuka, including Ode To Kirihito, MW, Apollo’s Song, the 3 volume Dororo, and 9 volumes of a 13-volume release of Tezuka’s second-most popular creation, Black Jack. Viz finished their release of Phoenix with all 12 volumes in print for a brief, fleeting moment, before volume 2 went out of print at the end of 2009 (hopefully only temporarily). Dark Horse released a number of very early works by Tezuka, more historical curiosities than anything else, including Metropolis, The Lost World, and Next World 1 & 2. DMP jumped in in 2009 with Swallowing The Earth, possibly the first outright bad Tezuka comic released into English. That’s it’s own sort of milestone I guess, but not one I’ll be noting here. Those and the afformentioned Astro Boy and Adolf make up the entirety of Tezuka’s works translated into English, about 70 trade paperbacks out of hundreds and hundreds in print in Japanese. Hopefully, with more to come.

Art: Top: Buddha Volume 1: Kapilavastu Hardcover Cover Image, published by Vertical Inc. Art by Osamu Tezuka, design by Chip Kidd. Middle: The spines of Buddha Volume 1-8 formed a larger image of the 3 periods of The Buddha’s life. Art by Tezuka, design by Kidd. Bottom: An original page of art from Buddha, by Osamu Tezuka. Taken at the Tezuka Museum. Photo by Christopher Butcher.

-o+O+o-

Tomorrow: #6, #7, and #8!

- Christopher!

Shonen Jump, Volume 1, Issue 1. Published by Viz, November 2002.

I kept going back and forth on this one, trying to decide whether November’s Shonen Jump Volume 1, Issue 1, was more of a milestone than Raijin Comics #1, released a month later. In the end, Raijin was an innovative and exciting product, but it’s most notable for failing. Shonen Jump is still going strong 8 years later, with a monthly circulation of 200,000+ readers. So let’s talk about Shonen Jump instead.

In November of 2002, the industry was not exactly hurting for manga anthologies. In Japan, anthologies are plentiful–it’s very rare for a work to be released in a long-form edition without having been serialized first. In fact hundreds of different series are serialized in different magazines each year, and the king of the heap with the highest circulation is Weekly Shonen Jump. While Tokyopop had got its start in the anthologies MIXX, SMILE, and TOKYOPOP, and Viz had Manga Vizion and my beloved Pulp, by the end of 2002 all of those magazines had bitten the dust. Sure, Dark Horse’s Super Manga Blast and Viz’s own Animerica Extra continued to bring manga to the masses with their 100 page, $8 price points, but the industry was headed a different direction. With the popularity of the smaller, cheaper manga that Tokyopop was pushing (and Viz had yet to embrace…), and Tokyopop’s then-recent decision to end serialization of most of  all of their comic books and go straight-to-trade, combined with Dark Horse announcing that it was going to be releasing Tezuka’s Astro Boy as a series of graphic novels at that same $9.95 price point, it looked like the sun was finally setting on serialized manga.

But. In June of 2002, Viz announced that it would be partnering with Japanese publishing giant Shueisha to bring their flagship manga anthology, Shonen Jump, to North America. It flew in the face of the newly burgeoning market. While Viz had experience publishing anthologies at this time, it was seen as a bold–even wrong-headed move by most. Particularly as Viz’s version of Shonen Jump would be monthly, and Shueisha’s was weekly. Fans decried the pacing, saying that favourite series like Naruto and One Piece would lag further and further behind their Japanese serializations (of, if only they knew…). And who needed anthologies anyway, why not just go straight to the collected edition?

The reasoning was pretty obvious. Viz was going to use the strongest tools in their arsenal, the absolute biggest and most popular manga in Japan, to make an offensive outside of the comic book distribution system into… well, everywhere else. They anchored the book with the still incredibly popular Dragonball Z. They partnered with The Cartoon Network, filling the book with series that also had anime airing on TV (or were about to!). They had Yu-Gi-Oh, the manga that inspired the hit collectible card game, and they bound a rare card in the first issue to goose sales. They worked their asses off to get it good distribution, working well-ahead with Diamond and (the now defunct) Suncoast media stores, where tons of manga was already being sold. They got great newstand presence too…!

All of that added up to first issue-sales of over 300,000 copies, which effectively silenced all those critics I mentioned in the preceding two paragraphs.

First chapters of manga are usually double-sized, 48 pages or so, to give readers a more thorough introduction to the story. Because of this, the first issue of Shonen Jump only featured 5 of its planned 7 “launch” series, Akira Toriyama’s Dragonball Z and Sand Land, Yoshihiro Togashi’s YuYu Hakusho, Echiro Oda’s One Piece, and Kazuki Takahashi’s Yu Gi Oh. The second issue introduced the world to Masahi Kishimoto’s Naruto, and the third issue gave the world Hiroyuki Takei’s Shaman King. Within 3 months, the official launch line-up of Shonen Jump was completed. If you look at the titles there, more than half of them were amongst the most popular and bestselling manga of the past 10 years. Naruto and One Piece still top the charts. All in one magazine.

The kicker? Shonen Jump magazine was available  every month, on every newstand, more than 300 pages at a go, for just $4.95. It immediately changed the game for manga pricing, but was also massively successful in attracting superhero readers like John Jakala, who published this infamous blog post, which I have reprinted in its entirety:

The Weak American Conversion Rate

After the last couple long posts, I figured I’d do something light. So here’s a comparison of what $60 will get you in manga versus American comics:

Gee, I wonder why young kids are flocking to manga?

(In case you’re wondering, that’s 12 issues of Viz’s manga anthology Shonen Jump (with a $4.95 cover price) on the left and 24 issues of various American comics at $2.50 a pop on the right .)

- John Jakala, October 30th 2003

It’s even worse now that American comics are $3.99 a pop. Funnier though; that stack of comics would be half that size.

Viz had beaten Tokyopop at their own game, and produced much, much-better looking material doing it. Granted, it accomplished this through massive investment by the largest publishing company in Japan, investment that eventually led to Shueisha and rival pub Shogakukan purchasing Viz outright… and man was that a game-changer or what? It allowed for a massive reinvestment in their line, huge expansion, and a radical shake-up of a company that had advanced only very incrementally over its time in the publishing game. And THAT came out of Shonen Jump too.

So lets see, our milestone has opened up hundreds of new outlets for manga sales, introduced tens of thousands of new readers to the medium of comics (manga), become the best-selling comic book since the speculator boom (and bust) of the early 90s, and was the first step to Viz being the publishing juggernaut it is today. Not too shabby. It also ended up inspiring the similar just-for-girls anthology Shojo Beat a few years later, putting comics explicitly for girls and young women back onto the newstand, from which they’d been absent (save Archie…) for years. Sadly, Shojo Beat was cancelled in 2009, but the trade paperback line that bears its name is still going strong, with some of the bestselling manga in the industry published under the Shojo Beat banner.

-o+O+o-

#4. Inu Yasha Volume 13, by Rumiko Takahasi. Published by Viz. April 2003. Solicited January 2003.

InuYasha Volume 13, by Rumiko Takahashi. Published by Viz Media, April 2003.

Then, one day, right in the middle of their serialization of the very-popular Inu Yasha graphic novels, Viz changed the format of their manga. Inu Yasha Volume 12 was the standard 6″ x 9″ format Viz manga had been using for years. It also retailed for $15.95, $6 more per book than a comperable series from another publisher. Then the next volume was completely different. It was terrifying.

By April of 2003, Tokyopop had given up on single issue comic books AND anthologies altogether, and increased their manga trim size to the now-standard 5.5″ x 7.5″. They were going straight to graphic novel format with shoujo series like Cardcaptor Sakura, Happy Mania, Marmalade Boy, and Tokyo Mew Mew, shonen manga like Cowboy Bebop, Dragon Knights, Luipin III, Rave, and Rebound, and even Seinen (young men’s) manga like Chobits and Initial D. In April of 2003 Tokyopop released 12 volumes of new material, par-for-the-course for them. A new publisher named ComicsOne has also released a bunch of manga in “The Tokyopop Format”. Dark Horse serialized Astro Boy trade paperbacks in “The Tokyopop Format”. And just like that, an entire trim-size of book became named after one company, and it stayed that way through most of the decade. The Tokyopop Format.

(Interestingly, the Tokyopop format doesn’t actually correspond to any sort of page size used in manga in Japan, or any size ratio. It’s actually a really awkward size for publishers, too long and thin for the original manga pages, which means that either more artwork gets chopped off on the sides, or there’s blank-space on the top or bottom, or the artwork is “smushed” to fit.)

When Viz announced that they were moving all of their books to a new trim size, they never came right out  and called it “The Tokyopop Format”, they couldn’t, but yeah, they lost that particular battle.

But when Inu Yasha Volume 13 came out, it became apparent that they were looking to win the war.

The book dropped at Tokyopop size, yes, but also with a radically redesigned book-cover treatment, cutting edge for comics at the time. AND it landed at just $8.95, a buck cheaper than the new $9.99 standard. Take a look, side by side, at the covers of Inu Yasha 2 first edition and new edition… It was like Viz had finally woken their design dept. up out of the 1980s, and were ready to COMPETE:

Slick, eh?

But this was just the harbinger. You see, Inu Yasha Volume 13 was the first new Viz manga to be released in the new format, but Viz hadn’t decided to just move forward with this new format. No, they were moving backwards as well, and Viz had (and still has) the largest manga backlist in the industry. Inu Yasha Volume 13 started a tidal-wave; a flood. A flood of what immediately became known as “Old Format Viz”.

“Old Format Viz” was basically the comics equivalent of herpes: no one wanted it, but chances are everyone had it, in one form or another, and would try anything to get rid of it.

“But wait,” you ask. “Why would everyone try to get rid of differently-sized printings of perfectly good manga,  some of which was even released the very-same-month as Inu Yasha 13?” That’s a very good question. The answer is simple: I’m a bit of an unreliable narrator.

Y’see, Inu Yasha Volume 13 was solicited in January of 2003 and it was the first manga to be solicited in the new format, and it was the first brand new Viz manga to be released in the new format. But a few weeks before it appeared in stores, Viz had rush-solicited and then released this:

FEB03 2196 DRAGONBALL VOL 1 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2197 DRAGONBALL VOL 2 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2198 DRAGONBALL VOL 3 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2199 DRAGONBALL VOL 4 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2200 DRAGONBALL VOL 5 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2201 DRAGONBALL VOL 6 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2202 DRAGONBALL VOL 7 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2206 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 1 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2207 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 2 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2208 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 3 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2209 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 4 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2210 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 5 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2211 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 6 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2212 DRAGONBALLZ VOL 7 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95

Viz had announced that it wouldn’t just be their new books, going forward, that would be in the new format. They’d be going back to press on more-or-less their entire backlist over the next 24 months, and re-releasing it all in the new format, at a new pricepoint of between $8 and $10! A new pricepoint that was between 33% and %50 cheaper than the previous versions had been, in a more popular, better-designed format. They released 14 volumes of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z manga on the same day, then, the single-largest release of English language manga at the same time in the history of the medium. Oh, and Viz had basically just bricked all of their existing stock on store shelves.

The people who suffered the most? Direct Market comic book stores who were buying the product non-returnably from Diamond. You see, if Borders or Barnes & Noble stopped selling the old format Inu Yasha volumes because it was now being released in a shiny new edition for half the price, they could just send the one that didn’t sell back to Viz and get a refund. Direct Market stores, who had stocked and sold manga for years? Almost all of their Viz product was ‘dead’. Overnight. They were not happy, Diamond wasn’t going to take the product back, and Viz never offered. Even at phenomenally deep discounts (and really, they STARTED at 50% off on Old Format Viz), most buyers didn’t care, they didn’t want the books that “didn’t match” the rest of their collections. Manga fans are both fickle and OCD; it’s a deadly combination. If you were an optimist-type retailer, you looked at it as a long-haul thing, clearing out shelf-worn copies of books and improving the overall health and longevity of manga in your store, even if it cost you a bunch of money. If you were a pessimist, you stopped carrying manga.

Actually, heh, you shoulda heard the Ranma 1/2 fans who were more than half-way through the series in the Old Format before being told, flat-out, that the series would _not_ be finished in that format and that they’d have to switch to the new one. And re-buy 20 or 21 volumes of a book that they’d already spent nearly $400 collecting if they wanted the spines to match up. Sucks to be a Ranma fan. Or an OCD one anyway.

In the first 3 months of the Viz revamp, Viz had re-released nearly 40 volumes in new editions, and changed over the vast majority of their line to the new Tokyopop format. The only hold-outs were series that would not be getting reprints, like Kia Asamiya’s Steam Detectives, or mature works and special projects like Vagabond by Takehiko Inoue. The writing was on the wall: the old format books were dead, and you were only hanging onto them until the new ones came out. If that long.

In the end of course, the format was a godsend and we all made so much fucking money off those books over the last decade. As this was happening, I had started working at The Beguiling and doing some of the ordering and shelving, including these books, and was just marvelling with every announcement about the interesting times we lived in. I even picked up all of the Dragon Ball volumes, now that they were uncensored again, to treat myself.

And it all started (more or less) with Inu Yasha, the harbinger of the most massive change that manga saw in the last decade: the move en masse to cheaper, more attractive formats that changed the way we look at comics. Tokyopop may have invented it, but Viz used it better.

-o+O+o-

Tomorrow: Parts 5 & 6!

- Christopher

There were more manga released each month in 2009 than were released in the entirety of the year 2000. The growth of Japanese-originating comics in the North American comics industry has been phenomenal over the last ten years, with a massive manga boom that never busted (plateaued though), an explosion of material for every gender, every age group, and nearly-every interest. While there are still readers to be initiated and battles to be fought, the preceding decade saw manga arrive in North America; its decades of scouting and waiting paid off in spades for quite a few publishers… and dashed others against the rocks.

There have been thousands of manga released in North America over the past 10 years, but I believe the following 10(-ish) manga were the milestones of the decade, the most important works to be released in English. Depending on how detailed (or long) I wanted this article to go, I could pick 25, 50, 100 manga that serve as milestones, indicative of the industry and the medium and what was and whats to come. But I think I’ve picked 10 manga that paint the most vivid picture of the medium so I’m going to go with those–part of the fun of making lists like these is seeing where opinions differ, and what’s important to the writer (me!).

-> Unfortunately I went on entirely too long about my first two choices, and so I’ve had to break this up into a number of parts. I’m loathe to do that, but I feel like 2000-word chunks is a good length to read a bunch of manga history. So here’s book 1 and 2, chronologically, and hopefully we’ll keep pace for the rest of the week.

Feel free to leave a comment if you like, and without further ado let me present to you The 10 Manga That Changed Comics in the last decade, #1 and #2:

#1: Dragonball #1 (pre-2000) / Dragonball Volume 1 (August 2000). By Akira Toriyama, published by Viz.

Dragon Ball Volume 1, by Akira Toriyama, Published by Viz Media, August 2000

In the waning days of 1999 manga sparked the first fires of potential controversy with its march into North America. The manga version of Akira Toriyama’s popular Dragonball series had started a few years earlier, in the quaint (but then-standard) format of 40 page single-issue comics, each reprinting a chapter (or two) of the Japanese comics phenomenon in English language, for the first time. The series were among the first to be released “unflipped” (or in their original Japanese orientation of right-to-left) by Viz, after it was proven the format would be popular thanks to unflipped releases of the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. It was selected because, sure, it’s a manga phenomenon and was incredibly popular everywhere in the world, but also because it was really good, and that was the REASON it was popular everywhere else in the world. The Dragon Ball manga are hilarious, have fantastic fight scenes, great art, and present a fully-realized sci-fi world that any kid (or the young-at-heart) would love to hang out in. It’s top-notch comics, by one of the best creators in the world.

Oh, and, ALSO because Viz was in the midst of a boom of licensing bucks thanks to BIG! POKEMON! DOLLARS! (they had the rights to the million-selling Pokemon manga series) and the Dragonball and Dragonball Z (a sequel) anime adaptations were doing very well on U.S. Television.

The heavily-edited anime adaptations, I should add.

The manga, owing to the creator’s wishes and the general feeling amongst anime fandom that nothing should ever be edited, ever, was completely unedited and featured boobies, pee-pees, and a bunch of other juvenile, completely hilarious jokes. The comics were very popular too, with more than 4 printings of the early issues topping several hundred-thousand copies. They were so popular that Viz even bundled three or four issues into polybags, and sold them in the mass-market at a slightly discounted price.  They sold them at Toys ‘R’ Us. They sold them in Texas, where a man had to explain to his little kid what boobies and peepees are, and he was none-too-happy about that.

Here’s the CBLDF report about the incident, from March 2000, about the November 1999 event: http://www.cbldf.org/pr/000317-texas-dragballz.shtml

And here’s a reproduction of Viz’s Letter From The Editor in the Dragonball comics in August 2000, about the incident and censorship that followed: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2000-08-21/viz-explains-censorship-in-dragonball-manga

We all got lucky. Oh it made the news of course, and Toys ‘R’ Us pulled every comic book from their chain and have never really gotten back into the comics game. Viz… reacted… to narrowly escaping some very hot water, by editing all future Dragonball releases to remove boobies and peepees and tone down all of the sexual humour. By the time the first Dragonball collected edition came out in 2000, this:

became this:

And a lot of folks (me) whined on the internet. Viz had caved to public perception, and decided the fact that selling tens of thousands of Dragonball collections (at the then-standard 6″ x 9″ size, though at a ‘discounted’ price of just $12.95) was much, much more important than publishing the unedited work, and risking legal troubles. Dragon Ball taught us that sometimes the price of mainstream acceptance was watered-down and disappointing content.

It took a few years, and internet petitions, and letters, but right-around the time Dragonball Volume 4 was released, Viz decided to go back to releasing the work unedited, but with an “Ages 13 and Up” warning label on the cover. Read about it here: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2001-03-09/dragonball-manga-to-remain-unedited.

But apparently that warning label means jack and squat in the real world, when controversy comes-a-courtin’. Which of course is why Dragon Ball’s boobies and pee-pees made waves again THIS year.  In October of 2009, a  County Councilman from Maryland held up photocopies of panels of Dragon Ball at a school board meeting, decrying the work as filth and trying to use it as leverage for his own bullshit political agenda against the school in question (I may be biased). It caused quite a stir across the internet and in particular amongst librarians, with the vast majority of them coming down firmly in support of the work, though it wasn’t enough to stop the book from getting pulled from all of the school and public libraries in the county. Despite the fact that it’s a bestseller, despite the fact it had multiple warning labels, it was pulled from highschool and even public libraries in that county. Pathetic.

Luckily, Viz hasn’t decided to censor the work again and the recent VizBig editions of Dragonball which collect 3 volumes in one oversized edition, are the most faithful and best-reproduced yet, full of colour pages and cheap too! I highly recommend them. But I think this editorial from August, 2000, is still sadly applicable today:

If anyone has any specific questions about what has been changed, or what “originally” happened in a particular place, please write to me about it. Our intentions aren’t to conceal the truth even if we have to conceal Goku’s genitals. We’ll try our best to keep it as true to the original as possible within the boundaries that have been set upon us. Hopefully someday America will be mature enough as a country that Dragon Ball can be printed as it was originally drawn. – Viz Media, August 2000

Yeah, hopefully, someday.

-o+O+o-

#2: Cardcaptor Sakura Pocket Mixx Volume 1, March 2000

Cardcaptor Sakura Pocket Mixx Volume 1 - By CLAMP, published by Tokyopop, March 2000

Cardcaptor Sakura was one of the earliest and easily the most-anticipated manga released in English by the all-woman manga collective CLAMP, and Tokyopop made it happen. Originally serialized, much like Dragon Ball / DBZ, as a series of issues (in Tokyopop’s “MIXX CHIX” line of comics… hahaha), the first manga trade paperback was released in March of 2000, at the same time as the fourth issue of the serialization, also included in the book. I have a vague recollection of this being unprecedented at the time, the collected edition of a work arriving on THE SAME DAY as the serialization, but then Tokyopop always were ones to break the rules. It’s no wonder they rushed to get a collection out, as Cardcaptor Sakura had been a much-requested favourite of hardcore anime and manga fans for a few years, with huge communities and fan-bases sprung-up around the adorable, fashionable characters thanks to its genre similarities to the Magical Girl manga/anime Sailor Moon. It was the first manga series targeted not at an existing fandom, but at little girls.

Tokyopop’s format and price-point for these collections were shocking to most manga fans–they were tiny and cheap! The “Pocket Mixx” collections as they called them measured only 4.5″ wide by 6.5″ tall, a little more than 2/3 size of regular manga releases, or about 1/2 standard “comic book” size. Smaller than the Japanese size too. But Tokyopop priced them at only $9.99 a pop, for 200 pages of story, and a combination of the price-point, the ‘unique’ size, and the groundbreakingly fresh and original content drew in readers big-time… despite a bunch of bitching about the quality of the printing. Everyone liked to bitch about Tokyopop’s early releases, but man, did everyone buy them. Cardcaptor Sakura Volume 1 was definitely a hit. A small-scale hit, but still noteworthy from a company whose only major success to date had been the Sailor Moon manga, by Naoko Takeuchi, despite a half-dozen other releases. It was later that year that the series would really blow-up.

But before we get into why it was a huge success, lets go back and talk about Dragon Ball for a moment. You might’ve caught, above, that the Dragon Ball comics had been coming out for almost 3 years before the first collection was released in August of 2000. All manga trade paperback releases to that point were similarly slowly paced, and similarly expensively priced. If anything, the release of Dragon Ball Volume 1 at $12.95 could be read as a reaction to the Pocket Mixx pricing, though even then Viz couldn’t match the prices of the Tokyopop material with Viz’s larger book size and higher production costs. A quick survey of the 3 manga trade paperbacks Viz solicited in the same month as Cardcaptor Sakura Pocket Mixx Volume 1 shows their prices at $15.95 for the two adult releases, and $12.95 for the POKEMON release, which was selling like gangbusters at the time anyway. It was a very different industry.

So if Cardcaptor Sakura Volume 1 was not the first Pocket Mixx release, or the first CLAMP release, or the first shoujo release, why am I mentioning it? 3 Reasons:

#1: The Creators. While the success of Rumiko Takahashi in North America had already opened a lot of eyes about the lack of Gender disparity amongst manga creators (particularly as opposed to the male-dominated North American industry), CLAMP was not just 1 woman but 4, all immensely skilled, all trading duties on their manga, and they’d come up from the “junior leagues” of doujinshi to do it. They’re majorly inspiring creators for a generation of girls and women (and guys too!). Though CLAMP’s Magic Knight Rayearth and x/1999 were released a few years prior, they had nowhere near the impact or popularity of Cardcaptor Sakura.

#2: Timing and Audience: While it wasn’t the first shoujo released into North America, or the most popular (this is all post-Sailor Moon remember), it was certainly one of the first, and one of the most successful. With its delicate lines and drawings and exceptionally cute characters and fashions, Sakura’s appeal was clearly aimed at young girls, possibly the first mass-market comic to do so in 30 years, and went allll the way up to creepy 40-something otaku, ensuring a nice broad audience and healthy success. Cardcaptor Sakura was one of the first true moe manga to be released in North America (Google it). It was also the first solo stand-alone title that Tokyopop released after Sailor Moon, giving progressive comic shops (few though they may have been…) something else to sell the die-hard Sailor Moon fans.

#3: It was the title that really started the manga boom in bookstores.

In preparing a little research for this article, I pinged Kurt Hassler, former buyer for Borders/Waldenbooks, unofficial early-days Tokyopop consultant, and currently Editor-In-Chief of YEN PRESS, publishing Japanese manga, Korean manhwa, original English-language manga, and manga-styled other-media adaptations. Hassler is credited with starting the manga boom in 2000/2001, and for guiding numerous manga pubs towards the market we have today. So I flat-out asked Mr. Hassler about the manga-boom on Twitter, cuz he’d be the person to know:

@Comics212 said:  Kurt, what would you say was the most important book you brought to stores in the early days? Fruits Basket? Kingdom Hearts? A work by Clamp?

@YenPress said: Back in the day, Sailor Moon was the book that really paved the way for manga followed by Cardcaptor Sakura & Dragonball. Cartoon Network’s Toonami block opened a lot of doors for manga. It would be nice to see a network devote some afternoon airtime to anime again.

Cardcaptor Sakura, like most popular manga, spawned an anime tv series in Japan. Unlike most of those anime though, the series was brought to North America. It was dubbed, severely edited, and aired on Friday-afternoon TV as CARDCAPTORS. The series premiered on June 17th 2000 on the KidsWB!, a then-young network but with broad, broad reach. Sailor Moon was only ever available in syndication, getting legendarily bad time-slots and had been off-the-air in most markets for a year or two. CARDCAPTORS debut was massive and instant hit with kids (particularly girls), though it wasn’t without some controversy amongst die-hard fans. The North American release of the series started with the 8th episode–where not-coincidentally the male-co-star Li Syaoran finally shows up, to provide both a male and female lead to “better fit American tastes” or something. Almost all of the Sakura-centric episodes were edited out completely, and the action was ramped-up to turn the series into an action-adventure romp for boys… and girls could watch too if they wanted. And man, did this INFURIATE anime fans!!! Check this out: http://www.themanime.org/editorials.php?id=6.

So with Tokyopop releasing monthly Cardcaptor Sakura comics, and trade paperback collections of those comics every 4-6 months, COMPLETELY UNEDITED (but fueled by a popular afternoon TV show!) there was suddenly a rush by hardcore fans AND casual viewers alike to the new, AUTHENTIC releases, which as Mr. Hassler said just happened to be in bookstores everywhere thanks to Tokyopop’s previous successes. It’s important to note that, in my estimation, it was this drive to authenticity that really fueled manga through the 00s, for better-or-for-worse. But we’ll get to that later.

Yes, Sailor Moon opened the door for shoujo manga and anime, and other Tokyopop properties appearing around the same time with anime tie-ins like Gundam Wing definitely had some influence, and hell, Dragon Ball Z was (and is) a much more popular property than all of them combined, but Cardcaptor Sakura was in the right place, at the right time, at the right price-point, in the right format, with the right content, appealing entirely to a fanbase that had been otherwise completely abandoned by comics. Basically, it was the perfect book to launch the bookstore boom (though, honestly, it would take until 2002 or 2003 to really kick into gear).

It’s worth noting that Tokyopop re-released the series of tpbs in the now-standard 5.5×7.5 manga format a few years later, in 2004. Eventually they lost the license to the series due to a dust-up with Japanese licensor Kodansha, and at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con publisher Dark Horse Comics announced that, as part of their partnership with Kodansha and CLAMP, they would be re-releasing Cardcaptor Sakura in new omnibus editions with high-quality printing and a new-translation, just in time for the 10th Anniversary of the series in 2010.

-o+O+o-

Tomorrow: Manga #3 and #4!

- Christopher

Long story short, it’s a good one. Go check it out: http://comicscomicsmag.blogspot.com/2009/10/tatsumi-in-toronto.html

- Chris

Not as long as many of the “lifers” I’ve met during that time—the men and occasional women who will retail comics and pop-culture ephemera until the day they die or quit in disgust—but long enough. Long enough to remember the Direct Market of comic book specialty stores the way it was before Marvel, Heroes World, and Diamond. The way it was more-or-less since it’s inception, before immense greed and short-sightedness closed 2/3s of comic stores in probably 3 or 4 years.

I wasn’t terribly invested in comics retail at the time, I was too interested in comics as a medium. The Invisibles! JLA! Sandman! Awesome. The bits and bobs of ordering, sell-through, inventory tracking, I learned all that on the job. I also learned to fear the collapse of comic book stores—and the loss of my job—there too. In the second year I’d worked in the comic book store, when Marvel bought Heroes World distribution and pulled their comics from every other distributor over the space of a few months, I have to admit that I just didn’t really grasp all of it… But I knew enough to know that if my store stayed open, things would be very different.

In a little over a year we were getting all of our comics from Diamond—who had until that point never distributed in Canada at all. All of the local distributors (previously the Kings of Comics) were reduced to selling comics supplies and diversifying into sports cards, magic, RPGs, and mountains of old comics stock. When they didn’t go out of business entirely (owing a lot of people a lot of money, I found out years later). The industry had been through a major shift, a number of stores closed up shop in the Toronto area. We stayed open (though there were quite a few lean weeks there), and I learned what it feels like to wonder if the comics will be coming out next week or not.

The thing about all of this is that during this time I spent a lot of time on the internet. A Lot. Listening to fans bitch, to retailers bitch, to publishers and creators bitch. The comics industry was a cacophony of bitchiness, and I jumped in guns blazing. Through it all, the one big narrative through in the discussion, was that it was somebody else’s fault. A fan buys 5 copies of X-Force #1, and then becomes disillusioned 12 months later when he realizes the books are shit and never going to be worth anything? The Retailer’s Fault. A retailer orders 100 cases of fucking Warriors of Plasm Trading Cards + Binders and can’t sell one? The Publisher’s Fault. Publisher sales drop through the floor across the board? The fans fault. DEATHMATE BLACK? God Has Forsaken Us. And the industry collapsed in on itself.

It’s about 15 years after all that nonsense today, and things seem “stable” but really, that’s just a convenient lie that we’ve all bought into. Things aren’t stable, behind the scenes (and sometimes spilling onto message boards and websites) people are very worried. Fans, Retailers, Publishers. Distributors. But the thing that to me is the most disconcerting and heralds the biggest change? Diamond Comics Distributors drastically raising their order minimums. They did this a few months back. This action has shaken a lot of publishers out of the industry, and it’s meant some pretty bad things for a lot of people. But really, and realistically, The Previews catalogue is not any better or of higher quality than it was a year ago. I am reminded of this the last Tuesday of every month, when I race through that thing at break-neck speed, It’s just as tough a slog with most of the same bright spots as before. Hell, 100 pages each of Marvel and DC is more than enough to depress you on its own. But what the increased order minimums have really done is make my job as a retailer much more difficult. Why? Because of the things have been taken out of the catalogue that I have to go hunting for. Let me give you the example that prompted me to post this in the first place:

Last month, a customer asked me for Cynical Orange Volume 8, a manwha title previously published by ICE/Kunion, and picked up by Yen Press a year or two back. I checked my computer, and saw that we’d never received Cynical Orange Volume 8, despite my customer’s insistence that it was out. According to the YEN website? It was in fact released. It just never got offered through Diamond. So we didn’t have it.

Now I want to point something out here, something that’s really, really important. This customer is asking for a title that isn’t a popular one for us. It’s called Cynical Orange, for heaven’s sake. It’s a Korean shoujo title, which from a sales point of view? Not the strongest seller. But this customer is not just a customer for Cynical Orange. This customer buys, on average, 10-20 different new manga from us in a month. She does this because our prices are good, because we get things in in a timely way, and because we carry everything. We’re competitive, timely, and comprehensive, and so she comes here and spends a few hundred bucks a month, every month. And now, we’d missed a volume of her favourite manga, that she saw on the shelves at one of our competitors. Not another comic shop of course, but of Borders, Barnes & Noble, Chapters, Indigo, our real competitors, big box retail chain stores. What happens to us when we’re not as competitive, or timely, or comprehensive? Any one of those? We lose the sale. And we MIGHT lose all of the sales.

Of course I assured her I’d have it next week, got on the phone to any number of other distributors who actually carry Yen’s full line, and ordered it there. Got it. She’s a happy reader.

Here’s the thing: This wasn’t something that had been offered and then cancelled. We get little reports from Diamond when something we ordered from Diamond isn’t coming out. We then use that information to track down the item through another source (if it’s still coming out) or to disappoint a customer (if it’s not). This is something Diamond simply never solicited, despite soliciting other books from that publisher. This was, and I mean this in “comics retailer terms” and not to be too hyperbolic, but this was chilling. What else had I missed from Yen? From other publishers? Was I serving my customers or had I dropped the ball?

Of course the next thing I did was go through the Diamond catalogues for May, June, July, and August, and tried to figure out WHAT ELSE I was missing by ordering Yen’s books through Diamond. It was a good handful of books. Despite Yen being an imprint of the single largest publisher of books in the world, Diamond wasn’t carrying them all.

So Then I cut all of my orders of Yen Press books from Diamond. I’ve started ordering Yen Press through alternate distribution arrangements. It turns out that now I get Yen’s full line, I get them on time, and for more-or-less the same price as Diamond. It means another hour of work gets piled on me every few months, and it’s certainly not as convenient as just ticking more boxes on the massive Previews order I have to do anyway. But it means that I can still serve my customers, and keep them in my store, where I want them to spend money. I can do my job as a Direct Market Comic Book Specialty Store by going outside of the Distributor of the Direct Market of Comic Book Stores. You gotta admit, that’s pretty fucked-up.

It means that Diamond is losing that money. It’s no great shakes, admittedly, a few hundred dollars a month retail, more when it’s something big like James Patterson’s Maximum Ride or Svetlana Chmakova’s Night School. But I’m not going to be comparing and contrasting orders between two or three sources because of those sources is dropping the ball—my time is too valuable for that nonsense. I’ve talked to other retailers who, forced with the same conundrum, simply stop ordering lines like this altogether, letting the sales go to other comic stores, or chain stores, or the internet. That’s money out of Diamond’s pocket too.

What happens when Direct Market retailers can’t trust Diamond to keep them stocked?

For us, it means going elsewhere with surprising frequency. It means that the Direct Market has started to fade, losing relevancy, immediacy, its massive buying power and its ability to be heard. Instead of comic book retailers asking Diamond to bargain with pubs on their behalf for the common good, it becomes up to those same retailers to bargain for themselves with the great big publishers of material. It gives rise to direct market retailer organizations like COMICSPRO, who are attempting to fill the gap left by Diamond but honestly, I’ve never really found we had much in common with the concerns they’ve expressed publically.

I feel like it was Diamond’s (thankless) job to stabilize the Direct Market following the Marvel/Heroes World clusterfuck. I feel like, once stabilized, Diamond decided it was their job to maintain the status quo of distributing Marvel and DC Comics—and their closest imitators—to stores and retailers who’ve never really been educated on how to stock or sell anything else. Has there been a self-publishing success story like Bone since Diamond assumed control of the Direct Market? Could their be? My feeling is, institutionally, no. I feel like Diamond closed that door, and now the radical innovation (and radical success) happens entirely online, in webcomics. Which as I’ve mentioned before, doesn’t generally help me as a direct market retailer.

I’ve said this before, but: The idea of the direct market really is great, a specialized comics distribution network that caters to thousands of stores with a specific interest in them? Sign me up! Unfortunately, the actuality of the DM stopped living up to the ideals of the DM a long time ago.

With the back of the catalogue shrinking every month, the front of the catalogue bloating more and more to maintain the illusion of stability or “growth”, and extrapolating my own ordering practices of pulling orders away from Diamond, I feel like we’re just about done with the notion of a “Direct Market”. I feel like in the very near future, Diamond will exist as a mechanism to on one side distribute graphic novels from their clients to bookstores (Diamond Books), and on the other to distribute superhero comics to comic book stores (Diamond Comics), and everything else will exist through other distribution channels, or working direct with the content producers themselves. I feel like we’re 75% of the way there now.

And I admit, I’m pretty cynical. But honestly? With Amazon best-seller lists, and New York Times Graphic Novels Bestseller lists, and the popularity of manga, and graphic novels, and the big movie tie-ins and the rapid-fire collection of superhero stories into graphic novels, and THE INTERNET in all its forms (pirates especially), one day we’re going to look around and realize that no one really cares about the notion of a “Direct Market.” Everyone else will have moved on to the idea of graphic novels as a mass-market medium, available in all kinds of formats, from all kinds of venues.

Except the lifers, like me.

- Christopher

It went out of print last year, with word from Tokyopop that no matter how loud anyone yelled, the concluding Volume 2 wouldn’t be showing up anywhere and don’t hold your breath for a new printing of volume 1. I was resigned to getting one great graphic novel out of Mr. Graham, eager to see his new stuff, and galvanized that creators should never sign shitty work-for-hire contracts on books that they conceive of and create on their own.

Over the last little while behind the scenes, it seems Brandon and Image came to an agreement with Tokyopop to get this series back in print (though only in single-issue form) and this week, King City #1 hit the stands from Image Comics. It’s the serialization of the first trade, so for the few thousand people who bought the book the first time round, it’ll be doubling up what you already own. For everyone else though, you get to jump on board the series at the beginning.

I’m totally happy to see King City #1 hit the stands. Having just finished it (for a second time) I was reminded how much I liked it, how much neat stuff is shoved into the backgrounds, how thoroughly-constructed the sci-fi world Graham created is, and how the whole thing feels like a manga serial intended to run in HEAVY METAL in the 1980s…in the best possible way.

It’s on better comic store shelves everywhere this week. It’s a rare thing to get a good second chance on something like this, so pick it on up.

- Christopher

The line contains 4 different products, a series of balancing and cleansing oils that will run between $77 and $89 CDN, and be available exclusively at Holt Renfrew in Canada (Bloor Street, Yorkdale, Vancouver). Anno has contributed art and design for the packaging of the product, and generated a loose narrative around five archetypical Japanese women, each relating to a different ‘flavour’ of product. Also available is a make-up brush kit with Tokyo Kamon Girl designs emblazoned on the case, and a custom make-up box, also sporting Anno’s designs.

Incorporating traditional Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print styles and Japanese iconography, laid overtop of ultra-contemporary packaging, these are some downright lovely pieces of design. They integrate the traditional elements of Kamon design including circles and nature, with each flower or plant on Anno’s badges representing different aspects of the women she’s created… Kamon in particular were typically reserved for upper-class families, and the application of these designs uses lots of shiny gold foil and ink to give the products a luxurious, high-end feel. A lot of thought and effort has gone into this campaign, and shu uemera has spared no expense.  (Click for larger.)

This in and of itself is lovely, and would make for a lovely post here at Comics212. But here’s the most awesome part: The press kit also came with a gorgeous booklet which espouses the philosophy of the line and the various “girls” on one side, and a biography and gallery of Moyoco Anno’s manga and illustratuin work on the other! And a CD-ROM full of images from Moyoco Anno’s vast bibliography! And permission to post them (until at least October 31st, 2009)! So if all of the images disappear at some point in the future, you’ll know why.

Get ready for some lovely art. Let’s start with the book, first.

The Tokyo Kamon Girls 40-page flip-book could only be the product of an international upscale cosmetics company with money to spend… if you take my meaning. It’s a high-end production, with gold-foil inset on the cardstock cover depicting the Kamon  Girl designs in something approaching their historical mode: shiny and austentatious. The book features glossy full-colour production with liberal use of a fifth-colour gold ink to add that extra oomph.

Scattered throughout are biographies of each of the five Tokyo Kamon Girls: “pure and innocent” Sakurako, “energetic and strong-willed” Tamaki; Tsuruha (“who sparkles as she drifts through the streets of Tokyo”);  “reserved and elegant” Matsuno; “coquettish” Katsura. In addition to the Kamon featuring the girls, Anno also created a full-size illustration of Sakurako as an ukiyo-e print, which is gorrrrrgeous:

Lantern at night - Sakurako, Ukiyo-e print by Moyoco Anno ©2009

The first half of the book is then rounded out with a description of the make-up brushes and make-up box, a page featuring quotes from Anno on her inspirations for creating the series (“I felt afresh that shu uemura is a global brand which is aimed at the world and treasures Japanese aesthetics. That is why, when designing the bottles, I felt I wanted to design something with a hint of modern Japanese taste.”). Oh, and a walk through the five real-life Tokyo neighborhoods that the five fictional ladies live in, places that you will never live because you are poor (for the record: Ueno Park, Den-En-Chofu, Ginza, Azabu-Juban, Shirokane). It is amazing.

Manga-ka Moyoco Anno.

The other half of the book (and really it’s a flip-book, maybe this is side-a and the cosmetics-focussed side is side-b) is an introduction to Moyoco Anno, artist. It contains a biography, partial bibliography, and dozens of illustrations. Because the bio wasn’t presented to me in a digital form, I feel awkward about copy-pasting it in here, but the notable bits from her biography are that she’s been making manga for 20 years, she’s an accomplished ukiyo-e woodblock printer in addition to being a manga-ka, she’s had a bunch of hit series, and her website is http://www.annomoyoco.com.

One of the most interesting bits about Moyoco Anno that isn’t in the printed bio? It doesn’t mention that Moyoco Anno’s manga has appeared from more publishers in English than any other manga-ka! It’s true. Her North American debut was in the pages of the Tokyopop-published Happy Mania (11 volumes), but her next series was the satirical bishonen role-reversal series Flowers & Bees from Viz (7 volumes). Her current, and most-popular English-language series is Sugar Sugar Rune, an all-ages shojo series from Del Rey (8 volumes, ongoing) about magical young witches who gain their powers from breaking boys hearts (HEH). Somewhere in there, Anno contributed a story to the French/Japanese co-production JAPON, known in North America as Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators from Fanfare/Ponent-Mon (1 volume). Actually, the bibliography mentions all of these stories except Flowers & Bees, but despite being an English-language booklet produced for an English audience, it doesn’t mention which… if any… of her manga works have been translated into English! If it weren’t for the fact that my customer demographic and the demographic for these products were so far apart, I’d fear customers coming in to ask me for manga like Hatakari Man or Sakuraman. But I have a feeling I’ll be able to sleep easy on this one.

What this book does do though is provide lots of gorgeous illustrations and excerpts from her catalogue, which I am free to run below. Yay! Oh, and: all images Copyright ©2009 Moyoco Anno, all rights reserved. Don’t copy or distribute these images. Got it?

Chandelier, original work for Prints21 2005 fall edition. Prints21©Moyoco Anno.

Jelly Beans (interior art spread). Jelly Beans©Moyoco Anno / Kodansha.

Le Chant Des Grillons (interior page), ©Moyoco Anno/s (from Japan As Viewed By 17 Creators)

Sakurakan, ©Moyoco Anno/Kodansha

Sugar Sugar Rune (colour illustration), ©Moyoco Anno / Kodansha

Tundra Blue Ice, 1988 by Moyoco Anno, SHUEISHA Inc.

Stella, original work for Prints21 2005 fall edition. Prints21©Moyoco Anno.

Lovely, isn’t it? That “Tundra Blue Ice” one actually reminds me a little bit of Taiyo Matsumoto’s work, and it’s from very early in her career. Heck, it might’ve been her first series actually… the timing works out right. Nice.

Here’s two more pieces, but these are particularly cool. These are wordless comic strips from Moyoco Anno’s newspaper strip, called Ochibisan. It runs in Japan’s Asahi Shinbun, and is illustrated in the style of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. It’s a celebration of the seasons, and each strip runs in brilliant full colour.

Ochibisan © Moyoco Anno

Ochibisan © Moyoco Anno

Seeing all of these pieces together, it really shows the range that Anno posesses. Moving effortlessly from manga to fashion illustration to ukiyo-e woodblock prints to newspaper strips to product packaging and design. She has a phenomenal career, and I find myself really inspired by her work.

In closing, I wanted to talk about a few little biographical tidbits that I didn’t get to mention early on. First off, sadly Moyoco Anno took a break from manga last year for health reasons, stopping the serialization of her incredibly popular Hatakari Man manga mid-stream (which may account for why it has not yet been licensed for release in North America). It is currently unknown when she’ll return to manga (though she is continuing her newspaper strip), though given the prestige of the Tokyo Kamon Girls project I can’t imagine why she would.

Moyoco Anno is also the wife of Neon Genesis Evangelion director and co-creator and Gainax founder Hideki Anno. They wed in 2002, over 5 years after The End of Evangelion.

–

For more on Moyoco Anno and Tokyo Kamon Girls, check out these resources:

Wikipedia Biography – Moyoco Anno at AnimeNewsNetwork – Moyoco Anno Official Website – shu uemera at The National Post – shu uemera Tokyo Kamon Girls Official Website

- Christopher
Thanks to Nathalie for the heads-up!

]]> http://comics212.net/2009/08/19/moyoco-anno-x-shu-uemura-manga-make-up-debuts/feed/ 5 http://comics212.net/2009/08/18/are-the-new-people-post-otaku-welcome-to-the-mega-culture/ http://comics212.net/2009/08/18/are-the-new-people-post-otaku-welcome-to-the-mega-culture/#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:19:03 +0000 Chris http://comics212.net/?p=3097 This past weekend a new Japanese pop-cultural centre opened in San Francisco, and it sounds pretty awesome. It’s called New People and it’s… well it’s kind of a Japan-style mall. It’s got a gift shop with manga and artbooks and designer toys and things, 4 different goth/loli-informed clothing stores including a North American outpost for hyper-popular label Baby The Stars Shine Bright, a movie theatre sponsored by Viz, a cafe (or two), and an art gallery. It sounds like a pretty amazing building actually.

To celebrate the opening of New People, they held a great big cultural festival called the “J-Pop Summit”, with bands and clothes and artists and presentations from Yoshitaka Amano (final fantasy), Yuichi Yokoyama (New Engineering), and the director of the live action 20th Century Boys movie, which I guess Viz announced they have the rights to now? At least they had an actor dressed up like “Friend” from the books, which is kind of amazing too.

Check out these event descriptions from [About.com], [Same Hat!], and [Anime Vice].

All in all, it sounds like a truly amazing event, and a step forward for the promotion of Japanese pop culture in North America. It also seemed really weird to me as well, here’s why:

I think I mentioned that this fall I was lucky enough to see a presentation on Otaku by Professor Kaichiro Morikawa, an expert on Otaku, Japanese culture, and the export of Japanese culture outside of Japan. One of the most interesting points in his lecture (and the whole thing was phenomenal) was that Otaku spaces are generally _closed_ spaces, hidden from the public eye, and that non-Otaku spaces are all about being clear and visible and open to the public. The manga, software, doujin, and toy stores in Japan have their windows blacked out, and popular clothing and mainstream culture stores have big glass windows inviting eyes inwards. Otaku are introverts, ashamed of their purchases, non-otaku are extroverts flashing their shopping bags with massive brand-name labels on them (this is both only part of his larger point, and a simplification, but still). Check this out:

Animate Flagship, Manga/Anime/Character Goods Store, Ikebukuro.

Softmap Software store, Akihabara

Lamtarra, Porn Store, Akihabara

Now, conversely, check out the frontage on these fashionable flagship stores in Fashion-capital Harajuku.

Christian Dior Flagship, Transparent Building

Ralph Lauren, 25ft high windows

Louis Vuitton, giant glass windows with Takashi Murakami art done up in lights. Gorgeous.

Can you see the difference?

Actually as a bit of an aside: Perhaps the most interesting thing here? Japanese Otaku have largely rejected much of LV ‘partner’ artist Takashi Murakami’s work, apparently. He appeals to the mainstream, to youth culture, and especially to other artists. But the hardcore nerds simply aren’t into his work or his ideals, so far as I can tell. There’s nothing moe about his work… Louis Vuitton’s great big transparent open-concept retail space (with multiple scultptures visible from the street…!) is directly in opposition to contemporary otaku retail and public spaces.

So I trust this point has been well illustrated?

Here’s what the NEW PEOPLE building looks like.

New People Building Exterior. Photo by Ryan Sands, http://samehat.blogspot.com

It doesn’t look like an Otaku space at all, not even a little. I mean, it’s GORGEOUS, it looks like cutting-edge Japanese fashion retail design. It reminds me a lot of the Harajuku H&M flagship actually, lemmie see if I can find a picture of it.

H&M Flagship, Harajuku

The scale of these two buildings is really, really different btw. The New People building is probably about as tall as the top lit part of that H&M building (called ‘the ice cube building’ btw) in the middle. But you see what I mean about that right, where each floor is open to the street, for 30+ feet of transparent frontage? That was the thing that struck me when looking at the reports on the opening of New People–it doesn’t look like it’s a space for nerds… despite the fact that it is clearly intended to be a space for nerdish pursuits.

The first-floor of the New People building features New People: The Store, a sort of gift-shop of Japanese culture. Artbooks, manga, toys, shirts, paper goods, designer items, etc. The folks at Anime Vice did a great walk-through of the space, and apparently they allow embedding so spend 30 seconds or so watching this:

Here’s a still photo, in case it doesn’t embed correctly or you don’t like clicking things:

New People- The Store. Photo by Animevice.com

Again, it’s got a big open floor plan and it’s lovely and well-designed, but it’s laid out like a boutique clothing store, not something ‘otaku’. Check this out, here’s what a hardcore otaku shop looks like:

Animate, Ikebukuro

Village Vanguard, a pop culture chain store. Shown: Odaiba location.

“So where the hell is he going with this?” you’re asking yourself. And to be honest, I’m not 100% sure. The whole thing is just leading to more questions for me, about intent, about the future of Japanese culture (and therefore manga…) in North America, about the future of retail. But I think what it all comes down to is the future, and the industry passing from a planning/regrouping phase into actively seeking “What’s Next?”.

I’m specifically curious what this means for Viz, whose CEO and parent-company are the primary investors/visionarries involved in this undertaking. Let’s face it, they’re so huge now that when you’re talking about the North American manga industry, you’re talking about Viz (publishers of Naruto, Bleach, and Pokemon, for those not in the know). For years I’ve been discussing whether or not “What’s Next?” in manga is going to be an aging demographic embracing more mature works… or if it’s just going to be 40 year old Naruto fans (mirroring the superhero comics industry). While they have continued to funnel new product into the all-consuming shonen/shojo machine, Viz seems to have clearly staked out the mature next steps, the seinen manga, the light novels, the more mature shoujo manga, the sci-fi fantasy novels. But they’re also importing larger parts of both Japanese youth culture and otaku culture. We’re getting more art books, we’re getting more Japanese movies, we’re getting more character goods. We’re getting online manga, for free, for audiences that could be entirely new to comics (or at the very least a part of the burgeoning literary/new mainstream graphic novel clique). Viz seems to be betting on a wider, wilder, more diverse manga industry (as part of a larger J-culture industry), and part of that is creating a cultural context for the material here in North America… that more than hardcore nerds are aware of. New People is clearly a massive leap in that direction.

But: NEW PEOPLE are deliberately eschewing the “otakuness” of otaku culture in an effort to present otaku culture to the mass market.

Viz, Shogakukan, all involved over there, they’re trying to create a mainstream cultural awareness of many different facets of Japanese culture, which (if successful) will make it much easier for them to import the thousands of more complicated, unique, challenging manga that they have access to through their Japanese parent companies. It’s a canny move from where I’m seeing, if it plays out right. To be honest, as a fan of complicated, unique, challenging manga I win no matter what.

It also looks like Viz just might be trying to move their fortunes out of the iron grip of the increasingly fickle thieves (“but I’m just sampling!”) that make up anime and manga fandom to… you know, ‘normal’ people. I just wonder when, or if, the hardcore nerds, the American Otaku, are going to revolt when their fandom is opened up to the general public… It already happens all the time on smaller scales, the fandom all watches pokemon, it gets too big, they hate pokemon and people who still like it are “Poketards”. Ditto Naruto, and it’s die-hard fans who are called “Narutards” by the otaku elite (you can tell they’re elite because they refer to anime with North American releases by their Japanese names).

I wonder how long it’ll be before, much like Nintendo hardcore fans (called “core gamers” in the lingo) before them, the American Otaku cry that the manga industry has abandoned them for the general public, where companies can make a fuckload of money for a tenth the effort of satisfying their often insane and frequently contradictory desires…?

Or has that editorial already been written?

Anyway, maybe it won’t go tits-up after all, no core-fans vs. casual-readers in Thunderdome.

Uniqlo is a popular Japanese clothing chain, it’s like the Japanese equivilent of The Gap (actually Uniqlo’s been eyeing buying The Gap for years now… anyway). Uniqlo has been doing a series of radical partnerships for the last few years, putting manga characters and art, and anime, and video games, onto t-shirts. Inexpensive t-shirts too, that ‘normal’ people are expected to buy and wear. They call the whole thing “Mega Culture”.

Floor graphics, Uniqlo T-Shirt Store, Harajuku

MEGA CULTURE. Parappa + Uniqlo = greater than the sum of their parts. The blending of introvert and extrovert culture.

Uniqlo’s got the big glass-fronted stores & they’ve got otaku culture all wrapped-up in them, in their lovely boutique-style store layouts. And they’re making money hand-over-fist. When I was visiting Japan, the recently released slate of Shonen Sunday Anniversary shirts had made a debut, and the Harajuku Uniqlo was actually hosting a gallery exhibition and mangaka signing, VIP invite only. I did not get in (LAME) but I did get to observe the normals, the average hip man-and-woman off the street, prowling the same t-shirt racks as obvious otaku, both finding common ground in a bitch’n Gundam Anniversary T or distressed Urusei Yatsura LUM women’s longsleeve. MEGA CULTURE.

So maybe that’s what we’re heading towards… a more seamless blend of nostalgia, youth, and introvert culture with the mass market. Maybe there’ll be friction between the established fans and those trying to spread/exploit that fandom. James Cameron’s NEON GENESIS EVANGELION probably won’t be worse than this summer’s G.I. Joe movie (how could it be?). Maybe not, and video game t-shirts goth-loli affectations will fade. But with the opening of a three-floor, culturally oriented shopping centre by a Japanese-owned American publisher with 15 years of experience in importing Japanese culture, one thing is for certain: the game has definitely changed.

- Chris

]]> http://comics212.net/2009/08/18/are-the-new-people-post-otaku-welcome-to-the-mega-culture/feed/ 16 http://comics212.net/2009/06/29/japan-2009-village-vanguard-kyoto/ http://comics212.net/2009/06/29/japan-2009-village-vanguard-kyoto/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:32:44 +0000 Chris http://comics212.net/?p=2782 Hey folks, sorry the updates have been slow… Internet access hasn’t been that frequent, and we’ve actually been travelling quite a bit. So far we spent 3 days in Tokyo, went to Nikko (beautiful), up to Sapporo on Hokaido (awesome!) and I’m writing this from our hotel in Kyoto. It’s kind of an intense travel time. Anyhow, whilst walking around today we tripped over one of my fav stores from my first visit–Village Vanguard. It’s described as a “cool book store”, with lots of cool items, young-people culture, books, manga, and more. So I figured I’d just post the pictures I took there, today, and not bother with any sort of timeline this time out. I’m also going to try WordPress’ “gallery” feature here to save me some time… Let me know what you think!

Village Vanguard Kyoto: Photos by Christopher Butcher

Click to view the gallery:

- Chris

Update: I’ve been informed that DMP hasn’t terminated it’s exclusivity arrangement exactly, but it still offering its books to retailers. Not sure what this means to be honest. Will let you know when I do.

–

I’d been hearing rumblings that things were about to start changing with regards to Diamond exclusivity contracts, but the just-received e-mail I’m looking at still came as a surprise.

Without replicating the e-mail exactly, I can say that DMP/DMD/June Manga/Akadot Retail (they have about 10 different devisions I think) have seemingly cancelled or allowed to expire their exclusive distribution agreement with Diamond, and are now distributing/selling their work directly to established comics/book stores at discounts much higher than Diamond was offering on the same titles, and they’re doing so from a new retailers-only website, http://www.dmd-sales.com/. According to the website:

Welcome to Digital Manga Direct!!! We are now here to service your needs. We are an independent Manga publisher who has recently obtained the rights to distribute these titles on a ‘direct sales basis.’ This obviously eliminates “Joe Distributor,” thus affording us the luxury to offer you substantial discounts and savings. In addition, you can open an account and place an order right online. There are no minimum orders. 

This allows for fast processing and rapid shipping. Please browse through our great catalog of available titles.

It then directs individual buyers (i.e.: Non-retail accounts) to DMP’s online sales storefront.

I’m going to be honest here, I never understood why DMP went exclusive with Diamond. It’s just ridiculous–DMP has probably the best-developed online sales presence of any publisher in comics, let alone any manga publisher. They ship out thousands of customer orders a month, of all shapes and sizes. Why they would to cut-off retailer sales (which are usually easier orders to pull, bigger orders with more copies/volume means less overhead) when they’re shipping stuff anyway? I get why VIZ went exclusive actually, they were getting out of the shipping/fulfillment business entirely, letting their bookstore distributors Simon & Shuster handle everything. But DMP? I can only imagine the deal that Diamond offered them was really good–and that it’s no longer worthwhile.

Now here’s the big question: Do I think that other pubs will start doing the same? Hell yeah, but only if they’re not distributed to bookstores by Diamond Books… This is because they need the bookstore distro, and breaking a Diamond Comics Exclusive might seriously damage that relationship. I actually can’t think of any pub with a Diamond Book Distributors deal that isn’t also exclusive with Diamond Comics. Hm.

Anyway, fascinating change to the DM today, and just the start of what I feel will be many large changes to “the direct market” in the next 6 months.

- Christopher