Love Star.

Sapporo.

Mos Burger X Mr. Donut. L to R: Donut Holes (asst), Chocolate “Cheese Burgers”, Mango Pudding, Fried Dough with Raspberry “Ketchup”.

Convenience Store Sandwiches on white bread. Default flavour is peanut butter, but these are special. Top: Strawberries and Whipped Cream Sandwich. Bottom: Caramel Pudding Sandwich.

Birthday Cake… thing. Thanks Dave!

Harajuku

Delicious.

- Chris

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1. Random Japan: Prescience
2. Random Japan: Drinks
3. Random Japan: Bookstores

Dustin Harbin secures his spot at TCAF on the 5th floor, alone, by drawing me into a comic strip at his website. I like the illustration of me in the last panel the best but I didn’t want to spoil it.

- Christopher

Related posts:

1. Come, mingle with Comic Geeks
2. New York Comic-Con: See you there…
3. A quick little follow-up on Comic-Con…

–

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

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1. The Tuesday Review: Black Jack Volume 1
2. The Tuesday Review: DISAPPEARANCE DIARY, by Hideo Azuma
3. Review: Little Nothings Volume 2: The Prisoner Syndrome

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From a store just outside Harajuku JR Station, comes these socks. Mickey Mouse as Spider-Man, from July 2009… months before the announcement of the Disney/Marvel deal. Completely unlicensed, entirely prescient.

From my post on Harajuku, which I am working on at the moment.

- Chris

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But I guess the photos will have to do.

Worth noting: The bananas were actually pretty good!

- Christopher

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Giant Robot Magazine #49 Cover by Adrian Tomine.

I don’t really mention it on the blog here as much as I should, but my favourite magazine is probably GIANT ROBOT, an independently produced and funded mag out of California. I’ve been a fan for years and years now, spotting it on the newstands with a bold logo, great title, and an eye-catching photo of CK model Jenny Shimizu way, way back. #10! It’s a general-interest magazine covering art, life, and culture, but with a focus on Asian culture specifically… both here in North America and internationally. It’s well-written, informative, and a great education in all of the things you aren’t going to find just reading manga and watching anime. It’s also very current, very vital, and when it comes to art and film especially it’s like having a great inside track.

Maybe the thing I like about it the most is that it’s so personal–editors Martin and Eric have been there since the beginning. They open every issue with an editorial and a direct address to the reader that feels real and unrehearsed, unlike so many editorial notes that are perfunctory and exclamatory coming from people with a 1-year-contract, these guys have been there since day one, and each little editorial is like a window into a long distance’s friend’s life. What they’ve been up to over the past few months (had a baby! lost at softball!) and how that might tie to this issue’s stories. Even better through working at The Beguiling and visiting the San Diego Comic Con ever year, I have gotten to know Martin and Eric in person, and they’re smart, friendly dudes who love doing what they do.

GR gives me fantastic artist profiles, stories on food and food culture, even a little bit of politics… That’s great stuff. That’s not just worth paying for, it’s worth supporting directly.

In keeping with their editorial style, Martin and Eric have recorded a video asking GR readers and the general public to lend them a hand in a difficult time:

I don’t think they’ve mentioned it anywhere yet (brave face and all that), but in addition to the kinds of issues facing print these days (declining ad revenue, distribution, sales) they’ve recently been dropped from Diamond’s PREVIEWS catalogue, the only way to interact with the vast majority of comic shops who carry manga, anime and other Asian culture goods. Because of GR’s somewhat erratic publishing schedule I didn’t even notice for a little while–and I’m a fan! I’m not pointing at Diamond in particular as the culprit, just a symptom of lost ground. Print is a ‘war of inches’ right now, and if you lose enough ground on enough fronts, eventually you lose the war. This appeal is to help keep them in the fight.

Please go to http://www.giantrobot.com/donate, and you can read more about what they’re asking for, and why, and why it’s a good idea to help. In addition to just helping keep a great arts and culture magazine going, different levels of donation will net you cool stuff like prints, books, original art, subscriptions and more.

My friend Mr. Bryan Lee O’Malley auctioned off a piece of his original art, and raised $2550 for the cause. Which is awesome. I don’t have that kind of art (or that kind of scratch), so we worked it out and I can probably swing about a hundred bucks to directly support artists and work I appreciate, and it nets me a subscription which is cool. I’m hoping that some of you reading here can spare a few bucks as well, or failing that, maybe take me at my word that this is a great magazine and subscribe? Every issue I find something really great in it, and the re-read potential is high. For just $24 (or $30 CDN) you can get a year of great magazines. Failing that? Grab an issue from the newsstand, comic store, wherever you see it and check it out for yourself. And thanks for reading all of this, I don’t make public appeals like this a regular thing, but GR is worth supporting and worth saving.

http://www.giantrobot.com/donate

- Christopher

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The official Kanji of the Year for 2009, as chosen by The Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society? Shin, or ‘New’. Chosen for lots of different reasons, it feels like a lot the end of the last decade was on people’s minds the world over… particularly in Japan where the ruling party since WWII was swept from power! For more on the Kanji of the Year see Wikipedia.

- Chris

No related posts.

Kirin Lemon Strong, 8% alcohol. It’s terrible. Like lemon-flavoured paint thinner. Bought on my first night in Tokyo. This is Chuhai, a sort of only-in-Japan wine-cooler type beverage made with Shochu, which is distilled from Rice, Barley, or Potatoes depending… Chuhai comes from “Shochu Highball”, which is basically a mixed drink made with Shochu. I really dig these chuhai beverages, but this one with the amped up alcohol and chemical lemon taste? No good.

White-Grape flavoured soda at Mos Burger. Really tasty!

“Organic Orange Juice” J-BIO. Tasted awful, like under-ripe oranges. Sitting next to a piece of cheese-twisty-bread. What is the most prominent flavour in the cheese-twisty-bread? If you answered “wasabi/hot mustard”, you’d be correct. Worst breakfast.

Later in the trip, on the way to Sapporo actually, Andrew woke up in the morning and had a regular-strength Kirin lemon chuhai. This was our go-to beverage for the trip, and it treated us very well. Refreshing, with a hint of tipsy.

Asahi Presents: Fruits Party Chuhai! Tastes like muscat (green grapes). Next to it is “Gyoza Flavoured Hokkaido Potato Chips.” Behind it evidence of the more than 20 hours of work I did on Beguiling stuff while on vacation for three weeks.

This is a drinks case in the far corner of the food bazaar underneath Sapporo JR Station. This is the only place in Japan I saw A&W root beer!

This drink case is in the 7-11 attached to the Post Office near Sapporo JR station. In the center near the bottom, you can see two bottles of Rei Ayanami-branded Cafe Latte, clearly the best-selling drink of the day.

Nother shot of the cold UCC Cafe Latte with sexy Rei on it. These are all cold coffees, usually with milk in them. Milk and preservatives.

This was in Kyoto. We ended up staying in a budget hotel right near the manga museum, with lots of residences (and hotels) around. Just north of our hotel was this little scene, 2 vending machines in the outer lobby of an apartment building, with another across the street. Lighthouses that dot the city, guiding thirsty travelers through the urban seas.

Only 100 yen! Deal!

After walking under the blazing sun in Shirahama on Izu for basically three kilometres with no breakfast, I managed to convince my husband that we needed to eat. My increasingly cranky mood may have tipped the scales. We ended up going to the first restaurant we saw, which happened to be a Nagisa beer-themed restaurant, with western meals and really great beer, all-natural, totally unlike the Japanese beers we’d been drinking. Andrew had a pizza for lunch, I had pasta alfredo. It was just us, two sweaty white guys, and tons of Japanese house-wives, all getting lunch. My mood improved considerably after lunch, and I heartily recommend Nagisa Beer.

Our at a proper supermarket in Shirahama, with tons and tons of drinks. Awesome.  Not more selection, but definitely an impressive display! Let’s go in for a closer look.

I bought this Collagen Water, because I heard that it was a thing but I had never seen it on store shelves in Canada. It’s a little like drinking watery lube, with a hint of lemon. So no, I do not recommend it.

In Japan the word “diet” refers to Japanese parliament, and not eating specific kinds of food. So there is no ‘diet coke’ for the most part. They’ve got Coke Zero, which is still Coke Zero, but Diet Coke is called a bunch of different stuff. Currently, it’s No Calorie Coca-Cola Plus! This was a limited edition Coca Cola Plus, with added green tea flavouring. It tasted nothing like green tea, but for a diet coke addict in a country without diet coke… It was basically methadone for my heroin problem.

This is the awesomest canned coffee, BOSS COFFEE RAINBOW. So far as I can tell it tastes like all of the other canned coffees, but it is called BOSS and it has that dude on it, and also a rainbow.

Asahi Cocktail Partner! Made with real fruit juice, and perhaps Vodka! I think vodka rather than chuhai in this one? We tried one, I couldn’t really tell the difference.

The only place in Japan that you CAN get Diet Coke (okay, so I fibbed earlier), is Mickey Ds. While this is basically the size of a Large Coke in North America, in Japan it’s such a freakish size that it comes in a one-piece, sealed container for easy transport back to your home, because you’re clearly not drinking it while out. Japan!

- Chris

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Look, it’s a stunning photo of ME, taken by Charlie Chu, Oni’s newest employee (congrats buddy). That photo (or a crop thereof) graces an interview with me at Torontoist.com that went up earlier this week. In it I talk about comics and graphic novels and Canadian publishing and TCAF and The Beguiling and even this-here-blog. Thanks to Dave Howard for conducting the interview, and if you’ve been missing me here as of late you’ll probably get a kick out of the interview –it was taped rather than typed so I’m more off the cuff and rambly than usual.

On that note, my hosting bill came due at the end of January, and after a careful (slapdash) assessment of my finances, it looks like my advertising here at Comics212 over the last two years just barely covered my hosting here at Comics212 for the last two years. That’s the first time that’s happened, which is very nice and thanks to my many fine advertisers for that. Unfortunately, I should probably be doing a heck of a lot better after almost 8 years of blogging at roughly the same address, so more efforts to generate revenue from this site will be forthcoming. On the plus side that probably means I’ll write more…!

Actual blogging resumes later tonight.

- Christopher

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“I worked for them as a letterer at an embarrassingly low page rate. I took it to get some more superhero style stuff under my belt, hoping that I could at least use them as a springboard to get better work down the line.

For the first two books, things went ok. However, on the next four, I had to send invoices up to six times with constant reminders in order to get paid. It was crazy how often someone could “lose” invoices or have them “caught by the spam filter”. After having waited about 6 months to get paid, I walked and stopped doing any work for them. They did eventually pay up, but it took a lot of effort to get them to do so.

During the above situation, someone who’d worked on one of the books that I worked on contacted me to see if I’d been paid. He’d taken a back-end deal and was told that the book hadn’t made any money. I wasn’t surprised, to be honest — It didn’t seem like it was going to be a big seller. The person didn’t know much about how distribution worked and thought that it was a lie that Diamond was only giving about 40% of cover price, so I kind of dismissed his claims at first. Then he sent me a spreadsheet of expenses and income that he’d been sent from Bluewater and asked me to look over to see if it made sense. I was shocked to find that the cost of lettering was listed at TWICE what I was paid.

Maybe there’s a logical explanation as to why the lettering cost was listed at twice what I was paid, but I can’t think of what it would be. What it looks like, to me, is number fudging.

- Ed Brisson, comics creator and small-press publisher

So to reitterate: Most creatives working with Bluewater only get paid royalties once a book is profitable. But the accounting to determine whether or not a book is profitable is done by the publisher, and has allegedly been rigged in the publisher’s favour at least once. So to those last, few, desperate people defending the business practices of this company, it’s not just that you’re working for free to ‘get your name out there’ which in this age of social media and webcomics is frankly ridiculous, but this publisher may actually be deliberately cheating you out of money that you would be owed. I would recommend, again, to any creator looking to ‘break into’ comics, to find other routes than through the gutter.

In a completely unrelated matter, in no way tied to the previous statement (particularly in a way that could get folks like Mr. Brisson in trouble vis a vis Bluewater’s constant legal threats), after consulting with my employer we’ve decided at The Beguiling to no longer carry Bluewater’s product. If a customer would like to pre-order Bluewater’s material with payment, we’ll honour that request, because we’re a full-service comic store. But frankly the idea of supporting this publisher with shelf copies (or making money ourselves off of these books) has become incredibly unappealing to us for a variety of reasons.

For more on Bluewater Comics, check out Simon Jones, Tom Spurgeon, Johanna Draper Carlson (2), and Heidi MacDonald.

- Christopher, “every bit helps,” said the old woman as she pissed into the sea.

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We launched the TCAF website last week, and I think we finally have all of the bugs worked out and the little changes I wanted made, made. We haven’t really done any official PR yet, letting people discover it on their own through word of mouth, but I imagine that’ll change next week some time. I have one really big meeting tomorrow, and then one ridiculously big meeting on Friday morning, so work time and free time is kind of eaten up by that.

In addition to being angry enough to throw a couple of finger-pointy blog entries up, I decided to forgo 5 or 6 hours sleep this week to write a review for Manga.About.Com, on my favourite release of 2010 (to date), not simple by Natsume Ono. Go check it out. It was interesting because About.com has very strict guidelines about format and length, and it’s the exact opposite of my experiences writing here at the blog… or literally anywhere I’ve freelanced. I’m going to try to keep writing reviews for the site, because I think a few harsh formating choices will make me a better writer. Thanks to Manga.About.Com Guide Deb Aoki for the opportunity.

As for Manga Milestones… #9 is International Manga, probably as typified by Yen Plus #1/Night School by Svetlana Chmakova. I can’t decide how much I want to write about this. I could literally write 2 or 3 thousand words ripping Tokyopop and ADV new assholes, but I’m not entirely sure there’s enough of a point to it. I’ve been going back and forth in my head for a few weeks, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be too busy to write it, but manga influenced comics from Korea and North America were utterly shit-on, 2000-2008. I wonder if dredging up every single way that happened is worthwhile, when the future is so much brighter for all involved now? Still working on it in my head.

#10 is still a secret though.

- Chris @ The Beguiling

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You’re both wrong, I’m the new Batman.

Props to Kevin P. for the tip.

- Chris

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Torontonian artist and illustrator Gary Taxali has unveiled a near-complete preview of his art show at Narwhal Gallery this Thursday January 28th, entitled “The Taxali 300″. A collection of prints on found objects and ephemera, it’s a wonderful example of his style, influenced by pre-war cartoons and illustrations. A lovely way to spend an hour.

Taxali is notable for having given Google the finger, literally and figuratively, when they approached him and other illustrators to produce illustrations for their various pieces of software, with no intent on paying them. In this instance, it probably would have been a very good ‘portfolio piece’, but Taxali decided that his work was worth being paid for, particularly when a (very) large company making lots (and lots) of money was the one who came calling, asking for freebies. Good on him.

- Christopher

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“Bottom line is that if you want to break into the comic book world, or any artistic venue for that matter, you have to start at the bottom and work your way up,”
– Commenter on Newsarama, ‘defending’ Bluewater by calling them “the bottom”

Bluewater Comics has an awful contract that creators sign because they’re desperate to “break into” the industry. Basically, they don’t pay you until a comic book is “profitable” and then it’s a royalty, with no advances. Which is kind of a shitty contract in the book world, but you still see it. The difference is that in this case Bluewater owns or licenses the Intellectual Property (IP) and what they’re doing is developing that IP for other-media on the backs of young freelancers, whom they never have to pay, and that moves from being a shitty contract to exploitation.

Here’s the secret about not getting paid for work: If you’re not being held to a professional standard (and the page rates in the comics industry are often criminally low, and easy-to-hit…) then you’re generally not turning in professional work. Does the poor bastard who turns out an ugly, unedited Ronald Reagan bio for Bluewater think that they’ve got “a portfolio piece”? Do they think they’re “professional” now? No, fuck no. Any self-respecting editor at any company knows that Bluewater is churning out books with very little quality control, that a “portfolio piece” from them counts for very little unless the freelancer was exceptionally talented to begin with. Talented artists: Build your portfolios for and by yourself, and not, say, by providing free artwork to companies who could pay you, but don’t want to. It’s the quality of what you produce that will decide whether you get hired or fired. The “even if we don’t pay them it’s still a portfolio piece” argument is a myth, flat-out, myth, because if you’re putting together a portfolio you put your strongest work in.

(Admittedly, it’s probably a better deal for writers, because it’s harder to ’show’ writing samples than art samples, but I have yet to read any of their bio comics that are any good, and even if someone wrote a stunning biography of Oprah Winfrey, I have a hard time believing an editor is going to look at that and go “Shit, this person writes great trashy celeb cash-in biographies, I definitely want to see what they can do with a completely different style of writing.” Like, it could happen, but colour me unsurprised that it hasn’t yet.)

There are a number of companies that will pay freelancers to do comics, not promise to pay them if certain conditions are met, and leaving behind a long trail of dissatisfied creators claiming non-payment. My advice to aspiring talent is to find them, and realize that starting at the bottom doesn’t necessarily mean the gutter.

- Chris

No related posts.

According to the just-discovered MustLoveJapan website (thanks @DebAoki!), Himeji Castle will be closing for repairs and upgrades beginning April 2010, until sometime in 2015.

If you’ve been reading the site for a while, you might remember that in the midst of my Otaku-fueled first Japan travelogue in 2007, I took a short break to post 20 Photos of Himeji, a town I really liked. Himeji is a medium-sized town, and very pedestrian-friendly, it’s on a grid and the whole thing seems designed to give you the best-possible view of the castle.

If any of my photos inspired you to visit Japan (or visit places within Japan) you may want to move quickly to see this attraction, before it’s off limits for the next half-decade…!

- Chris

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Now it is 5:39am and I am going to go to bed.

- Christopher

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- Chris

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Dragon Age is a story-based RPG which features gay characters and gives players the option of playing a gay or bisexual hero if they wish to. Because this is the sort of thing gay video game players like, the game has received a mostly positive reception from the gay media.
IDW decided that the best person to write a comic in this setting is Orson Scott Card, a man so homophobic he has advocated treason in the event that gay marriage becomes the law of the land.
So, basically the good people at IDW can just go fuck themselves.

- Dorian Wright, Postmodern Barney

I don’t know if I’d go so far as Dorian in my condemnation of the publisher–I like a couple of the folks at IDW quite a bit–but sincerely, fuck Orson Scott Card, and fuck that book, and what were you thinking in hiring him, for that book in particular.

I mean, if nothing else, as soon as either gay or videogame media gets a hold of this there’s going to be a total shitstorm. Which I, for one, welcome with open arms. And I mean by “if nothing else” that we disregard all of the basic reasons of human dignity not to give that proselytizing jack-ass any more money to fund his vicious hate-speech. Which in the comics industry we are all expected to do, all the time, for some stupid fucking reason.

- Chris

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Specifically

It would be nice if someone sent

a copy of

so he could stop giving that quote in interviews, cuz that shit ain’t true.

- Christopher

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Book-Off in Kyoto. Frighteningly cheap books.

Casa Magazine Cover in an Osaka Bookstore. Featuring a lovely little colour Moomin illustration.

Osaka Bookstore– 21 prints magazine with a cover by and feature on Moyocco Anno.

Same bookstore. It’s another history book by Hideo Azuma, author of Disappearance Diary. Lots more to be released by this fascinating creator.

A brand-new 2-volume best-of of Oishinbo, focussing on Shiro and Yuzan. MAVERICK! TYCOON!

Tripped over the Japanese-language reprints of Moomin whilst there. Lovely, small little hardcovers. Let’s have a peak:

It’s a little funny to see the Moomin’s speaking Japanese… especially type-set Japanese.

Another classic of comics literature… kept in the kids-book section rather than with the manga or comics.

Videogame strategy guides and artbooks. I spent a bit of money here.

I have no interest in Monster Hunter, but the art in this was lovely. 2 hardcovers in one package.

Monster Hunter is really popular in Japan.

I’ve got another big post in me on the manga sections of bookstores, for you bookstore fans. No worries.

- Christopher

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That’s a huge fucking cell-phone strap, let me tell you.

- Chris

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3. Your Daily Dose of FUN: They’re Out There Somewhere!

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

Related posts:

1. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #7
2. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #6
3. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #5

The Walking Dead #70

So the manga milestones thing is going well, eh? Those last couple entries got pretty large and took a little more out of me than I was expecting. I need an editor. But yeah, the last 3 are sketched out and I should get to them tonight and/or tomorrow, wrapping the whole thing up.

What takes not-nearly as long as writing? Why just flapping my gums. I’ve recently been an invited guest on a couple of Podcasts, where I give my opinions on things without the luxury of an edit button. So far people seem to like them!

Back in December, right around the time of the kerfuffle about comics for kids (and don’t you worry, I’ll be revisiting THAT topic soon…), Dan Vado invited me onto the SLG podcast, alongside guest Evan Dorkin. You can find the archive of that Podcast here. I had been hopped up on energy drinks AND got on late, so the whole thing crackles with nervous energy, you should love it, Evan and I try not to feel bad about talking overtop one-another for a half hour. I think I end up on the podcast about 23 minutes in.

Meanwhile, my most recent podcast appearance was this past Friday. Canada’s SPACE tv network has a weekly podcast, The SpaceCast, and SPACE producer Mark Askwith(!) invited me on to talk about the decade in comics, particularly in and around genre comics. You can find that podcast right here. I had a really good time chatting with Mark, just shooting the shit about comics and graphic novels. I’m right at the beginning of the podcast and Mark and I chat for the first 30 or 40 minutes. I picked my favourite genre comic book of the last decade (ooooh!) and just talked about the stuff that really hit in the last decade… Almost none of which overlaps with what I’ve already written here at the blog. I’m followed by an interview with James Cameron, so that’s kind of weird. Edit: Just listened to the podcast… Pretty good in general, but I flubbed the details on http://graphic.ly/. Whoops…

Oh, and just big-ups to the dude who popped by Podcast-cherry, Robin McConnell at Inkstuds. I’m pretty sure I mentioned it at the time, but Robin, Dustin Harbin from HeroesCon/Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find, and myself talked inside-baseball retail nonsense back in October.

- Christopher

No related posts.

Related posts:

1. Your Daily Dose of FUN: They’re Out There Somewhere!
2. Your Daily Dose of FUN: GOD, P.I.
3. Your Daily Dose of FUN: Neal

Related posts:

1. Your Daily Dose of FUN: GOD, P.I.
2. Your Daily Dose of FUN: Neal
3. Your Daily Dose of FUN: Brief Melodrama

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

Related posts:

1. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #6
2. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #5
3. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #1 & #2

#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

Related posts:

1. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #7
2. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #5
3. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #1 & #2

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!

Related posts:

1. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #7
2. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #6
3. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #1 & #2

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

Related posts:

1. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #7
2. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #6
3. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #1 & #2

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 instantly hit with kids (particularly girls), though it wasn’t without some controversy amongst die-hard fans. The North American release of 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

Related posts:

1. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #7
2. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #6
3. Manga Milestones 2000-2009: 10 Manga That Changed Comics #3 + #4

We ate really well in Japan, and savoured tons of local delicacies, a range of fusion cuisines from China, India, Pakistan, and Korea, melding with Japanese food. But we also ate at McDonalds a few times, because when you’re eating unfamiliar food night-and-day for three weeks, it’s nice to know that McDonalds in Japan tastes exactly like McDonalds everywhere else in the world. My husband is a baco-tarian, which is to say a vegetarian who cannot resist bacon, which is to say a bad vegetarian, so when it came to a quick, familiar snack wherever we were (literally wherever), we dropped in for The McDonalds Bacon Potato Pie.

It is potatoes and little tiny bits of bacon, deep-fried in a McDonalds apple-pie crust. It is delicious in the most horrifying possible way–kind of like a portable scalloped potato, but with more bacon and cheese. And deep-fried. It is also mostly-vegetarian, which is a difficult thing to find without lots of prior research when wandering around Tokyo, let alone the parts of Japan that get far fewer foreign visitors.

For the bargain price of 120yen, I heartily recommend you try your own while there. Maybe pair it up with an Ebi McBurger (kind of a fillet-o-fish made of baby shrimp) or a McPork.

- Christopher

Related posts:

1. Random Japan: Chicken Bento
2. Random Japan: Cup Ice
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Comic AG Digital Issue 00 - Print Edition. From Icarus Publishing

So it looks like Simon Jones from Icarus Publishing has been doing his own experiments with the various post-paper formats for comic books, with extensive testing of Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader getting numerous posts as the good pornographer tried to figure the optimal format for reading comics on the device… full of helpful hints for any indy pub looking to distribute work in that format! But it’s his most recent post on print-on-demand that I think y’all should immediately go and read.

http://www.icaruscomics.com/wp_web/?p=3843

In the comments section to my last post, POD organization Lightning Source was mentioned, frequently, as doing the highest quality POD material on the market, and the majority of creators I’ve talked to about their experiences had high praise for the pub, though the quality (it was admitted) didn’t match-up with traditional offset. Well Mr. Jones has taken a test-run and printed Icarus’ “Comics AG Digital Issue 00″, a best-of sampler anthology, through Lightning Source’s new partnership with Drive-Thru Comics. Their intention is to produce POD comics as both a printing and distribution service, similar to what I was discussing with ComiXpress in that last post (Drive-thru already exists as a digital distribution service).

Jones verdict on the final POD product? Not too shabby! But more than a little disappointing in some areas.

I really do encourage you to read the whole post about his experiences with quality control and output; it’s well-balanced being informative and interesting for the layman/potential Icarus customer, and technically-detailed enough to give aspiring publishers something to think about.

I’ll cut to the chase and say that Icarus plans to make all 5 of its Comic AG Digital issues available through the service at a cost of $7.99 per issue, which is 3 bucks more an issue than their offset-printing endeavours, and a whopping $7.49 more expensive than their digital downloads of those same issues… Which certainly highlights the economic imbalance of POD… but that said, that’s $7.99 for 104 (ish) pages of content, which itself isn’t too shabby! Simon, if you’re reading, I’d love to know what kind of profit breakdown that price entails…

Of course I’m biased because I’m “Noted Comics Retailer” Christopher Butcher and POD sort of necessarily excludes traditional retail from the transaction. But take it from a guy who used to schlep his mini-comics to the Motor City Comic-Con for 4 or 5 years: I’m genuinely curious about POD and its applications to present high-quality printing for limited-run material. But I go to something like SPX or MoCCA and see creators investing as much time and effort into the physical presentations of their comics as the contents of those same books, and how can I not have a clear bias against a cookie-cutter production with so few of the benefits that mass-production entails (like consistency and quality…)?

Anyway, I’ve found the discussion very rewarding at least… and I’m probably going to try my own POD experiment in the next month or so. I’ll letcha know. :)

- Christopher

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Thanks for reading, see you soon!

- Christopher

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