The Shipping News, 9/9/10

If there’s a younger manga reader in your house, this week offers you a perfect excuse to introduce her to the Wednesday comic shop ritual. Three great kid-friendly titles will be waiting for you on store shelves: the fourth volume of The Big Adventures of Majoko (UDON), a sweetly funny magical-girl series featuring an inept witch-in-training; the fourth volume of Ninja Baseball Kyuma! (UDON), a comedy about a young ninja who puts his martial arts skills to good use on the diamond; and the third volume of Twin Spica (Vertical, Inc.), a coming-of-age story about a teenager who attends astronaut school. Though I think all three will appeal to grade schoolers, I have a special place in my heart for Twin Spica, a story that manages to be direct and heartfelt without being saccharine.

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Short Takes: The Art of Osamu Tezuka and Korea As Viewed by 12 Creators

I’m taking a break from shojo romances and seinen shoot-em-ups in favor of two books aimed squarely at older comics connoisseurs. The first is Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (Abrams Comics), an award-winning biography of Japan’s best-known manga-ka. (Her book just nabbed a Harvey in the Best American Edition of Foreign Material category, a category normally reserved for translated comics such as Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Abandon the Old in Tokyo.) The second is Korea As Viewed by 12 Creators (Fanfare/Ponent Mon), a much-anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed anthology Japan As Viewed By 17 Creators. Which ones deserve a place on your bookshelf? Read on for details.

THE ART OF OSAMU TEZUKA: GOD OF MANGA

BY HELEN MCCARTHY • ABRAMS COMIC ART • 272 pp.

In the introduction to The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga, author Helen McCarthy argues that Tezuka’s work merits scholarly attention, but also deserves a more accessible treatment as well, one that acknowledges that Tezuka “was first and foremost a maker of popular entertainment.” Her desire to bring Tezuka’s work to a wider audience of anime and manga fans is reflected in every aspect of the book’s execution, from its organization — she divides her chapters into short, one-to-three page subsections, each generously illustrated with full-color plates — to its coffee-table book packaging.

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The Shipping News, 9/1/10

It seems weirdly fitting that The Dreaming Collection (Tokyopop), Queenie Chan’s Gothic boarding school mystery, is being re-issued just as the fall semester begins. The new edition, which collects all three volumes into a single omnibus, is a brick of a book, clocking in at 608 pages. Re-reading the series in one sitting, its strengths and weaknesses come into sharper focus. Chan shows great promise as an artist and a storyteller; Greenwich Private School looks like something out of a Hammer Studios film, with its twisting corridors, lugubrious furnishings, and disturbing artwork, making it the perfect setting for a ghost story. For nearly four hundred pages, Chan sustains a mood of quiet dread, carefully laying the foundation for the big reveal in the final volume. Unfortunately, the last two hundred pages feel compressed, with too many conveniently expository conversations and a bolt-from-the-blue plot twist that never really synchronizes with the main storyline, making me wonder if Chan had originally envisioned the series as four volumes.

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Short Takes: Calling, Gorgeous Carat Galaxy, and Scarlet

And now for something… well, not completely different, but a little unusual for me: a Short Takes column focusing on yaoi manga. Back in March, when I reviewed the omnibus edition of Little Butterfly, I explained my ambivalence about yaoi:

On the one hand, I love the idea of women creating erotica for other women, of creating a safe and fun space where female readers can explore their sexual fantasies. On the other hand, I’m often uncomfortable by the way in which rape is conflated with extreme romantic desire in yaoi; it’s disappointing to see the “you’re so irresistible, I couldn’t help myself!” defense trotted out as a justification for sexual violation. To be sure, the rape-as-love trope abounds in romance novels and mainstream pornography as well, but as a feminist, it makes me just as uncomfortable to encounter it in yaoi as it does to encounter it in an episode of General Hospital. Then, too, there’s the issue of the characters’ homosexuality, which is sometimes trivialized, ignored, or “explained” by a character’s tragic past, as if sexual orientation were a simple, situational decision.

My deeply ingrained feminism makes it difficult for me to enthusiastically embrace the genre, but I’m no hater; I’m always on the lookout for books that don’t push my feminist buttons. I encourage yaoi fans to suggest titles they think I ought to read, or to take issue — politely, please! — with what I say about Calling, Gorgeous Carat Galaxy, and Scarlet.

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Short Takes: Library Wars, Ooku: The Inner Chambers, and Your & My Secret

A unseasonably cold, rainy weekend proved just what I needed to catch up on my reading; not only did I tackle a big part of my review pile, I also had a chance to flip through several recent purchases: bilingual editions of Doraemon and The Tale of Genji, Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka, and the long-anticipated Korea as Viewed by 12 Creators. I’ll post reviews of all these titles in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, I’m dedicating this week’s column to three continuing series: Library Wars, Ooku: The Inner Chamber, and Your & My Secret.

LIBRARY WARS: LOVE & WAR, VOL. 2

STORY & ART BY KIIRO YUMI • ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY KIRO ARIKAWA • VIZ • 200 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

I’m happy to report that the second volume of Library Wars is more compelling than the first. More happens, for one thing; the Media Betterment Committee stages a raid on the Kanto Library in an effort to confiscate books found in the possession of a teenage murderer. The raid raises a host of interesting ethical questions — can literature corrupt suggestible minds? should readers’ privacy be protected at all costs? does one’s reading habits reveal anything about one’s propensity for violence? — and creates a strange alliance between the Library Defense Forces and one of its avowed enemies, the Department of Education. Iku has more opportunities to opportunity to strut her stuff, for another: she rappels down the side of a building to prevent MBC thugs from capturing the “degenerate” titles in question, absolving the scornful Tezuka from performing the one task that unnerves him.

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The Shipping News, 8/18/10

Brush up your Fakespeare! It’s time for another volume of Ooku: The Inner Chambers (VIZ), Fumi Yoshinaga’s alternative history of the Tokugawa regime. Four volumes in, I’m no longer hung up on the pseudo-feudal script or the characters’ chattiness, thanks to a heartbreaking story involving Iemitsu, the first female shogun, and Arikoto, the monk-cum-concubine she loves. Iemitsu and Arikoto’s relationship reaches its conclusion in volume four — and I guarantee it will make you reach for a hanky, if you’re the kind of person who finds unfulfilled love stories the saddest kind of all. Though a lot happens in the aftermath of Iemitsu’s reign, the rest of volume four feels a little mechanical, as Yoshinaga tries to cover too much historical ground in just a few chapters; the characters’ emotional connection to events seems more tenuous than in previous installments of Ooku. Still, a so-so volume of Ooku is still a pretty damn good comic, so it tops my list of must-buy manga. (Click here for my review of volume one; click here for my review of volume two.)

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