Sunday, March 24, 2013
MANGA ROUNDUP
Recently, I was up in Chicago, and I bought some manga at Sanseidoh in Arlington Heights. I haven't had time to read any of them yet, but I thought I'd share some of my impressions upon looking at them. These aren't the only manga I bought, but I'll put these up to start with.
Swan vol. 11 by Kyoko Ariyoshi: Swan, a classic shoujo manga from the 1970s about a Japanese girl who becomes an internationally recognized ballerina, was published in the U.S. by CMX, but despite good reviews it never caught on. When CMX shut down it was left unfinished, and it seems unlikely to be rescued. In Japan, however, it remains popular, with two editions in print, of which this is one. Because this edition groups the series into only fourteen volumes, this volume doesn't correspond to CMX's volume 11. Instead, its first half contains most of what was in CMX's vol. 15 (the last volume it published), while its second half carries on from the end of that volume, for 149 more pages. Looking through this volume, there doesn't seem to be a lot of dancing, which is too bad, because those are the best parts. Swan vol. 11 is published by Akita Bunko and costs 562 yen. Its ISBN is 9784253171670, and its amazon.co.jp page is here. If you want to pick up where CMX left off, make sure you buy this edition of vol. 11; the other Japanese edition groups the series into fewer volumes than this one, so that edition's volume 11 will be later on in the story.
Incidentally, in the Japanese original Masumi and Leon work not with the fictional choreographers Bilanovsky and Bronstein, but with the real and renowned choreographers George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and the dance they work on with Robbins in not "Morning of a Satyr" but "Afternoon of a Faun." The Japanese guest dancer, as well, is not Yuko Kamimori but Youko Morishita, a real and internationally known ballerina.
Subete no Jidai o Tsuujite no Satsujinjutsu [Murder Methods of All Eras] by Shintaro Kago: This is Kago's latest tankouban, having come out late last year. The jacket proclaims it to be a collection of horror stories. You might ask how that differs from Kago's usual stuff. Based on looking through the volume, the answer seems to be "not much," although there may be more emphasis on violence and less on sex than usual. At any rate, Kago hasn't lost his obsession with adolescent girls, although there are male victims as well. Subete no Jidai o Tsuujite no Satsujinjutsu is published by Kubo Shoten and costs 1200 yen. Its ISBN is 9784765930284, and its amazon.co.jp page is here.
Hataki vol. 2 by Eiji Nonaka: Hataki is an animal which is described on the cover as a "very pretty and very very mysterious pet." Actually, it's pretty ugly and looks something like a pig's head with short legs. I bought this on a whim, because it's by the guy who did Cromartie High School (with his art style unaltered) and because I was curious about the pig-thing. Looking at it, I can't even tell whether it's a comedy or not, although at one point there's an invasion of anthropomorphic pig paratroopers. I guess it wasn't that popular in Japan, since it was published in 2009 and is already out of print. Hataki vol. 2 is published by Kodansha under the Evening [Ibuningu] label, and costs 533 yen. Its ISBN is 9784063522570, and its amazon.co.jp page is here. Or if you want to start with the first volume, its amazon.,co.jp page is here, although it's also out of print.
(0) comments
Recently, I was up in Chicago, and I bought some manga at Sanseidoh in Arlington Heights. I haven't had time to read any of them yet, but I thought I'd share some of my impressions upon looking at them. These aren't the only manga I bought, but I'll put these up to start with.
Swan vol. 11 by Kyoko Ariyoshi: Swan, a classic shoujo manga from the 1970s about a Japanese girl who becomes an internationally recognized ballerina, was published in the U.S. by CMX, but despite good reviews it never caught on. When CMX shut down it was left unfinished, and it seems unlikely to be rescued. In Japan, however, it remains popular, with two editions in print, of which this is one. Because this edition groups the series into only fourteen volumes, this volume doesn't correspond to CMX's volume 11. Instead, its first half contains most of what was in CMX's vol. 15 (the last volume it published), while its second half carries on from the end of that volume, for 149 more pages. Looking through this volume, there doesn't seem to be a lot of dancing, which is too bad, because those are the best parts. Swan vol. 11 is published by Akita Bunko and costs 562 yen. Its ISBN is 9784253171670, and its amazon.co.jp page is here. If you want to pick up where CMX left off, make sure you buy this edition of vol. 11; the other Japanese edition groups the series into fewer volumes than this one, so that edition's volume 11 will be later on in the story.
Incidentally, in the Japanese original Masumi and Leon work not with the fictional choreographers Bilanovsky and Bronstein, but with the real and renowned choreographers George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, and the dance they work on with Robbins in not "Morning of a Satyr" but "Afternoon of a Faun." The Japanese guest dancer, as well, is not Yuko Kamimori but Youko Morishita, a real and internationally known ballerina.
Subete no Jidai o Tsuujite no Satsujinjutsu [Murder Methods of All Eras] by Shintaro Kago: This is Kago's latest tankouban, having come out late last year. The jacket proclaims it to be a collection of horror stories. You might ask how that differs from Kago's usual stuff. Based on looking through the volume, the answer seems to be "not much," although there may be more emphasis on violence and less on sex than usual. At any rate, Kago hasn't lost his obsession with adolescent girls, although there are male victims as well. Subete no Jidai o Tsuujite no Satsujinjutsu is published by Kubo Shoten and costs 1200 yen. Its ISBN is 9784765930284, and its amazon.co.jp page is here.
Hataki vol. 2 by Eiji Nonaka: Hataki is an animal which is described on the cover as a "very pretty and very very mysterious pet." Actually, it's pretty ugly and looks something like a pig's head with short legs. I bought this on a whim, because it's by the guy who did Cromartie High School (with his art style unaltered) and because I was curious about the pig-thing. Looking at it, I can't even tell whether it's a comedy or not, although at one point there's an invasion of anthropomorphic pig paratroopers. I guess it wasn't that popular in Japan, since it was published in 2009 and is already out of print. Hataki vol. 2 is published by Kodansha under the Evening [Ibuningu] label, and costs 533 yen. Its ISBN is 9784063522570, and its amazon.co.jp page is here. Or if you want to start with the first volume, its amazon.,co.jp page is here, although it's also out of print.
Friday, October 19, 2012
IS KASUGA A PERVERT? A NOTE ON FLOWERS OF EVIL
In the manga Flowers of Evil by Shuzo Oshimi, the protagonist Kasuga is repeatedly told by his classmate Nakamura that he's a pervert. Kasuga insists that he isn't, even though he had impulsively stolen the gym clothes of the girl he loves. Who is right? The end of volume two may provide an indication. But earlier in that volume there's a very revealing clue, though only those who read Japanese can pick it up.
The bottom panel on page 82 depicts a bookshelf in Kasuga's room. For several of the books on it, enough of the spine is showing that we can determine the title and/or author. Most of these are unexceptionable books for an intelligent, literature-loving high schooler to own.* But the book in the most prominent position, adjacent to Kasuga's dialogue balloon, is Kachikujin Yapuu, also known as Yapoo the Human Cattle.
Yapoo the Human Cattle, by Shozo Numa, is a "classic" Japanese novel of male masochism. It's about an aristocratic German woman and her Japanese fiance, who fall into the hands of a future interstellar empire in which descendants of East Asians are regarded as subhuman and permanently treated as animals or in even more degrading ways. In the course of the book the Japanese man is reduced to the status of an animal, and his fiancee comes to think of him as an animal. (In fact the book is even more extreme than this description makes it sound, but I think I've said enough to make my point, and I don't want to turn reader's stomachs unnecessarily.) This sounds like something you would find in the darkest corners of the internet, but a number of Japanese critics and writers have taken it seriously as literature. (For an example, see here.) It's been repeated multiple times since it was first published in 1956, and is still in print.
In view of the way Oshimi calls attention to Kasuga's ownership of Yapoo the Human Cattle, my answer to the question posed in the title of this post is "Yes, he probably is."
*The author of the book to the right of the photograph is the French novelist J. K. Huysmans, not J. K. Rowling.
(5) comments
In the manga Flowers of Evil by Shuzo Oshimi, the protagonist Kasuga is repeatedly told by his classmate Nakamura that he's a pervert. Kasuga insists that he isn't, even though he had impulsively stolen the gym clothes of the girl he loves. Who is right? The end of volume two may provide an indication. But earlier in that volume there's a very revealing clue, though only those who read Japanese can pick it up.
The bottom panel on page 82 depicts a bookshelf in Kasuga's room. For several of the books on it, enough of the spine is showing that we can determine the title and/or author. Most of these are unexceptionable books for an intelligent, literature-loving high schooler to own.* But the book in the most prominent position, adjacent to Kasuga's dialogue balloon, is Kachikujin Yapuu, also known as Yapoo the Human Cattle.
Yapoo the Human Cattle, by Shozo Numa, is a "classic" Japanese novel of male masochism. It's about an aristocratic German woman and her Japanese fiance, who fall into the hands of a future interstellar empire in which descendants of East Asians are regarded as subhuman and permanently treated as animals or in even more degrading ways. In the course of the book the Japanese man is reduced to the status of an animal, and his fiancee comes to think of him as an animal. (In fact the book is even more extreme than this description makes it sound, but I think I've said enough to make my point, and I don't want to turn reader's stomachs unnecessarily.) This sounds like something you would find in the darkest corners of the internet, but a number of Japanese critics and writers have taken it seriously as literature. (For an example, see here.) It's been repeated multiple times since it was first published in 1956, and is still in print.
In view of the way Oshimi calls attention to Kasuga's ownership of Yapoo the Human Cattle, my answer to the question posed in the title of this post is "Yes, he probably is."
*The author of the book to the right of the photograph is the French novelist J. K. Huysmans, not J. K. Rowling.
Friday, September 07, 2012
MANGA CORNER: I AM THE BEATLES [BOKU WA BIITORUZU] BY TETSUO FUJII AND KAIJI KAWAGUCHI, VOLS. 1 & 2
At a panel at this year's Comic-Con, Carlo Santos named I Am the Beatles as the never-licensed manga he'd most like to see published in the U.S.* I happen to have read the first volume and part of the second, so I thought I would write up my impressions. Note that this review is mostly from memory, so there may be inaccuracies.
The Fab Four are the top Beatles tribute band in Japan, and have been invited to compete for the Beatles tribute band world championship. Makoto, the band's "Paul," has even greater ambitions for the Fab Four: he dreams of the band writing its own "Beatles" songs and becoming the 21st century's Beatles. Before the world championship, though, Rei, the band's "John," stuns the rest of the band by announcing that he's quitting. While he and Makoto are fighting about this, Makoto and Shou, the band's "George," are mysteriously transported back to 1961, a year before the Beatles' recording debut.
Makoto and Shou have to make a living, but there's obviously no demand for a Beatles' tribute band in 1961. So Makoto comes up with the idea of recreating the Fab Four and playing Beatles songs, but presenting them as their own original songs, since nobody in Japan has heard them. In effect, they would become the Beatles, only Japanese. This might seem like a crappy thing to do to your idols, but Makoto has a justification, or at least a rationalization: when the Beatles discover that the songs they were going to write have already been written, they'll have to write new songs, thus doubling the number of Beatles songs in the world.
Despite this tantalizing premise, I quit reading partway through the second volume. Near the start of the series, the manager of a club for Beatles tribute bands remarks that the Fab Four are unusual in being young, since most Beatles tribute bands are middle-aged. And the primary audience for the series seems to be people like the members of those other tribute bands: nostalgiac middle-aged men who fantasize about being the Beatles. I like the Beatles, but I don't dream of being them. Nor am I excited by the thought of playing instruments exactly the same as the ones the early Beatles played, as Makoto and Shou are and as the reader is supposed to be. Still, the art is good and so is the writing so far, despite my reservations. If I have time, I might pick it up again one day.
The series, which finished recently, is ten volumes long, and is published by Koudansha in Japan in their Morning KC line. Here's the amazon.co.jp page of the first volume, and you can follow the links from there to find the others. As you'll see, the series has mixed reviews on amazon.co.jp, but some of the bad reviews are by Beatles fans outraged at what Makoto and Shou are doing to the Beatles. If I thought that the authors endorsed Makoto and Shou's actions, I'd agree with their criticisms, but I don't think so, based upon a spoiler for later volumes I happened to come across.
*In the article I've linked to, the title is translated as "We Are the Beatles," and elsewhere I've seen it translated both ways.
(0) comments
At a panel at this year's Comic-Con, Carlo Santos named I Am the Beatles as the never-licensed manga he'd most like to see published in the U.S.* I happen to have read the first volume and part of the second, so I thought I would write up my impressions. Note that this review is mostly from memory, so there may be inaccuracies.
The Fab Four are the top Beatles tribute band in Japan, and have been invited to compete for the Beatles tribute band world championship. Makoto, the band's "Paul," has even greater ambitions for the Fab Four: he dreams of the band writing its own "Beatles" songs and becoming the 21st century's Beatles. Before the world championship, though, Rei, the band's "John," stuns the rest of the band by announcing that he's quitting. While he and Makoto are fighting about this, Makoto and Shou, the band's "George," are mysteriously transported back to 1961, a year before the Beatles' recording debut.
Makoto and Shou have to make a living, but there's obviously no demand for a Beatles' tribute band in 1961. So Makoto comes up with the idea of recreating the Fab Four and playing Beatles songs, but presenting them as their own original songs, since nobody in Japan has heard them. In effect, they would become the Beatles, only Japanese. This might seem like a crappy thing to do to your idols, but Makoto has a justification, or at least a rationalization: when the Beatles discover that the songs they were going to write have already been written, they'll have to write new songs, thus doubling the number of Beatles songs in the world.
Despite this tantalizing premise, I quit reading partway through the second volume. Near the start of the series, the manager of a club for Beatles tribute bands remarks that the Fab Four are unusual in being young, since most Beatles tribute bands are middle-aged. And the primary audience for the series seems to be people like the members of those other tribute bands: nostalgiac middle-aged men who fantasize about being the Beatles. I like the Beatles, but I don't dream of being them. Nor am I excited by the thought of playing instruments exactly the same as the ones the early Beatles played, as Makoto and Shou are and as the reader is supposed to be. Still, the art is good and so is the writing so far, despite my reservations. If I have time, I might pick it up again one day.
The series, which finished recently, is ten volumes long, and is published by Koudansha in Japan in their Morning KC line. Here's the amazon.co.jp page of the first volume, and you can follow the links from there to find the others. As you'll see, the series has mixed reviews on amazon.co.jp, but some of the bad reviews are by Beatles fans outraged at what Makoto and Shou are doing to the Beatles. If I thought that the authors endorsed Makoto and Shou's actions, I'd agree with their criticisms, but I don't think so, based upon a spoiler for later volumes I happened to come across.
*In the article I've linked to, the title is translated as "We Are the Beatles," and elsewhere I've seen it translated both ways.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
MANGA CORNER: THREE BY SHINTARO KAGO
About a month ago, having decided that Shintaro Kago is seriously underrated, I ordered from Sanseidoh, the Japanese bookstore in Arlington Heights, almost all the Kago manga amazon.co.jp carried which I didn't already own. Three of them have come in so far, all recent, including two that came out this year. A few days ago I picked them up. I've looked at them, but haven't read much yet, so these aren't reviews.
Antlion vs Barabara Girl, the oldest of the three, was published in 2009 and contains stories published between 2006 and 2008. In Fraction, the "Shintaro Kago" character said that he needed to write more mainstream manga. Though that was a fictional character, the stories here apparently were published in mainstream magazines: slightly over half appeared in Young Jump and the rest in Horror M, which I've never heard of but I'm guessing is also a mainstream magazine.
To what extent did this affect the stories' content? I didn't spot any explicit sex or scatology and there's little nudity. Compared to other mainstream manga, however, these stories are still very bloody and grotesque; and looking at them, I don't get the sense that they're watered down.
Toko Tochu no Deai Gashira no Guzen Kiss wa Ariuruka? Experiment [When Two People Collide on the Way to High School, Is It Possible that They Will Accidentally Kiss? Experiment], published in April of this year, mostly contains very short stories. It starts off with a color section containing nineteen twisted single-page -- and frequently single-panel -- gags which originally appeared in VICE magazine. The rest of the book contains twenty four-page stories, most of which appeared in Ax, and six longer stories ranging from seven to sixteen pages. Some of the Ax stories revisit the formal experimentation that first attracted me, and no doubt others, to Kago.
Harem End [Haarem Endo] was published only last month. Thicker than an average tankoubon, the title story itself is almost two hundred pages long. It starts out like the most banal, cliched "harem manga" imaginable, as a new college student finds himself, through a series of improbable plot contrivances, living with five women representing various stereotyped "girlfriend" types: the tsundere, the glasses girl, the silent girl wearing an eye bandage and so on. But after seventeen pages of this the story abruptly turns into a "normal" Kago story. A second plot strand concerns a sinister anime studio. Rounding out the volume are five eight-page stories. The first three of these, at least, appear to be linked.
I picked up some non-Kago boos too, which I'll try to report on soon.
The Kago books' amazon.co.jp pages are here, here and here.
(0) comments
About a month ago, having decided that Shintaro Kago is seriously underrated, I ordered from Sanseidoh, the Japanese bookstore in Arlington Heights, almost all the Kago manga amazon.co.jp carried which I didn't already own. Three of them have come in so far, all recent, including two that came out this year. A few days ago I picked them up. I've looked at them, but haven't read much yet, so these aren't reviews.
Antlion vs Barabara Girl, the oldest of the three, was published in 2009 and contains stories published between 2006 and 2008. In Fraction, the "Shintaro Kago" character said that he needed to write more mainstream manga. Though that was a fictional character, the stories here apparently were published in mainstream magazines: slightly over half appeared in Young Jump and the rest in Horror M, which I've never heard of but I'm guessing is also a mainstream magazine.
To what extent did this affect the stories' content? I didn't spot any explicit sex or scatology and there's little nudity. Compared to other mainstream manga, however, these stories are still very bloody and grotesque; and looking at them, I don't get the sense that they're watered down.
Toko Tochu no Deai Gashira no Guzen Kiss wa Ariuruka? Experiment [When Two People Collide on the Way to High School, Is It Possible that They Will Accidentally Kiss? Experiment], published in April of this year, mostly contains very short stories. It starts off with a color section containing nineteen twisted single-page -- and frequently single-panel -- gags which originally appeared in VICE magazine. The rest of the book contains twenty four-page stories, most of which appeared in Ax, and six longer stories ranging from seven to sixteen pages. Some of the Ax stories revisit the formal experimentation that first attracted me, and no doubt others, to Kago.
Harem End [Haarem Endo] was published only last month. Thicker than an average tankoubon, the title story itself is almost two hundred pages long. It starts out like the most banal, cliched "harem manga" imaginable, as a new college student finds himself, through a series of improbable plot contrivances, living with five women representing various stereotyped "girlfriend" types: the tsundere, the glasses girl, the silent girl wearing an eye bandage and so on. But after seventeen pages of this the story abruptly turns into a "normal" Kago story. A second plot strand concerns a sinister anime studio. Rounding out the volume are five eight-page stories. The first three of these, at least, appear to be linked.
I picked up some non-Kago boos too, which I'll try to report on soon.
The Kago books' amazon.co.jp pages are here, here and here.
Sunday, June 03, 2012
MANGA ROUNDUP
One of the original purposes of this blog was to be a source of information about Japanese-language manga. In line with this, each time I've come back from a trip with a bunch of Japanese-language manga, I've planned to post descriptions of them. And each time I never get around to it. This time, I was determined that things would be different. Thus, here are brief descriptions of some of the manga I bought on my most recent trip to Sanseido. These aren't reviews; I even haven't read any of these yet, except for a quick reading of the first chapter of one manga (because otherwise I would have had no idea what it was about). I've included links to the books' amazon.co.jp pages.
Billy Bat vol. 9 by Naoki Urasawa: I haven't glanced at the interior yet, for fear of spoilers. I haven't even removed the shrink-wrap, and I'm doing my best to not look closely at the covers. All I can tell you is that the front cover has a striking image: the artist with the bushy white hair and beard whom I mentioned in my review of the last two volumes is painting a large outline of the Bat in red, which seems to be between the artist and the viewer, as if he was painting on a transparent glass sheet placed between himself and the viewer.
In Wonderland (vol. 1) by Takahiro Yabauchi: This pastoral fantasy manga is another variation of Alice in Wonderland. Its protagonist is a girl named Elise who is not visiting, but lives in Wonderland along with many of Lewis Carroll's characters. Thankfully, there's no attempt to make Wonderland grim and gritty. In fact, this Wonderland is a happier, more peaceful place than the original, in which there was a lot of shouting and people being rude. I bought this mainly because of the artwork, which does have much of the flavor of John Tenniel's original illustrations, though Yabauchi's line, unlike Tenniel's, is thin and fragile. (I put "vol. 1" in parentheses because there's no indication in the volume that the story is not complete, but in fact it continues beyond this volume and as far as I know is still ongoing.)
The Night Has A Thousand Eyes [Yoru wa Sen no Me o Motsu] by Kentaro Ueno: This is a hefty (478 pp.) collection of 4- to 8-page gag stories. It's pretty meta stuff, with Ueno obviously parodying a wide variety of artists, though I'm not familiar enough with manga to recognize more than a few of the artists parodied, and of these the only one I've read is Shiriagari Kotobuki. Also of note is a single-page adaptation of Les Miserables in 175 tiny panels. The stories here all appeared between 1998 and 2003, but the series is still running in Comic Beam.
R - Chuugakusei vol. 1 [R - Middle Schooler] by Yukiko Gotoh: Unlike the previous two manga, it's not easy to tell what kind of manga this is without reading it. But it appears to be a romantic comedy with a rather weird premise. The male protagonist, a second-year middle schooler, is a self-proclaimed "smell fetishist" who is especially turned on by dirty articles that girls have discarded. When he meets a girl who is willing to give him her used sanitary napkin, he's in heaven. Despite the premise, there's no sex in the manga (or at least none that I noticed when I skimmed it) and virtually no nudity. Again, I picked this up mainly for the art: Gotoh has an unusual style, and her used of solid blacks is striking.
Naniwadora Ihon vol. 1 by Takashi Morimoto: Again, it's hard to tell what kind of manga this is without reading it, but it appears to be a drama set in Edo-period Japan about an elegant but ferocious woman and her young daughter. To be honest, I don't remember why I special-ordered this. Maybe I was just in an expansive mood. But it turns out, just like the two previous manga, to have a distinctive style influenced by Edo-period prints, the faces in particular. It won a Tezuka Osamu Cultural Award in 2004.
(2) comments
One of the original purposes of this blog was to be a source of information about Japanese-language manga. In line with this, each time I've come back from a trip with a bunch of Japanese-language manga, I've planned to post descriptions of them. And each time I never get around to it. This time, I was determined that things would be different. Thus, here are brief descriptions of some of the manga I bought on my most recent trip to Sanseido. These aren't reviews; I even haven't read any of these yet, except for a quick reading of the first chapter of one manga (because otherwise I would have had no idea what it was about). I've included links to the books' amazon.co.jp pages.
Billy Bat vol. 9 by Naoki Urasawa: I haven't glanced at the interior yet, for fear of spoilers. I haven't even removed the shrink-wrap, and I'm doing my best to not look closely at the covers. All I can tell you is that the front cover has a striking image: the artist with the bushy white hair and beard whom I mentioned in my review of the last two volumes is painting a large outline of the Bat in red, which seems to be between the artist and the viewer, as if he was painting on a transparent glass sheet placed between himself and the viewer.
In Wonderland (vol. 1) by Takahiro Yabauchi: This pastoral fantasy manga is another variation of Alice in Wonderland. Its protagonist is a girl named Elise who is not visiting, but lives in Wonderland along with many of Lewis Carroll's characters. Thankfully, there's no attempt to make Wonderland grim and gritty. In fact, this Wonderland is a happier, more peaceful place than the original, in which there was a lot of shouting and people being rude. I bought this mainly because of the artwork, which does have much of the flavor of John Tenniel's original illustrations, though Yabauchi's line, unlike Tenniel's, is thin and fragile. (I put "vol. 1" in parentheses because there's no indication in the volume that the story is not complete, but in fact it continues beyond this volume and as far as I know is still ongoing.)
The Night Has A Thousand Eyes [Yoru wa Sen no Me o Motsu] by Kentaro Ueno: This is a hefty (478 pp.) collection of 4- to 8-page gag stories. It's pretty meta stuff, with Ueno obviously parodying a wide variety of artists, though I'm not familiar enough with manga to recognize more than a few of the artists parodied, and of these the only one I've read is Shiriagari Kotobuki. Also of note is a single-page adaptation of Les Miserables in 175 tiny panels. The stories here all appeared between 1998 and 2003, but the series is still running in Comic Beam.
R - Chuugakusei vol. 1 [R - Middle Schooler] by Yukiko Gotoh: Unlike the previous two manga, it's not easy to tell what kind of manga this is without reading it. But it appears to be a romantic comedy with a rather weird premise. The male protagonist, a second-year middle schooler, is a self-proclaimed "smell fetishist" who is especially turned on by dirty articles that girls have discarded. When he meets a girl who is willing to give him her used sanitary napkin, he's in heaven. Despite the premise, there's no sex in the manga (or at least none that I noticed when I skimmed it) and virtually no nudity. Again, I picked this up mainly for the art: Gotoh has an unusual style, and her used of solid blacks is striking.
Naniwadora Ihon vol. 1 by Takashi Morimoto: Again, it's hard to tell what kind of manga this is without reading it, but it appears to be a drama set in Edo-period Japan about an elegant but ferocious woman and her young daughter. To be honest, I don't remember why I special-ordered this. Maybe I was just in an expansive mood. But it turns out, just like the two previous manga, to have a distinctive style influenced by Edo-period prints, the faces in particular. It won a Tezuka Osamu Cultural Award in 2004.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
JAPANESE-LANGUAGE BOOKSTORE CLOSING SALE
Six years ago I wrote about JBC, a small used book store in Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago, which sold Japanese-language books, including manga.* I was there yesterday and learned that the store would be closing: "perhaps by the end of next month" is what the guy told me. This is sad news, of course. On the other hand, this provides opportunities for bargain-hunters. Not only have prices been cut on their regular stock, but they are selling their rental manga in sets for two dollars per volume. You have to buy all the volumes they have of a series at once (and as far as I could see they were complete series, or complete up to recent volumes): you can't pick and choose individual volumes. But there were plenty of short or reasonably short series there. On the other hand, if you've been waiting for an opportunity to buy 105 volumes of Oishinbo for $210, or even 173 volumes of KochiKame for $346, now's your chance. (Unless they've been sold already, of course.) Instructions on how to get there are in the post I linked to. Note that I'm not talking about the JBC in Mitsuwa, which doesn't sell books. I don't know if that one is closing or not. *The Shiriagari Kotobuki volumes I wrote about in that post are no longer there, though. (I think.)
(0) comments
Six years ago I wrote about JBC, a small used book store in Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago, which sold Japanese-language books, including manga.* I was there yesterday and learned that the store would be closing: "perhaps by the end of next month" is what the guy told me. This is sad news, of course. On the other hand, this provides opportunities for bargain-hunters. Not only have prices been cut on their regular stock, but they are selling their rental manga in sets for two dollars per volume. You have to buy all the volumes they have of a series at once (and as far as I could see they were complete series, or complete up to recent volumes): you can't pick and choose individual volumes. But there were plenty of short or reasonably short series there. On the other hand, if you've been waiting for an opportunity to buy 105 volumes of Oishinbo for $210, or even 173 volumes of KochiKame for $346, now's your chance. (Unless they've been sold already, of course.) Instructions on how to get there are in the post I linked to. Note that I'm not talking about the JBC in Mitsuwa, which doesn't sell books. I don't know if that one is closing or not. *The Shiriagari Kotobuki volumes I wrote about in that post are no longer there, though. (I think.)
Saturday, May 12, 2012
MANGA CORNER: A BRIEF REMARK ON KINECOMICA
A long time ago I briefly wrote about Kinecomica by Tori Miki. This is a collection of short gag manga, each one parodying or riffing on a well-known movie. What I didn't notice at the time, because I didn't have enough experience with manga, was that some of the pieces also parody or imitate the styles of other manga artists. "Star Wars," for instance, is quite obviously in the later style of Shigeru Sugiura. "Ghostbusters" is equally obviously in the style of Shigeru Mizuki. Though it's not as obvious, I believe "The Bible" is in the style of Hideo Azuma. And "Robocop" is evidently in the style of some 50s or 60s robot manga (the panels are even numbered), but I don't know which. I'm sure there are more parodies that I don't recognize. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if every story in the book is a parody of a different artist.
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A long time ago I briefly wrote about Kinecomica by Tori Miki. This is a collection of short gag manga, each one parodying or riffing on a well-known movie. What I didn't notice at the time, because I didn't have enough experience with manga, was that some of the pieces also parody or imitate the styles of other manga artists. "Star Wars," for instance, is quite obviously in the later style of Shigeru Sugiura. "Ghostbusters" is equally obviously in the style of Shigeru Mizuki. Though it's not as obvious, I believe "The Bible" is in the style of Hideo Azuma. And "Robocop" is evidently in the style of some 50s or 60s robot manga (the panels are even numbered), but I don't know which. I'm sure there are more parodies that I don't recognize. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if every story in the book is a parody of a different artist.
