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Flipped!: David Welsh On SIGIKKI
posted August 3, 2009
 



By David P. Welsh

Viz Media has been making ambitious use of the Internet lately. It's been publishing new chapters of Rumiko Takihashi's Rin-Ne simultaneously with their release in magazines in Japan. It's built a web portal around manga from Rin-Ne's parent magazine, Shonen Sunday (Shogakukan). The site offers free chapters of upcoming series and of long-running, critically acclaimed but under-performing Kekkaishi by Yellow Tanabe. There are lots of sensible reasons to launch these kinds of initiatives -- fending off online piracy, building an audience for print editions, and developing a web infrastructure to build good will with an audience that's increasingly accustomed to consuming content online.

Their most interesting recent gambit is something called SIGIKKI. It's a sub-brand of Viz's Signature line, which features more sophisticated, ambitious titles like Taiyo Matsumoto's Tekkonkinkreet: Black and White, Naoki Urasawa's Pluto and 20th Century Boys, and Takehiko Inoue's Real. The SIGIKKI branch of the imprint is populated by titles originally serialized in the magazine IKKI (Shogakukan), which Viz describes as having built "a catalog of titles notable for its diversity" characterized by "an uncommon emphasis on creative quality and on pushing the boundaries of the norm."

At this point in manga's still relatively short life in English translation, sophisticated, ambitious titles don't necessarily fly off the shelves. They garner critical acclaim, win awards, and are greeted with great enthusiasm by dedicated fans of comics from Japan (and comics in general), but they rarely show up on best-seller lists. So I think Viz is to be congratulated for taking a risk and trying to build an audience for this kind of work by giving some of it away.

While nine series are in rotation on the SIGIKKI site, only one has been made available in print, Daisuke Igarashi's lyrical Children of the Sea. When all of the series will see print is uncertain, though two titles (Q Hayashida's Dorohedoro and Mohiro Kitoh's Bokurano: Ours) already have 2010 release dates according to Viz's Signature listings. Ultimately, though, Viz seems to be trying to build an audience and determine demand before committing to the expense of publication and distribution.

According to Candice Uyloan, Viz's director of brand management, the potential success of a series will be determined by various factors. "We will be looking for a combination of things on sigikki.com such as the quality and quantity of reviews, comments, [and] direct fan outreach to VIZ Media. No other manga publishers in North America have done this before so we're really testing the waters and the system."

I tend to prefer paper comics to images on a computer screen, though I'm certainly not going to pass up the prospect of free, high-quality seinen because of that. (Well, I'm not going to pass it up when I know that the creator is being compensated for distribution of his or her work, but that's a different subject.) The interface is usable for the most part, though I found the first sampling of Eiji Miruno's Tokyo Flow Chart too difficult to read. The concept of the series is intriguing, though, deconstructing four-panel gag strips, and I'd like to see it in a format that's friendlier to the content.

None of the series made anything close to a bad impression, though a few didn't win me over entirely. Kumiko Suekane's Afterschool Charisma, about a high school full of clones of seminal figures from history -- Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Napoleon Bonaparte -- made me giggle more than was probably intended. The classmates-meet-giant-robot intro of Bokurano and the monster-hunter mayhem of Dorohedoro struck me as fairly standard, though they were executed well. Natsume Ono's House of Five Leaves shows a fair amount of promise, and if the out-of-work samurai and seedy gangster start making out, that promise will be fulfilled.

Based solely on the first chapters of the remaining three series, I'd immediately buy print versions of them. Hisae Iwaoka's Saturn Apartments endears itself to me by reminding me of Makoto Yukimura's Planetes (Tokyopop), one of the best manga ever published in English. Planetes portrays the lives and ambitions of orbital garbage collectors, examining the unromantic specifics of life in space. Saturn Apartments moves laterally on the career ladder, focusing on orbital window washers. In Saturn Apartments' future Earth, humanity has left the planet, which has been converted to a wildlife preserve. The population resides in floating residential complexes in the ionosphere, contained in transparent bubbles that need to be cleaned, just like anything else. To pay off family debts, young Mitsu follows in his late father's footsteps cleaning windows. It's perilous drudgery, but there's also a level of wonder to the task. Iwaoka's stylized, cartoonish art strikes that same balance between reality and marvel, and I'm really looking forward to see how the culture of the story evolves.

Shunju Aono's I'll Give it My All... Tomorrow seems to reside in a promising sweet-spot between manga and the kind of low-fi, confessional, independent comics that are fairly common in the west. Upon turning 40, Shizuo Oguro gives in to pre-middle-age malaise and quits his dull job. He settles on becoming a manga-ka as the career that will give his life purpose and meaning. As he's never previously expressed any interest in the calling or any talent for it, his elderly father and teen-aged daughter are a bit surprised. (Well, actually, his father bursts into tears of despair. I would imagine a lot of cartoonists have experienced that.) Like its protagonist, I'll Give it My All... Tomorrow isn't especially ambitious, but it's amiable and funny. (The manga is intentionally funny; Oguro, not so much.) There are a few surprising twists that underline the precarious state of Oguro's ambitions and existence, but it's generally very low-key and oddly, grimily endearing.

Someone with SIGIKKI must have decided that, if one manga about manga is good, two would be better. Since the second series is Seimu Yoshizaki's Kingyo Used Books, that person was correct. It's a slice-of-life series about a used manga store and its patrons, and the first chapter strikes a soft, nostalgic note. A salaryman stumbles across Kingyo and decides to try and sell off his manga, bought to pass the time on public transportation; the magazines take up too much space in his small apartment, and he feels a little odd reading it as an adult. Then he goes to a school reunion, and the nostalgic power of manga soon holds sway. Everyone's talking about their favorite series and the moments in their lives that they associate with those stories. It's sweet, generous stuff, maybe too sweet for some, but I like quirky, sentimental stories, and the art is crisp, detailed and very attractive.

Next week, I'll take a look at the first print product from the SIGIKKI line, Children of the Sea.

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David P. Welsh has loved comics since his parents first used Archie and Casper to sedate him during long trips in the family station wagon.

He's worked as a reporter and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, and later sold out for the glamorous world of public relations. Prior to relocating to The Comics Reporter, he wrote his Flipped column for Comic World News for just over three years. He's written articles on comics for print outlets and a variety of other web sites.

He lives in West Virginia, which he says has gotten a lot easier since the Starbucks and Barnes & Noble opened up.

You may e-mail David with questions or commentary You can write to this site about David's columns

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