Flipped!: David Welsh On Manga-Related Developments For Which He's Grateful



By David P. Welsh

I enjoy any holiday centered almost entirely on eating, so I like Thanksgiving. I can't say that it makes me particularly contemplative in the intended way, and I'm relieved that there's no tradition in my family of going around the table and expressing individual gratitude before we can gorge. (A brother-in-law suggested we do that one year, and the results were sufficiently caustic that the experiment wasn't repeated.) Aversion to that kind of sentiment aside, there are a number of things going on in manga publishing for which I'm particularly grateful, so I'll make an exception and get in the non-caloric Thanksgiving spirit. Here are some manga-related developments for which I'm grateful:

The imminent ascendance of Natsume Ono: Each year there seems to be a manga-ka who goes from virtually unpublished in translation to ubiquitous. Notable past examples include the marvelous Fumi Yoshinaga and the eccentric You Higuri. Ono, who doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry yet, seems to be on deck for this treatment, and I couldn't be more pleased at the prospect. Her first translated work has been The House of Five Leaves, serialized on Viz's SIGIKKI site, and it's low-key and enticing entertainment. It's about an out-of-work samurai who falls in with an eclectic group of professional kidnappers, and it combines delicate, incremental character development with intriguing moral ambiguity. It's also gorgeously fragile in terms of Ono's illustrations. Next up from Ono is not simple, a contemporary tale of fractured families and world travel. Ristorante Paradiso is on deck for March of 2010, followed in short order by its sequel, Gente. Comics can always use more talented, idiosyncratic creators, and Ono seems likely to be a welcome addition to that roster.

Vertical's commitment to Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack: Classic manga, even comics by an undisputed master like Tezuka, don't always reap the commercial success they deserve. I'm not sure what the numbers are for Black Jack, but I am sure that there should always be some new-to-us material from Tezuka arriving on retail shelves. Beyond these comics' historical significance and the way they offered an abundant toolbox to all of the creators that followed, I've yet to read a comic by Tezuka that wasn't at least very, very entertaining. Unlike some of Tezuka's more ambitious works, Black Jack aims mostly to divert with over-the-top medical melodrama, and it consistently succeeds in that aim. Tezuka's prodigious skills as a cartoonist and his training as a physician fuse to create episodic entertainment that's tense, funny, creepy, inventive, and eminently readable. It's not a series that demands your attention, but it definitely rewards it.

Manga conversation on Twitter: One of the reasons I started writing a blog was because I enjoy engaging with other nerds about nerdy things. I still enjoy blogging, but I find that the immediate, 140-character gratification of Twitter is an excellent supplement to the (theoretically) more contemplative discourse of weblogs. Many publishers still seem to be figuring out what to do with their Twitter presences, and many of them haven't evolved beyond the intercom at the big-box store, announcing specials in the housewares department. Opinionated readers, on the other hand, have hit the ground running. To start, check the #mangamonday hashtag for recommendations and mini-reviews. For a good sampling of manga publishers and pundits chatting on Twitter, click here. For a more general list of comics personae, try this.

The stabilization of Tokyopop: 2009 was not particularly kind to Tokyopop, what with the loss of many of its licenses to Kodansha, and 2008 didn't invite many scrapbook opportunities either, marked as it was by massive employee layoffs. But it's still here, it's still acquiring new licenses, and it's returned books like Mari Okazaki's exquisite office-lady drama Suppli to the schedule. Right up until the 2008 implosion, Tokyopop indulged in the kind of marketing hyperbole that all but guaranteed at least a certain degree of Schadenfreude when things inevitably went south, but the publisher's more subdued, direct communications of late seem to have muted that reaction. If the company seems chastened, it also seems more focused and professional.

CMX's taste in shôjo: DC's manga imprint does a lot of things right, picking interesting titles from a variety of demographic categories. I think they deserve special mention for their choices in the sector of comics created for girls. This has been the case since the imprint's launch, and 2009 has reinforced the impression. One of my particular favorite recent offerings has been Natsune Kawase's two-volume The Lapis Lazuli Crown, which embodies a lot of the qualities I associate with CMX shôjo: gentle wit, easy charm, and attractiveness. It's about a young, inept sorceress who dedicates herself to improving her potentially significant magical skills and finds romance and purpose along the way. Kawase's pages are crisp and cute, and her characters are instantly likeable. It's not alone in CMX's slate of engaging 2009 arrivals. Due this week is the adorable-but-not-saccharine The Lizard Prince by Asuka Izumi. Darker and deeper is Ken Saito's The Name of the Flower, and it's earned a lot of critical admiration. And it should never be forgotten that CMX is doing almost all of the heavy lifting in terms of publishing classic comics for girls, continuing with Yasuko Aoike's From Eroica with Love and Kiyoko Ariyoshi's Swan.

The reinforcement of the category of comics for grown-ups: Best-seller lists may be dominated by comics for younger audiences, but it's hard to imagine fans of sophisticated, challenging work feeling particularly deprived at the moment. From Yoshihiro Tatsumi's massive autobiography, A Drifting Life, to Daisuke Igarashi's exquisite Children of the Sea, to not one but two new series by Naoki Urasawa, to Junko Mizuno's mind-bending Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu, it's been a year of extraordinary debuts. Factor in new volumes of ongoing series like Takehiko Inoue's Real, Yuki Urushibara's Mushishi, Hiroki Endo's Eden: It's an Endless World!, and others, and you can't help but see 2009 as a year of extraordinary abundance. You don't even have to pay for it if you don't want to, which brings me to my last cause for thankfulness.

More free stuff: Is Viz making an end-run around piracy sites with its online initiatives SIGIKKI, Shonen Sunday, and The Rumic World? Probably. Are these efforts a strategic loss leader to encourage readers to sample, and then buy? Certainly. Does it matter when there are so many good comics available to read for free with the support and compensation of their creators? Not one iota. I hope we see more legitimate online manga offerings in the coming year. It's like a magazine without the dead trees or distribution and production hassles.

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* bottom and top images from Natsume Ono and Daisuke Igarashi; other covers according to their titles.

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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

Please bookmark his site, Precocious Curmudgeon.

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