Newsarama finally notices the manga censorship story that’s been making the rounds. Given that the story is from Barstow, one of the more stridently conservative parts of California, I’m not surprised that the big manga back-lash story that everyone seems to be bracing for comes from there.

The thread is notable for comic creator Scott Sava making a case for censorship, quite literally on the basis of the “won’t someone think of the children!” argument. His point, basically, is that since he can’t monitor his children at all possible seconds, no material that he disapproves of should be available to anyone. He also thinks that the Dewey Decimal System is to blame for a non-fiction book about comics to be shelved in the non-fiction section of a library, where just anyone could find it!

The thread also contains this comment from another poster:
This is coming from a state where Child Pornography is ok for private use and a state with a bill in the state senate that will force all public school children to focus on the importance of the sexuality of people throughout history. In other words George Washington was evil because he wasn’t gay.
Not to mention a state that is so anti-white that anything from other cultures (including unconfirmed reports of graphic beastiality) should be considered art.

See, that right there is what happens when you get all your information about the world from Fox News. I’d like to know exactly how much crack this guy is smoking. Because, really? Child Porn is legal in California? School children are being taught that heterosexuals are evil?
Precisely what color is the sky on this guy’s world?

(Or, I Work For A Living, I Can’t Get To A Comics Shop On Wednesday!)

I discovered today that, in my absence, the manga section has actually managed to expand a little. Which is a promising sign. It was at the expense, of course, of my great experiment with racking manga by genre. Without a full-time person aware enough of manga in the store to keep it going, it was becoming too hard to determine what should go where. Also, I gather that the “but that’s not shojo” factor was a problem as well, where people refused to accept that certain titles really and truly belong in certain genres. This was always a problem with racking certain manga titles in the kids graphic novels section. Apparently Dragon Ball Z fans really don’t like being told that it’s a kids book.

Though I did pick up School Zone by Kanako Inuki. I was flipping through it, slightly put off by the cutesy-goth horror manga aesthetic that almost every Japanese horror comic seems to use, when it struck me that the book was completely bat-shit insane.
“Bat-shit insane” is pretty much a selling point on manga for me.

I also picked up The Battle for Bludhaven. People seem to be having mixed reactions to it. Given the general tenor of Palmiotti’s and Gray’s other collaborations, and the fact that the first issue prominently features the Force of July and the Atomic Knights (and the return of the Monolith), I’d say that the mix of played-for-straight and tongue-in-cheek material is deliberate.

And I grabbed a copy of Superior Showcase, the art-comic that tricks people who get snitty about not reading super-hero comics into reading super-hero comics.

And I got this, because one can never have too many “Bugs Bunny in drag” objects in your collection.

And a small stack of Lois Lane comics were purchased. I also said mean things about a particular Vertigo comic with good art and a dreadful writer to Mike, and he countered by describing one of the books in a certain company’s cross-over mania as an example of their attempts to get women to read super-hero comics.

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Recent side-bar maintenance

DudeTube, comics and naughty YouTube videos.

Here Now, comics and pictures of men in various states of undress. It’s like the perfect blog for me.

Blockade Boy is excellent, and I really should have drawn attention to my link to it before now.

The New Adventures of Queen Victoria, because clip-art funnies about historical figures are your best entertainment value.

To revisit an earlier post of mine, the exact line in the V for Vendetta novelization is “I fell in love with you Evey.”

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The downside of kids digging manga in book-stores: Gee, I really would have liked to have browsed your manga section, seen what was new, see anything I might like to spend some of my money on…
But, of course, it’s kind of hard to browse when you can’t even reach the shelves because there are so many kids sprawled out on the floor, incapable of moving aside after you say a polite “excuse me.” And if you do manage to reach the shelves, the books are so badly out of order because the kids don’t work there and don’t have to clean up so what do they care, that you can’t possibly find anything.
(And I’m one of those pro-manga, pro-kids-reading-comics guys, and this annoyed me.)

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Once upon a time Mike insisted that I post some scans from a Harvey magazine about the forthcoming Baby Huey live-action film. He’ll be pleased to know thatit is now available on DVD.

(This may actually be old news, but screw it.)

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Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go let the last of the alcohol leave my system while I watch my brand-spanking new Bill Hicks DVD.

As a result of some re-arranging of the manga shelves, I’ve decided to take the plunge and try to arrange the manga by genre. As you follow the shelves down from the top, they go something like this:

Over-size books: books that, because of their size or shape, will only fit on the top shelf.
“Mature” titles: these are actually the more, for lack of a better term, “male” orientated mature readers titles. The ones I wanted to make sure were out of kiddies hands.
Historical drama: this is where all the samurai and ninja comics go. I tried, at first, to keep them strictly historical, but I had to lett a few of the more fantasy-based titles creep in there for space reasons.
“Shonen”: not strictly speaking comics for young boys, but the more male-orientated action and adventure comics.
Shojo: this category was fairly easy to put together and is more or less accurately described.
Josei/Yaoi/Shonen-ai: the more “mature” titles aimed at a female readership. Normally I’d have wanted to keep them on a higher shelf, but they’ll almost certainly sell better if I keep them close to related titles. Desire for example will probably sell better if it’s only a shelf away from another romance comic than it will if it’s on the same shelf as something like Battle Royale. As much as it might amuse me to put it on the same shelf as Battle Royale to see people’s head’s explode when they stumble upon a gay romance comic while they’re looking for their school-girls getting killed manga.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, the actual kid-orientated titles are already on our kid’s comics rack, and have been for some time now.

There were a few times I had to bend the classifications a little, just for the sake of putting a title somewhere where I know it’ll sell. Chobits and Maison Ikkoku for example, are not shojo comics, but they sell almost exclusively to our female customers, so they feel like a better fit for the shojo section. Likewise almost every horror-themed manga title I came across on our shelves felt like a shojo title, whether that was the author’s intent or not.

It’s also worth noting that in many cases, when I couldn’t decide what category a particular title best fit in, the decided factor was the size of the female character’s breasts. The bigger they were, the more likely the title was to end up in the “shonen” section.

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A few trade paperbacks that DC hasn’t released yet, and I don’t understand why not:

Justice League of America #s 166, 167, and 168: This is the story in which the Secret Society of Super-Villains do a mind-swap with the JLA and learn their secret identities. Considering just how many comics DC has published within the last year which reference this story in some way, it’s really very puzzling that DC hasn’t released it in some format.

Wonder Woman in the [Decade]: They’ve got these books for Batman and Superman, and Wonder Woman has a long enough publishing history that it’s possible to put these out. Granted, a lot of those sixty years worth of Wonder Woman comics are absolutely terrible, but they’re really no worse, on the whole, than the Batman or Superman comics that DC has reprinted. Plus, Wonder Woman is one of those few comic characters that non-comics fans will actively seek out merchandise for.

Amethyst: a young girl travels to another dimension, is transformed into a teenager, can do magic, discovers that she’s the prophesied savior of the kingdom, and has a bunch of cute boys competing for her attention. Put it into a manga-sized trade (including manga-size page count), and I think DC may have that cross-over book they seem to want so badly.

Sugar and Spike: I’m not actually particularly interested, but everyone else seems to be. I think even DC has acknowledged in the past that this is one of their most-requested titles for reprints. So why hasn’t it been?

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Another category of books missing: gay manga. No, not yaoi. I mean actual manga by and for gay people. The recent yuri titles are a nice start, and I don’t honestly expect any US publisher to be brave enough to try to publish Gengorah Tagame’s work, but still…it would be nice to read some gay themed manga that aren’t about willowy under-age boys for once.

Your Gratuitous City Of Heroes Image Of The Day:

Rum Red and his Holy Shotgun. No, I’m not making that up. As part of a mission Rum was given by a creepy guy who hangs out in a cemetery, Rum and his team had to go into a mausoleum crawling with zombies and evil tikis and flush them out. Using a holy shotgun. After that we had to rescue some scientists from evil Nazi vampires and were-wolves. Well, they’re not Nazis anymore so much as they’re evil alien Nazis, but still.

Part of the game’s appeal for me are these types of scenarios, where you just get to go and do fun, sort of silly, super-heroic adventures. Yeah, the task-forces have their appeal in their high-stakes, we must actually save the world even though failure has no real in-game consequences other than debt, way. But I get more out of the loosely-connected storyline type missions from contacts.

Speaking of debt, I strongly suspect that I’ll have paid off my student loans before I get Rum out of debt. Everytime I finally drag myself out of the debt hole, I’ll turn the corner and smack head-first into a purple Ancestor Spirit or Lesser Devoured, and it’ll be right back to the nearest hospital and a new round of debt to clear up.

So next time you’re on Victory, send me a “Hi” tell.

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Dorian’s Top Five Manga

Everyone else is doing it, so in no particular order:

1) Tuxedo Gin: The art is very cute and the story is both funny and touching.

2) Fruits Basket: I’m a sucker for the transforming animals and watching Tohru’s emotional growth gets to me.

3) Imadoki: A down-to-earth and affecting romance.

4) xxxHolic: Clamp’s answer to the EC/Creepy horror tradition. Stylish and spooky little morality plays.

5) Ranma 1/2: Still funny after all these years.

Honorable mentions go to Kindaichi Case Files, Angel Sanctuary, Tsubasa, the recently concluded Alice 19th and Inu-Yasha–though frankly I’d just as soon they find that damn jewel already!

Part 1: Why I Hate Super-Hero Comics

Part 2: Why I Hate Indy Comics

Part 3: Why I Hate Manga

Manga is variously going to save or destroy the Western comics industry, depending on who you ask. People who like manga are convinced that if only they could get all those JSA and X-Men fans to read Tramps Like Us or City Hunter than they will fall in love with manga and Western comics publishing will start looking more like manga publishing and all the comic book stores and publishers will be saved! Hooray! People who dislike manga, on the other hand, are resentful of the fact that all these kids are reading Fake instead of Spider-Man or The Avengers like they “should” be.

Both sides are, of course, wrong. Manga’s audience isn’t anything like the Western comics audience and the rise and potential fall of manga has nothing whatsoever to do with the well-deserved (potential) death of the contemporary comics industry. (To borrow a phrase from Mike, since he seems in no hurry to use it, the comics industry we have today is the last, pathetic gasp of a fad that began seventy years ago.) We need to stop pretending that manga and western comics have anything to do with one another, other than occasionally brushing up against one another on book-store shelves.

Which is not, of course, to say that the manga readers don’t have their faults. They can be just as tiresome as the super-hero fans and the indie scenesters in their own way. In fact, manga fans seem to largely embody some of the worst negative traits of both the super-hero reader and the art-comix crowd.

To start with, there is often quite a deal of pretension amongst manga fans. I’m not talking about manga fans looking down on those “sad, adolescent” people who haven’t evolved past the point of reading super-hero comics, as they go to have their purchase of the latest volume of DragonBall Z rung up, although that element certainly exists amongst manga fans. No, what I’m thinking of most specifically are the people who pretend sophistication because of their deep knowledge and respect of manga, which is the most perfect artistic and literary form ever devised. It’s a peculiar form of Japanaphilia, less creepy than the anglo-American men who obsess over J-Pop singers, but annoying nonetheless. It’s the people who complained incessantly about manga not being presented in the “authentic” format when most publishers were still flipping and touching up artwork to present it in a left-to-right format. The fact that English is read left-to-right and presenting manga in that format might make it easier for people to read it was irrelevant. Now that most manga is presented in the original right-to-left format, their major concern is that the translations aren’t sufficiently “faithful.” “By changing the ‘san’ suffix to ‘Mr.’ they’ve completely changed the author’s intent!” they cry, weeping into their first edition copies of Manga! Manga!.

This is, of course, when they’re not too busy trying to impress you with the fact that they know a particular titles name in the original language, or it’s “cute” fans only name. I’ve lost track of the number of times people have asked me for Furuba or Aa, Megami-sama instead of just asking me for the title that I might actually be able to find it under.

To flip to the other end of the scale, one aspect of manga readership that doesn’t get mentioned very often is that many manga fans are actually very limited in their tastes. Despite the staggeringly large diversity of genres that exists in manga, and despite what a lot of manga-boosters would have you believe, most American readers stick very close to one genre. Their narrowness of taste will often put those of the most fanatical super-hero fetishist to shame. But unlike the spandex fetishist, many manga readers will insist that their purchases somehow actually do display an interest in a wide variety of genres and styles. The person who only buys X-Men comics in which Gambit appears at least has some basic honesty in their posistion; they don’t try to pretend that they’re more open-minded than they’re purchasing habits would indicate. But many manga fans will argue that there are actually significant and important distinctions between titles like Chobits and Love Hina and Oh My Goddess and Ai Yori Aoshi and Negima and Urusei Yatsura and Real Bout High School and they’re not just buying titles that feature under-age Japanese school girls topless and/or in panties, dammit!

Now, it is perhaps unfair to blame manga for the short-sightedness of it’s detractors, but there are a couple of comments from the anti-manga peanut gallery that manga publishers have sort of brought upon themselves. First is the notion that manga is a fad. People making this complaint really haven’t been looking up from their DC and Marvel comics long enough to realize what’s been going on in the comics industry for the last twenty years, and now that they have they look around them and see all these (gasp)women! and (shock!) children buying these strange-looking black-and-white paperbacks instead of reverently placing the most recent issue of Jim Lee’s Superman into an acid-free bag-and-board as all comics readers should be. For them, dismissing manga as a “fad” comforts them, and makes them forget that they’re the graphic entertainment version of a dodo–getting eaten into extinction by Dutch sailors because they’re too stupid to learn how to adapt to changing circumstances. Never mind that this “fad” began a good twenty or so years ago when Eclipse tentatively released some translations of Japanese comics into direct market stores to see if anyone would bite. No, what we’re really seeing is more of a “bandwagon.” Tokyopop decided to bite the bullet and throw a bunch of manga out in book-form to see if anyone would care…and they wisely decided to hell with the direct market and pushed to get the books into bookstores where the target audience for the kinds of material they were publishing would see it. And it worked. Very well. So every other manga publisher decided to follow suit. And it worked. Very well. And so other publisher have seen that it works very well to put book-form stories in book-stores and want a piece of that pie for themselves. To someone who was so engrossed in whether or not Peter Parker was a clone or the unflinching virgin purity of Gwen Stacy, all of these manga books suddenly appearing in Previews and where the Kingdom Come and other nostalgia-wanks used to be at Borders, it must look remarkably like, oh, say, the black-and-white comics boom, or the chromium comics boom, or the bad-girl comics boom, or the Crossgen comics boom (oh, wait, that one never actually happened). So, to a certain extent, manga publishers could have done more to differentiate their success from the other bubble-economies that the direct market has gone though over the years. On the other hand, screw the direct market and what it thinks seems to be a business strategy that’s worked well for manga.

The other potentially valid, they’ve-brought-this-on-themselves, issue that manga publishers face and I unfairly blame them for, is the issue of the manga glut. Yes, there are a hell of a lot of manga titles coming out each month now. I think Tokyopop alone accounts for about three or four inches of previews each month. But at this point, manga publishers are still seeing what the market will bear. Not the direct market, Dear God no, but the book-store market, which is several orders-of-magnitude larger than the direct market and therefore potentially more able to handle a wide variety of back-stock and new releases. No, the real issue with the two million or so different manga titles that come out each month is that the overwhelming majority of them are absolutely terrible. Badly drawn, derivative, cliched, and the only reason I give the writing a pass is that all I have to go on are the English translations, which are generally artless in the extreme. It’s not too much manga we have to fear, it’s the tidal wave of crap swamping the worthy titles. As it gets harder and harder for readers to find the wheat amongst the chaff, we run the risk of manga readers losing interest, or worse yet, losing critical discernment. And again, manga publishers and their “throw everything out there and see what sells” approach is largely to blame. Well, no, Tokyopop is largely to blame, to be honest. With most of the other manga publishers I can be reasonably certain that even if something is not to my taste, it still has some merit to someone. With Tokyopop we’re lucky if one of the 4,000 titles they release each month is worth reading.

I’m going to be busy the next couple of days with work, barbeques, and watching my new Chronological Donald Vol. 1 DVD, so here’s proof that shameless swipes aren’t confined to American super-hero comics:

I mean, even the “Dragon Comics” logo is reminisicent of the Marvel comics logo of the time. Oh, and the Wolverine rip-off’s name is Buffalock. If nothing else, that’s a genius name for a character.