Monthly Archives: October 2011

Some Updated Thoughts On J-Manga

Posted on by
1

We have had a little time to get used to the J Manga service, and now that I have had the chance to work with it, actually read some titles, I have a few thoughts about the future of the service and my current opinion of it. Every new medium needs some time to grow, and I think we have gotten a good introduction to the services that J Manga is currently providing (or, in some cases, not providing) for its customers.

First, is the pricing: at $4.99, volumes of digital manga are much easier to purchase and are much more reasonable than their previous $8.99 price point, but I have no idea if this price point will stay the same. Right now I am paying 4.99 for a volume on Viz Media’s manga app, which i can take on my iPhone, iPad, or any laptop computer. The manga available for purchase on the Viz site is, by far and large, better translated and better adapted. There are no graphical glitches or unreadable text, which puts it a step ahead in quality, price, and convenience, all things that I am very sensitive to when it comes to digital content. I will be interested to see if the content goes back up to $8.99 on Tuesday – I imagine that if the price does go back up, I will be discontinuing my subscription. I didn’t buy Yen Press manga for that price digitally, and I won’t pay $8.99 for digital manga.

Second is content availability: there are plenty of books listed on the J Manga site, but very few are actually available on J Manga, The majority of shonen titles in the J Manga store are just the digitally localized volumes from the Viz Media app, and the selections that are available are sparse. This needs to change immediately. If you are going to list a series as available for purchase, it needs to be available to purchase. I understand the idea that these pages are a stand in for when the manga finally comes down from the Japanese companies on high, but nothing is more frustrating or off-putting than to attempt to buy a volume of manga that isn’t actually on the site.

Third: previews – these need to be at least a chapter long. Other digital services are pretty consistently allowing consumers to try the first chapter of a given manga before having to purchase. This is a system that J Manga needs to enact as soon as possible. As it stands, they aren’t meeting industry standards, and it is not helping them sell content.

Finally is a pet peeve of my own, which I don’t think many share: the josei section, which I am extremely interested in as a reader, is mostly yaoi. Not that yaoi is a bad thing. I just think it needs its own section. It clearly caters to women as a genre, but the stories that appear in josei manga anthologies and those that appear in yaoi anthologies are extremely variable. I also find that many series appear in multiple headers. For example, some books labelled as seinen are also available in the josei section. This is misleading at best, and confuses me as a consumer.

I am certainly not giving up on J Manga all the way, despite my gripes. I am interested in the content they can provide as a matter of wanting to read content unavailable in the USA. I am also interested to see if J Manga can provide license rescues that other print publishers have been unable provide. Still, J Manga has a long way to go before I will consider them a successful publisher and not just a flash in the pan. Let’s hope they can bring things around in the next two months.

Review: Sand Chronicles, Vol. 1

Posted on by
Reply

Sand Chronicles, Vol. 1
Publisher: VIZ Media Shojo Beat(January 1, 2008)
Language: English
Genre: Shojo/Romance
Rated: OT for Older Teen
US $8.99, CAN $10.99
ISBN-13: 978-1421514772

I have read some comics that have been melancholy, sometimes even downright depressing. They are generally stories that show how people act towards personal tragedy or how they deal with atrocities. Comic books like Maus and Years of the Elephant show us personal pain and tragedy, and do it in a very unique fashion. Sand Chronicles may not be the most unique setting (the first volume focuses on school age Japanese students, like so much other shojo), but it is remarkably poignant and oftentimes saddening piece of fiction.

The story focuses on Ann, who starts the manga as a 12-year old who has just moved back to her mother’s rural Japanese hometown after her father and mother divorce. Ann meets other neighborhood kids, Daigo, Fuji, and Shika, and things seem to be going well for her, until the unthinkable happens – Ann’s mother commits suicide.

I feel torn by this turn of events. In one hand, the possibility of her suicide is hinted at, and her breakdown is a slow, gradual process in the beginning chapters of the book that makes it believable. But it is unequivocally the most depressing moment I have yet to read in a shojo comic.  I think that this is the general point of Sand Chronicles – it is a sad book, and it intrinsically deals with how people deal with sadness. Ann is dealt a pretty terrible hand in this first volume, and I think that she makes some very understandable mistakes, especially regarding her relationships, because of how her mother’s death overshadows her thoughts. It seems apparent that the relationships built in the first volume of Sand Chronicles cannot last, at least not in the forms in which they exist at the end of this volume. That would be making something very complicated far too simple.

The drama of these events, their effects on the human psyche, and the way that people deal with them, is a core feature of Sand Chronicles. Another is the way that Ashihara defrays her most serious situations with one-note jokes. And trust me, while I have dismissed other writers in the past for this same tendency, it works much better here, thanks to a well written adaptation, and for the sole fact that Sand Chronicles DESPERATELY needs these jokes. They are what keep the story from wallowing in the murk of despair and self-pity.

The art in Sand Chronicles is pretty standard fare, but it conveys all of the necessary emotion. I am reminded of We Were There and Monkey High!, but maybe with a little less fish-eye than We Were There and not quite the fluidity and bounce of Monkey High (all three series were/are published in Shogakukan’s Betsucomi, so this similarity may be on purpose).

Sand Chronicles is dramatic, and marked by sadness and worldliness that other shojo manga from Viz Media’s Shojo Beat line don’t manage to achieve. This is both a blessing and a curse; the series has the emotional gravitas to work out a mother’s death by suicide, but this gravitas also keeps the reading experience somber and heavy. Whether or not Sand Chronicles can stand out as a series past the first volume depends on its ability to develop a meaningful and reflective story that continues to acknowledge the drama and gravitas of the first volume. It will be interesting to see how volume two plays out.

Love Hina MMF: It Gets Better

Posted on by
Reply

Love Hina is a series that has, and for a long time, been a part of my background as a member of the manga fandom. It was one of the first series I read compulsively, and during a family vacation, instead of waiting a week for books I had reserved on inter-library loan to finish the series (volumes 13 and 14) I instead stopped by a local bookstore in a town I knew nothing about to buy them and find out – what happens to Keitaro and Naru?

In some ways, Love Hina and I have had a sort of tumultuous relationship. At first, I absolutely loved the series, and devoured the series published by TokyoPop. This would have been 2005, I think, so the series had recently finished publication in the USA, so it was fairly easy to find the books. Later, I purchased the entire series on eBay, and read it again, and was torn. What was the reason I liked this series, I wondered. It didn’t seem to have the same charm as it did in the first read, and I grew impatient with the stalling and bickering between the two main characters.

And then, to my great pleasure, I have had the chance to review the Love Hina omnibus released by Kodansha Comics, which has really revitalized the series with a brand new translation and a book that reads crisply and has great art. Looking at the differences between the TokyoPop edition and the Kodansha edition, it is a night and day difference in image quality. Kodansha clearly trumps the old TokyoPop versions, and it’s a cleaner and much more vibrant book. The translations are much more focused and the lettering is very clean and certainly unlike TokyoPop‘s original print run. It is obvious that whoever put this project together loves this comic, and wanted to see it released in style.

While I was reading through this new version of Love Hina, I remembered in a flash what had enamored me to it so nearly 7 years ago; like another series I had recently started reading, Harry Potter, Love Hina tried to show me that if you try hard enough, if you want something bad enough, if you work and dedicate yourself to that thing, you can obtain it. For Harry, it was resolution and the ability to become a great wizard. For Keitaro, it was an education and a wife.

When I was reading Love Hina in the summer of 2005, I had recently just resolved a really sour relationship. It had changed how I thought about relationships and my future, and now, looking back on that time in my life, I can see that I was much more depressed than I think I let myself believe, and certainly shaken to the core. I did not think that I could go through a relationship again if that was the end result of being with other people.

But, I began reading Love Hina, and found myself re-evaluating my problems. I could project them onto Keitaro (that poor bastard, he has enough problems without mine to deal with), and escape into the lovely world of the Hinata Inn. Keitaro was my proxy, and I found myself rooting for him as if I were encouraging myself to do better as I moved into the next phase of my life.

I know that Love Hina doesn’t have this deep meaning or strong themes to criticize and analyze – but sometimes, that isn’t the point. The point is to empathize and care about the results of the story, to connect, to project, and to become, if only for a moment, a character of another world. I think that is why Love Hina is a series that deserved its own MMF.

I took plenty away from Love Hina, but the most important thing that Keitaro and the girls of Love Hina taught me is that things get better. We can’t always expect life to be sunshine and roses, and there will be strange circumstances and odd coincidences that ruin your day or make you feel like your back is up against the world. You may not be able to have a high quality relationship with the person or people you care about. And that is part of life. Keitaro taught me that we make our own way, one bumbling step at a time, and if we fall, the thing that matters most is that we stand back up.

Manga Widget Investigates: Toribako House

Posted on by
3

With the release of Bunny Drop‘s 4th volume last week, I’ve been thinking about Yumi Unita again, who I think has one of the most distinctive and beautiful styles in published josei today. Her use of line, pattern, and white space is different from most of the comics I’ve seen published, and I think that it is criminal that only one of her series has been published in the US (major props to Yen Press for picking up Bunny Drop, even if it is on a fairly slow release schedule). Also news – it looks like Unita is writing a Bunny Drop sequel that focuses on the story before the time jump that’s supposed to happen soon (I haven’t received my volume of Bunny Drop from my order yet, so I don’t know if the time jump happens in volume 4 or 5).

This week I’m looking at a two-volume Unita series called Toribako House (トリバコハウス), published in Shodensha’s Feel Young anthology in 2003. It focuses on an early-20s woman named Miki who is living with an older man. She has a real aversion to people being in her personal space, and comes across a guy who is brash, rude, and is all up in her grill. It is these sorts of situations that Unita derives her comedy and great story-telling situations, so I assume that this would be a great read. Apparently there are some darker tones to this series – threatened abuse from Miki’s boyfriend, perhaps – that apparently give it a darker feel at some points, but I suppose that’s what reading the book is for. The metaphor is a bird in a gilded cage, as evidenced by the cover art for the first volume (check out those shirt patterns!)

Unita has a style that I find expressive unique, and delicate, and unlike other shojo or josei, focuses more on the characters themselves than the places in which they interact. Her expressive facial features and varied character composition are highlights to what I consider a very excellent style of illustration, if a bit unconventional.

Toribako is a two-volume series, so not a big investment in funds – Yen Press could have it in a one-and-done omnibus (which I think I would prefer over two volumes, although I would certainly pay for two), and I wouldn’t mind reading it in digital if I had to – it looks like it lines up well with content from Digital Manga or NetComics, although I assume JManga could get the digital rights as well.

Toribako House looks like a cute series that could possibly stand on the line between shojo and josei, and could easily make it to the US because of its small size. Who do I have to beg to get a copy of this?