I respect Lissa quite a bit for her work in manga blogging, and we’ve had the opportunity to talk about manga on Ed Sizemore’s Manga Out Loud podcast. The business of publishing is something Lissa and I both have a lot of interest in, and Lissa has essentially revealed herself as an “old soul” of publishing mentality in our podcast, while I consider myself more progressive, at least in matters of digital publishing. Lissa has been an excellent community member, and has done me a great service in multiple occasions by helping me get copies of comics from Canada that I would not otherwise have access to in the United States.

Why do I preface my entire article with all of this? Because while I think that Lissa is a great person and a wonderful member of the manga blogging community, I absolutely and vehemently disagree with her entire argument against Kickstarter campaigns, and I want to present the opposite argument without offering any personal insult.

What I want to argue in this article is that there is a stark difference between what the use of Kickstarter actually means for manga fans and the perceived attacks on fandom that have been presented by Lissa’s article. I feel that the bulk of Lissa’s argument is predicated on the idea that the traditions of analogue publishing are the only correct way to publish content, or that the publisher has an obligation to the traditional methods of licensing and publishing content in English. I disagree.

The Barbara Kickstarter campaign offers manga fanatics and Tezuka appreciators the ability to commission the translation and print of a volume of manga currently not published in English. I use the word commission because this is really what is happening with the Kickstarter campaign system. DMP is essentially saying “If you give us X dollars, we will do this project, and we can give you access to our process and input into the final product.”

Commissions are a vital part of the art industry, and comic publishing to a very large extent is a system of commercial art that does not run on this system.  There have been recent Kickstarter campaigns, such as Womanthology, Ashes, the Transmetropolitan Art Book, and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Other Stories, to name a few, that have challenged the idea of comic publishing as an industry with traditional methods of content delivery.

With the Barbara Kickstarter campaign, DMP is essentially asking for a commission for a book. This is unorthodox considering what the traditional publishing model is (the publisher licenses material, translates, edits, typesets, and prints it, then sells it to bookstores and hopes to recoup its costs and make a profit). Just because this system is unorthodox does not make it bad. In fact, being able to have input in the way that the industry works and makes decisions offers fans the direct ability to be involved and get something that they want.

As publishers of Japanese content continue to dwindle in the United States, DMP is making a small move from the traditional publishing model to a commission model because commissions are what work for microniche consumer materials. We are at a place in the anime and manga industry that is stressful for publishers, because one flop, like Bandai’s overproduction of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya product, could lead to the failure of that company. DMP is readjusting its game plan to determine what markets will bear prior to taking the intial risk by asking consumers – something that no manga publisher has truly done before. This is a smart business move.

The idea of crowd sourcing risk has been a standard practice in the wider business community for a long time. The crowd-sourced model that DMP has adopted is a much more open and malleable process than the standard operating procedures of the banking, credit, and private equity industries. Also, unlike those systems, where you take on the risk without being explicitly made aware of it, you are being made aware of that risk when using Kickstarter.

Lissa makes some strong arguments about the role of publishers in the market. She states that Kickstarter is a program for individuals without corporate backing, and that traditional publishers should continue to publish manga traditionally. I have two issues with this statement. The first is that this argument denies the publisher the ability to experiment and change the relationship between producer and consumer. Experimentation, trying new business models is one way that microniche publishers like DMP can stay ahead of a recession economy, and continue to publish.

Second of all, as a rule, companies do generally take risks and hope that these risks lead to sales and a positive income. Just because that is what happens now, does not mean that is what DMP has to do. They do not NEED to bear the risks of a new title because they are a traditional publisher. They are under no obligation to do so. If DMP has a program that allows consumers to decide whether they want to pay for a possible license, it is perfectly fine for them to do so. This tradition of “risk to profits” in business only exists because it was the only way business could be done until the past 2-3 decades. If you as a consumer do not like the model that the publisher uses, then you do not need to purchase their products. But it is not an obligation for a company to take risk.

In fact, many other small businesses are using Kickstarter to produce content. Small Box Games is a great example of a small board-game publishing company that is using Kickstarter to fund games like Omen of War – and other companies are doing projects like this more and more frequently as time passes.

Lissa takes crowd-based risk a little personally, I think – she states that because the impetus to publish Barbara is left to the fan, the fan is accountable for the failure of it to meet its goals.

“There is definitely excitement and enthusiasm from fans fueling this drive, but it also feels like driving the pledging frenzy is the underlying sense of guilt and worry. After all, if you don’t pledge, you may never see the book. If you don’t pledge, it means you don’t want the manga at all. If you don’t promote this book you’ve likely never read and this initiative you only have on a promise will deliver, there will be no book. If Digital Manga Publishing isn’t able to create and print this book it is your fault.”

I think this is a gross overstatement of the relationship between the publisher and its customers. Never in a million years would DMP blame customers for not supporting a Kickstarter campaign. That’s the easiest way to go out of business that I can currently think of.

You have no obligation as a manga reader, consumer, or even as a Tezuka fan to purchase or fund Kickstarter campaigns. If you have doubts about the system, that is your chance to not purchase, not make that jump. If you decide not to buy from Kickstarter, you have made your choice as a consumer. That’s your right.

The idea that guilt is an emotion that should be considered in the use of Kickstarter projects is farfetched. In no other industry is there guilt associated with not buying an item because the manufacturer or project will fail if you don’t. This is antithetical to the idea of modern business – if the project/product does not succeed, it is not your failure as a consumer. It is a failure of the business to meet the wants/needs of the consumer.

Feeling guilt about not buying into Kickstarter because you think the project will fail is equivalent to the false guilt for allowing certain titles like Gintama die. Gintama didn’t succeed as a business venture and was cancelled. If you didn’t buy it, it was because you didn’t want it. Why should you feel guilty if the product is discontinued? Neither of these is a rational view on the relationship between a consumer and a producer.

I have discussed my thoughts on traditional publishing with Lissa and many of the manga blogging community, but as a restatement here, I feel that traditional publishing is becoming antiquated in this largely digital world. There are certainly products that can exist without direct consumer input, but in a microniche world, this is becoming less and less the case.

The way we license product from Japan is an antiquated system that is being threatened in a small but significant manner.  As we move forward in the next 10 years, it is my hope that licensing and publishing in the United States continues to grow out of the system created in the 90’s and in a more open, more consumer-oriented way. For this reason, I fully support the Kickstarter campaign that DMP is running and will continue to support these projects provided that the product they are offering is something I want to buy.

And if I don’t buy? Well, I won’t be feeling guilty about it.

The recently passed Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and New Year seasons are a time of celebration for many people in the United States, and a large part of these celebrations is spending time with family. Having spent a lot of time with family this past holiday, I started to think about manga that focuses on the relationships between family members. Some of my favorite manga published in English focus on family dynamics (Cross Game and Bunny Drop come to mind) and while these books are probably not the most monetarily successful, these series have been critically acclaimed, and are always series that I make sure to have copies of at my home (and promote tirelessly!).

After a bit of digging, I came across what looks like a real gem – Tzusuki wa Mata Ashita (つづきはまた明日, To Be Continued Tomorrow) a manga about the Fujisawa family, which consists of a 5^th grade boy, a 1^st grade girl, and a salary-man father. The mother in the family has recently passed away, and so the Fujisawas gets by with the help of the father’s younger sister. The story starts off as a new family moves into the home next door, and the neighbors look remarkably similar to the Fujisawas. It seems like a very remarkable story, and having recently dealt with the pain of losing a family member, the idea hits close to home.

Tzusuki wa Mata Ashita is written by Kita Konno and published by Gentosha. The series is currently at 3 volumes and counting, and is currently published on Gentosha‘s Web Spica, which honestly, I’m going to have to learn some Japanese to understand exactly what’s going on here, but it looks like an digital platform similar to www.sigikki.com. I’ve been pulled to this site before on the account of beautiful watercolors and other artwork, but I still haven’t explored enough to know exactly what is going on. More reasons to become bilingual, I suppose.

Kita Konno is not a widely known writer in the USA, but has written a mix of josei, shojo, yaoi, and yuri manga in a mix of anthologies. This mixed pedigree makes a me even more interested in her work, as some of my favorite authors (Natsume Ono, Fumi Yoshinaga) have the same type of mixed pedigree.

As far as publishers go, I am not sure if any of the publishers have a direct relationship with Gentosha, so perhaps someone like Yen Press might go for this title, or perhaps this might be a great candidate for Digital Manga’s Kickstarter crowdsourced publishing. (I believe that TOKYOPOP had a licensing relationship with Gentosha, but unfortunately, TOKYOPOP is no longer publishing manga. Probably.) It appears that the parent publishing company has done some work with digital comics, so that might be a good home for Tzusuki wa Mata Ashita, so either JManga or NetComics take note.

While manga about families suffering hardship and coming out of it together may not sell a lot of comics to the Naruto crowd, it has the appeal of a more independent, adult comics-reading audience, and as the manga-reading population ages, this sort of content may be a good step in that direction. I would love to see manga like this in the United States, and I challenge publishers to redefine the meaning of manga with titles like Tzusuki wa Mata Ashita.

I bought the first volume of this series on a whim at the VizManga.com webstore and read it on a combination of my iPad and iPhone and at first, was struck by how… terrible the first chapter was. I had read the first piece of the story and had attempted to give it up, when I read a review of the first volume from David Welch, who praised the volume after he trudged through the first chapter, and decided to finish the first volume. After an abysmal first chapter, I was surprised at how great the story turned out to be. Blue Exorcist manages to turn itself around and get on its storytelling feet in a matter of pages, and it’s a change that makes this story go from cancelled in 10 chapters to a long-term success with its own anime.

One of the things I really enjoy about Blue Exorcist is its fully realized fictional world, something we don’t often see in shonen manga, where things are often made up on the spot, chapter by chapter – in the world of Blue Exorcist, there are two realms, Assiah, the human realm, and Gehenna, the demon realm. Exorcists protect Assiah from the influences of demons. The demons of Gehenna seem to have a sort of taxonomy that the author, Kato, has constructed that makes it much more cohesive. Our main character, Rin, wants to become an exorcist after his adoptive father, Shiro Fujimoto dies at the hands of Satan, the most powerful demon of Gehenna.

This is complicated by the fact that Rin is the son of Satan. Oddly, Rin has a twin brother, Yukio, who knows of Rin’s demonic nature before he does and vows to protect him by becoming an exorcist. At Shiro’s funeral Rin encounters another exorcist, Mephisto Pheles, who helps Rin enroll at the True Cross Academy, a school for exorcists. The relationship between Rin and Yukio adds an interesting twist to this otherwise straight-forward battle manga, where the protective and studious Yukio tries to prevent Rin from being consumed by his demonic powers.

As Rin joins the Academy to become an exorcist, the cast of supporting characters grows larger and we meet other students and teachers for Rin to interact with, and things get a bit sketchy when they all find out he is a son of Satan. This development is very organic – growth and trust in the students in the class leads to fear and misunderstanding of Rin’s purpose and background, and it’s very “Shonen Jump” but it’s a little softer, and less forced than other series that have pulled this trick before.

Another positive for this series is its fantastic artwork. Kato’s character designs remind me of D. Gray-man, a series written by another female Jump writer, Katsura Hoshino. Both of these ladies do fantastic work in illustration, and their backgrounds, settings, and landscapes transcend the traditional shonen aesthetic. Having a well-written storyline to go with the gorgeous illustration never hurts, and Kato moves at a pleasant clip, neither irritatingly slow nor blisteringly fast.

Overall, I think that Blue Exorcist is one of the sleeper hits of 2011. The series has a lot going for it – beautiful illustration, dynamic characters, and a slick fantasy world to let them play in. It’s a battle manga that transcends the battle manga ethic in a fun way.

 1. Drops of God is Licensed and Released in the USA by Vertical Inc.

 I have been writing about Drops of God well before its release in the USA. The series has always marveled me because of its wine economy-shifting powers and the way it champions the world of wine in an unpretentious, exuberant, and often fascinating way. Getting to read the first two volumes has been a fantastic ride, and a great reminder of why I love wine and comic books. I am looking forward to the identification of the disciples and the one wine to rule them all – but I am guessing I will be reading quite a while before I see that come to fruition.

2. Wandering Son Makes an English Debut

I have heard praise again and again for Wandering Son, a manga about two young children, a boy and a girl, who identify more with the opposite sex than they do with their own gender. This is a story of growing up, and of being different, and finding the support you need to live the way you want – volume one was one of my favorite manga in 2011, and having just purchased the second volume, I am looking forward to more of the simple slice-of-life that Wandering Son provides so well.

3. JManga Opens, and Actually Has Manga

I know I give JManga a lot of flak. I am a fairly demanding person when it comes to spending money on digital comics, and I don’t think that JManga is at a point right now where the service and selection are at a peak for their platform. They have been publishing 0-2 books per week now for the past few months, and while this is a fine pace, there are plenty of titles on the service that only have their first volume available to purchase.

Still, JManga represents a powerful tool to allow readers to legally purchase translated manga from Japan. If JManga continues to expand, manga that is “essential Japan” or too niche to be picked by a big publisher in the USA will become more and more a part of the offerings of the service. There have been a few great series that JManga has published that do this, and for that reason, I have to commend the folks at JManga for creating and improving their digital service in 2011. I am looking forward to more improvements in 2012.

4. Interacting With the Manga Community

One of the things I tried to focus on more in 2011 was interacting with other bloggers and writers who were talking about manga. I tend to be an internet lurker at heart – I love to sit and read other people’s comments, but I rarely talk about my own thoughts or opinions. That’s something I have slowly tried to change, and I commented more on blogs, spoke more on Twitter, and had the privilege of speaking on the Manga Out Loud Podcast twice in 2011, which was a great way to get to know more of my fellow bloggers. (Thanks to Ed and Johanna for the invitations!)

5. Hosting the Natsume Ono Manga Moveable Feast

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about the Natsume Ono MMF a few months before November of 2011. Having never hosted before, I wasn’t sure of what the requirements would be, and how I would be able to do a good job. Following in the footsteps of some very talented bloggers, I managed to write and host the MMF, and I think that the whole thing was a great success. I feel great about the content we generated in that month, and I am looking forward to the next time I host an MMF.

6. Reading A Bride’s Story for the First Time

I have read quite a few comics since I really started getting into them about 8 years ago – but nothing, not a single book, has swept me into its world like A Bride’s Story. This manga is absolutely fantastic, and I can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone, ANYONE, who likes a good story. It is wonderful. The third volume comes out this year, and I am already impatient for it.

I hope that everyone has had a great start to their new year. Hopefully this is a year of great manga (and a year to possibly get to a convention for me!).

Breathe Deeply

As a medical professional, I sometimes have a hard time reading medical dramas or watching medical shows on television.This is especially true with shows like House, where the way the series is set up forces it to be completely technical and still be somewhat accessible for the layperson. As part of a long-standing studying stress reliever, my friends and I would gather around the television during pharmacy school and analyze all of the things that were going wrong throughout a given episode of House. I remember running through lists of ways the medical team could have accurately diagnosed the patient and not half-killed him or her throughout the show.

It was this same sort of trepidation that I came into my reading of Breathe Deeply, a hefty volume of manga written by Doton Yamaaki, the pen-name of a husband and wife creative team who have been serialized in Kodansha‘s Morning, among other titles. This particular title seems to have been published by Sanctuary Publishing in Japan, which is a publisher I don’t have much information on; according to the One Peace Books website, the English publisher is a joint international venture of Sanctuary Publishing.

Regardless of the source of this piece of fiction, Breathe Deeply is a deep and sometimes dark look at one of the great medical debates still plaguing the medical community; the use of stem cell research to save lives.

Sei and Oishi are two young men in love with a sick girl named Yuko, a girl with an incurable heart condition that requires she receive a heart transplant in order to survive. She does not receive the necessary treatment in time, and passes away. The story of Sei and Oishi is one of heartbreak and stubbornness as each of them try to find their own way to a solution to Yuko’s illness after her death. Each of the men has a different outlook on the use of stem-cell research based on their interactions with Yuko. Sei, a brilliant chemical engineer, has created a polymer that can mimic heart cells and be applied to the failing heart to help massage it and keep it working, while Oishi struggles to have his research accepted as a major mode of inquiry into stem cell research (he has potentially discovered a unique way to create a new heart out of stem cells). The battle between them is one that weaves through the convoluted issues surrounding stem cell research – is transplant medicine ethical, is stem cell research murder to save future lives, and other modes of a morality vs. scientific progress argument.

Even when each character is at their highest point in the volume, each has to deal with the guilt and sorrow they’ve been grappling with for the past 15 years. It makes their struggles and fights more personal, their victories more bitter, and sets the stage for one of the most well-written “friendships” in manga for 2011. The way that Sei and Oichi play off of each other makes Breathe Deeply into a real interpersonal drama, where it otherwise could have been a sermon. Doton Yamaaki have an excellent eye for dialogue, and interactions in the lab seem very true to life, while the interactions between Sei, Oichi, and Yuko are a convincing mix of hormones, anxiety, and longing.

Doton Yamaaki have done an excellent job presenting both sides of the argument in this book, and it is clear that the only agenda the pair has is to write compelling fiction. In this area, they succeed, and do so with aplomb.  Breathe Deeply is a brilliantly written and illustrated piece of fiction that allows the reader to be drawn into personal fights and relationships while simultaneously asking the deepest questions and expecting no answers.

While I would not recommend Breathe Deeply to every manga reader (its often sketchy visual style and some adult scenes will not suit some readers), I do think that it is an excellent medical drama. The relationships are complex and human, and moments that could have been preachy or despicable are cast in that same human light. Overall, Breathe Deeply is a surprise success, and one of the better manga published in 2011.

A copy of this work was provided by the publisher for this review.

I hope to have some reviews up later this week, so please check those out. Have a great New Year!

As I worked over my list, I came upon a sort of realization: blogging in general has a sort of perverse relationship with top 10 lists. Blogging is by its nature very quick and unseasoned. It can be excellent journalism, but more often than not is an assortment of opinions and a few pictures. Top 10 lists do this excellently. There are plenty of pictures, plenty of opinions, and it all turns into one quick article very nicely. Badda bing, badda boom. But this seems to have generated a sort of “need to make a top 10 list” mentality that many people are so quick to mention or notice, and some people have broken down the general formula of the list post and displayed it for all to see in a sort of “dissected-frog” sort of way.

I appreciate the idea of a backwards glance at the year as much as the next person, but there are plenty of great Top 10 lists already on the internet. (Your local flavor may vary) So instead of a Top Ten list, I just want instead to talk about things that I thought were important in 2011, along with a few thoughts for 2012.

1. Digital manga becomes mainstream:

The biggest change to manga in 2011, in my opinion, is the push towards the digital medium. We have been seeing a bit of this for some time, but with the advent of the iPad and the B&N nook, Viz Media, Yen Press, and Kodansha have started releasing a quantity of their manga into the digital realm for download. Viz shuttered Shonen Jump magazine, and announced the start of Weekly Shonen Jump Alpha, a weekly digital anthology offering the weekly releases of the newest shonen manga in Japan. Yen Press also moved Yen Plus online in 2010 and has continued to publish the magazine with seeming success.

Gen Manga, an online anthology of seinen manga written by independent mangaka in Japan, has also jumped into the fray this year and has released an impressive lineup of seinen manga available monthly in a very accessible format. The content delivered by Gen Manga is easily accessible on most devices, and its relatively low price has made it a great investment as far as entertainment/dollars spent goes. I have been extremely impressed with the latest releases, and hope that great content continues to grow and increase. Gen Manga is one of the first digital hybrid models, where content is released first digitally and then can be printed on demand once the content has been collected.

The other big digital player this year was JManga, which opened its doors this summer. While I feel JManga had an okay starting platform, it is clear that there is a lot of work that needs to be done this year if they are going to survive as a digital content provider. Digital content has a price ceiling, and it seems as though JManga has realized that. Still, the major problem with the platform right now is a lack of continuation of content already on the service, and hopefully that will change in 2012. Additionally, JManga can only do itself good if it releases apps for the Apple and Android devices in 2012.

2. DMP utilizes Kickstarter to reprint Swallowing the Earth:

While this may not seem like much on the surface, I feel like microniche publishing has now found a unique and powerful tool to publish what would normally be considered unpublishable manga in the United States and all across the world. Microniche publishing through crowd-sourced funding can be the source of some really off-beat and fantastic comics, and I hope that DMP and other publishers try to use the Kickstarter model to their own advantage.

Think about Kickstarter as the method to get josei manga published in English. Just think about that for a second. Or, if you would prefer, how about obscure horror manga, classic shojo, or yuri? Kickstarter has proven to be a successful market for comics, and if Swallowing the Earth is any indication, DMP will be using the service again to fund future projects.

3. TOKYOPOP shuttered, Stu Levy sells TOKYOPOP brand to GeekChicDaily:

TOKYOPOP, the publisher I loved to hate, and sometimes loved, shut down after being one of the longest-lived companies in the business. While financial woes were certainly caused by the 2011 Borders closing, it also seemed as though Stu Levy was tired of publishing books. He is now off in Japan shooting a documentary of the hurricane disaster from this year.

I can understand not wanting to stick with something for your entire life. People’s interests change over time, and I can’t blame someone for wanting to stop doing what they have been doing. However, I do think that TOKYOPOP didn’t need Stu Levy at the helm to publish books, and I think shutting down the company instead of selling it or transitioning it to another CEO or publisher would have been more pleasant for the community.

The real nail in the coffin is the GeekChicDaily newsletter, which it appears Levy has sold the TOKYOPOP name to, utilizing what I am sure is the last ounce of public goodwill towards Levy for either a license or a lump sum payment for the name. Additionally, TOKYOPOP has promised to return to publishing comics, however nothing has really come of this except promises for more work and pleas for purchases of old content from current retailers. Hmmmmmmm.

4. Kodansha prints money with Sailor Moon:

This is a series that many people have been waiting on for quite some time, and Kodansha took advantage of its reverted TOKYOPOP rights to republish a new set of reprints of the books, which quickly sold out and went to second printing. It appears that a lot of people who liked the Sailor Moon anime as kids (me being one of those kids) wanted to read the manga and didn’t want to fiddle with the old versions that TOKYOPOP printed in the early 2000′s.

5. Less content was published in 2011:

This is mostly a function of a stagnant economy, the shuttering of TOKYOPOP, and the closure of Borders Booksellers, but it bears repeating that manga publishing is down from where it was in its peak days and even down from two years ago. As a function of this publishing environment, it seems as though more risky titles are not getting an opportunity in the USA, at least from larger publishers. New shonen releases have been fairly formulaic, which is fine, but some of the diversity of previous years is sorely lacking this year.

6. But even though less was published, there was still some fantastic new content published in 2011:

New series or one-shots include: A Bride’s Story, Drops of God, Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths, A Zoo in Winter, Wandering Son

Continuing series of note include 20^th Century Boys, Bunny Drop, Chi’s Sweet Home, Cross Game, and Twin Spica

7. And I am looking forward to some fantastic comics in 2012:

Books that have been announced that are sure to please: Heart of Thomas, Sakuran, 5 Centimeters Per Second, A Message to Adolf, Fallen Words, Cigarette Girl

Continuing Series I’ll be reading in in 2012 not already mentioned: Sailor Moon, Blue Exorcist, The Story Saiunkoku, Kimi ni Todoke, Itazura na Kiss

I hope that everyone has a fantastic new year, and that this year is a great year for manga. I am looking forward to reading more great comics in 2012!

The trigger for my original purchase of the first book came from a review of The Magician King from The Onion’s AV Club, which likened these novels to a Harry Potter of the real world – a fantasy novel that was more about people and how wretched they can be than the fantastic feats they could perform. I took the bait, and was enthralled by Grossman’s keen fiction.

The premise of the first novel is simple – a brilliant young man named Quentin, obsessed with novels about a magical land called Fillory (a Narnia of sorts) finds out, in a strange afternoon, that he has the ability to do magic, and that he, instead of being accepted to the halls of Stanford or some other prestigious Ivy-league school, will instead attend the similarly-prestigious and completely mysterious Brakebills School of Magic. He learns the craft of magic slowly throughout the first book, and falls in love with a young woman who will become the crux of the two novels – a woman named Alice. As he graduates and moves on to the real world, he finds that Fillory is a real place – a magical world where he and his other friends can live out the rest of their lives.

But not all is golden in Fillory, and neither is the real world. Neither, for that matter, are any of the characters in these two novels. Each of them has their warts, their tics, and their habits, and Grossman swings, spins, and twists them around stage until their basest desires and hideous natures are revealed, and then pushes them into the face of gods and delights when they spit in defiance. In the near-final portion of the book, Quentin loses things that are precious to him, but the world of Fillory is saved. It is an empty victory.

In the second novel, Quentin and a high-school friend named Julia, traverse the world of Fillory, and Earth and other lands in order to save the thing they both love most – magic. We learn about Julia, who appears briefly in the first novel as a broken and disturbed reject of the Brakebills School of Magic, and the darkness that permeates her character and her life. Oddly, once the dust of the action has settled, Quentin again has lost something precious.

Loss is the central theme of The Magicians and The Magician King. We watch the characters react to loss, whether it is a loss of their faculties, their relationships, their friends, and sometimes, their humanity in the name of heroism. Grossman seems to look into our sense of optimism and longing for happy endings, and chidingly tells us, “But remember children, this is how things actually happen.” It is this sense of loss and how real and biting it can be that has stuck in my craw even now as I look back on the books.

Grossman has a sense of the dramatic, but he also understands the balancing act each person must reconcile as they go about their lives, and he understands what drives people to make terrible, life-altering decisions. Amongst the bad choices and hedonistic tastes of his characters, Grossman sprinkles pop culture references, and brings into focus the books (The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter) which he so lovingly deconstructs.

The Magicians and The Magician King are books that every fantasy reader should read, but not because they are escapist, like the rest of the genre – they should read these novels because they are so rooted in the human. Grossman gives magic its due, but reminds us, sometimes gently, and sometimes with the force of a swinging hammer, that life is neither an escape, nor a fantasy. Our choices often have unintended consequences, and these consequences can unhinge us and make us who we are. Or who we are meant to be.

While I was busy preparing to host the Natsume Ono Moveable Manga Feast,  Digital Manga Publishing Inc. announced a Kickstarter project to bring about another print run of Osamu Tezuka’s Swallowing The Earth, a one-shot tome of early Tezuka work from 1968 that had received a very short print run due to publishing costs. The book has been praised by many in the blogosphere, and its short-printed status means that currently, a first print copy of Swallowing the Earth will run you somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 USD – that’s double-plus MSRP (originally $24.95 in 2009). This is actually cheaper than it was 6 months ago, before the Kickstarter was announced – a “new” copy of Swallowing the Earth in March was running more around the $75-80 mark. Which is frankly absurd. But Tezuka fans will be Tezuka fans, and I, being one of those fans, had been building up a small budget for the book, until the DMP announcement.

Other bloggers have talked about Kickstarter – Johanna Draper Carlson being the most prominent, having voiced her opinions about the platform multiple times. While I agree with some of her cautionary words, I also am interested in crowd-sourcing as an idea, and the idea brought onto the consumer’s stage by DMP is the idea of niche-publishing.

Ben Applegate of DMP has gone on the record in this Kickstarter video, saying:

So in order to get [Swallowing the Earth] back out there, to let people read this really important book, not only in the history of Osamu Tezuka, but in the history of manga as well, we’ve come to Kickstarter as a new way to fund manga publishing in the United States. If this Kickstarter is successful, and we’re able to get this book back out in to people’s hands, you’re going to see more, not only reprints of older titles, but also possibly even new titles coming over from Japan aimed at a niche audience in the United States that would never have been brought over by a publisher otherwise.

The emphasis here is my own, but I think it is safe to say that Digital Manga has high hopes for a Kickstarter-like crowd sourcing model. I have high hopes for it too, which is primarily why I backed the Kickstarter (as you may have noticed from the image of the site above.) Kickstarter is a unique tool that allows a publishing company with ties in the Japanese manga business to attempt to bring manga to the United States in a way that puts relatively little risk on the publishing company. I can understand why this is important – small companies like DMP that have small operating budgets need to invest in titles that can sustain a business. For Digital Manga, that means the niche audience of yaoi, and the occasional non-yaoi comic.

As a person who reads more independent and niche manga (Bunny Drop, A Bride’s Story, Velveteen and Mandala), I am interested in seeing more content from Japan that meets my tastes and expectations. I would love to see more josei manga printed in the United States, and am willing to put my money where my mouth is. Digital Manga if you publish josei manga on Kickstarter – you have a loyal customer in me. I understand that josei is a micro-niche of manga – but this is the type of content that can thrive in  a crowd-sourced publishing system, where those that want it can buy into it, and create that opportunity for publishing that so many josei titles have been missing.

Now, I think it’s a fair criticism to ask- if you aren’t going to publish a book using your own budget, do you really need to be a book publisher? The answer here is a resounding “not necessarily.” With the appropriate contacts and contracts, it is within the realm of possibility for me to license and sell manga through the platform of Kickstarter. The thing that Digital Manga brings to the table is an honesty and a reliability as a company that has and continues to publish quality manga.

Also safe to say here that DMP‘s views on crowd-sourcing are not necessarily the same as my own. They may use Kickstarter to fund reprints exclusively, or print more yaoi manga. But my hope is that the company lives up to Ben’s words and uses the success of this first Kickstarter project to fuel the licensure and publishing of underrepresented content.

Digital Manga Publishing is on the bleeding edge of publishing. The Kickstarter initiative, in addition to the Digital Manga Guild, are two projects that may not succeed in the long term – but this type of innovation is bringing content to readers in a way that no other publisher is trying, and it is this sort of innovation that may become the new and best model for the micro-niche in years to come. I am looking forward to the results.

Especially in February of 2012, when I get a brand new copy of Swallowing the Earth shipped to me because of this Kickstarter pledge.

Jason Yadao at Otaku Ohana has a review of not simple and finds it to be a powerful work, again bring up the ties of family that others have mentioned this week:

[Natsume Ono creates] manga that are equal parts entertainment and contemplative exercise. I’ve seen this in reading Ristorante Paradiso – not enough that I feel qualified to comment fully on that book yet, but enough to know that the focus of that book, Nicoletta, comes from a family just as broken as Ian’s.

His review is the polar opposite of Jason Green’s, which I featured yesterday, but will link again, because I feel truly represents the very different perspectives of Ono’s work among the manga community.

I think I may have missed linking to a discussion between Melinda and Michelle at Manga Bookshelf in my complete archive, so to make up for that, please go read it again. Enjoy it. It is a fantastic discussion.

Last but not least, Ed Sizemore announces the plans he has for the Manga Out Loud podcast (spoiler – he’s still doing it! YAY!) and afterwards, he, Johanna Draper Carlson, Kristin, and I all have a great discussion about Natsume Ono, her works published in the USA, the works unpublished in the USA, and the MMF in general.

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Let me finish by saying that this has been an absolutely fantastic (if hectic) experience. Thank you all for participating, and for being a part of the Manga Moveable Feast for Natsume Ono. I hope you all have enjoyed this as much as I have.

I’ll be back later this week with commentary on DMP’s foray into Kickstarter. For now – this is Alex, flipping the switch. Have a good night, folks.