Monthly Archives: December 2010

Kodansha USA: some thoughts

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I was quite pleased with yesterday’s announcements by Kodansha USA, insofar as they had some. The lag time is actually a bit less than I anticipated (only 6 months, not bad considering the publishing world), and they even announced some new titles. They did not announce anything really different or unique – the Morning manga site was not mentioned, for example, and the one new seinen title they mentioned is a tie-in to a Nintendo DS game – but they do have a full slate of releases at last, rather than just reprints of old Dark Horse editions.

It struck me, as I was looking over the list of new licenses, that this is very much Del Rey’s Winter/Spring 2011 catalog, ported over to Kodansha. There is nothing here that doesn’t suggest all this would have been announced by Dallas at NYAF for Del Rey had Del Rey remained in the manga business. Which is both reassuring, in that it’s good to see business-as-usual from a publisher, and a bit disquieting, in that I sensed the last 1-2 years that Del Rey wasn’t sure what to do with any title that wasn’t in Shonen Magazine or Nakayoshi.

The old titles getting new volumes this summer seem to consist of DR’s heavy hitters – Negima, Fairy Tail – and their more popular mid-range titles, such as Zetsubou-sensei and Air Gear. Air Gear and The Wallflower seem to be back to single volume releases (the Wallflower has caught up with Japan, so that may be by necessity), and they were sure to tell fans that any titles not mentioned are merely not coming out this summer. Nothing is cancelled, and I remind my readers that these days, announcing a title is cancelled due to low sales does few publishers any good and only serves to anger a base. So you’ll never hear anything about, say, Nodame Cantabile beyond ‘we’re still looking into getting that back on the schedule’.

As for the new titles, two of them are popular Shonen Magazine series, still running in Japan (though one has ended and then started a ‘2nd season’). Bloody Monday and Cage of Eden are both very much in the Code: Breaker vein, i.e. dark psychological thrillers with a lot of mystery and a high body count. Provided you don’t mind gore, I think both should do pretty well here. Monster Hunter Orage is from the author of Fairy Tail. Deltora Quest has an anime currently running, and is based on the novels by Emily Rodda. Mardock Scramble also features an anime. Animal Land is from the creator of Zatch Bell, the first title created by him after the lawsuit against Shogakukan that led to Zatch Bell’s end. And Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (which ran in Monthly Young Magazine, making it technically the one seinen title) is based on the games, but will feature an actual plot, unlike the previous doujinshi anthologies.

There were a couple of license rescues as well. Gon surprised me, as CMX had released it here only a couple of years ago (this is now its 2nd license rescue). But then Kodansha mentioned they’re shopping it for a movie, so it made more sense. More surprising was Until The Full Moon, a shoujo title with yaoi overtones that ran in Magazine Be x Boy back in the 1990s. Broccoli Books put this out over here in 2005, but Kodansha bought the rights from Libre Shuppan and reissued it in Japan in 2009. Seeing Kodansha edge into the yaoi market, even if Until the Full Moon isn’t quite yaoi, is intriguing. And the Rave Master ending omnibus, which had been scheduled but then cut when Del Rey folded, is back on the schedule.

Lastly, in an effort to clean up its bestselling title and make it more fluid to readers taking it all in, Negima will get an omnibus release with a new translation/adaptation. Del Rey had made big news in 2004 when they hired Peter David to adapt the series, but his adaptation, while not quite at Keith Giffen levels, still took a lot of liberties with the material that read oddly to fans these days. (Yes, I’m thinking of “Can I have a cookie?”). I’m presuming this new version will be by the Nibley twins, who are doing the current run of Negima books.

So there you have it. Kodansha USA: back in business. And if it looks a lot like Del Rey with the name crossed out, that’s likely a very deliberate choice. More to the point, supporting them again encourages sales, which will encourage both the return of things like Nodame Cantabile and Moyashimon, and the licensing of more ‘difficult’ titles.

Manga the week of 12/15

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There’s a huge pile of manga in at Midtown, but most of it is the Viz stuff people got this week, so I’ll skip that, as I talked about it last week.

Digital Manga Publishing has a huge pile of yaoi out this week, mostly one-shots but with Vol. 2s of the unlucky at licensing series The Tyrant Falls In Love and the shonen fantasy Knights.

Seven Seas has the 9th volume of Dance in the Vampire Bund, a NYT bestseller which has vampires in it. And is possibly also really good and interesting. But which, well, does have vampires in it.

Tokyopop has the 3rd volume of the series Foxy Lady, which looks by the cover to appeal to guys who like harem girls with ears, but also runs in the magazine Comic Zero-Sum, which has a lot of female readership. So I’m giving up on pigeonholing this one.

Udon has the 3rd (and possibly final? information is thin on the ground) volume of Swans in Space, another in their series of manga for young kids. I hadn’t gotten any of these series, but I applaud the idea in general.

Viz has the first volume of Itsuwaribito, a new Shonen Sunday title about a liar who lies… on the side of GOOD! It’s apparently much creepier than you’d expect. Sunday also gives us the 4th volume of Arata, and the 55th and penultimate volume of Inu Yasha. One more to go! Also, for fans of gut-wrenching metal, there is Detroit Metal City Vol. 7, which runs in Young Animal but has less boobs than the other YA series.

And then there’s Yen, ending the year with a huge pile of things people want. First and foremost is the 9th volume of Yotsuba&!, everyone’s favorite kids’ title that’s actually for grownup guys. I am sure it will have much adorable stuff. We also see a one-shot, Not Love But Delicious Foods, from Yoshinaga Fumi, dealing with her love of food. Duh. Higurashi wraps up another arc (we’re at Vol. 10 technically), the last of the 2-volume series for now, as we see the Answer Arcs starting in February, which are longer. I’m always up for a new volume of Bamboo Blade, and I also quite like GA Art Design Class in a 4-koma way (despite it continuing not to feature Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro). And Sundome, one of Yen’s most surprising acquisitions, wraps up with Vol. 8.

What appeals to you?

Seiho Boys High School! Volume 3

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By Kaneyoshi Izumi. Released in Japan as “Men’s Kou” by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Bessatsu Comic (“Betsucomi”). Released in North America by Viz.

After the gut-wrenching plotline of Volume 2, I was ready for something a bit lighter, and indeed this is a bit lighter than Volume 2. At the same time, though, it draws heavily on that, with Maki being told my everyone in the world that he has to try to move on, but finding that it’s not really as simple as that. Things get even worse when he meets a surfer girl whose name is very familiar…

First, though, we have the comedy. This features Miyaji, the girl we’d met at the end of Volume 2. She’s still crushing a bit on the handsome, smart, and athletic Kamiki, and wants him to treat her different than he does everyone else. So when they decide to spice up their school play by adding an actual female (pretending to be a male in drag), hijinks naturally ensue. Honestly, this was the story that read the most like ‘typical’ shoujo, and you’d expect that in typical shoujo, Miyaji would be the heroine whose life we follow. Here it’s the guys, though, and we discover that class jerk Nogami is not the only one who has an unerring ability to ruin relationships by simply opening his mouth.

The other non-Maki chapter features Nogami, who presumably saw Kamiki being tactless in front of the girl who likes him and thought “Hey, that’s MY schtick!”. So we get another chapter featuring his passive-aggressive (emphasis on the aggressive) relationship with the school nurse. Being a teacher/student romance, naturally she is getting pressured to leave for the sake of the students, despite the fact that no romance has actually occurred. Nogami is having none of this, of course, and refuses to read her ‘final letter’ to him, most likely as it’s saying goodbye. This all culminates in her final address to her students, interrupted by Nogami in an epically awful way. Naturally, this is all part of a plan to make her admit she wants to stay. The ending itself felt a bit rushed, and the author noted it wasn’t what she originally planned. On the other hand, the last line was great.

Then there’s Maki. I realize that this is far more likely to occur in Japan than in North America, but running into a teenage girl with the exact same name as your dead junior high crush has to be a giant monumental coincidence. It doesn’t help that she has a similar grumpy demeanor. (She’s also quite busty, something I noted only as it’s rather rare in shoujo manga. Counting the school nurse, this now makes two women in the series with that attribute. No wonder the author notes that everyone doubts this is a shoujo manga…) Maki finds himself fascinated by her, but as always is putting up a front of ‘nice guy’ that girls find off-putting.

Maki, frustrated by his friends heaping abuse on him for his lack of a love life, asks her to pretend to be his girlfriend. She does this, despite having accused him of being gay multiple times (she even calls him an uke, and is rather startled when he manhandles a guy attempting to grab her with ease). She also calls herself a BL fan, and Maki is so desperate for her companionship (it seems) that he starts trying to molest Kamiki to attract her interest. Of course, this culminates in her tearing him apart for pretending to have a girlfriend without bothering to even hold her hand. And it becomes clear that she’s just as smitten with him as he is with her.

This was my favorite part of the manga, but it’s still very odd. Erika’s similarities with Maki’s former girlfriend are eerie, and I keep thinking that there’s more behind this than there actually is. Her facial expressions, especially when she noted someone would be miserable with him as a boyfriend, read very much like she has a backstory of her own that will hold things up as much as Maki’s will. And once more we see Maki, who is outwardly the perfect high school boyfriend, giving off auras of ‘I am preoccupied with something else’. Luckily, he seems to finally be trying to work past this, and asks her to give him more time to make this work. Of course, he’s going to have to mention his past at some point, especially as Erika finds her namesake’s picture on his phone right at the end.

Arguably the main thrust of this volume relies too heavily on coincidence, but that is the problem with a lot of fiction, and it’s not like I’m asking the series to be completely realistic. More to the point, this series has some of the best characters I’ve seen in shoujo in a while, being handsome guys, outwardly great, but all with quirks that makes it easy to see why there are immense problems with having any of them as a boyfriend. Maki in particular is riveting, and I root for him to make things work with Erika while realizing that there are immense problems with it happening. More to the point, anyone who ever drops a series after one volume should read this as a great example of why you should give it a bit more of a chance.