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The Layer Method
Our top Secret time-saving technique for creating and merging balloons and tails in Illustrator.
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Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Holiday Shopping Guide
If you aren’t even a casual observer of any particular religion, you still might find yourself drawn into the annual December gift-exchange frenzy. And there may just be a manga lover on your list. Personally, I’m an extremely lazy giver, favoring the gift certificate or card approach and letting the recipient sort it out. But for those who actually want to give someone a physical object instead of the theoretical promise of one, there are plenty of fine choices available.
Lots of people who aren’t comics fans in the more specific sense enjoy comic strips, and you would certainly be doing them a favor by presenting them with the big fat Azumanga Daioh Omnibus from ADV. This book collects all four volumes of Kiyohiko (Yotsuba&!) Azuma’s funny, quirky, high-school comedy strips for your reading pleasure. I tend to be of the opinion that great comedy comes from crafting strong, distinct characters and standing back as they bounce off of each other in unexpected ways, and the students and teachers here certainly fit that bill. Beyond being a great gift for the manga indifferent, it’s great for the mangaphile as well. Nothing can cleanse the palate between volumes of ongoing series like a couple of dozen pages of Azuma’s charming comic strips.
ADV isn’t the only one repackaging individual volumes into bulky, gift-worthy packages. Tokyopop is offering hardcover, multi-volume treatments of perennial favorites like Fruits Basket
and Battle Royale, among others.
Del Rey has been packing three volumes of popular series like Negima!, xxxHoLic, and Tsubasa into hefty and economical omnibuses. A bit further out of the mainstream are Viz’s repackaging of Taiyo Matsumoto’s hyperactive and imaginative Tekkonkinkreet, and Vertical’s done-in-one collection of Osamu Tezuka’s medical morality play, Ode to Kirihito.
Those last two remind me of another giver-recipient dynamic. Let’s say you’re a manga fan with an independent comics reader in your life. Why not bridge the gap by giving them a book that would satisfy the finickiest Fantagraphics devotee? While just about anything from Fanfare/Ponent Mon would fit the bill, you might start with any of the following: Jiro Taniguchi’s lovely, soothing The Walking Man; Kinderbook, Kan Takahama’s collection of thoughtfully sexy short stories; or the outstanding Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators, which brings together Japanese and European creators for a richly varied tour of that nation.
Fanfare doesn’t own the weird-but-worthy category by any means. Viz earned endless karma points when they published Iou Kuroda’s brilliant Sexy Voice and Robo, about a nosy 14-year-old and her hapless otaku accomplice. You don’t need to tell the giftee that Hiroaki Samura is best known for swordplay epic Blade of the Immortal when you give them Ohikkoshi (Dark Horse). June Kim’s moody, lovely 12 Days (Tokyopop) is equal to just about any meditation on love and death out there, and Morim Kang’s 10, 20 and 30 (Netcomics) provides a funny, pointed look at three generations of modern women. And I’m frankly galled that I haven’t seen any of the early “best comics of 2007” lists include Fumiyo Kouno’s heartbreakingly beautiful Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossons (Last Gasp). If you haven’t read it yet, give it to yourself, for pity’s sake. You love yourself, don’t you?
If a single volume seems too much like a stocking stuffer and there’s no big, fat collection available, you could always pick up an entire run of a completed series. This is easier with shôjo, shônen-ai and yaoi, as those series tend to have shorter lifespans than others, but there’s still plenty of variety. Minoru Toyoda’s Love Roma (Del Rey) is almost criminally short at five volumes, but each is a quirky gem of oddball teen romance. I’m of the opinion that Yuu Watase’s class-conscious shôjo comedy Imadoki! (five volumes from Viz) is really underrated among the manga-ka’s body of work. Takako Shigematsu’s Tenshi Ja Nai!! (Go! Comi) offers a leaner, meaner shôjo experience with eight volumes of gender-bending showbiz shenanigans. For sci-fi with a softer side, Vertical offers three volumes of Keiko Takemiya’s classic To Terra. Consumers of amusing fluff (which I often am) would probably be pleased with Yuki Miyamoto and Kyoko Negishi’s Café Kichijouji de (three volumes from Digital Manga). And while the first volume of Ichigenme: The First Class is Civil Law (801) was better than the second, so-so yaoi work from Fumi Yoshinaga is still almost always really good manga.
If you aren’t quite sure what kind of manga your gift recipient enjoys, but you know they like it in general, you can always go the reference route. Jason Thompson’s Manga: The Complete Guide (Del Rey) is an invaluable companion for the discerning manga shopper, providing well-written reviews of every series available in translation at the time of publication. Thompson and his collaborators have covered everything from the fluffiest shôjo to the most esoteric ero-manga.
Equally inclusive and informative is Paul Gravett’s Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics (Collins Design). Gravett’s book is a couple of years old at this point, but it’s still one of the most readable and comprehensive reference pieces available, and it’s stunningly illustrated.
Three issues in, I can say with confidence that Otaku USA is a very good magazine. Okay, there’s the occasional geek-splosion of uncomfortable hipster-isms, but in general, it offers well-informed pieces on manga, anime, games and other products of Japanese culture. Reviews are solid and useful, interviews are interesting, and columns offer varied takes on the magazine’s areas of interest. I can say with reasonable certainty that a subscription would be gratefully received by the manga or anime fan in your life, even if they wouldn’t go so far as to embrace the otaku label.
I know I’m leaving off a lot here… manga box sets of varying sizes (from the portable to the structurally reinforced), gorgeous art books, anime box sets, and swag of every shape and kind. And it could be successfully argued that I’m just using the wish-list construct to pimp some of my favorite books. But hey, why have a column at all if you aren’t going to groom your pets?
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• The End.
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