By Yuki Sato
224 pages, black and white
Published by Del Rey
I think Del Rey is trying to corner the market on books starring yokai (Japanese spirits) in English. Late last year they released Yokaiden, and now they’re translating Yuki Sato’s Yokai Doctor. Yokai Doctor is definitely a step in the right direction for books with yokai in them, but even then it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re seeing a little too much sameness between Yokai Doctor and a lot of other releases.
By Byun Byung-Jun
240 pages, black and white with some color pages
Published by NBM
Assembling a book of short stories—be it by a single creator or an anthology—is a delicate undertaking. You can’t front load the book with the best material because if the weaker pieces are all at the end, you run the risk of the final impression for the reader being disappointment. On the other hand, saving the best pieces for the end has its own problems, where the early entries aren’t strong enough to have someone continue to read the book. All of this came to mind for me when reading Byun Byung-Jun’s Mijeong, a collection of the author’s short pieces. At the end of the day, I can’t help but think that whomever decided the order of this book could have done a slightly better job.
By Kiminori Wakasugi
200 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
This may sound strange, but comics like Detroit Metal City are, I think, an argument for why a collected edition is not always better. Don’t get me wrong, I like this first volume of heavy metal silliness. But this is definitely an example how when it comes to just from a pure reading standpoint, I wish I’d been reading it as a serialized comic every week.
By Rumiko Takahashi
black and white
Published by Viz; available online at The Rumic World
I remember when, back in the day, if you got a foreign comic or television show within six months of its release elsewhere, you were doing pretty good. Now all sorts of media are getting legitimate releases on different continents closer and closer together, and I couldn’t be more pleased about that. One title to add to the list of simultaneous releases is Rin-ne, the new manga from powerhouse and superstar Rumiko Takahashi, which has new chapters go live online in English the same day they hit the stands in Japan—and for free. Who said you can’t get something for nothing these days?
By Jiro Taniguchi
200 pages, black and white
Published by Fanfare/Ponent Mon
When I think of Jiro Taniguchi books, it’s quiet stories like the aimless strolls of The Walking Man, or the day-in-the-Meiji-period vignettes of The Times of Botchan. As a result, getting an advance copy of his book A Distant Neighborhood Vol. 1 made me joke that perhaps it was a sequel to The Walking Man where the main character got seriously lost on a walk. And at first, A Distant Neighborhood seems like it’s just going to be another quiet story about a man absorbed in his childhood memories. Once the book takes a distinct turn, though, Taniguchi finds a way to keep that aspect around while upping the proverbial ante in a fun way.
Written by Antony Johnston
Art by Wilson Tortosa
192 pages, black and white
Published by Del Rey
I know, it sounds at first like a bet gone wrong. A manga version of one of the most popular comic book characters of all time? But that’s exactly what Del Rey (with the obvious cooperation of Marvel Comics) aimed to do with Wolverine: Prodigal Son. It’s not a bad idea when you think about it; take the core ideas of what make the character popular and then map them onto another style. Considering Marvel has published every other alternate version possible of their own characters, it’s not a bad idea. But will manga fans pick it up? And if so, just what will they find?
By Kim Dong Hwa
320 pages, black and white
Published by First Second Books
When the manga boom first really erupted into North America, a lot of publishers began also translating Korean comics (or manhwa) into English. One of the big benefits was that manhwa already is read left-to-right, so it didn’t have to go through the whole issue of "flipping" versus reading right-to-left. These days very little manhwa is being translated as the boom has settled back down into a more reasonable level, but occasionally a new manhwa shows up, like Kim Dong Hwa’s The Color of Earth. I think most people would agree that it’s books like The Color of Earth that are a good reminder why ignoring manhwa would cut us off from a whole wealth of really good comics.
By Naoki Urasawa
216 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
Every now and then I hear from someone from my childhood. Even before social networking sites like Facebook, Friendster, or MySpace rolled out and made it so much easier for people to connect, I’d get e-mails out of the blue, often from people that I went to school with. (Having your own website, occasional pull quotes on books, and a very uncommon last name helps matters.) Sometimes I’d know who the person was instantly and be delighted to hear from them. Sometimes the name would ring a bell and it would take a while to turn the hazy memory into a picture in my head.
But every now and then, I’d have no idea who the person was. I’d pull out my high school yearbooks, look at the person’s face, and think, "I have no memory of you at all." We had classes together, sometimes even mutual friends, and the person had still entirely slipped out of my memory. With Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys, then, I found myself appreciating the fact that this is a story about a group of adults whose past is coming back to haunt them—but most of them don’t remember some or all of the details. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, needless to say, but still the perfect place to begin.
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
856 pages, black and white
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
I really have to commend Drawn & Quarterly for bringing Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s comics into English. They’ve already released three collections of his short stories, ones which reek of discomfort and alienation among every day, real people. I was a little wary, though, when I heard that their next Tatsumi project was an autobiography that ran over 800 pages long and only tackled a small fraction of his life. Could Tatsumi really have that much to say? As it turned out, I was very wrong for doubting; A Drifting Life may be set in the 1940s and 1950s, but it has quite a bit to say about here and now.
Written by Tetsu Kariya
Art by Akira Hanasaki
272 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
When I read Oishinbo: A la carte: Japanese Cuisine earlier this year, I enjoyed it. A series all about different foods, going for the generic theme of Japanese cuisine for the first volume seemed like a good way to kick off these specially themed, best-of compilations from this series that’s run for over 25 years now. Now that I’ve read the second volume, Sake, I’m starting to really see just what Oishinbo is really capable of—and how much better the second volume really is.
