Renaissance Josei

I swear, I don't mean to keep picking on Tokyopop. It's just that this company has done so many notably dumb things over the years.  It has failed so many goddamn times.  It has screwed over so many goddamn people.  Yet it keeps coming back like a manga-publishing cockroach, even if its current form is naught but a shadow of its turn-of-the-millennium glory.  For the last decade, it's been fairly easy to ignore them unless they pull something audacious like a sketchy charity book for Ukraine or bringing back their controversial Rising Stars of Manga program. So you can only imagine my surprise when a link came across my social media feed advertising Tokyopop not as a manga publisher, not as a multi-media company, but as a potential investment. Their sales pitch is a seemingly simple one.  Any wanna-be investor can purchase private shares in Tokyopop itself.  These shares are just $5 apiece, although they must be purchased in bundles ranging from $1000 ...

There are a lot of vampires in shoujo manga.   This is just a simple fact.   Poke around your local Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million and you’re bound to find titles like  Vampire Knight ,  He’s My Only Vampire ,  Honey Blood ,  Millennium Snow , and so many more.   They all tend to be populated by  beautiful and tormented young men who are all simply waiting for some lovely young thing to come wandering into their undead life to bring them the love and redemption they all seem to be seeking in various degrees.   It’s incredibly predictable, incredibly derivative, and it’s enough to make any seasoned manga reader cynical about vampires in manga in general.   Every once in a while, though, we get a manga series that manages to take an old idea like vampire romance and do something new and interesting with the idea. Amongst those select few titles is  Black Rose Alice , the latest series from  Afterschool Night...

It’s kind of shocking that it took Viz so long to start a yaoi imprint of their own, SuBLime. Over the years it seems that most of the major publishers have at least dabbled with the genre, if they didn’t have a dedicated imprint or were themselves dedicated to the genre.    SuBLime certainly has been far more wise in their title selection than most, and by being more selective about what goes to print, they can afford to explore more unconventional titles.    Amongst the most unconventional of the lot is  The Man of Tango  by Tetuzoh Okadaya. The titular man is Angel, a renowned tango dancer who himself has never experienced the sort of passion that tango is renowned for.   He’s become something of a heartbreaker over the years, and one of the few constants in his life is his fellow dance teacher/best friend/roommate Bene.   A performance at a local bar leads to the two of them meeting Hiro.   Hiro is half Japanese and half Latino, an...

Osamu Tezuka created many, many manga over the course of his career. Some were long-spanning and ambitious, exploring philosophical, even experimental ideas. Other were short and strange ideas seemingly done on a lark. Personally, though, I find that his best works were those that were simple, straightforward, with universal appeal. This is true for works like  Princess Knight, Astro Boy,  and the subject of today's review:  Unico. Unico  is the story of a lovely little unicorn who belonged to Psyche, an ancient Greek princess renowned for her beauty and gentleness. The love goddess Venus envies her and does her best to foil Psyche, but not even her son Cupid is immune to Pysche's charms. Thus, Venus decides that if she can't get rid of Psyche, she will get rid of her unicorn with a curse. She commands the west winds to steal him away and spirit him through time and space, far from where he could be loved. Regardless of where and when Unico lands, he always ends...

Once again, the rumor mill is churning about Digital Manga Publishing's future as one Kickstarter is all but confirmed to be dead and others face an uncertain fate.  While it may be a little too early to start writing the eulogies, it's not too early to look back upon the many works they've licensed and wish for some of them to see print again.  With over a decade's worth of books scattered over a handful of imprints, there's more than enough to make a Top 10 list's worth. Naturally, there are a few caveats.  These are my choice and my choices alone; your choices may (and likely do) differ.  They are listed in alphabetical order because trying to rank these numerically would be too arbitrary even for me.  There's no Project H titles included because I don't read hentai manga, so I leave it to others to determine what titles there are worth saving.  Finally, his list is far from a complete one, but it's one that I feel represents a reasonable slice...

It's a difficult thing to write a story about sex workers. A big reason for that is that regardless of place or time period, prostitution is a distinctly unglamorous thing. The women who perform it often come from impoverished, abusive backgrounds. Their lives are often equally impoverished and abusive, not to mention short and tragic. In fiction, such women may be used to drive home some moral point, a demonstration of what happens to those women who stray from conventional morality. They may be the focus of some tragedy, showing the downfall of some poor noble creature who is either saved from her wretchedness by an outside force or by killing herself to escape her life with some sense of honor or dignity. More often than not, they're nothing but sexy, trashy window dressing for the real story. That's what makes a manga like  Sakuran  all the more unusual. It's not just about how the main character became a prostitute, but also how she rega...

"est em" is not a name you’ll hear on the lips of most manga readers.   She doesn’t have the multi-million sales of someone like Yuu Watase or CLAMP.    She works in two genres that are decidedly niche in the North America manga scene – boy’s love and josei.    Even her name is low-key, being purposefully lower case like e.e. cummings.    Her name may be small, but within the boy's love fandom, she is a giant.   Few of her works have seen any sort of release here, save for a few one-shot anthologies from Aurora Publishing and a few of her josei works appearing on the late, lamented JManga site.   You can only imagine the excitement amongst those in the know (myself included) when one of her latest works was picked up by Viz via their SuBLime imprint.   Like the other works that got physical releases,  Tableau Numero 20  is a one-volume anthology of stories, with no real theme tying them together beyond est em...

Previous to the last couple of years, just about any anime and manga fan you could find would tell you the same thing:  JoJo's Bizarre Adventure  would never be popular in the United States. It's not like people didn't try to make it otherwise.   We got some of the manga, a couple of OVAs, even a fighting game on the Sega Dreamcast and PS1.  All of them still have followings to this day, but all of them failed to reach the mainstream at the time. Audiences were put off by the long-running continuity, the inherent weirdness of the story and art, and Hirohiko Araki's fondness for naming characters after musicians made licensing any JoJo material a balancing act between avoiding music rights issues and staying faithful to the original.   JoJo's Bizarre Adventure  might have a beloved franchise in Japan, but until quite recently it was relegated to a few memes, even fewer hardcore fans, and the depths of the scanlation scene.  Then something truly ...