I’m on Twitter now! I’m expecting to be posting many mini-updates about the agony of dealing with two simultaneously teething babies.

Amethyst Princess of Gemworld Annual #1

This annual serves as a bridge between the first Amethyst 12 issue mini-series and the next 16 issue series. The cover features Amethyst wielding her magic, surrounded by her Gemworld allies Lord Garnet, Lady Turquoise, Prince Topaz, and the Emerald Princesses. Amy’s school friend Rita is crouched down looking up at Amethyst.

This story is called “Point of No Return”. Amy is trudging to school with her books, her head facing down. In the background she’s remembering Topaz, Garnet, Turquoise, and herself as the grown-up princess Amethyst. Rita is yelling at her in the school hallway, trying to get her attention. Amy says that she was thinking. Rita encourages a boy named Tom to ask Amy to the Spring Dance. Amy says, “I guess so Tom, I don’t have anything else to do. But I’ll have to check with my Mom and Dad.” Tom asks if she doesn’t want to go to the dance, and Amy says that she does but she has to run to gym class.

Amy and Rita are changing for gym. Rita asks Amy what her problem is, since Tom is cute and has a huge crush on her. Amy says that she doesn’t know what’s wrong, she sort of likes Tom too. I can see why Amy would have this dilemma. Topaz does seem to have a habit of being mopey and staring off into the distance, but he is a cute blond man who runs around in tight fitting breeches. Poor Tom is just a typical 14 year old boy.

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Mixed Vegetables Volume 1 by Ayumi Komura (amazon)

I tend to enjoy manga about food. Japanese cuisine has an element of visual presentation that translates well on the page. I’ve read Yakitate Japan, Iron Wok Jan, and Antique Bakery, but other than Kitchen Princess I’m not aware of another shojo cooking manga currently being released. So I was excited to read Mixed Vegetables, a manga about a girl named Hanayu who is heir to a pastry shop but really wants to become a sushi chef and her romance with a boy named Hyato who is heir to a sushi shop but expresses himself best through baking.

Hanayu Ashitaba is ambitious about following her dream of becoming a top sushi chef, attending a high school that has special cooking classes. She’s decided to fixate on her classmate Hyato Hyuga as the key to achieving her dream. If she marries into a famous sushi family she’ll be able to attain her goal. Unfortunately her ideas of courtship only extend to slicing up fish in the classroom in the hopes that Hyuga will notice her cooking skills and be prompted to propose marriage. Ashitaba doesn’t really have an idea how to snag a guy. Her behavior towards Hyuga is often antagonistic, because while she wants to marry him she’s also jealous of his position as sushi shop royalty.

Hyuga notices Ashitaba constantly staring at him, and he asks her out. While they are boyfriend and girlfriend, Ashitaba starts to feel guilty that she’s using him because he’s actually a really nice guy. The budding romance may be derailed by the struggle between love and ambition. The art is appropriately over the top when demonstrating the characters’ passion for food. Ashitaba talks about all the specialized knives she hopes to own and the background behind her fills with a visual dictionary of cutlery. Hyuga gives advice on how to properly slice cucumbers, saying “You have to feel your rhythm” and a gust of wind ruffles his hair.

I liked the contrast between Ashitaba’s enthusiastic nature and Hyuga’s more self-contained personality. This is exactly what I’d expect from a Shojo Beat title - a fun, fluffy high school romance. The author notes included in this volume were very funny, as Komura confesses to being a gourmet connoisseur of cup noodles. There’s also a glossary in the back with notes about the ingredients and dishes prepared in Mixed Vegetables.

Review Copy Provided by Viz

I’d always thought that the first meeting between Amethyst and Topaz took place off panel, but one of my commenters who obviously has much better reading comprehension skills than I pointed out that there’s a panel of Prince Topaz in the very first issue:

He looks very different than when he pops up next doesn’t he? So I wonder how Topaz managed to transform himself so quickly:

• After falling in love with Amethyst at first sight, he decided that he had to have hair that looked just like hers, so he ran to Lady Tourmaline’s Extensions-O-Rama Hair Salon and bought himself some long flowing blond locks.
• Not content with merely having blond hair, he decided to trade in his orange scaly armor, puffy shirt, and purple toga at Beryl’s Bangin’ Breeches - Specializing in tight knickers since the reign of Lord Ruby!. Lord Beryl insisted on making Topaz wear pants that would match his yellow eyes.
• I find it notable that in his first appearance, Topaz is perched in a balcony staring off into the distance. I don’t know why he has this odd fetish for standing in high places, but it is good to know that his odd habits were firmly established in the first issue of Amethyst.

Really, this version of Topaz looks much less foppish and more serious, even though he is oddly passive about watching the future love of his life being manhandled or ogrehandled as the case may be.

Books

Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer
A Sherrilyn Kenyon book, I forget the title
Kushiel’s Mercy by Jacqueline Carey
Your One-Year-Old: The Fun-Loving, Fussy 12-To 24-Month-Old by Louise Bates Ames and Frances L. Ilg

Manga & Graphic Novels

One Pound Gospel #1
Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes
Kiichi and the Magic Books #1
High School Debut #4
Skip Beat #13
Nana #10
Fruits Basket #20
Death of Captain America Book 1
Minima! #1
Mixed Vegetables #1
Zot! Black & White Collection
Your and My Secret #2
Genju no Seiza #1
Suppli #3
Queen’s Knight #12

Minima! 1 by Machiko Sakurai (amazon)

Minima! is a shojo series with an interesting twist. The series opens with a scene from the future where a woman is getting married. A tiny animal sits in the church wearing a tuxedo. In the present day Ame has a pathological case of shyness at school. She greets the boy next door Midori with a gloomy hello when they are getting ready to walk to school. When Ame goes to an amusement park and picks up a stuffed meerkat, she ends up having tons of attention forced on her. The meerkat Nicori has broken the secret that all toys have - they can actually talk! Nicori yells at some of Ame’s classmates and causes such a sensation that she soon finds herself surrounded by roving reporters.

Nicori’s personality at the beginning of Minima! is very self-involved. He’s excited by all the attention he receives from the media, but he doesn’t really understand the impact the frenzy has on Ame. He wants to be a star. He’s afraid of being used up and thrown away by other toys, and Ame is sympathetic about his situation partly because one of her only outlets is toy collecting. Nicori also doesn’t appreciate the nuances of human behavior and he blurts out information about Ame’s crush Sasaki in front of her entire class, causing her massive amounts of embarrassment. There’s some character growth towards the end of the volume, as Ame begins to speak up for herself a little more and Nicori grows more protective of her.

Having everyone be aware of a sentient stuffed animal is an interesting plot device. While in some ways Minima! seems to be setting up a typical shojo love triangle wth Ame, Sasaki, and Midori, Nicori’s antics and the events he puts in motion make me want to pick up the second volume to see how the plot of this series develops. The art is attractive, with plenty of exaggerated expressions and gestures from Nicori that fit his larger than life personality.

One thing that I’ve been wondering is how many libraries will decide to subscribe to the new Yen Plus Magazine. The price point is much higher than Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat, but on the other hand Yen Plus features a bunch of series that the typical library reader might not be familiar with. It is a little tough to get an estimate of how many libraries are currently subscribed to Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat, just because WorldCat has multiple records for each magazine. And there are tons of libraries that aren’t represented in the WorldCat numbers for subscriptions. It looks like Shonen Jump has roughly 500 WorldCat libraries subscribed to it and Shojo Beat has a little under 400 library subscribers. Yen Plus doesn’t have any libraries listed yet. It’ll be interesting to see if libraries start to pick it up. I’ve seen a Yen Press marketing person posting on the Graphic Novels in Libraries List, so at least they are making an effort to reach out to the library market.
I read the first issue, and my thoughts about it tend to agree with the general consensus of most of the people reviewing it - Yen Plus presents some wildly inconsistent series that vary greatly in genre, tone, and age range. While that can be a good thing for a reader wanting to stretch themselves a little bit, the higher age range (Older Teen) listed for this magazine is no joke. School libraries which have more concerns about nudity/fan service will likely not want to subscribe to Yen Plus, it won’t be worth the hassle.

Here’s a mini round-up of reviews for library folks out there who might be considering adding this to their collections:

Mania
Popcultureshock
Good Comics For Kids
シャノンのブログ
Mangablog
Comics Worth Reading
Comics Should be Good - Manga Before Flowers

Updated to add a link about Yen Plus subscription problems.

Drawing Words and Writing Pictures Making Comics: Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond (Paperback)
by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden (amazon)

Drawing Words and Writing Pictures is a art class in a book, giving an overview of the process of creating comic books. It is divided up into themed chapters, so budding comics creators can explore topics like layout, inking, lettering, story development, and digital art. Each chapter has a suggested reading list for further study and exercises for students. A variety of examples was used throughout the book, ranging from Matt Feazell’s Cynicalman to the work of the Hernandez brothers. The examples showcase a wide variety of artists and styles, providing a good overview of a variety of historical landmarks in comics and current indie creators.

My main quibble with this book is that it mentions manga in the title, but there isn’t really much manga coverage or use of manga in illustrating comics storytelling other than a couple panels from Osamu Tezuka and Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal. Manga has some unique artistic conventions and storytelling techniques and I would have liked to have seen a few pages address it. There also isn’t that much in the way of superhero coverage. That aside, art books tend to be very popular in libraries and I think most public libraries will want to add Drawing Words and Writing Pictures to their collection. It is a very solid resource for aspiring artists and reading this made me appreciate all the work that goes into creating comics.

There’s a companion web site available with resources for students and teachers using the book at http://www.dw-wp.com.

A review copy was provided by First Second.

A couple quick links to some library related commentary from the blogosphere:

Get Over Yourself - Manga Xanadu reacts to a story about a kid checking out mature manga from a library. Really, if more parents had an approach like hers, there would be way fewer library challenges.

Circulatory systems - Precocious Curmudgeon lists 5 essential comics for libraries.

Although Hot Gimmick is widely referred to as the manga of feminist shame among some blogs, I still hold some fondness for the series despite not liking the way it ended very much. Miki Aihara is a master at writing gripping soap operas about downtrodden heroines. So I was excited when I saw the latest issue of Shojo Beat on the newsstand with the first chapter of Honey Hunt.

The downtrodden heroine in this manga is Yura, who has the misfortune to be the child of celebrities. Her mother is a famous actress and her father is a successful composer. Her teachers at school always hold up her parents as an example to her, but Yura isn’t particularly talented. One of her few friends is Shin, the boy next door who tutors her.

The first chapter packs more soap opera plot twists in a few pages than you’d expect to see in a collected volume of manga. There’s the drudgery of Yura’s life in high school. Her parents decide to get divorced. Shin betrays Yura in a spectacular fashion. Yura’s mother is a raging bitch. Yura bumps into a cute musician who wrote the theme song to her mother’s TV show. Her father sends his manager Keiichi to Japan to look after Yura during the divorce. Yura has to move into a hotel to escape the media frenzy. She has a meltdown on TV, and it is pretty clear that both Keiichi and the composer dude are interested in her. What will she do now that she’s been abandoned by both her parents?!

The tough thing about a new series being serialized in Shojo Beat is that it takes forever for the collected volume to come out. I’m excited about this series, it looks like it will be full of over the top drama. I’m just sad I have to wait until April 2009! There’s an online preview of the series at the Shojo Beat web site.