Fun Home Protest in Utah

Some students at the University of Utah are frightened by autobiographical graphic novels, as shown in this story where they compare Fun Home to pornography. There’s even a protest group with an online petition, I find horrible mid-90s web page design much more frightening than porn. If students are horribly traumatized by reading graphic novels in English class, there’s always another school in the state they could transfer to, where they would be in no danger of being exposed to material involving homosexuality. Usually when you hear about book challenges like this, it happens in a school library setting. But Utah is special!

SOS

SOS, Volume 1 by Hinako Ashihara amazon

I liked the first volume of Sand Chronicles so much, I decided to check out this book of short stories by Ashihara. “SOS” is a longer work with a couple chapters. Yu is a popular girl but she always seems to fall into the trap of becoming platonic friends with the boys she has a crush on – to the point of helping them get together with other girls. She’s noticed by Raku, an upperclassman who thinks that she’d be the perfect go-between for his high school dating agency, which operates out of the abandoned library club room. Yu and Raku are joined by Nono, a beautiful girl who is determined to use the cash from the dating agency job to open her own business because she doesn’t ever want to be dependent on a man. Since this is an Ashihara manga, it has the heightened, more serious melodrama that sets it apart from the typical shoujo title.
Raku and Nono are old friends and Raku has a crush on her, but Nono hasn’t recovered from an assault attempt from a man when she was younger. Yu starts getting more and more invested in the lives of her dating agency clients in an attempt to escape her own problems – giving an underconfident girl a makeover and encouraging her to date a guy who ends up being a total sleezebag. When the students’ history teacher finds out about the agency, he threatens to expose them if they don’t find a man to distract the woman who’s stalking him. Yu desperately tries to help but her involvement in her client’s lives doesn’t turn out well. Despite herself, Yu finds herself more and more attracted to Raku, even knowing that she’s trapped in her typical pattern of falling in love with a guy she thinks is unattainable. The “S.O.S.” in the title of the story refers to Yu’s silent call of distress as she wishes to connect with someone.
“Sweet Organ Song” is a sentimental story about lost love set in the backdrop of the Kobe earthquakes in 1995 and 1922. “The Easy Life” details a relationship that isn’t the type of happily ever after scenario often found in shoujo manga. Mami is going out with Yohei, who she’s always had a crush on. Mami finds out that since Yohei’s been totally spoiled by his mother, he treats his girlfriend like a servant. Gradually Mami begins to stand up for herself, but it might be too late to salvage her relationship.
Ashihara’s expressive, polished art effectively dramatizes the emotions of her characters. While some one-shot manga seem incomplete, with stories that were canceled before they had a chance to fully resolve, SOS is a great self-contained book of short stories. SOS is definitely worth checking out if you’re going through withdrawal while waiting for the next volume of Sand Chronicles to come out.

Swinging for the Fences and The Lonesome Puppy

Swinging for the Fences: Hank Aaron and Me by Mike Leonetti and David Kim (amazon)

Swinging for the Fences is story of a young fan and baseball player named Mark watching closely as his idol Hank Aaron attempts to break the home run record. Mark gradually learns how to improve his own baseball game as he follows Aaron’s winning season. Kim’s illustrations are rendered in soft pastels, giving the pictures a hazy nostalgic quality, and most importantly managing to make the 70’s not look ugly. There are little details that keep the reader reminded of the time period, like a woman’s feathered hair cut and the wideness of a man’s suit collar. Even though this is a fictional story, I think the book would likely appeal to any kid who enjoys sports or reading non-fiction. As someone who is not a big fan of baseball myself, the drama of Aaron trying to break the record maintained my interest, and the illustrations captured the excitement of Mark and his fellow fans watching baseball. Swinging for the Fences includes supplementary material – a brief biography of Aaron, a mention of what happened when his record was broken by Barry Bonds, and a bibliography listing books and articles consulted by the author.

The Lonesome Puppy by Yoshitomo Nara (amazon)

Giant dogs loom large in fiction. You’ve got Clifford the Big Red Dog, Big Dog and Little Dog, and there’s always Marmaduke. They are now joined by the Lonesome Puppy who is so gigantic that when he stands on top of the earth he dwarfs cities. He is so huge, no one even knows that he exists so this naturally makes him very lonesome. One day a girl notices him, and after spending an eternity climbing up his leg, crossing the vast expanse of his body, and falling against his nose she sings the puppy a song and they become friends. The story is sweet, but it is probably the weakest aspect of the book. Nara’s illustrations show the girl and the puppy with wry expressions on their faces that act as a counterpoint to the simplicity of the story. This is a picture book that functions as an art object, which makes sense as the author is a pop artist in Japan. There are several illustrations after the main story, showing the girl and puppy in various settings like outer space. If you enjoy Nara’s aesthetic and have small children, you have the perfect excuse to check out this extremely cute book.

Review copies were provided by Chronicle Books

Manga Giveaway Winner

In order to select a winner of the manga giveaway, I got my husband to pick a number out of a hat. And the winner is…..drumroll…..drumroll….drumroll….Laura (commenter #14)! Send me your address Laura, and I’ll get your package in the mail.

I wanted to do something extra for someone, so Rebecca who had a birthday yesterday is going to get a Japanese knitting and crochet book and a skein of Manos Cotton Stria, since I know she knits.

Everyone else who entered, if you happen to like bookmarks that feature manga versions of Cesare Borgia, e-mail me your address and I’ll send you a couple Cantarella ALA Read Campaign bookmarks while supplies last. 🙂

Thanks to everyone who entered the giveaway, and thanks for reading my blog! 🙂

Big Big Tokyopop Sale

Manga Xanadu points out a massive Tokyopop sale on BookCloseouts.com.
Some discounted series you might want to check out – books from CLAMP, including Wish, Angelic Layer, Magic Knight Rayearth, Tokyo Babylon and RG Veda.
The comedic vampire fantasy saga Vampire Game. If you’ve been enjoying Eternal Sabbath, you might want to check out Fuyumi Soryo’s good girl meets bad boy biker shojo series Mars. I also like the manhwa fantasy series Queen’s Knight.

Yozakura Quartet

Yozakura Quartet Volume 1 by Suzuhito Yasuda amazon

I pre-ordered this because I thought the image of a pink-eyed girl with a guitar on the front cover looked sort of cool. I guess I was secretly hoping that she’d wack people over the head with the guitar; instead she uses a lacrosse stick. Unfortunately, someone using sports equipment in battle was not enough to sustain my interest in this manga. The Yozakura Quartet is a group of teens that have banded together to protect their town. Hime, the girl on the cover, is a superhero who is referred to as the Mayor. She’s joined by a psychic cat-eared girl, a girl with big boobs and glasses who can conjure up anything she imagines, and an ordinary high school boy.
This manga starts in the middle of the action, with no backstory or explanation as to why the 4 characters are hanging out together or why they have superpowers. I don’t need an elaborate origin story, but I would have liked to see the relationships and history between the characters fleshed out more throughout the volume of manga, especially since this was the first volume. The quartet deals with a demoniacally possessed serial shooter and a depressed kindergartener. The stories in this volume seemed disjointed, and I wasn’t surprised to read in the author notes that the chapters were originally published in a different order. I’m not sure if reordering them would have helped though. There wasn’t enough narrative flow and while I often don’t mind this in other manga. usually my interest in the characters keeps me reading. There wasn’t much to grab my attention and I had to force myself to finish reading this. The art is attractive, with a flat style that reminded me a little bit of the anime studio Bones.

Tenshi Ja Nai

Tenshi Ja Nai by Takako Shigematsu (amazon)

In elementary school, Hikaru had a brief stint as a child model and as a result was bullied by her classmates. Now that she’s in high school, she wants nothing more than a ordinary life. When her parents move to France, she stays in Japan and enrolls in a boarding school for girls that’s designed to turn out perfect wives and mothers. Hikaru calculates all her responses to her classmates overtures to be as uninteresting as possible. But Hikaru’s plans for an anonymous existence are foiled when she finds out that she’s rooming with teen idol Izumi, who Hikaru meets when she’s fleeing from fans. Izumi leaps a wall and lands on top of Hikaru, leaving a silicon falsie behind.
Izumi is not merely flat-chested, she’s a guy! And he’s determined to make Hikaru keep his secret, so he promptly takes photographs of her topless while she’s sleeping in order to blackmail her into helping out with his masquerade. Izumi’s imperious manner leads him to assume that Hikaru will do whatever he needs. Hikaru capitulates when he blackmails her, not knowing what else to do. She gradually finds herself feeling more sympathetic towards Izumi due to his determination to follow his dream, even though she doesn’t really want to know why he needs to pursue fame and money. Izumi is aided by his stoic bodyguard Yasukuni, who has a job as a janitor at the school.
The artwork is attractive, with clean lines and clear layouts that make the action easy to follow. The plot of Tenshi Ja Nai isn’t particularly innovative as there are more than enough cross-dressing shojo manga out there. Izumi’s personality makes him a little more interesting than the typical shojo hero, and I’m curious to see if Hikaru’s exposure to the world of show business starts bringing her out of her shell. I think I’m going to try to check out at least one more volume before deciding to follow the series or not.

Manga and Book Swapping

If you’ve got some manga you don’t want anymore, you can always give it away, but you might want to try swapping it too. One list that I’ve used for a long time to swap manga is manga trade, but there are a couple new sites I’ve used recently that have also come in handy for trades.
Mangatude has you fill out a profile with a list of the items you’re willing to trade, along with your wish list. You can swap anime and other graphic novels there too. There’s a wish list search feature, so you can check to see if a title you’re offering is wanted by someone else. I’ve also used swaptree recently. Swaptree accommodates three way trades, so the number of items potentially available for you to swap for is much higher. I’ve traded manga and books around four times on both mangatude and swaptree. It always is a bit chancy when you’re sending stuff off into the mail to people you don’t know, but I haven’t had any problems at all.