Alt-manga on the way | The Hooded Utilitarian

Very good news for readers of my column, tipped by the gents at Same Hat! Same Hat!:

Top Shelf has a big anthology of manga from the avant-garde magazine AX on the way. Scottish expat/comics writer Sean Michael Wilson is joining series editor Mitsuhiro ASAKAWA for the 400-page volume.

As to the lineup they mention, I like Maruo & Furuya’s works about as far as I can throw them, but on some of the others:

Akino Kondoh I quite like, as I wrote about her in TCJ #289
Shinichi Abe too; he was one of three Garo artists (along with the guy who founded the comics store Mandarake and Suzuki OUJI) who define the magazine in the 70s; I bet they include his counterculture short “Yasashii Hito”
Nishioka Kyodai (or “Brosis” as they’re sometimes called) are a brother-sister duo who do creepy tales in delicate lines that recall Renee French
Yoshihiro Tatsumi? Really? What has D&Q missed?
Kataoka Toyo does grotty slice-of-life, and fires surface-to-air missiles from the nose (site in Japanese only, but you can poke around & find images)
Naoto Yamakawa does an odd-looking comic called “One More Coffee” that I’ve never read in a cartoony style that wouldn’t have looked out of place in pre-Kramers USA alt-comics
Toshio Saeki does finely-bound (cough) volumes of erotica (I guess, I haven’t read them either, but that’s what they looked like in the bookstore before the grannies walked by and made me too self-conscious to pick them up)

That’s a solid lineup, but there should be much more. As that the three previous English-language anthologies of alt-manga barely contained one good volume of work among them, this news makes me both hopeful and cautious.

I hope our guides choose quality over representative works. Too many of the latter just aren’t that good. (And I’d add that some of the most-praised artists, like Nemoto, who has a PictureBox book coming out, I find wanting).

But we should see Kotobuki Shiriagari & Imiri Sakabashira, two greats, and many more. I haven’t picked up AX in a couple of years, so I hope I’ll be surprised. With this book, some scanlations here & there, and the “Nouvelle Manga” works Frédéric Boilet has been promoting, you can get a very good idea of the most interesting new manga without torturing yourself by learning kanji.

(Also, the new AX has Hideo Azuma on the cover; Noah’s carnivorous review of his Disappearance Diary in the new TCJ had me howling & scowling.)

~~~

Update: For clarity’s sake, this is NOT a list of who’ll be in the book, just Ryan’s list of various artists in AX. Though I’ll be surprised if many of these aren’t, and will comment again whenever the full list is available.

Also: this is a test: ?????

0 thoughts on “Alt-manga on the way”

Thanks for the post Bill!
AX has a long and interesting pedigree of artists, and some of the ones I listed are just a handful of unique and interesting artists. I’m currently reading One More Cup of Coffee and a book by Toyo Kataoka, and digging their styles, albeit in very different ways.

I might make a list next week of every artist ever published in AX (oh god, what am I thinking) and then sort through them that way… The only artists I know for sure are in the book are Shinichi Abe and Akino Kondoh (saw a PDF with a few pages in english).

I’m not sure if the folks I listed will be in the book— can’t wait to try to squeeze a more complete list out of Sean when I meet him at APE next weekend.

Best!
ryan

Interesting to note Boilet… I know he has promoted Furuya in the past, which is definitely something I can get behind. What other mangaka (besides Taniguchi) does he include under the umbrella of his “Nouvelle manga” ?

I haven’t paid much attention to his non-fiction exploits (perhaps unfairly?) because I really, really disliked the one comic I read by him, Yukiko’s Spinach.

Bill, who is that image by? It’s superb; reminds me of Japanese prints, which is always a good thing.

So…I’d be interested to hear your take on Disappearance Diary. What did I miss?

Ryan,

thanks for dropping in! So I totally misread your list– oops. Plz. do your best to corner all concerned at APE and get the full skinny. Like you said, AX is great, and the very least skimming Toyo's blog makes me think I should give him another look. Kondo & Abe I think are tops, so their inclusion's great news.

The quantity of manga (& the 24-hour day) makes me quick to find excuses not to look more closely at certain manga, but I'm always happy to find I'm wrong. So yes, I'll have another Boss Coffee, please.

As to Boilet, he lists the usual suspects. (From the Spring/Summer 2005 issue of ARTiT, a bilingual fine art magazine):

-HANAWA Kazuichi (Doing Time)
-NANANAN Kiriko (Blue)
-TANIGUCHI Jiro (L'Homme Qui Marche)
-ODA Hideji (Coo's World)
-IGARASHI Daisuike (Hanashippanashi)
-TAKAHAMA Kan (Mariko Parade)
-KURODA Io (Nasu, Sexy Voice & Robo)
-FURUYA Usamaru (Short Cuts)
-litte fish & FUKUYAMA Yoji, neither of whom I know offhand

He describes them as "manga d'auteur." In other words, it's not a movement coherently emerging from within the manga industry, but one he maps onto it. (He does live in Japan & collaborates with Takahama, but N.M.'s not like the big international cross-pollination I'd envisioned for the 15 seconds Tom Hart, Paul Pope, & David Mazzucchelli were working for Kodansha).

So while I like most of these artist (& have written about Kuroda & Igarashi in TCJ), I think "Nouvelle Manga" is shorthand, not a movement.

Noah,

The art's KONDO Akino. Also romanizable as KONDOH or KONDOU. Click it for links. She does good comics, too.

& I was howling with laughter at your D.D. review, mind– that was a VERY funny review (as always with snark, I tend to scowl bemusedly).

I do like D.D. much more than you– maybe I have a higher tolerance for dumpster-diving instruction manuals? I might quibble that Azuma's got some range as an artist, more than lolicon, which can't really be laid at his doorstep (though his follow-up to D.D. suffers for being mostly drawings of his type of girl). D.D. works for me for its tension (not always in his control, perhaps) between that idiom & its content. Which accounts for the wildly divergent reviews it's received.

I had not, dumbly I might add, made the connection you do about his absent wife, which is totally spot-on.

Hi Bill,

Sean Michael Wilson here, co editor of the AX collection.

Thanks for this long consideration, though as Ryan says that was NOT a list of who we will have in the book, just his thoughts. I will tell Ryan more about who will be in the book when we meet in APE. But we are open still to suggestion for artists to have it the AX collection, we have only chosen about a third so far. So please fire away…

The sampler we will give away in APE will include excerpts from newly translated stories by:
Akino Kondo
Shinichi Abe
Yuichi Kiriyama
Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Bill – I take it you are the man who translated Tsuge’s ‘Nejishiki’ in TCJ 250? If so you have my respect, sir. I will mention that appearance in my talk on sunday nov 2nd at APE (and have done already in the previous AX/Gekiga talks in NY and the UK) Although, out of interest, did Tsuge agree to that translation? This is in no way a criticism, merely a question. As so far he has refused Asakawa’s requests for us to make translations of his work. Which is a great pity.

However, on the good side, there IS a chance to do some of Masahiko Matsumoto’s work in English. He is, as you know, one of those key early gekiga creators along with Tsuge and Tatsumi. So he is, we feel, next in line for greater exposure in English. I will be bringing a short book with me to SF to show to publishers, that Asakawa made in 2005, of a Matsumoto story from 1973. Which we are probably going to call in English: ‘The Girl in the Tobacco Shop’ or ‘Tobaco shop daughter’.

Anyway, please help out with your connections and knowledge of alternative manga to spread the word and make this AX collection a success.

Hi, Sean,

thanks for you comment, and your work on the anthology. Of course, I'll be happy to speak more about the book the more I know. And please enjoy APE & SF; I wish I could be there and see your talk.

For the record, I was the translator of "Screw-Style," but there were a lot of hands involved (probably because in my first draft, everyone sounded like a hillbilly).

Tsuge did approve, or at least agreed to it. Milo George, then TCJ's editor, deserves credit. He contacted Kosei ONO, a manga critic/editor who's close to Tsuge and served as a liaison. Milo did all the legwork; I never actually spoke to Ono or Tsuge.

ryan on October 24, 2008 at 1:10 pm said:

Thanks for the post Bill!
AX has a long and interesting pedigree of artists, and some of the ones I listed are just a handful of unique and interesting artists. I’m currently reading One More Cup of Coffee and a book by Toyo Kataoka, and digging their styles, albeit in very different ways.

I might make a list next week of every artist ever published in AX (oh god, what am I thinking) and then sort through them that way… The only artists I know for sure are in the book are Shinichi Abe and Akino Kondoh (saw a PDF with a few pages in english).

I’m not sure if the folks I listed will be in the book— can’t wait to try to squeeze a more complete list out of Sean when I meet him at APE next weekend.

Best!
ryan
ryan on October 24, 2008 at 1:15 pm said:

Interesting to note Boilet… I know he has promoted Furuya in the past, which is definitely something I can get behind. What other mangaka (besides Taniguchi) does he include under the umbrella of his “Nouvelle manga” ?

I haven’t paid much attention to his non-fiction exploits (perhaps unfairly?) because I really, really disliked the one comic I read by him, Yukiko’s Spinach.
Noah Berlatsky on October 24, 2008 at 1:20 pm said:

Bill, who is that image by? It’s superb; reminds me of Japanese prints, which is always a good thing.

So…I’d be interested to hear your take on Disappearance Diary. What did I miss?
Bill Randall on October 27, 2008 at 10:32 am said:

Ryan,

thanks for dropping in! So I totally misread your list– oops. Plz. do your best to corner all concerned at APE and get the full skinny. Like you said, AX is great, and the very least skimming Toyo's blog makes me think I should give him another look. Kondo & Abe I think are tops, so their inclusion's great news.

The quantity of manga (& the 24-hour day) makes me quick to find excuses not to look more closely at certain manga, but I'm always happy to find I'm wrong. So yes, I'll have another Boss Coffee, please.

As to Boilet, he lists the usual suspects. (From the Spring/Summer 2005 issue of ARTiT, a bilingual fine art magazine):

-HANAWA Kazuichi (Doing Time)
-NANANAN Kiriko (Blue)
-TANIGUCHI Jiro (L'Homme Qui Marche)
-ODA Hideji (Coo's World)
-IGARASHI Daisuike (Hanashippanashi)
-TAKAHAMA Kan (Mariko Parade)
-KURODA Io (Nasu, Sexy Voice & Robo)
-FURUYA Usamaru (Short Cuts)
-litte fish & FUKUYAMA Yoji, neither of whom I know offhand

He describes them as "manga d'auteur." In other words, it's not a movement coherently emerging from within the manga industry, but one he maps onto it. (He does live in Japan & collaborates with Takahama, but N.M.'s not like the big international cross-pollination I'd envisioned for the 15 seconds Tom Hart, Paul Pope, & David Mazzucchelli were working for Kodansha).

So while I like most of these artist (& have written about Kuroda & Igarashi in TCJ), I think "Nouvelle Manga" is shorthand, not a movement.

Noah,

The art's KONDO Akino. Also romanizable as KONDOH or KONDOU. Click it for links. She does good comics, too.

& I was howling with laughter at your D.D. review, mind– that was a VERY funny review (as always with snark, I tend to scowl bemusedly).

I do like D.D. much more than you– maybe I have a higher tolerance for dumpster-diving instruction manuals? I might quibble that Azuma's got some range as an artist, more than lolicon, which can't really be laid at his doorstep (though his follow-up to D.D. suffers for being mostly drawings of his type of girl). D.D. works for me for its tension (not always in his control, perhaps) between that idiom & its content. Which accounts for the wildly divergent reviews it's received.

I had not, dumbly I might add, made the connection you do about his absent wife, which is totally spot-on.
Sean Michael Wilson on October 27, 2008 at 7:30 pm said:

Hi Bill,

Sean Michael Wilson here, co editor of the AX collection.

Thanks for this long consideration, though as Ryan says that was NOT a list of who we will have in the book, just his thoughts. I will tell Ryan more about who will be in the book when we meet in APE. But we are open still to suggestion for artists to have it the AX collection, we have only chosen about a third so far. So please fire away…

The sampler we will give away in APE will include excerpts from newly translated stories by:
Akino Kondo
Shinichi Abe
Yuichi Kiriyama
Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Bill – I take it you are the man who translated Tsuge’s ‘Nejishiki’ in TCJ 250? If so you have my respect, sir. I will mention that appearance in my talk on sunday nov 2nd at APE (and have done already in the previous AX/Gekiga talks in NY and the UK) Although, out of interest, did Tsuge agree to that translation? This is in no way a criticism, merely a question. As so far he has refused Asakawa’s requests for us to make translations of his work. Which is a great pity.

However, on the good side, there IS a chance to do some of Masahiko Matsumoto’s work in English. He is, as you know, one of those key early gekiga creators along with Tsuge and Tatsumi. So he is, we feel, next in line for greater exposure in English. I will be bringing a short book with me to SF to show to publishers, that Asakawa made in 2005, of a Matsumoto story from 1973. Which we are probably going to call in English: ‘The Girl in the Tobacco Shop’ or ‘Tobaco shop daughter’.

Anyway, please help out with your connections and knowledge of alternative manga to spread the word and make this AX collection a success.
Bill Randall on October 28, 2008 at 9:08 am said:

Hi, Sean,

thanks for you comment, and your work on the anthology. Of course, I'll be happy to speak more about the book the more I know. And please enjoy APE & SF; I wish I could be there and see your talk.

For the record, I was the translator of "Screw-Style," but there were a lot of hands involved (probably because in my first draft, everyone sounded like a hillbilly).

Tsuge did approve, or at least agreed to it. Milo George, then TCJ's editor, deserves credit. He contacted Kosei ONO, a manga critic/editor who's close to Tsuge and served as a liaison. Milo did all the legwork; I never actually spoke to Ono or Tsuge.