Mammoth Book of Best New Manga
Ilya, ed.
Running Press
It’s rare to find a book with not one, not two, but three prevarications in its title. The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga is, in the first place, not manga — hardly any of the creators are from Japan (most appear to be from the U.S., England, and China.) And while some of the stories are obviously in the manga tradition, many of the others look like…just plain comics. Nor is the work in the volume necessarily “new” — the first piece, “Kitsune Tales” by Andre Watson and Woodrow Phoenix, for example, was published originally in 2003, five years before this volume’s 2008 copyright. And, finally, the volume is not a “best of” in any usual sense; the pieces weren’t selected from any defined pool that I can see. Rather, they seem to have been chosen from the author’s network of friends, acquaintances, and readings. In some cases creators came to his attention through contests he judged. A couple of the entries here are even submissions.
In other words, if, like me, you read the title and thought, “Hey, this is going to show me some of the most exciting work in Japanese comics created during the last year or so!” — well, you’re going to be seriously disappointed, because this ain’t that. Instead, it’s just another anthology, like Kramer’s Ergot or Mome, though in comparison to those two series it’s aimed at a younger, less artsy audience.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with anthologies per se. A pulpier, all ages Kramer’s Ergot — that’d be great. Unfortunately, the confusion evinced by Brand New Manga’s title seems to reflect, not only marketing gone haywire, but a general lack of editorial vision. Even when I don’t like Sammy Harkham’s selections (Kevin Huizenga…eh) they at least feel like conscious, idiosyncratic aesthetic statements. Whereas much of the material in Best New Manga seems to have been chosen at random.
Robert Deas’ “Infinity Rising,” for example, is entirely predictable space opera, complete with a torched farmhouse lifted from Star Wars, a gratuitous revenge motif, some gratuitous violence against women, and preposterous, pumped-up anatomy, digitally-colored so that the muscles look like hunks of plastic. Mitz’s “Pilot” is a by-the-numbers sci-fi YA kid-gets-super-powers story; it’s charming and competent, enough, sure, but it’s hard to see why an editor would jump up and say, “Yes, I must have this rather than all the other work that looks much like it!” Or again, Rainbow Buddy’s yaoi entry “Snowfall” shows some kid looking up and mooning enthusiastically as images from the past bleed into each other and everything is flecked with stars — fine if you like that sort of thing, I’m sure…but if you like that sort of thing, surely you’ve seen lots and lots of similar exercises as good as or better than this one?
I could go on and on, really: why the Tank Girl rip off? The utterly clichéd coma-victim-saved-by-dream-ghost-girl riff? Why a story devoted entirely to the saccharine question, “Wouldn’t it be cute if we drew a cat as a human with cat ears?” And, good lord, if you have to print a sixth-rate “Is-the-android-really-human?” story, please try to pick one that doesn’t end with the protagonist staring up wistfully into the sky thinking to herself: “I don’t know what my future will hold, but I won’t be bound by my past.” That’s just egregious.
The book is almost 450 pages long, and at that length even the most benighted editor is bound to include at least a few decent pieces. Michael Kacar’s Ramen Jiman does a funny take on Iron Chef with some genuinely loopy gags (generations of heifers force-fed red-hot-chili to fulfill their destiny as a component of spicy beef ramen) and very accomplished black and white shonen style art. Gilian Sein Ying Ha’s “Darumafish” features beautifully scratchy but controlled linework, almost as if Edward Gorey had decided to draw shojo. Laura Howell’s “The Bizarre Adventures of Gilbert and Sullivan” made me laugh out loud several times. Gilbert’s mischievous nieces run amok, but Arthur Sullivan is oddly placid. “Even now, they’re filling your trousers with offal and you’re entirely unconcerned,” muses the hyper-deformed and disgruntled librettist. “Woman + My trousers = Good!” exclaims Sullivan. Against such successes, though, you have to balance James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook’s unforgivably pretentious “Ground Zero-The Wedge,” in which a couple of New York hipsters burble on endlessly about lots of, like, far-out ideas, man, while the trendy, graffiti-inspired art tries desperately to be witty and self-referential. (Look! The characters are pulling up the edge of a panel! That’s so post-modern!)
In the intro, Ilya declares “Best New Manga exists to showcase the best of what’s new from the rising generation of international talent.” If I thought that this were really the best of what the rising generation of international talent had to offer, I’d be seriously depressed. Luckily, all you have to do is glance through, say, Dokebi Bride or Nana or even Bizenghast to know that there’s much superior work out there. Manga doesn’t need Ilya to promote it, and it will suffer no especial harm from having this anthology take its name in vain. Still, it’d be nice to have a title that more accurately reflected the contents. The Mammoth Book of Randomly Selected, Relatively Recent Comics has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
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This review was originally published in the Comics Journal.
Chinese Comics aren’t Manga? Do they have their own name like Korean Comics? (I forget the name for Korean Comics.)
Chinese comics are Manhua wikipedia tells me. Korean comics are manhwa.
Someone actually gave me this book. I was terminally unimpressed. The Gilbert and Sullivan were pretty funny–but maybe only if you care about G & S, which has to be a pretty limited market at this point.
Gilbert and Sullivan still are much loved by large numbers of people, have no fear.
How about a notice for the truly atrocious printing on this particular volume? Since when did 72-300 dpi become acceptable resolution for black and white line work? Do they want every diagonal line to look like a staircase? This book has been remaindered for two bucks at my local Half Price books, but one flip through was enough to convince me to stay far away.
There’s also another term which is used in connection with some older Chinese comics – lianhuantu (???). I think it’s okay the use the term “manga” in connection with the comics Noah is writing about since they’re all influenced by the Japanese versions of the form. Both words are derived from the same two Chinese characters as well – ??.
Actually, it’s really unclear that all of these comics are especially Japanese influenced. Many of them are, some of them might be, and some of them really don’t particularly seem to be.
Sean, I have to confess I didn’t pick up on the bad printing. But it does go along with the general half-assed feel of the anthology as a whole….
Wow Noah, thanks for getting this to a larger audience. I was hoping it would simply drift into a snowstorm of disintegrating old Comics Journal issues, ha ha.
Your unforgivably pretentious pal James
Hey James. Sorry about that. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think the blog audience is *that* much larger, really….
You mean, you have two readers? Just kidding. BTW I am not influenced by manga at all really.
I did have a pile of issues of Akira at some point but when I realized how much I was paying for them all, I stopped. Still don’t know what happened at the end.
“Large numbers” of Gilbert and Sullivan fans… compared to what? Maybe compared to the audience for Best New Manga—but that’s not saying a whole lot.
Given the generally paltry state of interest in the theater, opera, and etc….”large numbers” seems generous.
I think there are large numbers of gilbert and sullivan fans compared to the number of fans there are for most opera or most theater.
Not sure what you want? I mean, it’s not pop music, but it still has an audience….
Anyway, it’s irrelevant whether or not I think I do manga. Ilya thought it was manga or related to manga in some way and he’s the editor. I applaud all efforts to dispose of these artificial seperations, these fake borders that seperate us, barriers imposed on us all by the powers that be.
Perhaps he thought it was mammoth-related?
Not to beat a horse but what is manga anyway? A style? It must have big eyes and speed lines? Or Is it a format? Is what Paul Pope does called comics if published in America and manga if published flipped in Japan? If a story is translated to French and colored with more taste is it then bande dessin? Is an illuminated page done entirely by hand and concieved with all elements integral to the whole the same as a page where the artist vaguely left room for text that ends up lettered with fonts? Is a graphic novel comics? etc.
It’s all comics, so whatever. If you don’t like it, fine. But Mammoth Manga is in certainly the manga format and a lot of the work has aspects of manga, perhaps Ilya used the opportunity bend the parameters and put some stuff in there because he liked it. Just, y’know, apart from my own involvement in your review, of the targets to choose, anthologies are low on the list, they should be encouraged.
Manga are comics made in Japan. That’s the accepted definition. When you put “best new manga!” on your anthology, you’re indicating that it contains new comics made in Japan.
The title is essentially false advertising. You’re trying to get people to buy it who like manga, even though the actual relationship to manga is tangential. It’s false advertising, and it’s a shitty thing to do.
I mean, there’s wiggle room. If you’re really manga influenced to such an extent that a person buying the product can easily see the link and not feel ripped off (like the Bizenghast creator) then it’s no big deal. But this anthology pretends to be something it’s not, and it looks very much like the reason it does this is to sell more books on the basis of its “affiliation” with a global marketing juggernaut. Again, It’s not illegal, obviously — no one owns the copyright on “manga”. But it’s cynical and stupid, and it should be mocked.
Wasn’t aware of these hard and fast rules. Don’t like hard and fast rules much.
I don’t know anything about Ilya’s book besides being asked for a few pieces. But in order to go to press artists might have a project molded into something by a publisher that the publisher thinks will sell. Books are sold under all sorts of pretenses.
Comic books are collected and called graphic novels when they have no feature other than printed format and thickness with a novel.
It looks like part of the print run of regular comics is just set aside to be bound in trade paperback form to be a GN. Shelf space in bookstores is crammed with tons of superhero stuff which floods the market and edges out more actual graphic novels.
The manga FORMAT is being promoted in this country, and I guess England as well, for graphic novels because they are easier for bookstores to shelve. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Do you really consider manga to be that different of a medium?
It’s not a rule. It’s a definition. It’s like saying “Best New Mysteries!”, and the stories aren’t new, and many of them aren’t mysteries. People who purchased that would be pissed off because they’d been lied to.
And yes, manga means something specific. It means Japanese comics — or work very much influenced by shojo or shonen or other recognizable Japanese genres. Are these categories ironclad? Not necessarily, and if someone wanted to do an anthology specifically to explore and broaden the definition of manga, that’d be cool. That isn’t this though; this book just ignores the definition and makes use of the title to sell copies, as far as I can tell.
People buying a Green Lantern graphic novel know exactly what they’re getting. You may think it’s pretentious to call it a “graphic novel” or whatever, but that’s different than actually misrepresenting the contents, which are going to be exactly what the purchaser thought they were going to be.
I’m not blaming Ilya necessarily. I don’t know whose decision the title was. But whoever picked it, it’s deceitful. Not “oh, my god you’ve murdered babies and must be punished!” deceitful. But small-bore, piss-ant deceitful, which makes everybody involved look ridiculous and petty.
My ire was similarly raised when I bought a “Best Of” Science Fiction anthology that included Neil Gaiman’s “Study in Emerald”, a Sherlock Holmes/Cthulhu mashup, and a straight-up ghost story set at Ground Zero in NYC. I understand that the term science fiction now walks the line between science fantasy and hard science fiction, but the inclusion of those stories was flat-out misrepresentation. I don’t know what possibility is more disturbing: that the Gaiman story was intentionally misused to sell more books, or that editors in general have no idea that science fiction does not include things like ghosts, dragons, and magic.
Ha! That’s funny; I bet that wouldn’t have bothered me at all, actually.
Was the Gaiman story any good?
It’s a prose form of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen set in a skewed alternate universe where the Great Old Ones rule the Earth. You need some prior knowledge of Sherlock Holmes to figure out what exactly is going on. I thought it was OK. I think Gaiman’s style is fun to read, but I didn’t enjoy it beyond that because it’s nothing more than an exercise in cleverness. If you’re interested, it’s available as a free download at Gaiman’s website.
Isn’t there a whole genre of “American manga” and/or “manga from other countries?” That is, comics from non-Japanese stories in “the manga style”? Obviously, this is problematic, since Japanese comics themselves (“manga”) are not limited to one style–the perception may be otherwise however. This is why Ilya, et. al. can call this stuff “manga” (or some of it anyway) without necessarily originating in Japan and without violating all possible (or all “used” anyway) definitions of manga. I think the real “violation” in the title is the use of “Best,” as if there had been some real effort to cull the “best” manga-style stories from a discrete period of time. Clearly, no real effort was made to do so…”Best” is just used to give that impression and to sell books… This is done with some frequency, of course, but it’s still willful and “intentional” deceit. “Manga” may have a slightly more flexible definition than Noah suggests–so I’m not quite willing to call this a lie based on the lack of comics of Japanese origin. The “best” label is a flat-out intentional falsehood, thoug, as far as I’m concerned. These are, “things Ilya liked and could get permissions for cheaply”–nobody’s definition of “best.”
Gaiman’s fiction is pretty mediocre. I wish he’d stuck to comics, really. Since he’s gone to fiction, he writes crappy comics and only marginally better prose. The movie of Coraline was somewhat fun, though.
It’s not manga by any definition though. Many of the contributors (like James) obviously have little or no Japanese influence. As I said, if there were an effort to show the worldwide influence of Japanese comics, that’d be cool, and the title would be appropriate. But there isn’t.
I have two Star Trek “manga” collections put out by Toykopop. Some of the art uses manga techniques like speed lines and close-ups, but overall, because the writers are American, it seems like typical comic book fare trying hard to imitate manga.
For example, one story has the Enterprise fight a squardron of Gundams. Another is a fanfic story showing Kirk’s role in the creation of the Borg, with the gimmick being that the sound effects are in katakana. Sometimes, the art has no Japanese elements at all. The only common denominator is that the stories are collected in manga sized digest format. If the stories in the Mammoth Book of Best Manga are anything like the Star Trek material, I understand exactly where Noah is coming from.
I know they get Star Trek in Japan because I watched DS9 on one of my trips there. It’s a shame they didn’t get any Japanese creators to provide an unique interpretation of Star Trek.
Back to Gaiman, I really liked Anansi Boys. It’s not filled with big ideas or deep insight, but I liked the characters, it was funny, and unlike some of Gaiman’s work, focused. I think I like American Gods more than you did Eric, although it certainly had some flaws. I tend to be forgiving of some writing when it has interesting ideas, even if those ideas aren’t executed all that well.
ericb, that’s usually called OEL manga. The two most prominent examples are Megatokyo,a web comic, and Svetlana Chmakova’s Dramacon. Both have actually been published in Japan in Japanese, which would seem to be the goal. Usually OEL reads like fanfic and struggles to imitate broad visual tics in pop manga– wannabe manga. Both of these are more fluent.
And while I usually just say “manga=comics” and consider uses of the term for non-Japanese stuff as bad marketing (like Bob Woodruff describing his limited-animation movie “Earth 2100” a “graphic novel”), some smart people have argued that there are fundamental differences. One’s Paul Pope. The changes in his work before & after he got that Kodansha contract in the 90s, as well as in Tom Hart’s non-Hutch Owen work, are worth a look.
You guys are too funny though. Trashing the poor little mammoth English anthology but singing the praises of Neil Gaiman. Really, you don’t find HIM pretentious? Did you see the article on him in the New Yorker a few weeks ago where he expressed his confidence that his fans would follow him until their wallets run dry, his more memorable statement was that he was “nobody’s bitch”…what an inspiration he is to all of us.
James, did you read the comments above? The appreciation of Gaiman is lukewarm at best.
For the record, Gaiman can be pretentious sure. He’s also written some dreck. Sandman is a lot better than this anthology though. Also, Gaiman’s personal statements, or yours, don’t have anything to do with how good or bad the work is.
We did a Gaiman roundtable a little while ago which was by no means entirely laudatory. It’s here.
Read the New Yorker? Now who’s being pretentious? :)
Heh heh. Noah reads it so it must be okay. And it’s a better option than People when you’re waiting for a root canal.
Uh…I hardly ever read the New Yorker. I didn’t read that Chris Ware issue; just saw the cover online.
The New Yorker does good investigative reporting though. Seymour Hersch is great.
I do read People though, at least sometimes.
I don’t have a response to that one. Okay, go back to your mocking, never mind.