Quick OEL Manga Reviews

Snow vol. 1 by Morgan Luthi (TokyoPop, $9.99) features one of those galactic future milieus where humans and aliens exist side-by-side, and an oppressive galactic empire seeks to run roughshod over the various worlds for no apparent reason. The empire's key weapon is The Ghost, a humanoid being that is dropped onto an uncooperative planet and runs roughshod over everything. On the ass-end of the universe is The Hub, whose newest arrival, Snow, bears a remarkable resemblance to The Ghost. Luthi--another of TP's Rising Stars finalists--manages to work in libertarian ideas without being too obvious or preachy, or leaving out the many warts. In fact, there are a lot of good ingredients here; but they don't quite gel into a comprehensive whole, and the story is a bit too obvious in places.


I shouldn't have liked Nathaniel Bowden & Tracy Yardley's Riding Shotgun vol. 1 (TokyoPop, $9.99) for it's senseless, over-the-top violence, but it was gleeful and charming enough to win me over in its nihilism. Set in an alternate world where assassination is legal and regulated, Doyle Harrington and his partner Abby are up-and-coming assassins looking to make the jump to the big leagues. But their plans go awry when one of their targets turns out to be Doyle's old high school girlfriend. Yardley's art is appropriately energetic. The car chase sequence that runs for about 17 pages at three-quarters of the way through is one of the best I've seen represented in comics. Riding Shotgun doesn't quite measure up to Bambi and Her Pink Gun in the ranks of violent nihilistic comics, but it's a good read for fans of that sort of stuff and I'll be looking forward to the next volume.


With Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness (Oni, $11.95) I think I'm finally getting into the groove of Brian Lee O'Malley's video games-meet-emo world view. I laughed quite a bit, and actually looked forward to the crazy fight scenes that pop in to resolve existential and emotional conflicts. I'm a bit concerned that the plot doesn't seem to be moving forward much, but we get enough drama, back story, action and humor to carry us through this volume at least. And I still feel sorry for poor Knives Chau, whose only mistake was falling for the charming but self-centered Scott.



Ratings:
Snow vol. 1: 2.5 (of 5)
Riding Shotgun vol. 1: 3 (of 5)
Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness: 3.5 (of 5)

Dave's Dozen: Collections/GNs

Concluding my look through the October Previews (for items supposedly shipping in December or January or later), here are a dozen collections and graphic novels that I feel are worth your attention:


Alice in Sunderland
(Dark Horse, $29.95, p. 27)
Even after reading the solicitation copy I have no idea what this is actually about. But any new work from Bryan Talbot (Luther Arkwright; Tale of One Bad Rat) is cause for celebration.



The World Below
(Dark Horse, $12.95, p. 30)
Raise you hand if you like weird & creepy monsters! Paul Chadwick's underrated underground adventure story gets a long-awaited collection.



Gunsmith Cats Omnibus vol. 1
(Dark Horse, $16.95, p. 40)
Kenichi Sonoda shows that you can do a manga with plenty of violence and fanservice and still have a story that's, well, good. And now you can get it in a big thick omnibus edition at a fraction of the cost that those of us who bought the original collections did.



Batman: Year One Hundred
(DC, $19.99, p. 63)
I heard plenty of excelent things about Paul Pope's take on the Batman of 2039, but didn't buy it because I just knew there would be a trade. Now there is.



Doom Patrol vol. 5: Magic Bus
(DC, $19.99, p. 117)
Another collection of the classic Morrison series, with plenty of Dada--the Brotherhood of Dada that is!



Action Philosophers! Giant-Sized Thing Volume 2
(Evil Twin, $8.95, p. 278)
If you missed picking up issues #4-6 the first time around, now's your chance to laugh and learn about Karl Marx, St. Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Descartes, and the rest.



The Grave Robber's Daughter
(Fantagraphics, $9.95, p. 278)
Richard Sala returns with a new GN story of Judy Drood, Girl Detective. More dark funny from Sala.



Jane's World Omnibus volume 1
(Girl Twirl, $19.95, p. 284)
It's a massive 400+ page compilation of Paige Braddock's lesbian slice-of-life comic; that is, if your life includes alien abductions, vegan Amazons, and super spies!



Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
(Last Gasp, $9.99, p. 300)
Fumiyo Kouno's manga about a young woman in Hiroshima ca. 1955.



The Treasury of Victorian Murder volume 8: Madeleine Smith
(NBM, $8.95, p. 308)
The latest in Rick Geary's line of darkly whimsical recountings of 19th century murders.



My Dead Girlfriend, vol. 1
(TokyoPop, $9.99, p. 322)
It's a story as old as time: awkward boy meets cute girl, finally asks her to the dance, and they fall in love. Problem: the girl's a ghost! Should be a fun OEL manga from Eric Wright.



Roadsong, vol. 2
(TokyoPop, $9.99, p. 330)
The second volume of Allan Gross & Joanna Estep's OEL title promises to bring the two on-the-lam stepbrothers to Nashville for a little country twang to go along with the comedy/action hybrid.




Hey look, this month I actually managed to get all the way through Dave's Dozen before the end of the month! (Earlier in the week I posed my picks for mainstream comics and indy comics.)

More TokyoPop & Viz Charts

Following up on my post from earlier today about the volume number counts for TokyoPop & Viz:

I ran the numbers from the August & July Previews as well. Here are the histograms (you may need to click to see the larger version to read them fully):

TokyoPop:



Viz:



Series 1 (blue) = September
Series 2 (red) = August
Series 3 (yellow) = July

For TokyoPop:
September: Count: 39; Median: 3
August: Count: 42; Median: 2
July: Count: 39; Median: 3

For Viz:
September: Count: 38; Median: 8.5
August: Count: 31; Median: 9
July: Count: 35; Median: 9

(Note: for both publishers, I did not count books/novels, just manga volumes.)

With three months of data, it looks like the pattern is holding; TokyoPop produces more manga with low volume numbers, and more new titles each month than Viz.

TokyoPop & Viz Output

Over at Crocodile Caucus, Lyle asks:

Why does the large number of titles that Tokyopop publishes inspire phrases like “flooding the market” and “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” when Viz, who also publishes a large number of titles never generates the same complaint?

It's a good question. In terms of sheer number of volumes, TP & Viz put out about the same number of titles per month, but they definitely have a different image in the comics blogosphere. Some of the responder comments point to things like quality, shipping schedule, and Viz's use of imprints.

Those are some good anectdotal possibilities--and when you're dealing with perception, anectdotal evidence can go a long way. But I suspected there was something else going on as well, so I did some number crunching. I looked at the TP & Viz sections in the current issue of Previews (September, for items supposedly on sale in November). A pure count shows that TP has 39 volumes, Viz has 38 (for purposes of this analysis I didn't count Shojo Beat or Shonen Jump). But then I counted how many titles each publisher had with a particular volume number; i.e. how many titles were on vol. 1, how many on vol. 2, etc. Here are the results in handy histograms:

TokyoPop:



Viz:



As can be plainly seen from these graphs, TP's output is weighted far more towards the early volume numbers, while Viz's output as a whole is far more mature. The median volume number for TP is 3, while the median for Viz is 8.5.*

So that's where the “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” image for TP comes from; they're putting out a lot more new series every month, while Viz is more likely to stick with longer-running series. This means that each month readers and retailers are faced with an array of many new choices (or ordering decisions) from TP, while with Viz they know more what they're getting into.

Just another piece of the puzzle.


(* You might be tempted to try to take an average, but I think that your college statistics professor would likely have told you that you cannot take averages of ordinal data.)


Update: Three months worth of data graphed here.