Friday early links

At PopCultureShock, Erin F. has a good writeup of the NYCC panel “Comics Publishing: Review and Outlook 2007.” I just started listening to the podcast from MangaCast, but it’s nice to see it in writing as well.

Stephanie Folse (Telophase to the LJ readers) has a new column up at Tokyopop. This one is a how-to on moving from script to thumbnail.

Vertical is betting big on the Aranzi Aranzo phenomenon, which takes scary-cuteness to the next level by putting it in the hands of the people. Check out their new website to see what I’m talking about.

Tokyopop editor Tim Beedle has exciting news about two of his titles: Kat and Mouse was chosen one of the two best “AmeriManga” of 2006 by Anime Boredom, sharing the honors with another Tokyopop title, Dramacon. And Starz has optioned East Coast Rising for an animated film to be released in theaters. Tim also shares a page from the upcoming vol. 2 of that series.

David Welsh likes the new format of the Rising Stars of Manga competition.

Pata relays a conversation about what the Japanese call manga. Up next: How do you ask for French toast in Paris?

Manga 201: If you’re lucky enough to live anywhere near UC Irvine, they are offering a followup to their initial course on manga and anime. And Dallas Middaugh is a guest speaker. I’d go to that, if it wasn’t on the wrong coast! And continuing this academic theme, Japan’s Academie du Vin will be offering a two-week class on hot topics in the wine world, taught by Kenichi Hori, creator of the manga Sommelier.

ICv2 has DMP/June/801′ s release schedule for the rest of the year.

The Broccoli blog links to some new cover images.

Is Borders slipping on the manga front since Kurt Hassler left? That’s what Heidi is hearing. I haven’t noticed any difference at my local store, but I suppose these things take a while to percolate through. Meanwhile, my Barnes & Noble just enlarged the size of their manga/GN section quite a bit but doesn’t seem to have many more titles than before, just larger quantities of the Tokyopop and Viz stalwarts.

Reviews: At Slightly Biased Manga, Connie has some interesting choices: vol. 1 of the manwha novella collection Lie to Me and Hot Gimmick S, the novel based on the Manga of Deep Feminist Shame, as Mely calls it. Comic Book Bin checks out vol. 5 of Gacha Gacha. Active Anime’s Holly Ellingood reviews vol. 2 of Trinity Blood and vol. 4 of Never Give Up, while Scott Campbell gives his take on vol. 15 of Project Arms—The Fourth Revelation. Anime on DVD’s Julie Rosato enjoys the writing in vol. 1 of Loveholic. At the Mangamaniaccafe, Julie orders up vol. 2 of Peppermint. Class is in session at Okazu, where Erica Friedman compares and contrasts Fun Home and 12 Days. At Comicsnob, Matt Blind reviews vol. 1 of In the Starlight, a new series from Netcomics.

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Comments

  1. For what it’s worth on Borders… The Borders Express at the mall here in North Austin has doubled it’s BL line, and the one in Round Rock just gave it another row. I’ve noticed more new publishers as well.

  2. one in Round Rock just gave it another row.
    By ‘it’ I mean manga overall, not just BL. ^_-

  3. ChunHyang72 says

    The B&N here in Manhattan generally carry a better selection of manga and have placed it in a more desirable part of the store than their Borders counterparts. I never see anyone browsing in the Borders manga aisles, but the B&N at Lincoln Center is positively overflowing with teenagers and young-ish hipsters reading stuff.

  4. Chun, you’re making me miss home, in the worst way…

    Our B&N in North Austin has one manga shelf, four rounders of Tokyo Pop materials, and most of their ‘young adult’ manga can be found in the young adult section. All gay comics from H&O and Alyson, are in the Gay/Lesbian section—BL is virtually non-existent. The metro B&N has more titles and publishers represented in manga, but again—nothing to encourage browsing or reading or even picking up, they’re stuffed back by the windows with the alt lit, and take up no more than 1 aisle. Sci-fiction has more shelf-space at B&N Austin than manga/graphic novels.

    As for Pata’s entry: It’s the one that says, Bad-Mother-F*cking-Comic.

  5. My preference is Borders for now and I disagree that B&N has more manga loafers in the aisles. When I was in NY, I’d say it was equal and of course, the closer it is to a school of some sort the more loafers you’d get.

  6. mangaijin says

    The Borders stores in Boston all have better stock and organization than the B&N locations. The shiny new store on Boylston has a great selection that stays in order.

    Dramacon is definitely the best “AmeriManga” on the market (wait, does Mega Toyko count?) It manages to respect the language of manga with out being a slave to it.

  7. Yeah, and in manga magazine, they use the word comics to the graphical oriented story they print every week or month, Every single one of them. But that’s just too much for Americans to accept, I guess.

  8. I’ve found the same thing around Boston as mangaijin mentioned. B&N is great for TP/Viz titles, but..that’s about it. I still remember standing in the manga aisle of one B&N and not seeing even one single title that wasn’t Viz or TP…

  9. Out here in SoCal, there are manga loafers in almost all Borders stores, which are much more heavily stocked with manga titles than the B&N stores. I almost never see the loafers in B&Ns.

    Come spring break, I expect to see so many loafers in the aisles at Borders that it will be difficult to actually buy manga.

  10. In my town in WV, the B&N has the best set-up and placement for the graphic novels, though the selection isn’t as varied as the tiny WaldenBooks at the mall. I’ve noticed the same thing Tina did at the local WaldenBooks — lots of titles by different BL and yaoi publishers that I’ve never seen at the B&N or the local Books-a-Million, which has always had a pretty decent BL-yaoi selection. And while the B&N is primarily Viz-Del Rey-Tokyopop oriented, there is a so-so representation of other publishers.

    I’ve noticed that the B&Ns that I’ve been to up in Pittsburgh seem to have abdicated graphic novels to Borders. There’s even less variety than at the local store in just about every graphic novel category. The South Hills Border is awesome in terms of selection and seems to keep eating space. I’ve even seen a Fanfare/Ponent Mon book there, which is roughly the equivalent of spotting a unicorn. (Of course it was one I already had.) Another Borders just opened up downtown, and its GN section is HUGE and reasonably varied. It’s also a half a block away from a Whole Foods, so it’s my favorite bookstore ever, aside from being over an hour’s drive away.

  11. there are multiple manga series about wine? I love Japan.

  12. David: Our Waldens all closed and were replaced by ‘Borders Express’, in the malls. ^_- The biggest newcomers I’ve seen in the Express stores are KittyMedia and Infinity.

    Off-topic: Where is WV? Mr. Gynocrat is from Perryopolis in PA, just outside of Pittsburgh? I laugh when I hear the name of that town… LOL!

  13. >>there are multiple manga series about wine?

  14. [Forgot that putting quotation marks around text on these pages loses everything afterwards: this runs on from the last entry].

    Yup, and SOMMELIER is even available in French (complete with notes in the back by the Japanese wine expert who advised the manga-ka). It’s a seinen series, so the first few episodes are somewhat annoying as Our Hero – a half-Japanese, half-French sommelier named Joe Satake wandering through Europe in search of the wine his mother had him taste as a child – beds a different girl in each story and generally shows off. However, things pick up, or perhaps relax, around chapter 5: Joe isn’t the centre of every episode any more – though he and his knowledge of wine are always important – and SOMMELIER becomes an entertaining (and instructive) piece of reading. Recommended.

  15. Tina: Those are the two “new” pubs that I noticed on the shelves. A lot of the Waldens seem to be hanging on around here, and I’ve only seen a couple of the BEs open up, mostly up in Pittsburgh.

    I’m in Morgantown, which is about an hour south of Pittsburgh, which makes Pitt the “nearby urban destination” when we need to get out of the mountains. And Pittsburgh does have awesome neighborhood names, Coraopolis being my favorite. I always imagine a suburb ruled over by Cora with an iron fist.

  16. The Barnes and Noble near Solomon pond has a small graphic novel/manga bookshelf next to the childrens section and in back of the Dungeon and Dragon’s stuff. The manga is mostly old shit I read a year ago online and the graphic novels are blocked off by loitering weeaboos reading manga.

  17. ChunHyang72 says

    Maybe it’s just the competition from so many other outlets (good comic book stores, Kinokuniya), but the Borders in Manhattan don’t stock a very good selection of manga. (I only go there to pick up the latest installment of “Her Majesty’s Dog.”) B&N carries stuff by the biggest publishers—CMX, Dark Horse, Tokyopop, Viz—and is beginning to offer manwha. I noticed a healthy selection of Net Comics and ICE Kunion titles on my last visit to their UWS location. But honestly, I find 99% of what I’m looking for on amazon, eBay, or at the comic book store. I only venture into the big chains when I need to pick up something that Midtown Comics doesn’t stock.

  18. a healthy selection of Net Comics and ICE Kunion titles

    Now, when I went into the metro Borders Express to drop off an Iris Print sampler and my own personal titles catalogue [/plug] the woman there asked me if there were companies that published just manwha, and I told her about ICE and Net—gave her some places to web search as well. I got the impression that, as manager, she can and will ask for specific titles from the “supply” department, if she thinks her store can move them. I wonder if it’s just a matter of walking into your local shop with a cheat-sheet, for local managers that may not know what’s out there, but are in a position to make requests from regional mangers, for inventory. 0_o.

  19. For the most part, what I’ve noticed is a connection between the busy-ness of a store and its manga selection. The Union Square Borders in San Fran has a selection that leaves me struggling to whittle down my purchases to an affordable level while the newer Westfield Center one has more shelves for manga but I always struggle to find a title that’s on my shopping list.

    I pretty much always have a bad experience at B&N’s with shelves a mess, titles out-of-order, the division between YA GNs and adult GNs being unclear and inconsistent stocking for series (which always seems to miss the volume I want).

  20. Lyle, the first bookstore I visited since I moved to the Bay Area was that same Union Square Borders… there must have been 10 people either browsing or loafing. That was possibly one of the busiest manga sections I’ve seen.

  21. Hi, I hope it’s not too late for me to add my own tale about the Borders/Barnes & Noble situation. Well, in my town we only have a small B. Dalton’s with a pretty pitiful manga section. Very small. Can’t fault them too much for it though because the store itself is very small. The employees are friendly but don’t really know anything about manga. In fact a few weeks ago one of the employees asked me if I could give them a list of my favorite titles because their shelves were looking bare from people buying them all up and lately their head honcho people (don’t really know what to call them!) hadn’t been sending them any new stuff and they didn’t know what to order. Well, I made a big long list, gave it to them, and low and behold a week and a half later I checked back and there were some of the titles I had written down!

    Okay, so this really has nothing to do with what you’re talking about but I was just really excited about having them ask me for a recommendation list and I just wanted to tell someone about it!

    So today I drove about an hour to get to a city that has a Waldenbooks & Barnes & Noble. I haven’t been back there in over a year because I’ve mostly ordered my books through Barnes & Noble website.

    The Waldenbooks is even better than it was back then. Almost their entire right wall is manga (which is had been last year too but there was one very surprising nice change) and while I was scanning their titles I noticed some random yaoi in the mix. I was excited but then disappointed that they didn’t have the series I was looking for but then….

    I got to the very end of the wall and there was row after row of yaoi. Six or seven shelves of it (the complete series I was looking for was there too). At first I thought it was just their strictly yaoi corner but then I noticed the shelves below it had Sensual Phrase and other straight adult manga. So even though the sign above it all just says “manga” and not “adult” it’s actually their own little adult section.

    The clerk was super nice & friendly and even mentioned the yaoi I was buying. It was so weird to have someone say “yaoi” to me with a big smile on their face when I’m so used to the booksellers in my town not even knowing anything about manga. I mentioned the adult section and she said how that way when kids are over there looking at the stuff they know what they’re looking at. I don’t know if they shoo them away from it after that if they look really young though or what. In any case besides keeping kids away from it I think it’s great that all the adult manga is together because that way I can (and other adults!) find it a lot easier. A lot of it is shrink-wrapped too but not all of it.

    Do you ever find that if you have someone really friendly & sweet checking you out that it makes you want to buy even more stuff? Maybe I’m just too gulliable & sappy that way but whenever I get a bookstore employee that’s really friendly & helpful it always makes me want to buy more. It makes me just plain happy to be buying books in a store instead of shopping online. I hate getting robot zombie employees that speak with a monotone where all the joy has been sucked out of them.

    Okay, now about the Barnes & Noble. They have some yaoi mixed in with the regular manga but there’s no cool adult section like at Waldenbooks. It’s a huge store and that kind of made it a little less fun for me. The check-out lady was nice but didn’t say anything about my books so there’s no real story to tell there. Nice cross-section of people looking at the manga though. A super tall teenage boy, teenage girls, a young boy scarfing up all the Naruto his arms could hold, a man & woman in their 30s, and some mom on her cell phone talking to her daughter saying “Okay, I’m in front of the Tokyopop cardboard display…now what book did you say you were looking for?” There was a good variety of people in front of the Waldenbooks manga too.

    Okay, so this has been a super long comment. Just wanted to tell you about my day. I’ve never commented before so I should probably tell you I read your blog all the time & love it.

  22. There’s something else I forgot to mention about the Waldenbooks. When I was last there over a year ago the superhero/other graphic novels had about two or three shelves where the adult manga now are. Superhero & co. have been moved into one of the aisles close by in the science fiction section. I feel bad for the books because it feels like they’ve been banished or something.

    I didn’t look at them too long though because I gave up on superhero comics about a year ago (although I still wanna catch up on Runaways, She-Hulk, and some others in trades eventually) and it seems so hard to pick out the non-superhero graphic novels that are mixed in with them. A lot of the spines are very thin and you really have to study them as you scan to get a good read on the titles.

  23. I work at a B&N in Phoenix and I used to work at one in Maryland and I try pretty hard to keep the section well-stocked but we basically don’t get sales on non-Viz/TP stuff. A fair number of yaoi titles, which I’ve tried to order for my roommate, either never arrive or are unable to order. “Mature” titles like Berserk or any of the Dark Horse horror stuff sits on the shelf and I’m pretty sure the only copies of Monster we’ve sold are the ones that I’ve purchased. We actually don’t even normally stock Akira or Ghost in the Shell because they just don’t sell.

    Maybe it’s just my store or maybe most manga readers are trained now to go to Borders. They supported manga before Barnes & Noble and we’ve just been playing catch up since, to less than stellar results.

Trackbacks

  1. […] Filed under: Bookstores — davidpwelsh @ 3:40 pm There’s a lively round of compare-and-contrast going on over at MagaBlog over manga selections at Borders and Barnes & Noble […]

  2. […] getting bigger, as Wayne Beamer of Blog@Newsarama noted. When I blogged about bookstores last week, lots of people commented, most to say that their bookstores are expanding their GN sections. My local Barnes […]