Manga Links and More

My favorite recent manga article is SF by Shaenon K. Garrity. It’s a fascinating take on Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku that essentially tying it to the sci-fi new wave of the 60s and 70s and the manga of the Forty-Niners because of the way it uses a far out science fiction premise to explore gender politics. I’m not surprised to see a historical manga by Yoshinaga being labeled as science fiction. Her Gerard & Jacques series felt like it was taking place in a cold, mechanical world from the distant future that had been re-imagined into a historical setting, at least on the surface.

And speaking of Ooku, it was just nominated for the Tezuka Cultural Award. I had predicted which titles would be nominated a few weeks ago and I did fairly well if I do say so myself. Umimachi Diary was the only title I was aware of that I didn’t predict would be nominated. It had completely slipped my mind that A Drifting Life was qualified but now I believe it will be this year’s top winner.

On a final note, recently I’ve been enjoying the One Outs anime a lot. I try to keep this site as focused on manga as possible because I don’t want to presume any one cares about anything else just because I do but I may have to make an exception in this case. For now I’ll just say forget RideBack, this is the must-watch seinen anime of the season.

Pre-reading Impressions and the Best of the Best

As any one who reads this blog can probably guess, I don’t read many manga reviews. Sure I try to get a vague sense of what’s worth checking out but generally I prefer to go in to a series knowing as little as possible. But I have to say that I really enjoyed Danielle Leigh’s recent reviews of We Were There and Sundrome.

These were two series I had some mild interest in trying but now I’m really curious about them. I particularly liked how she described We Were There’s set up, essentially saying that the typical shojo drama has already taken place before the series begins and the characters are now living in the aftermath. It almost sounds like the shojo equivalent of one of those war stories that focuses on the surviving soldiers of a brutal battle who are struggling to make it back to civilization.

Sundrome sounds like a bigger risk to me because while I love a good dark highschool story as much as the next person, strong sexuality can be difficult for a mangaka to portray in a nuanced way and since this series initially ran in Young Champion, I doubt nuanced was the aim. However, I’m almost always willing to give a relationship story centering around two problematic individuals a chance.

On a different topic, I haven’t noticed many people posting top ten manga of 2008 lists lately. This includes myself because there’s plenty I haven’t started yet and I keep a running list of what I’m most keenly reading. Any ways, of what I have seen, there are two in particular that I want to highlight: Kai-Ming Cha’s Top 10 Manga for 2008 and Kethylia’s Top Eleven Manga for 2008. They’re both very distinctive representations of the best manga of last year and I look forward to sampling all of the listed titles. In fact, I’ll have thoughts on two of them up tomorrow.