Category: comics

Catching up on some manga

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working my way through a few old manga series that I started reading about ten years ago, but abandoned at some point. This all started with Rurouni Kenshin, back in November. I finished that series right around Christmas, with volume 28. (I’d previously read 1-19.) After that, I picked up on Ai Yori Aoshi. I’d read the first 13 volumes of that more than ten years ago, and finished the last few (14-17) in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Then, I picked up a short 10-volume series called Remote. I’d previously read the first six volumes. Right around New Year, I reread all of those, and then continued through the last four.

So that knocks a few things off my list. I had a lot of fun reading these. I have a few other series sitting around that I’ve either started and abandoned or bought but never started. So I’m thinking about continuing (or starting) those too.

One of the oldest and longest-running series on my list is Oh My Goddess. There are 48 volumes for that one, published in the US by Dark Horse, from 2002 through 2015. I have about half of the volumes between 1 and 20. I picked them up out of discount bins at a couple of conventions, a long time ago, so I was picking up what was available, figuring that maybe I’d fill in the holes at some point. I’ve read three of them. I guess I could just start reading what I have and see if I want to pick up the rest. Forty-eight volumes is a lot though. From what I can remember, it was the kind of series where it’s OK to dip in and out. I don’t think it was one long story. And I remember it being pretty funny.

I also have a fairly random sampling of Battle Royale volumes. That’s a 15 volume series; I have six of them. Again, they all came out of a discount bin at a con long ago. This one, I think, really is one long story, so I’m not sure if just reading six random volumes out of 15 is going to be any good. The series was originally published by Tokyopop before their shutdown, and is currently out of print in the US (as far as I can tell), though it’s not hard to find used copies on Amazon for less than their original cover price. Tokyopop made the interesting choice to bring in Keith Giffen to do an English “adaptation” of this series, so it’s not just a straight translation. I’ve seen mixed opinions on this, but it seems like most fans would have preferred a more direct translation.

There’s one more short series I have part of: Planetes. This was originally published as a five-volume series. I have the first three. (Technically, it was a four-volume series, but the fourth volume was split into two in the US.) The original publisher was Tokyopop; it was re-released by Dark Horse not too long ago, in two large omnibus volumes. I could probably get what I’m missing by picking up the second Dark Horse omnibus. I’ve been really curious about this series, since it’s generally gotten very good reviews. It’s supposed to be a hard SF series, which would be unusual for manga. (Most manga SF falls into the over-the-top space opera sub-genre.)

This has all got me thinking about the long and checkered history of manga publishing in America. I found a good article about this history on Anime News Network. Most of the manga I mentioned above was bought during the big manga boom of the early 2000’s, around 2000-2005. But I remember buying some of earlier stuff that came out of Eclipse/Viz in the late 80s, along with Lone Wolf and Cub from First, and Akira from Marvel.

Speaking of Lone Wolf and Cub, I should really pick up the Dark Horse collections of that, published from 2000-2003. They printed the whole series, whereas First only got through about a third of it. And the Dark Horse volumes are available digitally, so I don’t have to worry about even more manga paperbacks cluttering up my apartment. But maybe I should wait to buy those until after I’ve gotten through the rest of the stuff I already own.

 

2018 reading goals

I’ve been thinking about my habits around book-reading, and reading in general, lately, since it’s the start of a new year. As I mentioned in my New Year’s post, I completed my Goodreads challenge last year, reading over 100 books, though most of them were comic book collections. So far this year, I’ve completed 5 books: one audio drama, and four manga volumes. So I’m not patting myself on the back yet. I’m definitely on a manga kick right now, so this year’s reading may be pretty manga-heavy.

I just finished reading an old New Yorker article about a guy who was in prison for ten years, and used the time to read 1046 books. Not to be overly dramatic, but I feel a little like I’m in prison today; it’s so cold out that it’s really not a good idea to go outside for anything that’s not completely necessary. (So far, I’ve only left the apartment to take out my garbage, and that was pretty painful.) It’s a really fun article, one that I bookmarked a couple of years ago and just rediscovered via my attempt to clean up my bookmarks (see previous post), so that effort hasn’t been entirely pointless.

I also recently learned of the 52book subreddit, which is all about the idea of challenging yourself to read a book a week for the year. I can definitely do that, if comic books count. Otherwise, I think I’d have to be in prison or at least unemployed to manage a reasonably-long novel or non-fiction book a week.

I spent a little time organizing my audiobook “library” a bit more this weekend. I have several that I bought from Audible, several from Apple, a bunch from Humble Bundles, and some random ones I bought on CDs and ripped; I haven’t really been doing a great job of keeping track of them all. (In fact, I seem to have two copies of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere: one on CD and one from Audible.) I’d like to get a bit more into audiobooks and audio dramas this year, mostly due to issues with my tired old eyes making it hard for me to read at night.

I’m also trying to start up a meditation habit this year, so let’s see where any of this goes. It may all go out the window if it warms up and I can actually get out and do stuff outside again.

SDCC Open Registration

Today is the day for open registration for San Diego Comic-Con. It’s a good day for it: it’s snowing outside, I have a cold, and there was a derailment on the Raritan Valley tracks yesterday. So going into NYC would have been difficult even if it wasn’t snowing and I didn’t have a cold.

I turned on my desktop computer early this morning and made sure it was current with Windows updates, Firefox updates, and any other updates I could think of, so hopefully nothing will get in the way of working through the registration process. I also am all stocked up on ramen noodles, herbal tea, and cough medicine.

I’ve completely failed to get tickets for the last few years, and I’ll probably fail again this year, but hey, I have to try!

Rurouni Kenshin and other problematic entertainment

So I mentioned in my post earlier today that I was thinking about getting back into reading some manga, and maybe finishing Rurouni Kenshin, though I was having mixed feelings about that, due to the creator’s arrest for possessing child porn. Well, I did some soul-searching on that. (And by soul-searching, I mostly mean that I checked reddit’s r/manga, r/anime, and r/rurounikenshin sub-reddits for other people’s opinions.) I decided that, since I already own all 28 volumes, and have already read the first 19, it won’t do any harm to read the rest and see how the story ends. And also that maybe I should make a donation to The International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. (I don’t want to imply that making a donation to a related cause “evens things out” in any way, but it helps, I guess.)

I’ve already gotten rid of the first 19 volumes of the Kenshin manga. I either included them with the big donation I made to Superheroes for Hospice in 2015, or to a more recent donation for a library sale. I’m not sure. Once I’m done reading the rest, I’ll probably donate those too, though I’m not sure how I’ll do that. (Or maybe I’ll sell them on eBay and donate the money.) Either way, once I’m done with them, I think that’ll be it for me and Kenshin.

I’ve been a fan of Kenshin for a long time. I just checked my Amazon order history, and I bought the Samurai X: Trust DVD back in January 2001. And I see that I was watching the regular anime series on Cartoon Network in 2003. (I’m pretty sure that I managed to watch the whole series, or at least all the episodes that aired on CN.) For the manga, I was buying it as it was being released by Viz starting in 2003 and running through 2006. I was reading it regularly for awhile, but fell behind, and then abandoned it at some point (along with a lot of other manga and anime that I was buying). But for a long time, Rurouni Kenshin was one of my favorite things.

In the wake of all the scandals that have plagued Hollywood since the Harvey Weinstein story came out, I’ve seen a few articles wrestling with the question of whether or not it’s still OK to watch Kevin Spacey movies or Louis C.K. comedy specials or Charlie Rose interviews. It’s pretty easy for me to answer “no” on all of those, since I wasn’t that big of fan of any of those guys to begin with. But figuring out what to do with Nobuhiro Watsuki’s work is a lot harder. I guess that finishing up the manga volumes I already own is OK, but after that, I should put it behind me and move on to something else. (Sigh.)

(And yes, as a disclaimer, I should say that I realize that I’m just agonizing over mindless entertainment, and my problems here don’t compare in any way to the problems of abused or harassed women, or abused children. “First world problems” and all that. I just felt like this was something I had to think through, write up, and get out of my head.)

 

Extended Thanksgiving weekend laziness

All this month, I’ve been tossing ideas around in my head about productive things I could do with my four-day Thanksgiving weekend. And now it’s Sunday, and I’ve done very little. I went to a friend’s house on Thanksgiving, and had a very good Thanksgiving dinner. Then I started feeling sick on Friday, and just sat around the house all day reading comics and watching TV. I felt better Saturday, and actually got a few things done in the morning, but then I started feeling bad again in the afternoon and went back to my “TV, comics, and napping” agenda. Today, I almost talked myself into going into NYC to see the new David Hockney exhibit at the Met, but didn’t quite manage it. (It’s not actually open yet, but member previews were this weekend.) There’s still time for me to get some stuff done today, but so far, I’ve only managed to shower, eat breakfast, and read comics, and it’s 10am already.

I made one more Black Friday purchase yesterday: I broke down and bought a 27-month Quicken subscription via Amazon for $54. Quicken had their own Black Friday sale, marking down a one-year subscription from $45 to $30, but Amazon had a slightly better deal, essentially $27 per year, for two years, with three extra months tacked on. I almost talked myself into trying MoneyWell, since they haven’t changed to subscription pricing, but I’ve been using Quicken for so long that they’d have to do something really horrible for me to switch at this point. I almost bought the sub from Amazon last month, when they were charging almost $90 for it, so I’m glad I waited. So now I should be set through 2018 and 2019, and I don’t need to think about it again until 2020. (Which doesn’t mean I won’t think about it again, just that I don’t have to…)

My comic book reading this weekend has been eclectic. I finished the Sandman: Dream Hunters adaptation that was done by P. Craig Russell about ten years ago. That was really great, as I expected. (Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers, and Russell is one of my very favorite comic book artists. Maybe my all-time favorite.) (That book is only $5 for the Kindle version, right now, by the way.) I read the original illustrated (not comic book) version a few years ago, and that’s also pretty great. (Yoshitaka Amano is a pretty amazing artist, too.) It’s a little weird how a number of Neil Gaiman’s books exist in multiple versions like this: one with prose and illustrations, and one done as a comic book. But I can’t complain. When both versions are so good, I don’t mind buying and reading the same story twice.

I also read volume 2 of Megatokyo, which is a fairly low-key manga-style web comic. I read the first volume some time ago, but wasn’t really into it enough to go straight to the second. But, yesterday, it seemed like a good “lazy day” book. It was good, but I’m not planning on picking up any more of it right away. If I’m in the mood for it again, maybe I’ll try reading it on the web.

Reading Megatokyo has gotten me somewhat interested in reading manga again. I’ve got a lot of manga paperbacks lying around the apartment, but I haven’t really been in a manga mood lately. I thought maybe I’d finally finish reading Rurouni Kenshin. I have all 28 volumes of the manga, but I’ve only read the first 19 or 20. But now I’ve read that Kenshin’s creator has been arrested on child porn charges, so maybe I’m a bit less enthusiastic about that now. (One slightly alarming takeaway from the linked article: possession of child porn wasn’t “completely illegal” in Japan until 2015? Yikes.)

 

Black Friday

My Black Friday spending, so far, has been limited to renewing my Pluralsight subscription for their usual Black Friday rate of $200. When I paid for my first year, I wasn’t sure I was going to renew it for a second, but I’m getting enough out of it, so I guess it’s worth paying for another year. So I’m good through 2018 now.

I’m not seeing too many other Black Friday sales that look interesting, but I’ll probably spend some money at Comixology before the weekend is over. They have a lot of good stuff on sale.

The Ever-Expanding Backlog

After being somewhat industrious last weekend, I’m spending this weekend largely resting and reading comic books. I intended on putting a dent in my backlog of unread books, but it didn’t really work out that way.

Last summer, I picked up several of the books that Marvel put out under their Timely Comics banner, which were all $3 books reprinting the first three issues of one of their then-current ongoing titles. I wasn’t reading any Marvel books at the time, and I was just getting back into buying monthly books again, after an almost ten-year break, so it seemed like a good idea to pick some of those up and see if anything caught my fancy.

Well, long story short, they mostly went into my to-be-read box and have sat there ever since. (And I’m still not buying any Marvel books on a regular basis.) I did read the Doctor Strange one some time ago, which led to me picking up some of the Jason Aaron Doctor Strange run. (I liked what I’ve read of it, but I still haven’t read all of what I bought yet.)

Yesterday, I decided that I wanted to read something that was vaguely Halloween-related, so I picked the Scarlet Witch book out of the pile. Well, that was good enough that I decided to look into picking up more of it. The series lasted for 15 issues, and has been collected into 3 volumes, all of which are on sale at Amazon for $4.50 each (for the Kindle version). So picking those up was a pretty easy decision. I just finished the third volume. For what it’s worth, I thought it was a pretty good series. (I posted reviews on Goodreads.)

The point I’m trying to get to is that I’ve read a fair number of comics this weekend, but I’m really no further into my backlog. It seems that every time I read something, it leads me down a path where I buy even more stuff.

I had been thinking about maybe reading some Locke & Key this weekend, since that seems kind of Halloween-appropriate, and I have six volumes of that to read, from a Humble Bundle I bought back in 2015. But now it’s Sunday afternoon, and it’s too late to start into something new.

And I probably shouldn’t have bought the random DC Rebirth books that I picked up at last weekend’s comic book show, since now I’m probably going to want to add at least one of those titles to my regular pull list.

But hey, having too much stuff to read is a good problem to have. I just googled “too much to read” and found this interesting short article from Carve magazine on the subject. That guy is reading Shakespeare and Melville and I’m reading comic books, but the problem is similar. (Oh, and I also have way too many programming books to read, but that’s a subject for another post entirely.) By the way, Carve magazine looks like something I’d really be interested in subscribing to, if I didn’t already have way too much to read!

Flemington comic book show

I went to a small comic book show in Flemington today. I haven’t been to a really small local con in a while. This one was pretty cool. They had a few artists as guests, including Darren Auck, who I chatted with for a bit, and bought a sketch from.

I bought a handful of recent DC Rebirth back issues from a guy who was selling them for cover price, buy 2 get 1 free. And a few other older random comics, including an obscure Matt Howarth comic that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. I actually spent more (on comics) at this show than I did at NYCC (though I still didn’t spend very much).

And they gave out a goodie back at the door with quite a few random items in it, including some X-Men back issues and other random comics. Overall, it was a nice little show. Everyone was cool and friendly. There weren’t too many people there when I arrived, but I went early, so maybe it got busier in the afternoon.

Not a bad way to spend an hour or so on a Sunday.

The Levitz Paradigm

I woke up early this morning, and I don’t have much to do today, so I’m going to do some pointless blogging. (You’ve been warned.) I stumbled across a reference to the “Levitz Grid” this morning, with respect to Warren Ellis’ writing on The Wild Storm. That led me down a somewhat interesting path. The Levitz Grid / Levitz Paradigm is a system Paul Levitz devised when he was writing Legion of Super-Heroes back in the 80s. Gene Ha wrote it about it on a Google+ post a few years back. The grid has apparently also been used by Jonathan Hickman, for his Fantastic Four run, and Alan Moore, for Big Numbers. There’s a little bit more about the Levitz Paradigm at the Forbidden Planet blog. And a short write-up from Paul Levitz himself at his site.

I was a big fan of the Legion in the 80s. Back when I was buying comics with the money I was making at my minimum wage McDonald’s job, it was one of only a few books I was buying every month. I spent some time last summer reading a big stack of Legion comics, and wrote about that here and here. I saw Paul Levitz last week at NYCC, at the Will Eisner panel, and he seems to be doing well. (Speaking of which, I should really read his book on Eisner.)

The kind of plotting described by the Levitz Paradigm is, in some ways, very popular today, though usually in a more compressed form than Levitz used on Legion. Writers rarely have the space to let plots play out over multiple years, the way they could in the 80s, when nobody thought about trade paperback collections or six-issue arcs. Now that I think of it, the reason I’m enjoying a few of the books I’m currently reading probably has a lot to do with the fact that the writers have been allowed to stretch out a bit. Ellis’ Wild Storm is planned out as a 24-issue series. Though he’s writing it in six-issue arcs, they’re not really stand-alone stories. I think you’ll need to read all 24 issues to get the whole story. A number of the DC Rebirth titles fit this mold too, helped along by the biweekly schedule. I’d put Batman, Detective, and most notably Deathstroke in the “extended Levitz Paradigm” category (for lack of a better name). These three titles have all lasted for more than 24 issues, all without switching writers. And, while they’ve all been structured with discrete named arcs (as is common today), they’ve also had undercurrents and subplots that have crossed arcs.

I haven’t been reading much from Marvel lately, but it seems like they’ve been sticking more with a paradigm based on big events like Civil War II, Inhumans vs X-Men, and Secret Empire. I am curious about what’s going to come out of Marvel Legacy, but I’m not too optimistic about that. It doesn’t seem like they’re leaving much room for subtlety or long-term character development. Maybe I’m wrong though. I’ll keep an eye on reviews, and if anything seems promising, maybe I’ll look into it.

Star Trek novels and random web comics

I love Ty Templeton. I keep forgetting about his Bun Toons webcomic. (I should really set up an organized collection of webcomics in an RSS reader of some sort so I can read them regularly.)

Here’s a link to a recent Bun Toons that is “relevant to my interests” as the kids say. In particular, my interest in Star Trek novels, walking for exercise, and the inevitable slow decline into old age and decrepitude. I wish I had a thrift store near me with a good supply of Star Trek paperbacks. There used to be multiple used book stores here in Somerville, but they’re all gone. I had a nice walk this morning, but I only got as far as the bakery, and I came home with a granola muffin, so I think that cancels out the walk.

I’m currently reading the second Rise of the Federation novel, which is quite fun if you’re a huge Star Trek nerd who liked the Enterprise series. (If you’re not, though, I wouldn’t recommend it.) Once I’m through that series, I may go back to Ty’s post and look into some of the books he mentioned. I don’t think I’ve previously read any of them, and they do all look good!

Bleeding Cool has a good roundup of NYCC news stories up today. (And that’s how I got to Bun Toons, by the way.) I don’t recommend visiting BC without your ad-blocker set to maximum, but they do have links to a lot of the major DC & Marvel news from the con. The Beat has a lot of con coverage up now too, including an account of the Jack Kirby panel that I missed in favor of the Eisner one. (I really wish I could have gone to both of those!)