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Lone Wolf and Cub

LONE WOLF AND CUB was the single most recommended manga title mentioned in response to my request (buried somewhere in the comments of my legendary manga posts) for a starting off point in to the work. So through the good graces of eBay and my PayPal account I acquired a couple of dozen of the early volumes and dug in.

The volumes I picked up were those put out by First Publishing back in 1987-88. They apparently only ran up to about issue 30 which, at roughly 60 pages per book, accounts for less than a quarter of the total LW&C run. As many of you surely know, Dark Horse began publishing five issue collections in 2000, eventually compiling a 28 volume set that covered the entire series. You can find pretty much all of these volumes on Amazon if you’re so inclined. My completist nature will undoubtedly force me down that path.

So far I’ve read about a dozen issues and it’s quite easy to see why this was recommended. Excellent stuff. The story is simple: Disgraced Shogun assassin Ogami Itto and his infant son Daigoro travel the countryside in Edo-period Japan, selling their services to people in need while seeking revenge against the hit squad who killed Itto's wife. If this were simply a revenge tale the stories would get old quick but author Kazuo Koike uses the broader revenge and redemption themes as vehicles for a detailed exploration of the culture, history and brutality of feudal Japan. Each issue is self-contained -- often only progressing the greater plot incrementally -- and structured to strengthen our trust in Itto’s honor and ability. Each inevitably leading to a violent denouement. There’s some repetition here as every issue involves Itto spilling someone's (usually multiple someones) blood and at times it's hard to tell one antagonist from the next, but on a visceral level that’s part of the appeal.

The art of Goseki Kojima is more rugged and realistic than you might typically think of when someone says “manga” and in many places the art is all you have as Kojima’s images carry the load for pages at a time. I’ve read that Kojima has had a significant influence on Eastern and Western artists alike (particularly Frank Miller who pens the covers and intros for the first 12 issues) and while I’m not knowledgeable enough to speak to that, there are certainly some artists working today who could learn a thing or three about the value of  facial expressions and staging action scenes from Kojima’s work here.

If I was given to rating things with numbers I would give LONE WOLF AND CUB a 10 out of 12 since of the dozen issues I’ve read 10 have been very good to excellent and only two have been predictable or uninspired. (I’m not going to say which two.) If you’re looking for something different than the standard super hero fair, and yet not too far off the beaten path, you should try these out. I promise you’ll be entertained and that you'll learn something. 

My Manga Education

Wow.

When I posted the two articles on manga they were largely for me. Knowing that most of my audience doesn’t actually read manga I figured there to be little interest in these posts, but I wanted to write them, so what the heck. Some 700 plus hits later I may have to revise that theory.

Here are some random thoughts after the last few days:

I can’t say I’m a manga “fan” as yet – since I still haven’t read a single book, but I can honestly say the I’m a huge fan of manga readers. The response to my posts - while perhaps a little exasperated at times, yeesh, another dope who’s never read a manga book is going to tell us how it’s done - has been uniformly polite, friendly and informative.

As to not having read any manga yet: on the advice of several people I’ve been actively trolling eBay for LONE WOLF AND CUB sets and will be dropping in to Borders this week to pick up some other recommended titles. Thanks to all who emailed or left recommendations in the comments section.

I owe a huge thanks to David Taylor over at Love Manga. His original link to my post help kick off this little tempest in a teapot and the comments section of that post may be the single most interesting comments section I’ve experienced since deciding to write about comics. (But I don’t get out much.) Once you get past the little back forth between myself, David, Rivkah and few others, keep reading for some absolutely fascinating history on TOKYOPOP, culminating in a link to this which is absolutely worth your time. David has now posted a follow up with some of the responses. 

I began writing my post with only a vague notion that DC was doing something with manga and now have a much greater understanding for what’s gone wrong and right for them. I found it interesting that as quickly as someone stomped all over them someone else stepped in to prop them up a bit. There is hope, I think, but there’s almost certainly a subset of readers out there that will never, ever read a manga book published by DC or Marvel. That’s okay, I feel the same way about Ben Affleck movies. (That comment should officially kick off the “Ben Affleck manga” hits from Google.)

In hindsight, I didn’t explain clearly enough that this was purely an academic exercise on my part. I’m in no way saying that Marvel or DC need to be a force in manga or will. I just think they could be and that it would be profitable for them to be taking the steps to get there. And I wasn’t discounting other companies efforts to grow in this direction either – I was just looking at it from the perspective of the big two. The manga landscape is large and growing; in five years I expect there will be a number of players that we know little or nothing about today.

I feel like my manga IQ has ballooned about 50 points in the last few days. Thanks to everyone for their patience, links and input.

The Growing Manga Opportunity – Part II

Setting aside any posturing to the contrary, I think we can all agree that manga has something the big two, as well as any number of independent publishers, desire: loads of female readers. While there may be some managerial impetus (some might say incompetence) towards corralling these readers in hopes of converting them to superhero books, the real motivation should be simply that they buy books, period.

So how will Marvel and DC go about penetrating this market? Current indications are that a grass roots effort will fail. Referring as I did in Part I to Dirk Deppey’s column, Deppey articulates several examples of how the big two have either botched or failed to capitalize on opportunities that could have provided a foothold into this audience. The issue now becomes one of perception, will the desired readership accept a "manga" book coming from one of these publishers? (I’m leaving the independents out of the discussion for now – they have issues two wholly separate from the two big guns.) Well, DC is busy trying to answer that question for us with the CMX Manga line, but as we see at the indispensable Love Manga site, none of the CMX titles have made much of an impact so far. I wouldn’t totally write of DC’s efforts yet -- poor sales may be more indicative of a poor product than the shadow of the publisher -- but considering these numbers are derived from Wizard, I would expect the sales of the CMX books to actually show higher than a list derived from other sources (if that were available). Why? I would think -- with out knowing any better -- that DC’s leverage might afford CMX a little better representation through the direct market than some other publishers would receive. And if they do, that makes the showing that much the worse. Regardless, not being able to place so much as one book in the top 40 can’t be what DC has in mind.

The Growing Manga Threat? – Part I

I don’t read manga. I expect that will change at some point, but after a 25 year hiatus I’m having enough of a time figuring out what to read in the genres I’m familiar with without adding something to which I have no real connection. But I am fascinated by manga’s role in the business side of the industry in as much as I’m fascinated in the business side of the entire industry as a whole, and manga  comprises a large slice of that.

Before you go any further you might want to read Dirk Deppey’s most recent Opening Shot column in The Comics Journal.  If you're too busy for that, his conclusion summarizes his thesis fairly well:

It has now been conclusively demonstrated that the young female reader is, in fact, quite willing to buy comics. She just doesn't want yours. She's got her own thing now, and if you want her to notice you again, you're going to have to play by her rules. If you can't be bothered to do that, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Does the whole discussion boil down to the American comic book industry simply not getting it? (Or perhaps choosing not to get it.) That sure seems to be the case, at least based on anecdotal evidence, but I’m sure there’s an element of not wanting to be “got” as well – at least not by those ham-handed publishers of cape and tights books. Those guys couldn’t possibly ever get it, could they? Well, yes they could and probably will - and sooner than you might expect.