– Over at his blog, Scott Saavedra notes that he is rather ill and could use financial help, either via donations or by purchasing his some of his art work. (hat tip: Tom Spurgeon)

– Bloggers Paul O’Brian and Alistair Kennedy have started a new podcast, titled House to Astonish. It’s going to be an every-other-week affair, and focus on comics news and reviews. The premiere episode looks at recent Batman books, Dark Horse’s Gigantic and other books.

– Chris Butcher has more to say on the Bat-Manga! controversy.

– Tom Spurgeon tells us what comics he’s reading online these days.

– David Baille emailed us to let us know what a busy beaver he is these days. He’s got his first ever story in 2000AD this week, animator David Hailwood has animated a couple of his Zombies Interviews strips, and, perhaps most significantly, he’s started a new Webcomic, the Belly Button Bubble Chronicles.

– The work of cartoonists Josh Neufeld and David Rees can currently be seen at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library through January 10, 2009. From the press release: “Neufeld will show material from his true-life graphic novel A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, and Rees will exhibit a collection of his “Clip-Art Comics.” Neufeld will be showing original pages, oversized giclée prints, and an example of the creative process from script to final art.”

– The Windy City Times talks to Alison Bechdel about the release of the new Dykes to Watch Out For collection.

– A quick reminder: Quentin Blake is awesome.

– For your Monday enjoyment: Ten years of New Yorker covers.

While the release of the new Bat-Manga! book has largely met with strong publicity and good reviews, there’s been a bit of controversy recently, as some reviewers and bloggers have noted that manga-ka Jiro Kuwata, whose Batman stories make up the bulk of the book, is not credited on the cover or title page of the book. His name only appears on the inside flap initially, though Kidd does credit him in the introduction, includes a one-page interview with him and dedicates the book to him as well. Laura Hudson has a round-up of comments and offers her own thoughts on the matter:

even if we accept that Kidd et al. played a very important role in designing and presenting this book to an American audience, I’m not sure how that justifies the de facto usurping of authorship here, or the diminishment of the role played by the actual creator of these materials, without whom Kidd and friends would have had nothing to compile, edit, and claim as their own.

I had interviewed Kidd last week about the new book and decided to email him to see if he had anything to say about the controversy. Here is his response:

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The judges have been announced for the 2009 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. The five-person panel selects the nominees, who are then voted on by eligible members of the comics industry.

The 2009 judges are:

• Amanda Emmert, owner of Muse Comics & Games in Missoula, Mont., and communications coordinator for ComicsPRO

• Mike Pawuk, teen-services public librarian for the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Parma, Ohio

• John Shableski, a sales manager for Diamond Book Distributors

• Ben Towle, cartoonist, educator and creator of Midnight Sun

• Andrew Wheeler, comics reviewer, blogger and former senior editor of the Science Fiction Book Club

Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are in early negotiations to remake Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge film Oldboy, based on the manga series by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi.

Variety reports the movie will be produced by DreamWorks and distributed by Universal Pictures.

In the award-winning South Korean film, and the source manga, a man is kidnapped and held in prison for years with only a television and the voices of his jailers for company. One day he’s sedated, stuffed into a trunk and then dumped in a park. When he awakes he sets out to discover who destroyed his life so he can take revenge.

If negotiations work out, Smith would play the kidnapped man.

The original manga was serialized from 1996 to 1998 in Japan’s Weekly Manga Action. All eight volumes have been released in North America by Dark Horse.

– Van Jensen hangs out with Paul Pope to find out about the new reprint edition of Heavy Liquid, which Pope initiated when he discovered out of print copies selling on eBay for as much as $200: ” ‘That was disgusting to me,’ he said. ‘That was money those fans could’ve spent on other books.’ ”

– Kai-Ming Cha talks to Yen Press’ Kurt Hassler about the imprint’s absorption into Hachette’s Orbit imprint.

– Tom Richmond looks at how Mad Magazine has covered close elections in the past.

– Alan Gardner critiques the revamped Comics.com site.

– Erin Finnegan reports on the MangaNext show in Somerset, NJ.

– Apparently Famous Monsters of Filmland’s Forrest J. Ackerman is not doing well.

– Doug Wolk reports on last weekend’s APE convention.

– Noah Berlatsky doesn’t care for S. Clay Wilson’s work.

– Jen de Guzman wonders why Slave Labor isn’t getting that many submissions anymore and decides to blame the Internet.

– Because you don’t have enough to read: Here’s Graphic Novel Reporter.

Ah, Election Day, when a citizenry whose collective brain has been scrambled by 24-hour news channels and poll-tracking websites finally stumbles, zombie-like, into the voting booth.

What’s that have to do with this week’s comics shipping list? Nothing, really. But as “Can’t Wait for Wednesday” is a couple of hours late, I’m pointing to the election as an excuse.

If you’re not as election-obsessed as I am, your attention may be turned to what titles are hitting comics shops tomorrow.

From DC Comics, we’ll see the final volumes of New Teen Titans Archives and The Absolute Sandman, as well as Final Crisis: Resist and the first issue of The Sandman: The Dream Hunters adaptation. Marvel rolls out the Daredevil & Captain America: Dead on Arrival and Wolverine: Chop Shop one-shots, and the first issue of the big Ultimatum event. Dark Horse, meanwhile, collects Dean Motter’s Mister X sci-fi saga.

Elsewhere, IDW Publishing releases Kevin Colden’s Xeric-winning Fishtown, Macmillan publishes the autobiographical Alan’s War, and … Chris Mautner recommends porn. Really.

To see what other titles Chris and I think are worth mentioning, just keep reading. As always, let us know your choices in the comments below.

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Powells.com has a six-page preview from Chip Kidd’s Bat-Manga! book. “Originally published in 1966, at the height of the first worldwide Batman craze, and written and illustrated by manga legend Jiro Kuwata, these adventures were never collected in Japan, and had never been translated into English,” the site writes. Go check’em out.

Earlier this week Chris Mautner linked an article about a prefecture in Japan flagging woman’s manga magazines (out of 9 on the list) as “harmful”. This prompted a post on Melissa’s personal blog about the reaction to fanfiction on the Internet, and how the same mindset might be on display:

I always wondered what the PROBLEM was. (more…)

To close out the day, here are 13 fun & frightening links — some comic related, some not — to enjoy …

• Splash Page has a preview of Dark Horse Comics’ upcoming Creepy archive.

• Great Caesar’s Post has been running horror posts for the past couple of weeks, including Iron Man pumpkins and Hellboy stories.

• The Beat has the complete “Teratoid Cystoma” from Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack Volume 1 as a Halloween treat.

• Bruce Springsteen has a free song about the Jersey Devil up on his site for Halloween.

• World record zombie walk.

• Check out one of the special features from the upcoming Hellboy II DVD release.

• Marvel.com talks to various creators about terrifying moments in comics.

• Character Design looks at various characters from Nightmare Before Christmas.

• Neil Gaiman shows the one-sheet poster for the upcoming adaptation of his book Coraline.

• They Crawl By Night!

• Freddy Krueger, registered offender.

• I’ve had this nightmare before.

• And finally, Halloween is a good time to check out Necessary Monsters if you haven’t yet.

Happy Halloween!

Anime News Network reported yesterday that six josei (or young women’s) manga magazines were flagged by the local government of the southwestern Japanese prefecture of Okayama as “harmful” due to their sexual content:

According to the local laws, the prefecture’s youth welfare office is required to regularly identify and list harmful publications — specifically, titles that should not be accessible to minors, due to sexual content and other reasons. Of the nine magazines on the October 7 list, six were ladies’ comics, or manga aimed at usually older female readers. The office indicated that these magazines were readily available to minors in convenience stores and bookstores and not separated from comic magazines aimed at young girls.

The magazines are: Jōkyū Renai Mint, Renai Bijin if, Renai Tengoku (Paradise), Zettai Renai Sweet, Special Aya and Renai Taiken.

You can’t make stuff like this up. Well, you could, but it wouldn’t have the same delightfully bizarre quality.

Anyway, The Australian is reporting that a Japanese man is currently engaging in a nationwide campaign to make it legal for humans to marry cartoon characters. No, seriously! He’s got a petition and everything! And the amazing thing is, people are actually signing it! Presumably without irony!

Taichi Takashita launched an online petition aiming for one million signatures to present to the government to establish a law on marriages with cartoon characters.

Within a week he has gathered more than 1,000 signatures through.

“I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world,” he wrote.

“However, that seems impossible with present-day technology. Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorize marriage with a two-dimensional character?”

The story notes that marriage is on the decline in Japan and many there find it difficult to find romantic partners, which may help explain the situation a bit, though it doesn’t make it any less goofy.

Of course, there’s every chance Takashita is pulling everyone’s leg, in which case I hope he doesn’t end up running into any of his more devout petition-signers.

– Artist Shepard Fairey, who designed the “Hope” Obama poster, tells Boing Boing he’s pleased as punch to have his work parodied by Mad Magazine: “I consider a high point in my career for pop culture recognition.”

– Laura Hudson talks to James Kochalka about the 10th anniversary of his diary strip, American Elf.

– Hudson also interviews librarian and comics advocate Karen Green, who has a column over at Comixology.

– Doug Wolk looks at Bill Willingham’s upcoming plans for Fables, which include a prose novel.

– Bookslut talks to Phoebe Gloeckner.

– I hadn’t heard about this — cartoonist Carol Lay has a book coming out entitled The Big Skinny, about her lifelong battle with her weight. Wendy Werris has more details.

– Geeknerd’s annual Halloween Costume Bingo is up.

– Frank Santoro takes a look at the new Bat-Manga! collection and declares it good.

– Kristy Valenti takes time to remember the 1986 graphic novel Greenberg the Vampire, one of Marvel’s early entries into the graphic novel market.

– Noah Berlatsky thinks superhero comics are at their best when they don’t take themselves too seriously.

– Everyone and their uncle seems to be talking about Inio Asano’s Solanin, now in stores courtesy of Viz.

I’ve written enough about Halloween-appropriate books over the past couple of weeks, so I won’t highlight titles like Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein, or Screamland, or Cthulhu Tales #7, or Hellboy: The Chapel of Moloch.

Instead, I’ll focus on a Batman manga twofer: the collection of Yoshinori Natsume’s Batman: Death Mask, and the much-anticipated Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan.

If Batman, or manga, isn’t your cup of tea, there’s Final Crisis: Rage of the Red Lanterns, which further lays the groundwork for DC’s next big events. For those in a more political mood, there’s American Presidents and more biographies of John McCain and Barack Obama.

Or, while we’re on the subject of biographies, there’s always Bill Schelly’s Man of Rock: A Biography of Joe Kubert.

To see what other titles Chris Mautner and I think are worth mentioning, just keep reading. As always, let us know your choices in the comments below.

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The tenure of new Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso has been dealt its first political casualty: his comics-reading time.

The self-professed otaku, elected last month after the surprise resignation of Yasuo Fukuda, complained Sunday in a stump speech that, “It’s hard to read comic books as my time is now restricted.”

“This is already Sunday this week,” Aso told a crowd in Tokyo’s famed Akihabara district. “I’ve read Sunday and Magazine of the last week but haven’t got to Jump and Morning.” (He was referring to three major manga anthologies for boys, and one for men.)

It’s no coincidence that Aso chose the pop-culture paradise as the backdrop for his first street speech since taking office on Sept. 24. He used it as a platform from which to hail manga and anime as key exports.

“Japan’s subculture of animation has been overwhelmingly accepted in the world,” he said. “Japan’s culture is not only kabuki or no play. Comic books, our subculture power, have been widely read in not only Asia but Europe, the United States, Latin America.”

Here’s some excellent publishing news for fans of the indie manga scene: Ryan at Same Hat announced that Top Shelf will be publishing a 400-page anthology culling work from the seminal bimonthly underground magazine AX:

This gigantic book was co-edited by author Sean Michael Wilson and AX co-founder Mitsuhiro Asakawa. Sean is a comic book writer from Scotland, now an ex-pat living in working in Japan. He’s published a number of books, nine graphic novels, and his first English-language manga was published this past summer. Asakawa-san is an author and current editor of AX, and worked in the 90s on the staff of GARO, along with writing a number of books on alternative manga and gekiga.

AX was formed when the seminal underground geikga magazine Garo closed its doors several years ago, and has published work by such influential manga-ka as Suehiro Maruo, Shinichi Abe and Usamaru Furuya. Yusaku Hanakuma’s Tokyo Zombie, recently published in the U.S. by Last Gasp, was intially serialized in AX.

According to Ryan, Wilson will be at APE, hosting a panel on the magazine and its history and giving away a 16-page sampler. And here’s where I curse myself for living on the East Coast.

• Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim has been shortlisted for the Canada Council for the Arts’s 2008 Governor General’s Literary Awards in the Children’s Literature-Text category. [Xtra]

• An Italian prosecutor claims that a vampire manga — which one, I don’t know — inspired Raffaele Sollecito to kill Meredith Kercher in 2007. The defense calls the theory “stupid.” Curiously, earlier this year British tabloids tried to link the bloody murder to Akira. [BBC News]

• Designer and author Chip Kidd talks briefly about Bat-manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan: “”It was a labour-of-love project, an act of graphic-novel reclamation, if you want to call it that.” [National Post]

• Suzan Colón of The Advocate is encouraged by the promise of two non-heterosexual characters in James Robinson’s new Justice League series: Batwoman and the alien Starman. She also rattles off a list of “seven of the most memorable queer heroes.” [Advocate.com]

• If you’re thinking about starting a blog, don’t. Paul Boutin says the Age of the Solo Blogger is over: “Scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.” [Wired]

A librarian in Brooklyn, N.Y., has been fined $500 for promoting his daughter’s graphic-novel adaptation of Macbeth in a newsletter he distributes at a local high school.

According to The New York Times, Robert Grandt listed Shakespeare’s Macbeth: The Manga Edition, which his daughter Eve Grandt co-created for John Wiley & Sons, as “Best New Book” under the heading “Grandt’s Picks.” He also displayed copies on a library table at Brooklyn Technical High School with a sign that read, “Best Book Ever Written.” The book was given for free to those interested.

On Monday the city’s Conflict of Interests board announced that it had settled its case against Robert Grandt, who agreed to pay a $500 fine and admit he had violated the city ethics code by promoting his daughter’s work.

Needless to say, Grandt isn’t pleased by the decision. “It’s unbelievable,” he told The Times.

There are certain comics stories that appear again and again and again in the mainstream press: “comics aren’t just for kids,” “the kids love the manga,” AK Comics’ line of Middle Eastern superheroes, and those “And he still lives in Coatsbridge!” profiles of Mark Millar in UK newspapers.

Add to that list articles about Kami No Shizuku (”The Drops of the Gods”), the manga that spawned a wine craze in East Asia. As near as I can tell, the story originally surfaced in April 2007, and has bobbed about like a cork ever since. This is the fifth time I’ve blogged about it here — and that’s with ignoring the articles that appeared last month.

So, why am I blogging about it again? Because The New York Times this morning profiles the manga’s creators, Yuko Kibayashi and her brother Shin, who write under the pseudonym Tadashi Agi:

The comic — which appears every Thursday in Japan in a magazine called the Weekly Morning and has been compiled in 17 books so far — rapidly became a hit in East Asia, where people are still learning to drink wine and may feel insecure about it. Even in Japan, the region’s oldest and biggest wine market, annual per capita consumption is around 2 liters, compared with nearly 9 liters in the United States or 56 liters in France, according to the California-based Wine Institute’s figures for 2005.

In Japan, wine sellers grab copies of the magazine as soon as it comes out on Thursdays, quickly showcasing a featured wine in their stores or on their Web sites. According to Enoteca, a large chain, men in their 30s to 50s tend to ask for wines from the magazine, especially those priced around $30.

In related news, supermarkets in the United States are still waiting for that Martian Manhunter series so they can feature it with the Oreo display.

Papillon Vol. 1
by Miwa Ueda
Del Rey, 192 pages, $10.95.

Papillon is the type of Cinderella, “ugly girl cleans up nice” story that seems to be de rigueur for a lot of shojo manga these days, at least the ones I’ve read (apart from all the “mousy girl stumbles into fantastic other dimension where only she has the power to save the universe” thing I mean). It’s not a genre I can work up a lot of enthusiasm for since it seems to assume that a good makeover and learning to play the arm candy role are all that’s needed for today’s woman to feel fulfilled (the original Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart being my one exception). (more…)

Charities have realized that comics characters are an effective way to get money and attention, but for every authorized use — such as the Met’s superhero fashion exhibit or Diane von Furstenberg’s Wonder Woman collection — there are countless other examples of charities using comic-book icons without permission. Every so often, a publisher clamps down on one of these initiatives–and their reward is typically negative press. Just this month, for example, DC Comics was criticized for not giving the Heroes Initiative permission to include pictures of DC properties in The 3-Minute Sketchbook.

Singling out DC is a bit unfair — Marvel has had its own share of charitable controversy, and DC has allowed its characters to be used for other charitable projects — but the broader question raised by such incidents is not unreasonable. After all, if the money is going to a charity, why shouldn’t a publisher just let its characters help a good cause?

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