Is it just my imagination, or has Dark Horse quietly shelved Bride of the Water God and Translucent (a fate that also seems to have befallen XS Hybrid, a manhwa I was decidedly less enthusiastic about)? Scanning their website, I didn’t see the next volume of either scheduled for release between now and October. A quick search of Amazon didn’t yield any hits, either. Does anyone know what’s befallen these series? God, I hope I haven’t fallen for two more DH titles that will never reach closure—after the heartbreak of Club 9 and Satsuma Gishiden, I’m beginning to feel like a commitment-phobic bachelor, at least as far as DH’s manga/manhwa are concerned.

And speaking of books in limbo, what’s befallen Aki Shimizu’s Qwan? According to the Wikipedia, six volumes have been released in Japan, but Tokyopop has yet to publish anything beyond volume four. I’m wondering why it’s been almost a year since the last release—is it a licensing issue, or has Tokyopop caught up to the Japanese edition? I’d hate to see this offbeat shonen fantasy languish in manga purgatory, as its gorgeous artwork and compelling, folkloric storyline deserve a bigger audience.

Over at the recently re-named Good Comics for Kids (formerly Word Balloons), I reviewed a title that’s sure to make many best-of lists this year: Matthew Loux’s delightful Salt Water Taffy: The Legend of Old Salty. PCS’s own David Brothers posted a generous preview here at PCS, and will be reviewing it shortly, so stay tuned. You can also read a 38-page sample over at the Oni Press website.

Salt Water Taffy: The Legend of Old Salty is slated for a May release.

If there’s a younger comic fan in your house, you’ll want to bookmark a great new site: Word Balloons. The indefatigable Brigid Alverson is the creative force behind this new, all-ages comic blog, and she’s assembled a crack team of writers that includes Robin Brenner, Lori Henderson, Esther Keller, Eva Volin, Snow Wildsmith, and yours truly.

In the inaugural post, Brigid explains the purpose of the blog:

Word Balloons is a group blog about comics for kids. We will cover all ages from preschool through young adult, but we won’t lump all ages together; we’re smart enough to know that a three-year-old has different abilities and interests than a 13-year-old.

Our goal is to be the morning newspaper for anyone interested in kids’ comics: creators, editors, teachers, librarians, retailers, and most importantly, readers. We will present interviews, reviews, and opinions and link to the best of what other folks are writing. We expect to have frequent guest posts, and we invite our readers to send us a heads-up whenever they see something interesting about kids’ comics on the internet or even in print.

Also, we will cover all the comics kids read, as opposed to the comics grownups think they should read. That means we will cover works of great literary and artistic merit, but we won’t ignore the formulaic crap either. If it’s fun, it’s in.

So pour yourself some milk, grab the cookies, and join in the conversation!

I hope you’ll bookmark the site, leave a comment (or three), and offer your words of wisdom to other teachers and parents. My first contribution–a review of Flight: Explorer–is posted, as are several terrific interviews, reviews, and opinion pieces by Robin, Lori, and Brigid.

Yale has yet to create a graduate program in Slayerology, but folks in the Ivory Tower do seem smitten with Joss Whedon’s most enduring creation, seeking out every opportunity to apply the insights of Derrida, Foucault or, as this fan would have it, Schopenhauer, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I’m not sure that Wagner would appreciate his operas being lumped into the same category as Firefly and Buffy… he was a bit of an egomaniac.)

If you just so happen to be a Buffy geek with academic street cred and a strong background in music, this call for papers might be right up your alley:

From bands at The Bronze in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Angel singing karaoke at Caritas to the traditional-style fiddling and guitar playing in Firefly, music is an integral part of Joss Whedon’s universes. This collection seeks essays from both established and emerging scholars on the uses of and contributions made by music in the Whedonverse. Discipline-specific and interdisciplinary views are encouraged to address issues of power, relationships, identity, gender, communication, religion, multiculturalism, sanity and madness, and other topics present in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Serenity. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Music and performance
• Gender/identity/race and music (including traditional identity topics as well as those of non-human characters)
• Genre representations
• Scoring for action sequences
• Music and communication
• Musical characterization
• Music and camp
• Music and transformation
• Character vocality
• The use of silence and music in unique ways
• Levels and mixing of diegesis and non-diegesis

The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2008. The collection will be published by Scarecrow Press with an anticipated publication date in 2009.

Essays should be between 7,000 and 9,000 words and follow Chicago Manual of Style format. Only electronic submissions sent in a .doc (Word) formats will be accepted. Authors are encouraged to include photographs, but will be responsible for acquiring all materials and permission for use. Please send a cover letter including the title of the essay, an abstract of not more than 200 words, an author c.v, and author biography of not more than 100 words along with the complete blind essay (author’s name should not appear) to Kendra Preston Leonard at caennen_at_gmail.com.

I love me a good sci-fi flick as much as the next self-proclaimed geek, so I had high hopes for Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. I didn’t catch it in the theater—chalk it up to sheer laziness—so I added it to my Netflix queue to see whether it lived up to its “fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes or deserved to languish in box-office oblivion. (The film grossed less than $4 million during its brief theatrical run last summer.) Alas, I wish I’d heeded the advice of the always reliable Anthony Lane, who summarized Sunshine thusly:

The film is nonsense, and what counts is whether viewers will feel able to lay aside their logical complaints and bask in what remains: a trip in search of a tan.

Put simply, it’s a stinker, despite its classy cast—Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michelle Yeoh—stunning visuals, and risk-taking director.

The story itself has promise. A crew of astronauts is dispatched into deep space with an atomic payload. Their destination: our dying sun, which has begun to sputter out billions of years ahead of schedule, causing Earth to descend into a permanent state of winter. The first forty or so minutes of the film are rather uneventful, depicting life about the Icarus II. (Yes, it’s that kind of film: heavy on the symbolism, light on the insight.) The crew waxes philosophical over their mission, sends messages to loved ones at home, and squabbles over the small stuff. (Who left the toilet seat up—that sort of thing.) I think this section is supposed to serve as a character study, introducing us to the crew so that we care who lives and who dies in the final reel. Unfortunately, most of the cast lacks the requisite gravitas to convince us that they’re scientists and pilots; Yeoh and Sanada seem to be the only adults among the sullen crew. The biggest misfire casting-wise, however, is the normally excellent Murphy. That quiet intensity he’s brought to roles in Batman Begins, Breakfast on Pluto, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley has been replaced by bored passivity; it’s hard to believe that the silent, shaggy-haired fellow in the wifebeater is supposed to be the mission’s nuclear physicist. Couldn’t the screenwriter have fed him a few lines of scientific mumbo-jumbo to boost his credibility—perhaps a reference to the space-time continuum, or a detailed explanation of how, exactly, the ship’s payload is supposed to jump-start a star?

The crew’s routine is interrupted by a distress signal from the Icarus I, which vanished before successfully completing a similar mission. The astronauts rehearse familiar arguments about tracing the signal’s source—didn’t any of them see Alien?—ultimately deciding that their sister ship might still have its nuclear payload intact, offering them a plan B if their own Manhattan-sized bomb should fail to detonate. This decision triggers a series of small catastrophes that damage the ship, compromise the crew’s oxygen supply, and kill off the less developed cast members.

Sunshine’s final act quickly devolves into a grim hybrid of slasher flick and kamikaze drama when the crew realizes it has a saboteur in its midst. Whatever claims to scientific accuracy the film made in its first reels are quickly refuted by a series of ludicrous set-pieces, including a scene in which several astronauts hurtle through the vacuum of space wrapped only in some insulation—and survive. (Even if the scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories charged too hefty a consulting fee, wasn’t there someone on the set who could point out that the human body doesn’t withstand dramatic changes in pressure and temperature?) Other signs of desperation are evident as well: sympathetic characters meet gruesome ends purely for the shock value, and Boyle begins employing jump-cuts and shaky cams to heighten the sense of urgency—and perhaps conceal the saboteur’s identity—as the dwindling number of survivors continue their one-way journey to the sun.

The biggest problem with Sunshine, however, is that it never feels like a fresh gloss on a tired trope. Boyle worked wonders with tried-and-true B-movie formula in 28 Days Later, which borrowed liberally from George Romero’s classic zombie pictures while updating the genre to suit contemporary tastes. In Sunshine, however, these hat-tips to Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott never feel like organic elements of the story; like Quentin Tarantino, Boyle seems to have confused air quotes and knowing nods with genuine homage. I didn’t mind the shout-out to the silky-voiced HAL, but it felt utterly gratuitous, as if Boyle was intent on reminding us that he’s seen a lot of classic science fiction. This high-mindedness begins weighing on the film early in the first reel, when Boyle employs the kind of lingering camera shots and languid pace I associate with Tartakovsky. If Boyle had something interesting to say about human nature, or about our dependence on the sun for existence, such expository dawdling might be excusable. But when such Solaris Lite scenes are the prelude to an artsy, Freddie vs. Jason spectacle, the audience feels cheated: why the bait and switch?

About the best I can say for Sunshine is that the sound and set crews did a terrific job designing the ship. The movie looks like a million bucks—well, $40 million, to be accurate—and has a suitably eerie, minimalist soundtrack that’s a welcome relief from the swelling strings and tutti blasts so characteristic of space sagas. Bernard Hermann no doubt would approve. Whether Stanley Kubrick would feel as charitably towards Sunshine will remain an eternal mystery.

Kai-Ming Cha caused quite a stir when she named Jeffrey Brown’s The Incredible Change-Bots one of the ten best manga of 2007, with bloggers questioning her decision to list it alongside more obvious choices such as Suppli, MW, and Tekkon Kinkreet. Regardless of whether Change-Bots qualifies as “manga,” her list spurred me to finally pick up a copy and read it—something I’d been meaning to do for months. And while I wouldn’t include it on any of my “best of 2007” lists, I did find it entertaining.

As the title suggests, The Incredible Change-Bots is an affectionate parody of The Transformers in all its incarnations: Saturday morning cartoon, plastic action figure, Hollywood blockbuster. On the distant planet of Electronocybercircuitron, two groups of sentient machines compete for control of the planet’s dwindling energy resources: the peaceful Awesomebots and the war-like Fantasticons. (As in the original Transformers series, both the Awesomebots and the Fantasticons can assume the form of vehicles and household appliances from big rigs and cement trucks to microwave ovens and calculators.) Electronocybercircuitron descends into civil war, forcing both groups of robots to flee the devastation. After fighting erupts on their escape vessel, the Awesomebots and Fantasticons crash land on Earth, where two groups go their separate ways to regroup for another battle.

Brown devotes most of his energy to sending up popcorn movie clichés, from hero catch-phrases (“Time to take out the trash!”) to speeches aimed at boosting the esteem of the least impressive Awesomebot. Sometimes the jokes feel stale or obvious, as is suggested by this exchange between Balls, a Change-Bot who transforms into a golf cart, and Jimmy, a human teenager who befriends him:

Jimmy: “I bet your friends will be really happy to see you, Balls.”
Balls: “I don’t know about that. I’m so small, they think I’m not very useful.”
Jimmy: “But what if there was, like, a tiny tunnel or something, and they needed you to race through it?”
Balls: “Gosh, Jimmy Junior, I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

Most of the cinema conventions that Brown mocks have been parodied ad nauseam in movies like Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Spaceballs, thus diluting their comedic impact. But just as the Naked Gun coasted through dopey moments on the strength of Leslie Nielsen’s deadpan delivery, Change-Bots squeaks by on the strength of Brown’s artwork and lettering, which has the same slightly crude, child-like quality I associate with Roz Chast’s New Yorker cartoons.

The Incredible Change-Bots is funnier when it takes aim at more topical targets. In the opening pages of the book, for example, there’s a sly poke at American politics as Brown explains what prompted the conflict back on the Change-Bots’ homeworld: the democratic “machinery” comes to a screeching halt when the Fantasticons rig an election. Brown also wrings laughs out of our current energy crisis, poking fun at tree-huggers and environmental pillagers alike. The Awesomebots, for example, embrace renewal resources, building “solar-turbine power converters” in the Amazon rainforest, while the Fantasticons buy nuclear reactors from the US military.

Considering how quickly you’ll finish this pocket-sized book, its $15.00 price tag seems a little steep, though the high quality paper stock and French flaps guarantee that The Incredible Change-Bots will make a more lasting addition to your library than most trade paperbacks. The Incredible Change-Bots is best appreciated as quick, portable way to get your political satire fix while The Daily Show is on hiatus. And if you can’t get enough of Brown’s goofy jokes, don’t worry: in true action-movie fashion, he leaves the door open for a sequel.

For those of us who aren’t relishing the thought of another shakey-cam spookfest, the Harvard Film Archives is offering a neat bit of Cloverfield counter-programming this weekend: Vice vs. Virtue in Pre-Code Hollywood. This three-day festival celebrates the golden age of shock theater with ten films made between the advent of “talkies” in 1927 and the implementation of the 1934 Production Code. As Brandeis University historian Thomas Doherty explains, these movies offered Depression-era audiences taboo-busting escapism, documenting the travails of “trigger-happy gangsters, wisecracking dames, and subversive rebels.” “Frantic for patrons, every studio risked a raid from the vice squad to lure moviegoers whose spending was no longer discretionary, who were sometimes choosing between food and film,” he explains. “Even MGM, the Tiffany studio with high-hat pretensions, bankrolled Kongo (1932), a surreal run through the jungle featuring Walter Huston as a demented ivory trader trafficking in voodoo, vengeance, drugs, and prostitution.” Walter Huston?!

The festival kicks off tonight (1/18/08) at 7:00 PM with a talk by Doherty, who recently published a biography of the man responsible for ending the party in 1934: Joseph I. Breen. Doherty’s lecture will then be followed by a double feature of Call Her Savage (1932), starring Jazz Age cutie Clara Bow as a debutante gone bad (she goes slumming in Greenwich Village, a sure sign of depravity), and Blood Money (1933), starring George Bailey as a bail bondsman who keeps company with kleptomaniacs, nymphomaniacs, cross-dressers, and corrupt pols. Tickets are $10 and may be purchased at the Carpenter Center beginning 45 minutes before the show. (No advanced ticket sales via phone or web.)

For a complete schedule of events and directions to the Harvard University campus, visit the Harvard Film Archive website.

Better late than never, I guess!

More fun, less fiber at Minx.
The basic impulse behind DC’s Minx imprint was a noble one: create a line of comics that would appeal to young female readers. Though DC drafted some top-notch talent for its first Minx titles, the results were decidedly mixed, producing one entertaining book (The Re-Gifters), one middling book (Good As Lily), and two very pedestrian ones (Clubbing, The Plain J.A.N.E.S.). The biggest problem with these early Minx offerings was that they wore their literary aspirations on their sleeves, trying too hard to be the graphic novel equivalents of Judy Blume. Most of the titles were earnest and dull, with teens speaking in the slightly stilted patois of Dawson’s Creek and The OC as they fumbled their way to Very Important Life Lessons. No wonder many teenage girls continued to beat a path to the Borders manga aisle instead of seeking out Minx books at the local comic book store. My suggestion to DC is to stop treating Minx like a prestige project, cranking out respectable books that parents won’t mind buying for their teens—focus on making the books fun.

Fewer attempts to retell the classics in graphic novel form.
I don’t mind comics in the classroom—there’s ample evidence that comics can help a variety of students become more proficient readers. My curmudgeonly side is less enthusiastic, however, about the growing number of publishers hawking graphic novels as tools for teaching teens the classics. These pow-n-splat editions of Great Books prove just how difficult it can be to capture the poetry and mystery of the original works when you boil them down to plot—the least difficult element of Shakespeare or Homer for readers to grasp. And if the artwork isn’t good… well, anyone who’s ever lived with a teenager knows that high school students are quick to reject whatever doesn’t meet their platonic ideal of coolness or authenticity, especially if adults are calling it hip. (Or worse: manga.)

A moratorium on Spider Man movies.
The third Spider Man movie was a tedious, loud affair that ran too long, featured too many villains, and touched on too many iconic plotlines to give any of them satisfactory treatment. Even Rosemary Harris’s expert line-readings and Bruce Campbell’s deliciously obnoxious cameo couldn’t redeem this overstuffed turkey. Best to let this franchise lie fallow for a few years before making another movie… preferably with a new director.

And while we’re at it…
Let’s declare a moratorium on X-Men movies and movies based on C-list Marvel properties.

More funding and publicity for CMX.
Pssssst, DC… you already have a line of comics that appeal to girls: CMX! If you invested half the money and promotional energy in CMX that you do in Minx, you might be pleasantly surprised by the results. As commentators around the mangasphere have noted, the CMX catalog boasts some amazing titles, from old-school shojo like Swan, Moon Child, Cipher, and From Eroica With Love to kid-friendly fare like Chikyu Misaki and The Palette of 12 Secret Colors. But if you’re not making an obvious effort to promote them, how will the Fruits Basket crowd know that there are other titles besides Vampire Knight, Kare Kano, and Fall in Love Like a Comic? Take a page from the Go! Comi playbook and try some fun, creative, inexpensive strategies for building brand loyalty and increasing awareness of the CMX catalog: Fan art and poetry contests. Forums for discussing CMX products. Unusual giveaways. Fan-friendly panels at conventions. (Translation: give the Wildstorm folks their own separate forum for interacting with Ex Machina fans.)

Bring out your dead…
Now that the manga market has matured—and there are readers hungry for the kind of weird, edgy, WTF?! stuff that Viz and Dark Horse licensed five or ten years ago—I’d like to encourage publishers to revisit past under-performers with an eye towards reissuing them. Topping my list of titles I’d like to see in 2.0 versions: Clover, Rumic Theater, and What’s Michael. Given how beautiful the original presentation of Clover was, I think Tokyopop would be wise to reissue it as a four-volume box set (as it had planned to do in 2006 before dropping the project), while Rumic Theater and What’s Michael seem better suited to the omnibus treatment. I don’t need bells and whistles on any of these editions, though I wouldn’t mind seeing them issued with the artwork unflipped and, in the case of Clover, the translation refreshed. A new font for the lettering would also be most welcome—the original edition is typeset in what looks like Times New Roman.

More Tezuka, Toume, and old-school shojo.
I must have been good last year, because Santa rewarded me with a big-ticket item from my 2007 wish list: a new edition of Black Jack, courtesy of Vertical, Inc. That news has made me greedy for titles such as Kei Toume’s The Hour of the Mice and Fuguruma Memories, as well as shojo classics The Rose of Versailles, The Song of the Wind in the Trees, The Poe Family, and Princess Knight. What would really make my heart sing, however, is an English language edition of Ludwig B., Tezuka’s final project. Though Tezuka intended Ludwig B. to be sprawling, panoramic portrait of Beethoven and his times, Tezuka only completed two volumes before his death. It’s a pity he didn’t start the project earlier, as its superb layouts, vivid Viennese street scenes, and glorious images of Beethoven at the piano need no translation for music lovers to enjoy. Pair it with some CDs, and you might just have a bitchin’ music appreciation book that captures the spirit of the Classical style, if not all the historical details. No doubt Charles Rosen would approve, though he might not know what to make of the nekomimi in volume two.

Save titles from licensing limbo.
With so many series debuting each year, it’s inevitable that many won’t post sales figures big enough to justify their continued publication. But when it’s a title I love… well, I become a crusader, forgetting that manga publishers are in business to make money, not please (almost) middle-aged fangirls. Three titles that I’d love to see rescued from licensing limbo are Ai Morinaga’s Duck Prince (CPM), Masato Kobayashi’s Club 9 (Dark Horse), and Hiroshi Hirata’s Satsuma Gishiden (Dark Horse). Of the three, Duck Prince seems like the most likely candidate for a license rescue, perhaps by Tokyopop. As for the other two… there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing the full run of either. I just have to accept that unpleasant truth.

Better mainstream coverage of comics.
I’d been struggling to pull together my thoughts on the subject when Tom Spurgeon and David Welsh posted thoughtful critiques of the comics coverage in Newsweek, The New York Times, and Entertainment Weekly. I don’t have much to add to the discussion, though I can think of two suggestions for big-city papers interested in covering comics.

First, stop ghettoizing comic reviews and best-of lists to your websites. We still live in a world where “print” equals “prestige,” and when you can’t be bothered to give regular print space to comics, you send the message that comics just aren’t as important as the other media you cover. Second, don’t confine your reviews to literary comics (i.e. Shortcomings) and event comics (i.e. Civil War); try to cover a more representative sampling of the market. If you applied the same selection criteria to determining which movies, books, and TV shows to review, your Arts & Leisure section would be mighty slim indeed. (And given how miserable your high culture coverage can be, you can’t claim to be taking the aesthetic high road by thumbing your nose at Death Note.)

So that’s my wish list for 2008. Many thanks to the bloggers and readers who made 2007 a great year for us at PopCultureShock. Here’s to an even better 2008!

Over at Shuchaku East, precocious blogger Chloe Ferguson is celebrating her blog’s one-year anniversary with a terrific contest. One lucky winner will receive a copy of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, a beautiful manga that made many blogger’s Best of 2007 lists (including our Best Manga list). To enter, send Chloe your name and address by Thursday, January 10th at midnight (EST). The winner will be chosen at random from the entries.

Want to know more about Town of Evening Calm? David Welsh has compiled links to and quotes from reviews around the blogsphere, from Otaku USA to Jog the Blog. Though David has been generous in sharing the spotlight with other reviewers in his efforts to promote this wonderful book, I’m going to let him have the last word on why you ought to read Town of Evening Calm:

The incalculable individual cost of the bombing of Hiroshima has been handled in drama and documentary, and one can’t argue that the act of examining that kind of horror is automatically a virtuous or courageous act. The critical element is any given work’s ability to move its audience.

To personalize a tragedy of this magnitude is to risk trivializing the event or populating it with characters more philosophically functional than emotionally specific. Kouno avoids these failings entirely. There’s richness and realness to her cast and generosity to her storytelling that lets readers inhabit the world instead of simply observing or commenting on it. It’s a perfect blend of the painfully real and the creatively effective.

So, you should buy this book, because it’s good in every way that matters. Reading it will give you genuine pleasure, and that pleasure will only be enhanced by the worthiness of the subject matter and Kouno’s intelligence and sensitivity in dramatizing it.

And if you don’t win that copy that Chloe is giving away at Shuchaku East, you shouldn’t have trouble tracking it down at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Last Gasp, the publisher.

Over at Comic World News, David Welsh, a.k.a. Precocious Curmudgeon, enlists the help of numerous bloggers in staging an overlooked comic and manga festival of his own. (Should I be inserting a trademark sign next to the phrase “overlooked manga festival” label, or should I simply be paying Shannon Gaerity’s lawyer for permission to use it?) This week’s contributors include Brigid Alverson of MangaBlog, Ed Chavez of MangaCast, Kevin Melrose of Newsarama, Matt Brady of Warren Peace Sings the Blues, and yours truly. Next week, David will post part two of the series, with a new gang of comic and manga pundits pimping under-appreciated titles. Don’t miss it… you never know who will be stopping by!

UPDATE, 1/1/08: Part two of David’s Overlooked Manga Festival is now posted, and features lengthier recommendations from two of my favorite bloggers: John Jakala of Sporadic Sequential and Robin Brenner of No Flying, No Tights. Definitely worth a look, especially if you’ve been on the fence about trying The Demon Ororon, Kekkaishi, or Vagabond.