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Thursday, December 22, 2005
Very Last Minute Look at Previews
So, I'm still helping out the shop with manga orders. Because someone who actually reads the stuff should maybe give people a clue as to what to order or not order. Which gives me an opportunity to go over the entire Previews catalog in detail. Which always gives me a headache. Which brings out the short-tempered, mean-spirited side of me.
Dark Horse has the first volume of Crying Freeman, an intensely violent and misogynistic title that's widely regarded as a classic. They also have a ton of horror-themed manga titles...all scheduled to ship in March. I guess to celebrate the assassination of Caesar with campy horror comics.
I'm increasingly finding the very act of flipping through some publishers sections painful. There are three in particular in the A-D section that just hurt me on a very deep and personal level.
Hey, does anyone remember when Go Comi solicited Her Majesty's Dog through Diamond? I saw it in my local Mega-Chain Bookstore and thought I might like it, but according to Pal Mike Diamond doesn't have it on their in-stock lists, and going back through Previews I can't find it advertised. I'd prefer to buy it through my local comics shop, but if Diamond doesn't have it, I guess I'd have to actually buy a manga book from a chain store for the first time. Actually, I just looked it up, and apparently it's a Borders and Waldenbooks exlcusive title. You know, if I still worked in comics retail, the notion of store-exclusive titles would anger me, rather than just annoy me. I also can't seem to find the first volume of Cantarella anywhere. Which teaches me for not buying it when it came out.
Ignite Entertainment has the first collected edition of Jeff Krell's gay comic Jayson. I always liked the strip when I would find it in Gay Comics or Meatmen, and it's nice to see it available in collected form. It's an off-kilter, sitcom-esque look at a slightly neurotic gay man's life, and one of the better gay humor strips from the period. Ignite also has a new edition of the English language edition of Ralf Koning's Maybe...Maybe Not. Koning is a fantastic cartoonist, and his work is hard to come by in the US. If you're at all interested in gay comics or European humor strips, I'd strongly suggest you nag your local comics dealer to order you a copy.
Kyle Baker Publishing has trades for Nat Turner and The Bakers. Turner is an absolutely beautiful historical drama, and The Bakers is an excellent humor book. Both are worth your attention.
I'd say something nice about NBM's Dungeon trades, but I really didn't like the format they went with for the US editions, either the comic serializations they started out with or the almost-manga-sized trade collections.
Pantheon Books is releasing a fumetti adaptation of the "animated" (i.e. rotoscoped in ugly colors over film of mis-cast actors) A Scanner Darkly film. This is wrong on so many levels, I'm not even sure where I would start listing the reasons...
Let's just pretend that Tokyopop doesn't exist and move on...
Actually, I'm not terribly taken with Viz this month either. I realize that Read or Die has a strong fan-following, but I'm just not interested. And Black Cat's ad doesn't engage me at all.
Ah hell...I have to do this again a month from now.