Manga Recon @ NYCC 2008: Day One

The first day of New York Comic-Con 2008 yielded few surprises or big announcements, save for Ultimo, a new shonen series created by legendary writer Stan Lee and Shaman King manga-ka Hiroyuki Takei.

I spent most of day one prowling the floor, checking out the offerings from smaller publishers like Fanfare and Vertical, Inc. The always gregarious Stephen Robson was kind enough to show me the Spanish editions of upcoming Fanfare titles Summit of the Gods, Jiro Taniguchi’s gorgeously illustrated paean to mountain climbing, Korea as Viewed by 12 Creators, an anthology in the same spirit as Japan As Viewed by 17 Creators, and My Mommy Is in America and Met Buffalo Bill, a bittersweet coming-of-age tale from French creators Jean Regnaud and Emile Bravo. Stephen was also gracious enough to give me a copy of Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary, an autobiographical tale of a manga-ka who abandons his career for a life of wandering, odd jobs, and—what else?—drinking. Look for a review shortly.

Over at the Vertical booth, Stephen Vrattos and Jessica Hatakeda were passing out the con’s best freebie: Black Jack pens. (Pictures coming soon!) They also had copies of Dororo available. I just finished reading volume one last night and can say, without hyperbole, that it will knock your socks off, even if you’re not a Tezuka enthusiast. Gritty, funny, sentimental, and vividly drawn, it’s a shoo-in for most reviewers’ top ten lists this year.

On the panel front, the “State of the Manga Industry” wasn’t terribly informative—in fact, anyone who regularly follows Brigid Alverson’s blog could have been a presenter, as the discussion focused on the perennial issues of distribution, market saturation, and developing new audiences—older and younger—to sustain the category’s growth.

In lieu of the Ultimo event I chose to attend a smaller panel. (For the full scoop on Ultimo, visit About.Manga, where Deb Aoki has posted an excellent summary of the press conference.) “Beyond Shounen and Shoujo: Japan’s Indie Manga Scene” explored the history of alternative comics in Japan, from the emergence of gekiga magazines such as Machi (City) and Kage (Shadow) in the 1950s to the founding of Axe, a bi-monthly anthology that began production in 1998. British writer Sean Michael Wilson focused primarily on seminal artists Yoshihiro Tatsumi—author of Abandon the Old in Tokyo and The Push-Man and Other Stories—and Yoshiharu Tsuge—an artist whose work has remained largely inaccessible to Western audiences. (Tsuge has resisted requests to translate his work into other languages, although his ground-breaking story “Neji-shiki” has been translated and reproduced in full in issue #250 of The Comics Journal.) Throughout the presentation, Wilson shared rare images from the world of alt-manga, from vintage Kage and Garo covers to heta-uma (literally, “unskilled skilled”) strips from the 1970s. If you’d like to learn more about Japan’s underground comic scene, Wilson will be hanging out at the Fanfare booth (#2343) this weekend.