Friday Procrastination Aides, 9/3/10

If you’ve poked around the site this week, you’ve probably noticed that the new layout features a studlier menu and retooled sidebar. The goal of my renovations was to make it easier to find reviews and articles of interest, whether you’re looking for manga, manhwa, or kid-friendly titles. A few of the categories aren’t populated yet, but stay tuned — they will be in the coming weeks. As always, I welcome suggestions about the site design and navigation, especially if you find any glitches. And if anyone can tell me how to tweak the index.php file so that I can eliminate those stray commas that are flanking the category tags, I’ll return the favor by sending you some manga.

Linkward ho!

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Review Redux: Apollo’s Song, Vols. 1-2

Apollo’s Song may be one of the strangest sex ed manuals ever written.

It begins with a textbook Tezuka scene, at once lyrical and goofy: millions of anthropomorphic sperm race towards a comely egg. After one lucky soul pants and claws his way to the front of the scrum, the sperm and egg dissolve into a passionate embrace. In the following panel, we see the result of their union, an embryo, presiding over a veritable sperm graveyard. This juxtaposition of life and death — or, perhaps more accurately, sex and death — foreshadows the dialectic that will play out in the following chapters.

We are then introduced to Shogo, a young man who has just arrived at a psychiatric hospital. Shogo is a sociopath: unemotional, cruel to animals, scornful of society, and deeply misogynist. While undergoing electroshock therapy, Shogo has a vivid hallucination in which a stern goddess chastises him for renouncing all forms of love. As punishment for his cruelty, she condemns him to a fate straight out of Dante’s Inferno: Shogo will love and lose the same woman over and over again for eternity. Thus begins a series of romantic and sexual encounters between Shogo and various incarnations of his ill-fated partner.

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The Shipping News, 9/1/10

It seems weirdly fitting that The Dreaming Collection (Tokyopop), Queenie Chan’s Gothic boarding school mystery, is being re-issued just as the fall semester begins. The new edition, which collects all three volumes into a single omnibus, is a brick of a book, clocking in at 608 pages. Re-reading the series in one sitting, its strengths and weaknesses come into sharper focus. Chan shows great promise as an artist and a storyteller; Greenwich Private School looks like something out of a Hammer Studios film, with its twisting corridors, lugubrious furnishings, and disturbing artwork, making it the perfect setting for a ghost story. For nearly four hundred pages, Chan sustains a mood of quiet dread, carefully laying the foundation for the big reveal in the final volume. Unfortunately, the last two hundred pages feel compressed, with too many conveniently expository conversations and a bolt-from-the-blue plot twist that never really synchronizes with the main storyline, making me wonder if Chan had originally envisioned the series as four volumes.

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Short Takes: Calling, Gorgeous Carat Galaxy, and Scarlet

And now for something… well, not completely different, but a little unusual for me: a Short Takes column focusing on yaoi manga. Back in March, when I reviewed the omnibus edition of Little Butterfly, I explained my ambivalence about yaoi:

On the one hand, I love the idea of women creating erotica for other women, of creating a safe and fun space where female readers can explore their sexual fantasies. On the other hand, I’m often uncomfortable by the way in which rape is conflated with extreme romantic desire in yaoi; it’s disappointing to see the “you’re so irresistible, I couldn’t help myself!” defense trotted out as a justification for sexual violation. To be sure, the rape-as-love trope abounds in romance novels and mainstream pornography as well, but as a feminist, it makes me just as uncomfortable to encounter it in yaoi as it does to encounter it in an episode of General Hospital. Then, too, there’s the issue of the characters’ homosexuality, which is sometimes trivialized, ignored, or “explained” by a character’s tragic past, as if sexual orientation were a simple, situational decision.

My deeply ingrained feminism makes it difficult for me to enthusiastically embrace the genre, but I’m no hater; I’m always on the lookout for books that don’t push my feminist buttons. I encourage yaoi fans to suggest titles they think I ought to read, or to take issue — politely, please! — with what I say about Calling, Gorgeous Carat Galaxy, and Scarlet.

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Please Pardon Our Appearance…

If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you may have noticed that I’m in the process of “renovating” my blog. I just upgraded to WordPress 3.0, and am still tweaking and experimenting with my newly-chosen theme. Please bear with me; the next few days will be a little rocky as I teach myself a few new tricks, re-categorize posts, and adjust problems with typesetting, image alignment, etc. I do plan to post reviews and features this week, so please keep your eyes out for fresh content, and thanks for bearing with me as I iron out the details!

Short Takes: Library Wars, Ooku: The Inner Chambers, and Your & My Secret

A unseasonably cold, rainy weekend proved just what I needed to catch up on my reading; not only did I tackle a big part of my review pile, I also had a chance to flip through several recent purchases: bilingual editions of Doraemon and The Tale of Genji, Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka, and the long-anticipated Korea as Viewed by 12 Creators. I’ll post reviews of all these titles in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, I’m dedicating this week’s column to three continuing series: Library Wars, Ooku: The Inner Chamber, and Your & My Secret.

LIBRARY WARS: LOVE & WAR, VOL. 2

STORY & ART BY KIIRO YUMI • ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY KIRO ARIKAWA • VIZ • 200 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

I’m happy to report that the second volume of Library Wars is more compelling than the first. More happens, for one thing; the Media Betterment Committee stages a raid on the Kanto Library in an effort to confiscate books found in the possession of a teenage murderer. The raid raises a host of interesting ethical questions — can literature corrupt suggestible minds? should readers’ privacy be protected at all costs? does one’s reading habits reveal anything about one’s propensity for violence? — and creates a strange alliance between the Library Defense Forces and one of its avowed enemies, the Department of Education. Iku has more opportunities to opportunity to strut her stuff, for another: she rappels down the side of a building to prevent MBC thugs from capturing the “degenerate” titles in question, absolving the scornful Tezuka from performing the one task that unnerves him.

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