The Shipping News, 12/3/09

After a brush with ESP last week — that’s extra-sensory plagiarism, to be exact — and producing an edition of The Shipping News that eerily mirrored David Welsh’s Flipped! column, I made a concerted effort to visit both The Comics Reporter and Precocious Curmudgeon before composing this week’s recommendation list. I’m happy to report that David and I more or less agree on what you should buy — he’s more enthusiastic about Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei than I am — but adopted different strategies for communicating our mutual enthusiasms. Man, I smell a Mysteries of the Unknown book in here somewhere.

Anyhoodle…

Even if Black Friday and Cyber Monday have left you strapped for cash this week, I strongly encourage you to purchase a copy of Susumu Katsumata’s Red Snow (Drawn and Quarterly), easily one of the most beautiful, thought-provoking books of 2009. Through a series of ten vignettes, Red Snow depicts life in pre-industrial Japan, when men depended on the sea, the forest, and the field for their survival. Though Katsumata employs a self-consciously primitive style for his figures, the stories are neither bleak nor condescending towards their subjects; if anything, Katsumata’s figure drawings of farmers, woodcutters, and drunken monks have a rude vigor. Kappa and kitsune mingle freely with humans in Katsumata’s world, their presence treated as a matter of fact, rather than something extraordinary. As Deb Aoki notes in her review, the magical realist element demonstrates that gekiga isn’t necessarily synonymous with yakuza, samurai, and urban decay:

Compared to the gritty, urban gekiga tales of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Red Snow offers similar themes of sex, depravity, obsession and innocence lost but with rural, pre-industrialized Japan as its backdrop. Katsumata deftly mixes humor, fantasy and melodrama and wraps it all up in surreal, sensual and distinctively Japanese imagery.

Other good choices this week include the tenth and final volume of Emma (CMX), in which we’ll finally learn if William has the cajones to marry the virtuous but penniless maid of his dreams; the second volume of Yokaiden (Del Rey), with its spectacular bestiary of mythological Japanese creatures; and the first volume of the long-delayed Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture (Del Rey). I admit I was a little disappointed by Moyasimon; I’d hoped that the protagonist’s ability to see bacteria would be more than what Johanna Draper Carlson so aptly characterized as “a walking plot device.” Still, Moyasimon offers a unique twist on the teen-who-sees-something-others-can’t genre; for folks with a strong constitution, the series’ tendency to play the ick card does yield some laughs. (Click here for my review.)

The full shipping list is below.

NEW SERIES/ONE-SHOTS

• Butterflies, Flowers, Vol. 1 (VIZ)
• Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture, Vol. 1 (Del Rey)
• Night Head Genesis, Vol. 1 (Del Rey)
• Red Snow (Drawn and Quarterly)
• Yellow Omnibus Edition (DMP)

CONTINUING SERIES

• Alive: The Final Evolution, Vol. 8 (Del Rey)
• Amefurashi: The Rain Goddess, Vol. 2 (Del Rey)
• Baby & Me, Vol. 17 (VIZ)
• BakeGyamon: Backwards Game, Vol. 5 (VIZ)
• Bakugan Battle Brawlers, Vol. 4: Dan & Drago (Del Rey)
• Bleach, Vol. 29 (VIZ)
• Broken Blade, Vol. 2 (CMX)
• Emma, Vol. 10 (CMX)
• Eyeshield 21, Vol. 29 (VIZ)
• Honey and Clover, Vol. 8 (VIZ)
• Hoshin Engi, Vol. 16 (VIZ)
• JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Vol. 13 (VIZ)
• Magic Touch, Vol. 5 (VIZ)
• Mixed Vegetables, Vol. 6 (VIZ)
• Monkey High, Vol. 8 (VIZ)
• Muhyo & Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation, Vol. 14 (VIZ)
• NORA: Last Chronicle of Devildom, Vol. 8 (VIZ)
• One Piece: East Blue 1-2-3 (VIZ)
• One Piece, Vol. 23 (VIZ)
• Pokemon Adventures, Vol. 4 (VIZ)
• Princess Resurrection, Vol. 7 (Del Rey)
• Rasetsu, Vol. 3 (VIZ)
• Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking, Vol. 4 (Del Rey)
• Shiki Tsukai, Vol. 6 (Del Rey)
• Slam Dunk, Vol. 7 (VIZ)
• St. Dragon Girl, Vol. 5 (VIZ)
• Yagyu Ninja Scrolls: Revenge of the Hori Clan, Vol. 7 (Del Rey)
• Yokaiden, Vol. 2 (Del Rey)
• Yu-Gi-Oh-R, Vol. 2 (VIZ)