It has been ages since I last set foot in a mall, much less a Waldenbooks, so I don’t know how much concern the shuttering of 200 of these stores should give manga publishers. Is Waldenbooks a major buyer of manga? The last I recall seeing in a WB was Mai the Psychic Girl. (Yes, it’s been that long.) Borders Express and Borders Outlet stores will also be among the 200 closures, and I guess that’s bad news… unless you happen to be a comic shop in the same mall.
A complete list of stores that will be “right-sized” (oh, delicious sugar-coated perfidy!) can be viewed here.
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I’m conflicted whenever I see news stories extolling the educational virtues of comic books. It’s nice to have children being encouraged to read comics, but usually crawling just beneath the surface are the sentiments that comics require some utilitarian justification to exist since they have no intrinsic value as art, or that comics should be stepping stones to greater literature. That and, on a more general level, the elevation of the intellectual and complex over the sublimely elegant, bug me. It’s not that I favor simplicity or the commonplace, I just don’t think that’s in any way a useful gauge of artistic merit, no more than the message or “morality” of a work. It’s all terribly snobbish, if you ask me.
That said, this article comes across better than most.
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Mangaka Tamiki Wakaki raises alarms over the state of the manga industry, particularly the creative malaise in mainstream manga magazines as fewer truly talented creators rise to the fore. Wakaki believes the market has become difficult for artists not well-versed in “ero, parody, bishounen, and bishoujo.” That could be taken a couple of ways… Wakaki may be observing that only those kinds of magazines have stability in the current market, or he may be referring to the obsession with youthful beauty that pervades nearly all manga nowadays – in other words, the current tyranny of moe and effeminate male leads. I’m not sure if this is really something to lose sleep over (haven’t manga and anime been obsessed with cute since the 80s?), but I find it interesting that ero is explicitly mentioned as a genre in which artists can expect some employment security.
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Even Picasso was inspired by hentai.
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I haven’t really followed the story about two library assistants in Kentucky who refused to let an 11-year old girl check out Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and were subsequently fired for the incident, because it seemed so cut and dry… the library has (as all public libraries should) a policy of not restricting the access of anyone to any book, and since the personal convictions of the two women involved precluded them from properly performing what the job required of them, they were let go. But the Lexington Herald Leader (via The Beat) highlights a couple extra details that has made this story a truly entertaining train-wreck:
1. One of the pair had effectively kept the book out of circulation by repeatedly checking it out herself, making it unavailable to all the patrons of the Jessamine County Public Library, before the book was even requested by the 11-year old.
2. The same woman is paying a 10-cent-per-day fine by holding onto the book, which she personally censored with post-it notes. By my calculations, in one year the library should have enough money to buy two and a half copies of The Black Dossier. Which I suppose she could also check out, thereby almost tripling their new revenue stream. Dang, I think I just stumbled upon a solution for all libraries facing budget cuts.
I wish I knew the family of this 11-year old. I know what I would get her for Christmas…
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Chris Beveridge writes that the anime dubbing tradition is, if not dead, certainly on the wane. For many mid to lower-tier selling anime, it’s no longer financially viable to produce dubs, but another factor may be the time-consuming nature of the process, which doesn’t fit in with efforts to mitigate the effects of fansubs by shortening lead time between Japan and US releases.
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You know I don’t do manga reviews nor link to them often, but this is a very good selection of books.
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Much as I’d like to make a stupid joke about the educational merit of your books, I just can’t think of any possible way to do it at all cleverly.
When one of your books is ‘On Order from Manufacturer’ at Right Stuf, what happens then? Do they order more copies from you or do they just wait for you to randomly send them books or they try to find the books elsewhere or what? I’ve had copies of Girl with a Thousand Curses and Cheerful Eros Project on order since they held that sale and I see someone posting about waiting on books from there every few weeks.
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All of the Waldenbooks near me have already closed. I used to buy a lot of manga there, but it’s not available anymore.
One thing I never understood is that they never stopped the kids from sitting in the aisles and just reading volume after volume. Not only were they reading without paying, they were destroying merchandise with the way they would bend the spines. I still see it at Barnes & Noble and Borders, but not as bad.
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I always thought of Waldenbooks as one of those stodgy little chains that carried a lot of Bibles and self-help books, so I was amazed to discover, a few years ago, that the one nearest me had a huge manga collection—much better and more varied than the considerably larger Barnes & Noble down the road. I used to shop there regularly, especially when my daughters were buying a lot of manga, but alas, it closed its doors last year.
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Actually, Waldenbooks and Tokyopop had a whole relationship detailed in a Wired magazine article from a year ago. Those two companies are really responsible for the manga boom, in a way. Amazing how luck can change.
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First, I must apologize for Kentucky; second, I’m only one county north of this JCPL fiasco, so I got to read that article in a physical newspaper!
You missed the (hilarious) part where the librarian at the JCPL canceled the hold without the girl’s permission, a cardinal sin of a librarian if I ever saw one. My guess is that’s why she got terminated.
I also enjoyed the “let’s spill tea on it” attempted method of forcing the book to be withdrawn. They apparently haven’t realized how terrible bindings are these days, and that the book would eventually weed itself (although something niche and collectible like Alan Moore books are probably better bound than the “stick some glue on the spine and hope it works” James Patterson binding method of choice).
Libraries have to weather things like this every so often; I remember in 2007 after Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky won the Newbery some librarians got in a snit over it because on page two the word “scrotum” appears, attached to a dog and being bit by a snake. That was the entire reason for their objection to the book having a Newbery Medal. I can only imagine what they thought about The Graveyard Book…
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