October Previews Adult Manga; Why you need to pay attention to Aurora and Manga Sutra

September 18, 2007 in Manga Minutiae, Release Info | 16 comments

Next month’s Previews Adult is filled with notable debuts and interesting manga, and even a whole new genre (although, ero manga is still rather light if not including our own releases.)

Keep in mind that most of these books are not scheduled to hit until December.  The last alphanumeric code of each listing is the Diamond Previews Code, which retailers use to place pre-orders.  For more info on how to order our books from LCS, visit the How To page.  Click to download the full text file.

Links to artist homepages and product pages are provided if I can find them.  No guarantee that any of this info is accurate, blah blah blah…

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ERO Section (primarily straight stuff for straight guys, perhaps entertaining for some women, lesbians trapped in a man’s body, and possibly some farm animals.  Generally speaking.)

EUROTICA (NBM’s adult label)

ICARUS PUBLISHING (If you don’t know who we are… umm…)

  • COMIC AG #73, anthology, 80pgs, $4.99, OCT07 3574
  • COMIC AG #74, anthology, 80pgs, $4.99, OCT07 3575
  • ELEMENTS GN, Tanuki Kamogawa, 176pgs, $19.95, OCT07 3576
  • PATRIOT GN, Mashumaro Jyuubaori, 152pgs, $19.95, OCT07 3577 (Second Solicitation)
  • PET HUMILIATION DIARY GN, Gorou Horikawa, 160pgs, $19.95, OCT07 3578 (Second Solicitation)

Elements is our new trade for the month.  If you dig Innocence, be sure to pre-order this book.  We’ll have a preview of it online real soon.

RADIO COMIX (Mainly anthropomorphic comics, including original manga/doujinshi)

  • GENUS GREATEST HITS VOLUME 4, anthology, 64pgs, $6.99, OCT07 3745

I’m assuming this is a “prestige format” book.

TOKYOPOP

  • MANGA SUTRA - FUTARI H VOLUME 1 GN, Katsu Aki, 384pgs, $19.99, OCT07 3838

AKA Step Up Love Story, if you are a fan of the anime.  Technically, this isn’t the kind of explicit “ero manga” we all are familiar with… it’s an adult comedy with sexual situations.  But there is quite a high upper-body nudity quotient, and that’s enough to land it in the porno ghetto in the US.  Don’t be scared off by the price tag… it’s an omnibus edition, and you won’t find any missing nipples.  That’s always worth a few extra bucks, don’t you agree?

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YAOI Section (primarily boy’s love for women, gay men who can overlook poetic license, and kids who are too young to read this stuff but love handing out corporal punishment with paddles.  And yes, also some farm animals, I’m certain.)

AURORA PUBLISHING INC. (Duh!  I mean Deux!)

  • YAKUZA IN LOVE VOLUME 1 GN, Shiuko Kano, 192pgs, $12.95, OCT07 3294

BOYSENBERRY BOOKS (Broccoli’s BL imprint)

  • SEX FRIEND VOLUME 1 GN, Koreaki Kamuro (misspelled as Kamura in the solicitation), 208pgs, $11.99, OCT07 3369

801 MEDIA INC. (DMP’s hardcore yaoi stash)

KITTY PRESS (Media Blasters)

  • RETURN TO SCANDALOUS SEIRYO UNIVERSITY GN, Kazuto Tatsukawa (I’m assuming), $10.99, OCT07 3667

For some reason, Kitty Media’s entries are often short on info, or possibly redacted, missing some pretty important stuff like artist name, for example.  No idea why that is.

YAOI PRESS, LLC. (Mainly original BL)

  • YAOI CANDY #2, Yamila Abraham (misspelled Yamile in solicitation) & Studio Kosaru, 32pgs, $3.95, OCT07 3922

Has the first one shipped?  I’m curious whether a more traditional comic format helps it in the direct market.

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(Drumroll, please.)

LADIES Section (Straight romance for women.  Whoa…)

AURORA PUBLISHING INC. (Japanese publisher Ohzora’s American arm)

  • VOICES OF LOVE GN, Kanae Hazuki, 192pgs, $10.95, OCT07 3295

Ladies manga (or “redi comi” in Japan) are “grown-up”, explicit versions of the typical girl’s romance manga.  Voices of Love is the first lady’s comic to be released in the U.S..

Actually, I’m just assuming this is a Lady’s Comic.  I could be wrong.

And technically this is just the first Lady’s Comic I’ve seen offered in Diamond Previews.

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As I said earlier, this is a very notable month.  Not just for porno fare, but manga in general.  First we have Tokyopop’s Kama Manga Sutra, a non-yaoi explicit manga, being sold at twice the cover price of their regular offerings.  Besides yaoi, adult manga haven’t been popular in a while, and have never been able to crack mainstream bookstores.  Manga Sutra has cross-gender appeal in Japan, but it might face difficulty escaping the stigma that is attached to even bordeline-erotic manga titles.

Second, we have what appears to be the first ladies manga that is explicit enough to warrant listing in Previews Adult.  Aurora Publishing is treading virgin territory… this manga genre is practically unknown in the states.  There isn’t even a Wikipedia entry on it! 

Despite the success manga has had in drawing in a significant female audience, it remains to be seen whether those readers are ready to embrace Lady-Comi.  Dark Horse’s experiment with Harlequin manga, while I’m not sure whether it was a success or not, certainly didn’t make a splash on the market as Yaoi and BL manga have.  Generally speaking, Lady’s Comics actually cater to a different readership than Yaoi… “sophisticated” might be too strong a word, but these books are generally speaking for women who are older, and have had more “life experience.”

Success for both of these books is important for manga overall because, while fans have been doing a lot of chest thumping over manga’s amazing growth, what’s available here still represents only a few very specific spectrums of the Japanese comics industry.  That has led to the pigeon-holing of the word itself; manga as an art style, as a set of storytelling conventions, a publishing model, and most bewilderingly, book dimensions.  But what hurts more than any of that is the perception of manga as a medium for the kid to teenage/early adult crowd, and an aura of hip-ness that draws marketing types like flies to honey.  Between the extremes of chop socky ninja action or shape-shifting romantic comedies from the big publishers, and the occasional auteur experiments or vintage classics of the indy tastemakers, lies what truly makes manga mainstream in Japan, something you’d understand when you see the businessman reading on the train, or the young mama reading in the park; the variety of manga in Japan not only breaks the gender barrier, but the age barrier as well.  Only until that happens here can we fully appreciate manga, and rightly award it the moniker of “mainstream” with no reservation.

16 comments

  1. DocWatson on September 18, 2007 at 11:05 pm

    Simon wrote:

    > First we have Tokyopop€™s Kama Sutra

    “Manga Sutra”–an understandable mistake. ^_^;

  2. Simon on September 18, 2007 at 11:12 pm

    Damn it, why couldn’t they just keep “Step Up Love Story?”

    Aaaaargh =p

  3. ed chavez on September 19, 2007 at 12:13 am

    Technically few of TP’s josei and and I believe CPM’s Sweet Cream and Strawberries should be filed as ladies comics but then again “ladies” is actually the broad term used for “josei” by most retailers in Japan.

    This is going to be interesting. Walkin’ Butterfly has a nice looking cover and an intriguing lead but I haven’t heard much pub for it despite how often mangasphere pundits plead for josei. I didn’t see much support for Harlequin either (and honestly I didn’t think we were ready for that).

    Ladies comics or Renai Comics… I would love to see more of these (just cause they are smut). And you’d think they’d work since they are set up like many BL titles – generally short series, can get kinda explicit (but then again Teen Love shojo can as well)… But unlike BL you don’t see a rabid community, in the west or the east ranting about the artists (some do shojo and BL), the titles, and the HOT GUYS.

    Don’t ask me why? I have no clue. Manga for this demographic has been around for a while. They are easier to find than BL since major pubs like Akita Shoten, Kodansha and Shogakukan are releasing this stuff. Famous artists are making the stuff. No one seems to pay it much attention. There should be a market but who is going to “market” it to those women? Aurora and who else?

  5. TommyRaiko on September 19, 2007 at 4:25 am

    …I believe CPM€™s Sweet Cream and Strawberries should be filed as ladies comics…

    Hey, has Sweet Cream & Strawberries actually come out? I seem to recall that one getting a bit of buzz but being delayed with all the various CPM crises.

  6. Jeff-Flowers on September 19, 2007 at 4:44 am

    Nice article Simon. I will be ordering Elements, of course, and I think that I will be giving “Manga Sutra – Futari H” a try as well.

    Not related to this article, but I am also giving Seven Sea’s Dance in the Vampire Bund a try, and I have ordered the first two books of the MPD Psycho (Dark Horse) series as well. I think that the thing I love about manga is the amount of choice we have, something sorely missing in the american “superhero” dominated comic market.

  7. gynocrat on September 19, 2007 at 6:26 am

    For those of you used to searching JPQueen and the like, it’s AKA ‘ledicomi’. ^_- Another popular ledicomi creator that’s collected over here is Chitose Piyoko. I’ve noticed a surge of interest in old school Takaguchi Satosumi titles [these aren't even drawn in the modern 'style'], so I wonder if ‘DUH’ will bring them over?

  8. Simon on September 19, 2007 at 7:37 am

    Ed–>

    I don’t remember ever seeing those in Previews or on the shelf… well, not in Previews adult.

    Gyno–>

    That’s improper romaji! ;) 

    Jeff->

    Wow, Dance in the Vampire Bund is really going to come out, huh? I can’t imagine how that’s going to go down… not that it’ll cause a “loli” controversy, but how Kodomo no Jikan fans are going to react after being nearly dissed as perverts… -_-;;

  10. Jeff-Flowers on September 19, 2007 at 9:00 am

    “Wow, Dance in the Vampire Bund is really going to come out, huh?”

    It is listed in this month’s Previews and is listing at $9.99. Of course, it will only cost me $7.49 because I mail order all my comics (I never pay full price for my Icarus books either).

  11. ShellyL on September 19, 2007 at 10:22 am

    Dark Horse’s Adult Harlequin line didn’t do very well. It was scrapped. They kept and re-vamped the line for young adults, though nothing has been released since February, so I’m wondering if they’ve given up on that one too now. (and looking at their site just now shows that they’ve removed all mention of manga that was there.)

    My personal opinion about why the adult Harlequins failed is that they were using stories from the early 80s, which in romance is akin to black and white films from the 30s (ie there’s an audience for them but most people these days prefer something modern), and the purple ink made it seem like candy aimed at kids, not stories aimed at women. And the other thing is that to most adult romance-novel-reading women comics are just not a part of their background. There’s no connect there and they’d not even think of picking one up.

    I think adult manga for women can work as long as the publishers remember who the likely audience is, and don’t produce candy colored books aimed at old women, most of whom aren’t going to want to read them in the first place.

  12. Simon on September 19, 2007 at 11:26 am

    Agreed. They don’t print their novels with pink, so why should the manga be in purple?

  13. ed chavez on September 19, 2007 at 11:32 am

    You are right they weren’t in previews adult. But CPM did solicit their Nannan Kiriko book in Previews before they had their troubles a year ago and TP’s books are always in Diamond.

    And sorry to say Tommy Sweet Cream and Red Strawberry’s is still on hiatus (was resolicited for May 2007).

  14. yaoipress on September 19, 2007 at 1:41 pm

    “YAOI CANDY #2, Yamila Abraham (misspelled Yamile in solicitation) & Studio Kosaru, 32pgs, $3.95, OCT07 3922

    Has the first one shipped? I€™m curious whether a more traditional comic format helps it in the direct market.”

    Yaoi Candy 1 is out October 15th.

    As for your second question, the answer is no, order quantities weren’t any greater for the comics than what they usually are for our graphic novels. On the adult side (we had a mature readers comic in October as well as an adult one) it looks like the comic might have hurt orders for the graphic novels.

    In Previews Adult that month we relisted Yaoi Hentai 1-3, offered Yaoi Hentai 4 for the first time, and offered Yaoi Candy 1. Yaoi Candy 1 had the same average nuber of DM orders we see for graphic novels. Yaoi Hentai 4 had almost 100 fewer orders than usual! (Fortunately Barnes&Nobles picked up the slack for this volume for some mysterious reason).

    I believe the deficit was mostly because of the ‘offered again’ error. They listed Yaoi Hentai 4 as though it were an ‘offered again’ when it was a new release. I’m sure that made some shops overlook it. However, I’m not so sure that having a $3.95 comic as one of their selections from us didn’t make them order fewer copies of the graphic novels.

    If the direct market were my only outlet for the comics I wouldn’t print them. They sell well at conventions. That’s the only reason I’m continuing the comic book line.

  15. gynocrat on September 19, 2007 at 4:03 pm

    That€™s improper romaji! ;)

    I know….muwhahahahaha!~

  16. Simon on September 20, 2007 at 6:39 am

    Ah, thanks for sharing the info.

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