This is the time of year Chris calls us all together to make our top five lists, to which I respond to my monitor ‘just five more minutes!’ Then I run to my room and shove piles of manga against the door as a barricade, and climb back into the safety of my bed.
I will shoulder the accusations of indecisiveness with quiet dignity, as I can not place a title above another on my list. Some days I feel like taking the high road and acclaiming the most niche and reviewer beloved title as high art, but the next I’m geeking out at the latest One Piece chapter, and more often than not I’m buried in some square-enix offering and giggling madly. With my mood fickle and confronted with the sheer quantity of titles available, I can only rank them according to how my mood strikes me at any given moment. So, to account for that, I present to you fine readers my list of notable standouts for the year broken into my own personal categories.
Best Manga Of 2012
Thermae Romae – Best Presentation – Yen Press does a phenomenal job on their A Bride’s Story releases. Just when I thought it couldn’t be topped, they outdo themselves for a title which defies the logics of marketing and licensing. I honestly didn’t think anyone would take a chance releasing a story about a time traveling Roman focused on bath houses of all things, yet Yen did just that. To top it off, the end product is a hardcover tome that could easily be mistaken for a textbook with it’s size and translucent acetate slipcover. Sure, this kind of presentation doesn’t come for cheap, but the knowledgeable could find it on sale for a song, and it’s worth every penny. The best part is we can expect the follow-up volume next year, and watch Lucius continued struggles to bring the latest in bath technology to the ancient masses.
Dorohedoro/Excel Saga/Yotsuba&! – Best Continuing Series – A large majority of what comes out every year are more volumes of series which are still publishing. With that constant progression through story arcs and the usual highs and lows of narrative, it’s tough to find a single series that maintains it’s quality.
On the short list of series where I eagerly await each new volume are Dorohedoro, Excel Saga, and Yotsuba&! I might as well call this category ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ for all three series have slow release patterns which often leave me marking my calendar for pre-orders.
Dorohedoro revels in it’s weird world of sorcerers and commoners, with grit and blood on every page and a cast of colorful characters going about their everyday lives while trying to get to the bottom of a growing mystery. Excel Saga follows it’s cast of the equally insane in their conquest of the earth while pursuing the normalcy they all desire so badly, all while satirizing the plight of first world problems. Yotsuba is a series about an adorable orphan which was also an orphaned series, rescued from the defunct ADV to be re-released so that we could enjoy the antics of a five year old once again.
No matter how outrageous or foreign the setting or material, all three series draw you in with their casts who seem like people you know. It’s hard not to root for all of them, and I will continue to do so long after the last volumes roll off the presses.
Soulless – Best Adaptation – In Japan, light novels are adapted into manga with such regularity that seems to be common practice. America is catching on with it’s comic and manga adaptations of young adult novels, to go along with the films being produced of the works. One of the finest to come out of this mixing of media is Yen Press’ adaptation of Gail Carriger’s “Parisol Protectorate” series, with their release of Soulless. A story which fits in with the typical fare you’d expect in manga form was paired with an artist who had the skills and time to produce a book which is fun to read and lovely to look at. It stands alone well enough to not be constantly compared to it’s source and does a great job pulling in new readers who had never heard of the original novels.
The “Alice” series – Best Fangirl…er, Multi-title Franchise – Not long ago, Tokyopop had licensed and released the manga adaptation of a Japanese dating simulation called Alice in the Country of Hearts. It didn’t gain much attention at the time, although it did sell very well for a manga tie-in to a game that would never see an official English release. When Tokyopop closed it’s doors, Yen Press stepped in to relicense that series and Seven Seas jumped on board to snatch up it’s sequel.
Even with the slowing of the market, the series of multiple titles still sells surprisingly well. Is it deserved? All of the multiple adaptations, each of which hook Alice up with a different male costar for her happily ever after, seem to feature lush artwork with plenty of brooding and psychotic males for the ladies to love. If one pairing doesn’t do it for you, simply pick up the mini-series with the pairing you prefer! As to which outcome is cannon, well, who knows? With English releases full of color pages and presented with surprising continuity, I have to applaud everyone involved in grabbing a piece of this lucrative pie.
Barbara – Best Risky Venture – Unlikable characters doing unlikable things, in a book which can only be rated mature, all from the creator of Astro Boy? How much demand is there for mostly unknown but classic works from famous manga creators? Digital Manga Publishing set out to discover if they could make use a new way of funding to bring over a title far too risky to justify the cost of a print run. Last year they turned to Kickstarter and set up a reprint drive for Tezuka’s Swallowing the Earth, which earned them enough to reprint the series for those wanting a copy. When that drive was a success they moved forward on Barbara, easily beating their requested funding amount and paving the way for even more classic Tezuka titles on their third Kickstarter project. The end result of this was being able to get my hands on a true rarity. Violent, bizarre, sometime pretentious and definitely a product of it’s time, I’m happy to have Barbara sitting on my shelf. Here’s to more publishers taking a risk without putting themselves at risk.