Shaenon K. Garrity ([info]shaenon) wrote,
@ 2007-09-27 09:27:00
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Entry tags:overlooked manga festival, smithson

New Smithson!
Yes, cocoa is going to make this all better.

www.smithsoncomic.com

And don't miss this week's Chronicles of William Bazillion! William Sicilian. Yes. William Sicilian.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a guest at the Stumptown Comics Festival in Portland this weekend. I even drew a comic strip for the Portland Mercury's special one-shot alternative comics page, right alongside a bunch of much better cartoonists. Have a look!

Also, you hell of want to preorder this year's Marvel Holiday Special, featuring a story by Andrew and me. It'll be out this December, and it will include Spider-Man, Wolverine, and cake. Come on, cake!

What else? Oh, right. Overlooked Manga Festival!



At this point in the storied history of manga in English, there are some titles--mostly from Viz and Dark Horse--that have been around long enough that everyone takes them for granted and forgets that they're awesome. This is wrong, and it's time the Overlooked Manga Festival put a stop to it.



Makoto Kobayashi is one of my favorite manga artists, in part because his work doesn't look much like manga. He draws funny: big rubbery faces, goofy expressions, extreme (but meticulously observed) body language. And he can draw the hell out of anything. Since the dawn of time, Dark Horse has been publishing, in various formats and venues, two great Kobayashi comics that don't get nearly enough attention: Club 9, about an irresistable big-boned farmgirl who moves to Tokyo and becomes a bar hostess, and this manga, which is about cats.



What's Michael? doesn't have much of a continuing storyline, just a set of running gags, so you can start reading at any volume. Each chapter is a short, self-contained vignette, usually a breezy six pages long. Very roughly, it's the story of Michael, a typical orange tabby cat, and his typical middle-class family. But Kobayashi frequently breaks from even this vague premise, giving Michael different owners, transporting the cast to more exotic settings (a cop show, a samurai drama, a running parody of "The Fugitive" featuring a veterinarian on the run), writing himself into the story (something he also does in Club 9, where he frequently pops up as a lecherous bar patron), or envisioning a world of anthropomorphic cats and dogs.



At its heart, What's Michael? is about the relationship between people and their pets. It's a pretty strange relationship, when you think about it, and Kobayashi is good at capturing the absurdity of the way we deal with the animals we let into our lives and homes. Which, I guess, is basically a fancy way of saying that it's kind of like if "Garfield" was good.



And, frankly, a lot of the comic is clearly just an excuse for Kobayashi to draw stuff he really enjoys drawing. Many chapters are purely visual, giving us perfectly-drawn, perfectly-paced snippets of cat behavior, human foibles, or (a recurring favorite) cats dancing. Kobayashi loves to draw cats dancing.



Eventually he also introduces a baby into the regular cast, a shameless but devastatingly effective move. What's cuter than cats and babies? Nothing. Nothing is cuter than cats and babies.





Dark Horse has done a great job with What's Michael? over the years. I'd better give a shout-out here to Lea Hernandez, Toren Smith, and Dana Lewis, who provide the series with its graceful and witty English translation. If you've read manga from pretty much any other publisher, you can appreciate what a great job Dark Horse does with most of its manga titles. Over at Viz, we do our best, but Dark Horse has some good folks on the rewrites.



As I'm writing this, I've come to realize that one reason What's Michael? doesn't get more press may be that there's only so much a critic can say about it. It's not a deep exploration or a searing expose of anything. It's just the best damn cat comic in the world. What more do you humans want?



Previous Overlooked Manga Festivities:
Basara
Please Save My Earth
From Eroica with Love
Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga
Dr. Slump
Your and My Secret
Phoenix
Kekkaishi
Wild Act
Knights of the Zodiac
The Drifting Classroom
OMF Special Event: Manga Editors Recommend Manga, Part 1
OMF Special Event: Manga Editors Recommend Manga, Part 2
OMF Special Event: Manga Editors Recommend Manga, Part 3
OMF Special Event: Great Moments in Manga Baking
Shout Out Loud
Monster
Swan
Warren Buffett: An Illustrated Biography of the World's Most Successful Investor
Sexy Voice and Robo
OMF Special Event: 2006 Overlooked Manga Update
The Four Immigrants Manga
Gerard and Jacques
Ode To Kirihito
Bringing Home the Sushi
Banana Fish
Skip Beat
OMF Special Event: The Greatest Manga Magazine in American History
Cyborg 009
Anywhere But Here
To Terra
Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
Doing Time
The Walking Man
Sugar Sugar Rune
Parasyte
Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators
Mariko Parade
Golgo 13
Ricca 'tte Kanji!?
Pure Trance
OMF Special Event: My Legacy
OMF Special Event: An All-Star Tribute to Carl Gustav Horn
Guest OMF by Jason Thompson: 888
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Tekkon Kinkreet
Yakitate! Japan
Flower of Life
Domu
OMF Special Event: Top Ten Lines from the Excel Saga manga
Nana


(Post a new comment)


[info]conga_chili
2007-09-27 05:46 pm UTC (link)
I love What's Michael!!

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[info]conga_chili
2007-09-27 05:50 pm UTC (link)
Oh yeah, I distinctly remember that one with the baby - when that baby crinkled up its face and made that horrible expression, it stuck with me throughout all the rest of my artistic life.

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[info]gregmce
2007-09-27 06:18 pm UTC (link)
I read via Butcher's blog that there's talk about a big ol' What's Michael? omnibus from Dark Horse. That would make me happy, especially since the first three volumes have been out of print for so long that I've given up all hope of ever seeing them...

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[info]kelsied
2007-09-30 05:18 am UTC (link)
Oh! That would be awesome!

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[info]ensuing
2007-09-27 06:18 pm UTC (link)
CATS DANCING. That, by itself, makes me want to go buy this.

I've seen issues of What's Michael here and there for ages, but I never knew anything about it, so I never felt compelled to check it out. Thanks for the OMF on it, I'll try to get my hands on some now!

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[info]puritybrown
2007-09-27 06:42 pm UTC (link)
Kawaii!

I just got round to checking out Smithson a few days ago. I read through the whole archive, and now I'm kicking myself for not trying it sooner -- it's terrific. I love the way you use the web format to stretch the "page", I love the characters, I love the setting -- even though there's all sorts of weird shenanigans going on, Smithson still feels like a real college (more real than a lot of fictional colleges). I look forward to future instalments with great anticipation!

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[info]shaenon
2007-09-27 06:50 pm UTC (link)

Oh, excellent! Thank you so much!

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Smithson
(Anonymous)
2007-09-27 08:54 pm UTC (link)
"it's terrific"

Yes, it is.

b

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Smithson
[info]basil_jelly
2007-09-27 08:55 pm UTC (link)
"it's terrific"

Yes, it is.

b

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[info]jaderabbit
2007-09-27 09:23 pm UTC (link)
I see those baby expressions a lot, even without having a cat.

You know something awesome about What's Michael? When Michael goes to the vet, the address is that of San Francisco's wonderful Irving Street Veterinary Clinic. I saw a Christmas card with some Dark Horse characters on the door-of-holiday-cards once.

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[info]cosmicwaffles
2007-09-27 09:24 pm UTC (link)
sajdlasjd OMG KITTIES.

If there's no other manga I must have, this is it.


eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee KITTIES.

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[info]kidkappira
2007-09-27 10:03 pm UTC (link)
That page with the dancing cats is so Achewood. That serious, detailed, methodical matter-of-fact presentation of something so downright absurd. I adore it.

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in re: Smithson...
[info]chanlemur
2007-09-27 11:28 pm UTC (link)
...my, this has been a week full of disillusionment for our principals, hasn't it.

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[info]smoooooothdeath
2007-09-28 05:05 am UTC (link)
Yay for cute comics!! Now I know what to get when I'm done with Yotsuba.

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[info]acoustic_rob
2007-09-28 01:08 pm UTC (link)
Very cute! I'm gonna stick to my guns and maintain that B. Kliban drew the best damn cat comics, but these are darn good. I'll have to pick up a volume.

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[info]studioqt
2007-09-28 07:35 pm UTC (link)
Yay for What's Michael?!

I'm a huge fan of Kobayashi's expressions. I've seen some folks complain about how "ugly" his characters are, but I don't think they quite see the nuance and moods that he captures.

I'm also a fan of Toren and Dana and Lea's scripts. But I'm a bit biased. It's nice seeing an old SP title being dusted off and appreciated.

Now I gotta go dig up my copies to share.

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[info]divalea
2007-09-28 10:01 pm UTC (link)
Thanks for the props, Shaenon! I worked very hard on WM! (and everything I did for SP/Dark Horse).

Dana gave me fantastic translations to start with, too. She does a lot of research in her translations: explaining in-jokes, local culture, why not being able to use paper passes at a toll booth is a big deal, and so on.

Having been both a cat-free and cat-bombarded person during the time I worked on WM!, I can say with authority that WM! will appeal to people who love and hate cats. It reinforces both pro- and anti-cat sides.

My personal favorite story is the kitten cafe.

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[info]qshoe1989
2007-09-29 05:48 am UTC (link)
A What's Michael? omnibus is in consideration by Dark Horse. I don't believe it's any more than a vague possibility as of now unfortunately. I talked with Carl Horn personally at the Tezuka panel about this.

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[info]tmcm
2007-09-30 03:47 pm UTC (link)
What's Michael is one of my favorite comics. I think Dark Horse isn't doing the book collections any more.

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