Happy Halloween, VIZ fans! It’s time for another Pubwatch. This month we’re taking a look at some seasonally-appropriate spooky scary short story anthologies and a much less spooky shojo romance. But first, the news!
Summer 2024 Publishing Announcements
A long list of new releases and reprints coming this summer has been posted! I, of course, am most excited for the 3-in-1 volumes of my beloved Haikyu!!, but there’s a lot of other things that sound cool on the docket, including a very fancy-looking rerelease of Taiyo Matsumoto’s GoGo Monster and some first volumes of recent Shonen Jump series.
VIZ at NYCC 2023
I skipped the big show this year (tired), but VIZ media did not! They had a Zom 100 themed photo booth and con-exclusive merch for sale, panels and events with Maile Flanagan, the voice of Naruto Uzumaki as a special guest. Good for them.
VIZ Originals opens call for one-shot submissions
Big news for struggling cartoonists like me: if you have a short, 20-50 page complete comic in a black and white manga style, you can submit it to VIZ for the chance at getting professional feedback from VIZ editorial and your comic published on VIZ manga. And to help you with that, VIZ published a series of blog posts about different aspects of the manga-making process, from a 101 to pitching. I’m just glad they’re serious about developing original English-language comics in addition to publishing manga and anime. And speaking of publishing…
VIZ Social Media Team Substack Exists Now
Seeing this on my Twitter (I mean, X) feed prompted a reaction of “this might as well happen?” from me. The “FREE VIZ Social Media Team Substack” appears to mostly round up the best replies to official VIZ social media posts, as well as cool fan cosplay. I guess if you want to know what the good jokes on X are without having to be on X anymore, this Substack is where you want to be. Might be worth it, actually.
Anyway, enough of being too online, it’s time to take a look at…
What I’m Reading
Tamon’s B-Side, Volume 1
Yuki Shiwasu
October 3, 2023
What can I say? I love pathetic men in fiction. And few are more pathetic than up-and-coming idol Tamon, who, offstage, is a self-loathing shut-in barely capable of taking care of himself. By an astounding coincidence, his new housekeeper happens to be his biggest fan! The jokes really landed well for me (starting with the opening page “I want to live in his mole”) and I thought the two leads had a fun dynamic together. Utage learning to balance her fannish adoration with her need to support Tamon as a person was heartening to see. Embarrassingly, Utage’s insistence on shutting down all of Tamon’s negative self-talk with positive affirmations was actually a useful reminder to me, a person with self-esteem issues. If you liked My Special One, this is definitely in a similar vein, but also funnier in how it skewers a lot of the tropes and expectations of the idol romance subgenre. Kouta in My Special One was perfect inside and out, but Tamon is, well. I also liked the art in this more. It felt a little more grounded than My Special One’s pure fluff was, but again, if you like cute idol shoujos, this is also a cute idol shoujo with a slightly deranged twist.
Mimi’s Tales of Terror
Art by Junji Ito, Original Story by Hirokatsu Kihara and Ichiro Nakayama
October 24, 2023
According to the forward, this book collects some of Ito’s earlier comics adapting stories from the urban legends collection “New Earmuffs,” reframing the stories as having all happened to a cute young woman named Mimi and her friends. Ito himself admits he might have taken too many liberties in the adaptation process, and I think I agree. At a certain point I started to wonder how on earth one person could experience so many spooky things in such a short span of time. Mimi’s design reminded me of Umezz’s Orochi, but while Orochi’s frequent encounters with the supernatural can be explained by her herself being supernatural, it just seems kind of strange that the normalest girl in the world keeps accidentally surrounding herself with monsters and ghosts. My favorite chapter was the one without Mimi in it at all, a bonus story called “Monster Prop” about designers building a haunted house for an amusement park. The art is just as meticulous and creeptastic as always, though. I don’t think this is my favorite Ito collection, but it’s not bad by any means.
Betwixt
Stories by Michael W. Conrad & Becky Cloonan, Sloane Leong & Leslie Hung, Huahua Zhu, Ryo Hanada, Aki Shimizu, and Shima Shinya Foreword and Cover Art by Junji Ito
October 10, 2023
Okay, this absolutely ripped. With a cover and introduction by everyone’s favorite spookyman Junji Ito, this horror anthology collects three English-language horror comics and three manga in translation, with the book formatted so you can start reading from right-to-left or left-to-right and then flip it around in the middle. I read a digital version so I missed out on that part of the experience, but the stories within were a lot of fun. Becky Cloonan! Sloane Leong and Leslie Hung! As well as other creators I’m less familiar with, but nevertheless enjoyed. I think my favorite story in the collection was Conrad and Cloonan’s “Never Left”, but I really liked Shima Shinya’s art style in “The Window” even if I didn’t find the story all that scary. Unfortunately, reading two horror anthologies for one pubwatch made it hard for me to keep track of which stories were in which collection. If I had to recommend one of them, though, I’d probably go with Betwixt. Branch out from Junji Ito! Read something different!
Well, that was seasonally appropriate indeed. Happy Halloween, again! I’ll be back with probably lighter offerings next month.
