Manga Friday: Look! A Mammoth!
I’ve long harbored a suspicion about the “Mammoth Books” – you’re familiar with them, right? Big fat reprint anthologies, on a wide range of subjects (fiction and nonfiction, photographic and comics) published by Constable and Robinson in the UK and imported to this side of the pond by the now-defunct Carroll & Graf? – were put together somewhat on the cheap. (This was based on my encounters with their historical reprints, which I kept thinking should be called things like The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories That Are Out of Copyright.)
But this book, I hasten to say, is made up of new material, as far as I can tell. All of the works are copyrighted 2007, though the book doesn’t say where, if anywhere, any of this appeared before. Come to think of it, that’s a bit of a problem – if this is the Best New Manga, surely that’s in comparison with other manga, and implies that this stuff was previously published?
These are the kind of problems I always have with the Mammoth Books — they’re generally nice anthologies, but aren’t quite what it says they are on the tin.
OK, so here’s what I think this book is: a collection of all-new stories, in a mostly manga manner, by creators primarily from the UK. It doesn’t actually say that – the introduction, by one-named editor “Ilya,” spends most of its time burbling about how cool manga is and how wonderful the world will be once we can all manage to sell more and more copies of more manga books – but it’s the most likely scenario. (If this really is an anthology of previously published works, and those works are “manga,” then the fact that they’re nearly all British and that none of them are, oh, Japanese, becomes much more puzzling.)
As I said about the Mammoth Books – good anthologies, a nice value for the money, but don’t think about their titles too much or it will make your head hurt.
So what we have here are generally three- to twenty-page stories (though there’s one hundred-pager taking up a fifth of the book), by what all seem to be very young, often pseudonymous creators either British, resident in Britain, or having a British connection. There’s a whole lot of enthusiastic use of off-the-shelf ideas – the hundred-page story, for example, Chi-Tan’s “King of a Miniature Garden,” is a yaoi story about an amnesiac teenager and the dying girl he has to impregnate, set in an odd facility on a remote island – but not much comes together strongly.
The highlights of the book are Laura Howell’s “The Bizarre Adventures of Gilbert & Sullivan,” in which chibi versions of the Victorian opera-ka engage in much anachronistic frivolity with giant robots and so on. It’s just as second-hand and derivative as the other works in Best New Manga 2, but the stories are light-hearted, short, and they know that they’re silly little second-hand stories. (I suspect Ilya knows this, since he salts the book with three of them, at beginning, middle and end.) The supposedly serious ninja/samurai/thriller comics don’t come off as well, and the fact that some of them are from people being credited as “Rainbow Buddy” or “Stanasov” just gives the whole thing that much more of the air of a minor Internet bulletin board somewhere.
So, to sum up: these stories are decent but clearly not the best manga stories of the year. (By many definitions, they wouldn’t count as manga at all, being created in the English language mostly by Westerners and reading left-to-right.) But it is big and cheap, and folks with a higher tolerance for middle-rank adventure stories (or hundred-page yaoi yearnings in both English and Japanese) will enjoy it even more than I did.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga 2
Edited by Ilya
Carroll & Graf, 2007, $15.95
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.
Carrol & Graf had a tendency to look for public-domain stuff that they could make loopk like new material by popular authors – they had a run-in with Louis l'Amour, for instance; they published two books of his older stories that had fallen into PD – whereupon l'Amour and his regular publisher issued collections featuring the same stories, under the same titles as the C&G – with new (*noit* PD) introductions and commentary on the stories by l'Amour.
You have to admit that's partially L'Amour's fault. He shouldn't have let stories fall into PD.
I was pointed at this, just to spoil the first day back after New Year. "Assumption" is your middle name, right? And Gross at that. Whatever problem you seem to have with the Mammoth line, I think you should take it up with them directly, as otherwise you are just clogging up the airwaves.ILYA
Well, now that you're here, perhaps you could explain the process by which you choose the "Best New Manga" for your anthologies. Do you have an open reading period, like most of the "Year's Best" anthologies? What are the publications from which you choose your stories to reprint? Do you have more luck seeing new works from some publishers than others? (I had that trouble myself a few years back, when I judged a literary award.) Is there any particular reason why the best manga of the year don't include any actually created by Japanese people?Or is Best New Manga 2 more like what I thought it was: an anthology of new stories by creators whose work you like, in a manga-esque style? (That's a great kind of book — the Flight anthologies and Out of Picture are essentially that, with slightly less obvious manga influence, and they're quite successful, artistically and commercially.)The problem I have with the Mammoth books is that their titles are quite often misleading. "Best New Manga 2," especially coming a year after "Best New Manga 1," sounds like a Best of the Year annual, drawing from previously published work and presenting the best of it. If it really is that, I think you need to be clearer about where these stories originally appeared. If that's not what this book is, then the title is misleading, and that's not my fault or problem.
Hi Andrew,I wouldn't normally enter into any internet discussion (I'm afraid I just don't have the time), and indeed am not – this is it from me – but, since you took the time to ask your questions, here's answers in short.The realities of publishing: that's your shortest answer.Longer: I'm a working artist who edits this title 1) because I was asked, and 2) there's a definite need and market for such a book. There's a tight schedule, even for an annual – March deadlines for October publication, then straight on the next one. Most of the material I select already exists in some sense but lapses unpublished (at least in any "mainstream" sense), which is nothing less than a crime. BNM exists to begin putting that right. It's the best of what I can see around me, and what's more all creator-owned and available: Hopefully the existence of this title will only encourage other publishers to get on board and start publishing the rising generations of international creators who have nowhere to appear, unless it be the web. Look at the content and tell me such excellent works should not be much more widely available. Operating on basically next to nil budget or resources I select from what I can find and what's recommended or shown to me. On my side I have 20+ years in the business plus an open mind, so I make far-ranging contacts. I also know manga for what it is, not what little we import of it: which is limited almost solely to teen genres plus a few acknowledged classics. In Japan it's a mass-market form and that's what I want it to be here if only we'll let it. We can't persist in reducing an entire medium to a single genre or limited "fan" audience – it's madness.If you'll look, I have included Japanese creators in both Volumes 1 (Michiru Morikawa) and 2 (Chie Kutsuwada), but not out of balance: my brief is to reflect the (best of the)global phenomenon manga has become. Also, in a marketplace where the vast majority of material is Japanese translated, that's plenty available far beyond what little difference I could make. What exactly would be the point? (If you don't like the title or find it inappropriate, I didn't pick it and have no say there: it's a standard to the Mammoth imprint. Focus on the word "new" if you have to.)Me, I'm just trying to show everyone there's more to manga as I know and love it than teenage big-eye oops-my-panties cliches. Even Tokyopop are exploring possibilities beyond: in the USA Oni Press maintains an excellent list. Look to Ponent Mon's list among too few others for the best of what Japanese manga they are selecting, with a wider or adult audience in mind. (BNM is intended "all ages")"I think you need to be clearer about where these stories originally appeared." As I say, mostly they haven't, but fair point: I'll take that into consideration for next time. Thanks for your interest!ILYAeditor/manga wranglerThe Mammoth Book of BEST NEW MANGA
In all fairness I did reply to this Andrew, answering your questions – it's just not been put up. Is this all just you?