Word: manga
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...Originally TIME.comix ran on a weekly schedule. Gradually it has slowed. This is mostly due to my own increasingly busy life, but also reflects a shift in the market. When TIME.comix began there were far more chapter-length comic books than there are now (manga excepted). Gradually the focus in the "alternative" comix industry has become more on completed long-form books that can be sold through regular booksellers, beyond just comic specialty shops. This reflects the major shift in public interest towards graphic novels that TIME.comix has born witness to, and I'd like to think, in some small...
...During the writing of TIME.comix, graphic novels have gone from a publishing backwater to being the only book category displaying any growth at all. Last year saw $330 million in sales, up 12% from 2005, according ICV2, a website dedicated to covering the market. Translated Japanese manga, particularly the ones aimed at girls, accounts for much of this growth, a phenomenon that I am pleased to say I wrote about for Time far before any other major media outlet. Now virtually all the major print and online media that cover books have at least some sort of graphic novel coverage...
...little explanation: the Swallowtail is a "butler café," a Tokyo restaurant staffed entirely by Japanese facsimiles of English manservants, down to the formal tails, white gloves and gracious manners. That's the first cultural oddity. Here's the second: Swallowtail is for women--specifically the burgeoning numbers drawn to manga and anime (Japanese comics and animation), a world that usually caters to slightly antisocial male obsessives. These women are known as otome (their male counterparts are called otaku), which roughly means "maidens," and their tastes run to the medieval fantasies found in their favorite manga, which explains why some...
...desire to live like a manga character gave rise to "maid cafés," staffed by waitresses dressed in extreme French-maid outfits. The possibility that women might want a tearoom of their own prompted a group led by Yoko Otsuka, 29, a pleasantly bookish young woman, to create Swallowtail, Tokyo's first butler café. Since Swallowtail opened last March, customers have lined up for reservations. The café tripled its space in October, but tables are still booked solid. The most ardent customers come daily and might never leave if Otsuka hadn't put an 80-minute limit on reservations...
...those interested in a classier package and more novelistic read, Vertical, Inc., publisher of the Buddha series by revered manga author Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), has just released his single volume Ode to Kirihito (825 pages; $25). Best known for his stories on themes of the power of love and karmic justice, here Tezuka has created a sophisticated medical horror story, with so much perversity that it may permanently change the master's American reputation as the Japanese Walt Disney. Though it retains Tezuka's core interest in the karmic consequences of immoral behavior, in this particular book he seems...