The Top 10 Manga of 2009

2009 was a rough year for print publishing, and many small and medium-sized manga publishers couldn’t weather the storm. But despite the economic crash, it was a year of a number of excellent manga releases, and big experiments such as the release of VIZ’s SigIkki line, No Starch Press’s Manga Guides to various science topics, and UDON Entertainment’s Manga for Kids line.

1. Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu
On a planet inhabited solely like women, Pelu, a cute little ball of fluff with a face, is the closest thing to a man. One day Pelu discovers the shocking truth: the women reproduce asexually and Pelu is an anomaly, a sort of walking gonad that accidentally got dislodged from his female host when she was eaten by a space hippo. Strangely like Opus in Bloom County, Pelu leaves his homeland and travels search of a human mate, only to end up involved in some weird tales of love, romance, abortion and pill-popping bad girls. Junko Mizuno’s gynocentric cosmos has never been so literal as it is here–men, you are walking sacks of sperm!–and, although Pelu himself is almost a side character, the stories are strange, strange stuff and Mizuno’s hallucinogenic artwork is a beautiful intersection between pop art and just plain good manga.
2. Detroit Metal City
As a pasty nerd who grew up listening to rap music, I have a certain fondness for stories about pathetic nebbishes who indulge in fantasies of violent misanthropy. (Misogyny, not so much, and I have sympathy for readers who can’t stand Detroit Metal City due to the sexism and vulgarity of the main character’s alter ego.) Soichi is a shy, wannabe pop song writer who against his will ends up finding fame as Krauser II, a demonic heavy metal performer who performs atrocities onstage and can say the “f” word faster than anyone else on earth. The resulting gag manga skewers not just heavy metal but every aspect of pop entertainment, sort of like a Japanese version of Metalocalypse.

3. Red Blinds the Foolish
est em’s beautiful, classical figure drawing (and not just the suggestively positioned bull’s horn) are what first drew me to this yaoi romance about a Spanish bullfighter and the butcher who cuts up his slaughtered bulls. Intelligent, sophisticated, and R-rated rather than X-rated, this is yaoi that anyone can enjoy; in Japan, est em’s work appears in bara (gay men’s) manga publications as much as in conventional yaoi magazines aimed at women. In other words, she draws men who look like men — handsome men, yes, but not your typical yaoi androgynes. est em’s other translated works Seduce Me after the Show and An Age Called Blue are also excellent.
4. Moyasimon
Tadayasu, a freshman at an agricultural college, has the mysterious ability to see bacteria, allowing him to detect all the little signs of fermentation and decay, and tell Japanese yogurt from European yogurt at a glance. The concept is a great way to tell stories of brewing and cheese-making and foodmaking in general, but the super-cute, talking bacteria–imagine e.coli as a plushie–are what really make the series. Unlike the also delightful Oishinbo, this series won’t necessarily make you hungry–in fact, they really push the line with the gross effects caused by those microbiotic cuties–but it’s also got more of an ongoing plot and more memorable characters. Just check out the opening credits of the anime.
5. Oishinbo
Cooking manga is the best– the visual appeal of well-drawn food can really inspire you to eat and cook, and if you splash hot grease on your manga while you’re making a dish, it’s not as bad as splashing it on your iPhone. The two big monoliths of the genre are Cooking Papa and Oishinbo, both running in Japan since the 1980s. Cooking Papa has a recipe in each chapter, with people saying “Mmm, yummy!” over and over and over; Oishinbo, while still showcasing a food or drink in each chapter, is less instructional and has a little more variety in its plotlines. Sadly, VIZ only released 7 volumes of the many zillions of Oishinbo chapters (neatly divided up into subjects like Japanese Cuisine, Sake, etc.), but those 7 volumes are well worth reading or gifting.

6. Children of the Sea
In Japan’s remote Ogasawara Islands, a young girl meets two strange boys who were abandoned at sea and raised by dugongs. Now blessed with incredible swimming and diving abilities, the boys are the girl’s guide to a world of oceanic mysteries. Picture the whimsy of The Life Aquatic and Hayao Miyazaki crossed with an ecological science fiction mystery, and you have an idea of Children of the Sea. The really great thing about it is Daisuke Igarashi’s artwork, so detailed and yet so vivid and fresh, in contrast to, say, Jiro Taniguchi’s rigid-looking draftsmanship.
7. The Summit of the Gods
But I do love Jiro Taniguchi! The Summit of the Gods, his adaptation of Yumemakura Baku’s he-manly novel about a mountaineer obsessed with Mount Everest, is a fabulous evocation of pure space. Rocks and ice, deep abysses, pitons and ropes–this inorganic world of space and solidness is perfect for Taniguchi’s hyper-realistic artwork, and perfect for his favorite theme of Man vs. Nature. Taniguchi’s art style has more in common with European comics than manga, so it’s fitting that his recent work has all been translated by the European art-comics publisher Fanfare/Ponent Mon.

8. Bokurano: Ours
The graphic novel doesn’t come out till 2010, but the series is already available online at VIZ’s sigikki.com, so I’m going to give a shout out to Mohiro Kitoh’s science fiction brink-of-apocalypse nightmare. Like Evangelion, like any number of mecha manga and anime, Bokurano is about a group of kids who must pilot a giant robot to fight other robots and save the world–but Bokurano takes this story of survival and sacrifice to the logical but gut-churning extreme. Why are these 12 children chosen? Just who or what are they fighting, where did the robot come from, and what does their mysterious guide mean by “saving the world”? This isn’t a story of blood and carnage and explosions; like Kitoh’s Shadow Star, it’s a story of morality and the responsibility of power.
9. Red Snow
This amazing collection introduces ’60s-70s gekiga artist Susumu Yamashita to English-speaking audiences, revealing his voice to be just as powerful–and, to Western readers, more original–than Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Both are excellent draftsmen, but where Tatsumi’s gekiga is obsessively modern and urban, Yamashita’s work is grounded in rural Japan, blending realistic depictions of a vanished agricultural society with mythology and fairy tales about kappa and yokai. Where Tatsumi judges the modern world and finds it a bleak wasteland, Yamashita takes us into the forests and thatched huts of old Japan and brings back a unique mix of hope, despair, sexual anxiety and wonder.

10. 20th Century Boys
Pluto with its revamping of Astro Boy may be an easier pitch, but 20th Century Boys is Naoki Urasawa’s most ambitious work so far, a sprawling pseudo-science fiction thriller. A group of childhood friends, now grown to middle age, discover that a strange cult has sprung up around Japan, using elements of the imaginary mythology they invented to play with while they were children. Is one of them a cult leader? And what is the cult’s plan? It’s easy to imagine Urasawa’s work as a serial novel or a sprawling TV drama, and it’s rare to see such long, sustained work in comics apart from manga (and the occasional DC Vertigo series). Fascinating, page-turning stuff.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Looking back at this list, I see an embarrassing lack of shojo titles. To my mind, 2009 didn’t have as many great shojo releases as 2008, whose highlights included Nari Kusakawa’s Two Flowers for the Dragon and Hinako Ashihara’s Sand Chronicles. On the other hand, it did have Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ôoku, which could easily be on this list, Ken Saito’s The Name of the Flower, and Dark Horse’s rerelease of CLAMP’s Clover. Other notable 2009 titles include Osamu Tezuka’s Swallowing the Earth, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life, the way-better-than-I-expected manga adaptation of Cirque du Freak, and UDON Entertainment’s charming kids’ manga line, especially Fairy Idol Kanon and Ninja Baseball Kyuma. Among OEL manga, I paid special attention to the bugged-out 2nd volume of James Stokoe’s Won Ton Soup and to Svetlana Chmakova’s Nightschool.
I’d also like to make a frankly biased shout-out to Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei, the first four volumes of which I edited. (It was the most demanding editing job I’ve ever done, so if anything my feelings are colored by the resulting trauma.) Each chapter of this pop-culture/existentialist-angst gag manga, about a suicidal teacher and his insane students, usually involves people overtaken by some mad obsession with a word or idea (such as tidiness, incompleteness, foreignness, etc.) and ends in a grotesque visual image (like a house so stuffed full of people that the walls explode, or a 10-foot-long sushi rolls crammed into Zetsubou-sensei’s mouth). As such, it has more in common with Shintaro Kago’s horror manga than with a comedy manga. At times it’s too grounded in J-pop ephemera for it to be funny for Western readers, but the translator and I did my best to make it all make sense and make the cynicism shine.
Right now, I’m looking forward to the 2010 release of Ultimo, the Stan Lee/Hiroyuki Takei robot/superhero collaboration (Lee’s contribution is, er, minimal) which initially sounds like a joke…but when Takei starts using the story as a vehicle for his ideas about Buddhism, it turns into a marvelously weird manga worthy of the creator of Shaman King. I’m also looking forwards to the US release of Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo, Maximo Lorenzo’s OEL manga One Hit Knock Out and more translations of Natsume Ono, who is a great mangaka, but whose “not simple” (her first translated work) is a little too melodramatic for my tastes. In 2010, I hope that the Japanese manga industry keeps producing great titles…and that American publishers stay daring enough to translate them.