Ahhhh... Thank the lord and shukru'llah, back in my overcrowded, over-expensive, stinky, dirty, d--chebag-overrun stomping grounds, a.k.a. Gotham, a.k.a. New Yawk F@#$kin' City. Two days in, and I've managed to have my matzoh ball soup and kishkes at the pheonix-like reborn 2nd Ave. Deli, fresh lime gimlets at Cafe Loup, bloody mary-soused brunch at Blue Ribbon, masbacha plate from the eponymously named Humus, late "nightcaps" at Red's, and Oren's coffee and Balthazar croissant just now to help me try and sober up. "Try" being the operative word, so this post may lack, ah...concision, shall we say.

Okay, now that the conspicuous consumption inventory is out of the way, let's talk comics. American superhero comics, to be precise. To be even more precise, a confession and atonement regarding same.

I owe American superhero comics an apology.

I used to be a sequential art omnivore, with a typical reading menu that would go something like X-Men--Raw--Zap--Akira--Love & Rockets, with maybe some Blueberry for desert. Then, as I was pulled further into the manga world, my consumption habits became more and more homogenous, and by the time I started working at VIZ I was subsisting solely on Japanese. Which is fine--an entire nation has been living on nothing but Japanese for millennia and doing great at it. But, like mom always said, you need a balanced diet to stay healthy, and at some point I'd fallen into the blinkered trap of disparaging superhero comics. I became U.S. comics anemic.

My wake-up call came courtesy of DC. I was rummaging through a box at home and came across on Outsiders pamphlet. Since it had been more than a decade since I'd looked at it, I started procrastinating reading it, and after about half a dozen pages was seized by a nostalgic desire to read the whole series--a desire so strong that it sent me out into the SF streets looking for the compilations.

And now we come to the well-trodden manga/superhero, comic shop/bookshop, McCoy/Hatfield divide. It started out innocuously. I called up Isotope, and although the owner was as gracious and helpful as ever, he didn't have the books I was looking for.

The stores I refer to from here on shall be nameless, for soon-to-be-apparent reasons.

SF Store #1: Walk in and get the sub rosa alarmed reaction of "holy s$%t, it's a member of the human race carrying gonads on the inside." Since it's rare for comic store staff to have that kind of reaction anymore, there was something kind of amusing and sweet about it. What was very much not amusing and sweet was the way the owner then launched into an abusive harangue at this staff so severe that at first I thought it had to be a joke, tried to ignore it when I realized it wasn't, and then finally left when I was too creeped out/angry on behalf of the poor staffers to deal with it. And they didn't have the books anyway, although it was hard to tell since their stock was largely in haphazard piles. The owner's ire did bring up one germane point though, which was the enormous economic pressure these guys are under to keep their independent stores afloat. To which I could reply, Sir, I would love to support your business and buy from you, but if you act like a royal jerk and maintain an inventory "system" that precludes customers from finding anything, I can't. Really.

SF Store #2: Walk in. Stand in front of guy at desk for a minute. He's reading. No reaction. Out of curiosity I continue to stand there, shift my bag/jingle my keys so I'm sure he knows I'm there. No reaction. Finally I hazard human speech, excuse myself, say I'm looking for a certain DC compilation, and ask if they might have it. Without lifting his eyes, he's says "No." The end.

SF Store #3: Walk in. The space is a lovely, clean, well-lighted place for books. Ask the person at the counter if they carry my quarry. And then am subjected to a pitying look and something I'd forgot about: sequential art snobbery. No, they don't carry things like that here. Despite myself, a feel a small, obscure, dirty, reflexive shame that I am requesting an old spandex saga and not Asterios Polyp. I withdraw humbly, wondering if I should read some New Yorker fiction when I get home, before snapping out of it.

Switch scene to New York.

NYC Store #1: They don't have the books either. While I'm browsing along the aisles anyway, I'm treated to a full-volume, everyone-in-the-store-needs-to-hear-my-wisdom lecture by a young staffer that went something like this: Manga is stupid. The manga industry is dying. Shonen Jump just shut down. Tokyopop is dead and VIZ is about to die. Only girls and kids go up into the manga section. [With the strong implication that if you do, you'll catch their lame.] I am compressing this into shorthand but I am not paraphrasing. Although I am momentarily tempted to politely inform Mr. Knowledge that the death of manga/SJ has been greatly exaggerated, I go up to the manga section instead (I am a girl) and purchase vol. 4 of the awesome Astral Project.

NYC Store #2: No luck. But it's a good store, so I hang around to browse. Near the manga section a knot of guys in town for Anime Fest are talking about graphic novels. One of them says that he doesn't buy manga from U.S. companies "because of all the censorship." As before, I'm momentarily tempted to step in with, "Well, actually..." but the day is running out and I'm still on a mission.

And then, at last: Jim Hanley's Universe to the rescue! My standby store, they do it right. If you're around 33rd St., go visit. But even JHU, as good as it is, only has a random/sporadic manga inventory. The simple reason being that the backlist in the U.S. is now so large, and the manga volumes themselves take up so much room, that there's no way a store with finite shelf footage can keep anything near a comprehensive collection in stock. In order to do so, comics shops would have to sacrifice room for U.S. comics. And financially and culturally, that still doesn't make sense for them.

So, can comics and manga ever successfully coexist? Can the farmer and the cowman be friends? In a perfect world, they can and should be, for the benefit of both. Manga would stop being regarded as girly, juvenile and lame, and U.S. comics would stop being regarded as testosterone-fueled fulfillment fantasies. Hope is present in the form of some young artists on both sides of the Pacific (and Atlantic) who are appreciating each other's work, distilling the best aspects of both, and making some heady, intoxicating creations to serve up to the rest of us.

This relates back to one of the aims of the SigIKKI project. As Hideki Egami-san, IKKI's EIC, said in an interview recently, he wants to share these comics with as many people as possible, and hopefully some unknown kid somewhere will get inspired and come up with something that's neither IKKI manga nor any other dominant visual form but something unique that will knock our socks off. Amen.

Today I'll finish Astral Project while savoring Syuji Takeya's twisty plotting and trippy visuals, and move on to Outsiders: Sum of All Evil, as Judd Winick and the team make me remember how very good superhero comics can be.

Mom, you were right: I'll try and keep a balanced diet from now on. And Mr. Levitz, my apologies: spandex rocks.