This is my entry for the March session of Manga Movable Feast, an experiment where manga bloggers from around the web write about a single title. This month’s title is Kaoru Mori’s Emma, and the host is Matt Blind of Rocket Bomber. A full list of articles and reviews by those participating in this month’s MMF can be found here.

Emma is a Japanese comic about a maid.

Aside: I don’t really get the maid fad that was popular in Japan a few years back (and maybe still is?). When I was there, I never went into a maid café, and will not go to one if/when I ever return. I mean, if I went into a place for a cup of coffee and a bunch of girls in lace and frills I had never met before bowed at me and said “Welcome home, master,” I would probably back out slowly, then turn around and sprint the other direction with a cartoonish cloud of dust swirling behind me. And have you heard of some of the things the “maids” at these places do? They “cool” your drink by blowing on it, or give you hand massages. Assuming I somehow managed to stay in one of these establishments long enough to be served, I’d be like, “Why are you getting your spittle and germs in my coffee? What the hell are you doing to my hand?”

Of course, that’s all a rather romanticized interpretation of who a maid really is. Emma is rather romanticized as well, but seeing as it’s a romance story, I guess we can accept that a bit. And it at least tries for accuracy; it takes place in turn-of-the-century London (er, turn of the previous century, not the current one), when ostentatious display of domestic servitude was in fashion.

Emma, not to be confused with the Jane Austen novel of the same name, has had all ten of its volumes released domestically by CMX. (The books have a very nice non-glossy paperback cover with an interesting texture as you hold it in your hand - just don’t spill anything on it.) As I wasn’t really up to buying ten volumes of a series I wasn’t sure I was going to like, and wouldn’t have had time to sanely read all of them even if I had done so, I limited my purchase and reading to just the first two volumes.

So the titular Emma is a maid. She serves Keisuke, a lecherous 14-year-old aristocratic schoolboy who is always trying to peep on her when she’s changing out of her short frilly maid skirt; she inevitably catches him and sends him spinning into the heavens every single time with a stiff uppercut with her right hand while futilely attempting to cover her gargantuan breasts with her left. Wacky! Tacky! Sexy in a naked Barbie doll kind of way!

…Not. That’s kind of along the lines of what I would expect from a Japanese comic about a manga, and I bet it would sell real well and be made into a fifty-two-episde cartoon series and sell hundreds of thousands of naked Emma statuettes and set creator Kaoru Mori for life. But instead, Mori puts a lot of class into Emma’s world and characters, lucrative computer dating game profits be damned.

No, Emma is the personal maid of Kelly Stonwar, an elderly retired widow who plays something of a mother figure to the orphaned Emma after taking her in. Her maid frock is modest and simple, and she has yet to bare so much as an ankle - I’m at a loss as to why CMX slapped a “Teen Plus” rating on the back cover. And unlike Black Butler, the domestic servant in question is wholly human and spends her day cooking and cleaning rather than fighting bandits and solving mysteries.

Emma’s love interest in this romance is William, a former student of Kelly’s who meets Emma during a visit. William belongs to a family of merchants making their way in the world. Emma and William immediately take a liking to each other, and through a series of other meetings, chance and otherwise, they fall in something resembling love. However, William’s father - and much of the rest of society - disapproves of his son’s relationship with a lowly servant, and is instead trying to hook him up with Eleanor, the dolled-up daughter of another wealthy family who looks to be about ten years his junior. (Kelly, for her part, wants to see her two proteges get together.)

It’s all rather a classic story, but I’ve got to say that I have issues with how Mori tells it. She seems to not be following the old writers’ mantra of “show, don’t tell.” For one, I don’t see what these two people see in each other, and that’s a rather crucial aspect of understanding their romance, isn’t it? Is it just a physical attraction? I suppose Emma, with her round face, rounder glasses, and braided updo, has a bit of a librarian chic look to her. She apparently fetches - and rejects - the attention of many suitors, but when asked why she hasn’t rejected William, Kelly seems to be satisfied when Emma responds with something like “he doesn’t come off as strong.” And William for his part could probably have no trouble earning a trophy shinier than Emma, but does not and apparently never has. So they go for walks and on dates and such, and apparently have wildly fascinating conversations that deepen their attraction for each other which Mori doesn’t feel like sharing with us for some reason. Heck, it seems to me that Mori shows us more intimate conversation between William and Eleanor than William and Emma, even though we know William is just going through the motions to keep the peace with his dad.

Okay, maybe I just don’t get it. I’m a dude and therefore totally the wrong gender for this kind of story, after all. But in the end, I felt like I knew William and Emma cared for their each other merely because we had been told that William and Emma cared for each other instead of being shown how they fell in love, what they saw in each other, how they displayed affection. And the main conflict in the book - the entrenched differences in class between the two lovers - I also felt was being hammered into us instead of being displayed for us to witness for ourselves. Furthermore, I felt Emma herself as a character was a more interesting element of the comic than the romance between her and William. What does that mean when the story is supposed to be a romance? The whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.

So I’m afraid I’m going to stop with these two volumes. I know Emma has its fans, but I’m just not hooked.

Related links

• Hub page for this month’s Manga Movable Feast
• Emma at CMX’s site - includes previews (in browser (ugh!) (using Flash (ugh!)))
• Emma at Wikipedia
• Emma at ANN

This is Yen Plus Info, a fan site primarily providing news and info about the Yen Plus comics anthology published by Yen Press, though lately I’ve been sharing my experiences with other comics both foreign and domestic. Why not check out the front page and browse a while?

Anime news site Anime News Network features a weekly podcast which is usually rendered unlistenable by the nasally voice and general douchebaggery of co-host Zac Bertschy. (Yeah, the guy rubs me the wrong way.) However, if you can put that aside, their most recent show features an interview with Yen Press honcho Kurt Hassler. The interview begins at about the 16:45 point in the show. I haven’t been able to listen to it much yet, so I’m not yet sure if there’s anything mind-blowing in there, but it ought to be worth a listen if you’re interested in the man behind Yen Press’s surprising success.

And speaking of success, comic site Comic Book Resources has posted some heavy stats and analysis on how well many comic companies did in 2009. If you find that a bit tl;dr and/or mostly have an interest in manga distributors, Anime Vice offers an easier-to-parse breakdown. In terms of dollars, Yen Plus more than tripled the previous year’s sales in 2009, and it looks like they’re in for another great year this year, thanks to that little Twilight comic you might have heard something about; they’ve committed to printing more volumes of Twilight than all of their titles combined sold in 2009, which shows tremendous confidence in that product. If it can live up to its hype and sell, a whole lot of money is going to be made.

The data for the March 2010 issue is now in the database. Sigh, I kinda miss the days when every other issue would introduce a new comic or feature a preview… But maybe I shouldn’t jinx it.

For those who haven’t purchased or received your issue yet, here’s a preview page to tide you over, featuring a pivotal point in this issue’s chapter of Maximum Ride, which I totally didn’t just scan into Photoshop and then mask out the original text and replace it with my own.

David Welsh, blogger at The Manga Curmudgeon, had an idea for what he (somewhat puzzlingly) called the Manga Movable Feast; a manga title and date would be announced, and manga bloggers around the web would be invited to post about that title on the week of that date. The first title was Iou Kuroda’s Sexy Voice and Robo, and the date was Monday, February 8. I decided I wanted to join in, so I headed over to Amazon and placed my order for a copy of Sexy Voice and Robo. However, I opted to use Amazon’s free shipping option, which is marketed as “Super Saver Shipping” but should perhaps more accurately be titled “Whenver We Get Around To It Shipping,” as I ended up not getting my copy of until Tuesday, and I just finished it Saturday.

But perhaps being late to the party will give me a unique perspective. I was careful to avoid others’ posts about the book until I was done reading it for myself, and now that I’ve caught up on those other posts (which are listed here), I can react to those as well as the book itself.

Let’s start with the book. The curiously-titled Sexy Voice and Robo is, essentially, an episodic mystery series. The eponymous characters are Nico, a fourteen-year-old girl who part-times as a phone flirt (think phone sex, but less overtly sexual), hence “Sexy Voice;” and Iichiro, a stereotypical otaku adult loser with an unhealthy obsession with giant robot toys, hence “Robo.” (Erica Friedman provides us with a character study of Robo.) Nico’s job has made her quite skilled at not only altering her voice, but accurately judging the appearance and personality of the men she talks to just by the sound of their voice. Besides the money, Nico plans on parlaying her job and her talent into an eventual career in espionage, and she gets her chance when a mysterious old man in a café learns of Nico’s talents and hires her to solve a mystery for him… and one mystery is followed by another. As Nico becomes one of the mysterious man’s henchmen, hapless Robo becomes Nico’s henchman, mostly because his adultness provides Nico transportation and access to places she wouldn’t be able to get to otherwise.

The structure is pretty standard for a mystery (Kate Dacey compares it to the American novel Harriet the Spy, which also features a young girl sleuth), but executed well enough that it doesn’t feel stale or trite. In each chapter, a mystery presents itself, but by the end, Sexy Voice has cracked it owing mostly to her gift of gab. There’s a good variety to the stories presented. Though each chapter is independently episodic, there’s an overarching story involving the old man’s past which is revealed in stops and starts. The book’s ending has struck others as rather abrupt and left them calling for more, but I personally thought that the ending in relation to that overarching storyline is well-placed, and that the reader can draw their own conclusion as to where Nico’s spying career will go from there - I know I sure did.

The reactions to Kuroda’s art seems to be all over the board. Kuroda uses bold thick lines which appear to have been applied by brush, mostly sticking with simple black and white and using very little toning (to the point that it sometimes even looks out of place when he does); the look is very different from many modern Japanese comics, and rather refreshing. The look of the characters’ eyes in particular struck me as I started reading - and then I came across the chapter in which eyes play an important role. It’s rather cool how it unfolds, so I won’t say more than that, though unfortunately some of the other reviews you’ll find as part of this Feast spoil it a bit. However, it struck me initially that Kuroda was having some problems with perspective - things which should have been further back in his art didn’t look further back. Everything looked like it was on the same plane… It’s kind of hard to describe. In retrospect, I found this aspect of the art bothering me less as I got further into the book; whether the art improved in this regard or I just stopped noticing it, I’m not sure. There’s also the case where it can be sometimes difficult to discern just what the heck is happening in the more action-packed panels and you end up hoping that whatever happened will be explained later on in the chapter, but that seems to be an annoying fault of a whole lot of manga, so I won’t hold it against Sexy Voice and Robo uniquely.

The book itself is released by Viz and was originally printed in 2005. The pages’ dimensions are the same size as an anthology like Yen Plus (or, presumably, the one this series was initially serialized in), rather than being reduced in size for trade printing as is typical for manga; sorry, but if you have a “manga shelf,” this book may not fit on it. The book, which contains all chapters in one volume, runs almost 400 pages, starts with a note by Kuroda, and, interestingly, ends with an essay by one of Viz’s editors about Kuroda’s artistic rendition of Tokyo. Overall, it’s not a bad presentation, though I do want to fault Viz for leaving a lot of the text in Kuroda’s art untranslated, even when it was more than trivial in terms of the story. One part that struck me in particular was a note that one of the more important characters in the overall story arc finds. Viz doesn’t translate the note at all, though with my infantile Japanese skills, I was able to make out it was telling him to kill someone - rather a crucial plot element, I think. What other plot points did I miss because I couldn’t read them?

Kuroda’s unique and mostly pleasant art and strong stories come together to provide a cohesive whole which ends up as a rather fun read, particularly if you’re a fan of mysteries. It’s well done, but the whole is not more than the sum of its parts - I cannot unilaterally declare that you should “run out and buy [it] right now” as Christopher Butcher does, and I can see how it wouldn’t appeal to everyone - “Mehhhh,” says Sadie Mattox. You’re going to have to enjoy the mystery genre, and be at least tolerant of art which is well outside of the norm. But if that’s you, I think you’ll find something to like about Sexy Voice and Robo.

Okay, review ends there. I’m going to finish off this post by going a bit more in-depth into an issue brought up by other Feasters, and will maybe spoil the story a bit, so please only continue reading past the next paragraph if you’ve finished reading Sexy Voice and Robo yourself, lest you be spoiled. (If you’re on the front page right now, click the “Read more” link below.) To space things out, let me sell the site a bit for those visiting it for the first time.

Hi there. I’m your humble editor, Garrett Albright. This is Yen Plus Info, a fan site primarily providing news and info about the Yen Plus comics anthology published by Yen Press, though lately I’ve been sharing my experiences with other comics both foreign and domestic. Why not check out the front page and browse a while?