Nouvelle Manga Comes to the U.S.
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on January 17, 2006 Sign up now!
by Kai-Ming Cha -- Publishers Weekly, 1/17/2006
Manga readers itching for more mature fare can take heart. Fanfare/Ponent Mon, an unusual European copublishing venture specializing in literary manga, will debut a line of “nouvelle manga” in the American market this month after signing on with Biblio Book Distributors. Fanfare/Ponent Mon will continue to distribute through Diamond to comic shops.
Fanfare/Ponent Mon will publish six to eight titles per year, continuing its "walking pace," as Stephen Robson, manager of Fanfare, describes the publishing schedule. Based in North Cambridgeshire, England, Robson works with his life partner, Josephine Leigh. In Barcelona, Spain, Ponent Mon is run by Ami Reuveni and two assistants. Fanfare and Ponent Mon share a catalogue, with one end featuring English titles and the other featuring Spanish editions. Because Ponent Mon does the licensing, books normally appear first in Spanish.
Originally two separate companies, Fanfare and Ponent Mon executed a merger of sorts in 2003, becoming two separate companies that work closely together. The two companies publish what they describe as a new kind of comic that brings together the cinematic storytelling of French bandes dessinees with the everyday life stories of Japanese manga.
The style has been dubbed nouvelle manga by Frederic Boilet, a French expatriate writer and illustrator living in Japan, in a manifesto posted on his website, http://www.boilet.net/am/nouvellemanga_manifeste_1.html. Ponent Mon published Boilet's critically acclaimed Yukiko's Spinach with Ken Takahama, a story about a French comics artist and writer and his model/muse. Ponent Mon then went one step further to license sophisticated manga titles that fit the nouvelle manga description, publishing them in Spanish. Fanfare followed suit, handling the English editions of the books licensed for Spanish publication.
According to Boilet's manifesto, the stories of nouvelle manga take precedence over the artwork. While traditional American comics and French bandes dessinees originated with artwork as the focus, nouvelle manga uses a cinematic, panel-by-panel type of storytelling to portray stories of everyday life. Still, the art in Fanfare/Ponent Mon books is painstakingly beautiful. Jiro Taniguchi's Walking Man is an alternately lush and meditative examination of everyday life in a controlled and leisurely setting. The pages of Kiriko Nananan's Blue are drawn with a delicate hand, and the story and artwork are as disturbing as they are quieting. In Doing Time, Kazuichi Hanawa recounts his experience serving time in a Japanese prison. meticulously detailing the intricate rituals that inmates go through in order to, say, use the bathroom. Fanfare/Ponent Mon is also releasing Jiro Tanaguchi and Natsuo Sekikawa's The Times of Botchan, a ten-volume history of the life and times of Japanese literary master Soseki Natsume.
So far the Ponent Mon side of the catalogue is noticeably bulkier, including books by Yoshihiro Tatsumi (of Drawn & Quarterly's Pushman fame); Hideo Yamamoto, author of the masterpiece Ichi the Killer; and Daisuke Igarashi. Ponent Mon also publishes yuri (girls' love) material, including the aforementioned Blue and Q-ta Minami's No Toques a Mi Chica, or Hands Off My Girl, which is being scanlated (scanned and translated) in English at the online yuri manga site www.lililicious.net.
The two publishers will also continue publishing collaborative work like Boilet's joint venture with Japanese artist and writer Kan Takahama. Robson tells PWCW, "We have just put our anthology title Japan to bed." The Japan anthology features eight French artists who were sent to various places in Japan for a two-week visit to write stories about their views on the country. In return, eight Japanese creators came up with narratives about where they live now or about their home towns.
"There has long been a strong French community in Japan; they appear to share many artistic and cultural similarities," says Robson. "Both cultures have extensive roots in comics—whether it is called manga or bandes dessinees—and now that the seed of working together has been sown, I am certain that they will produce a wealth of new material that we will be happy to bring to the U.S. market."
