In other words, let’s avoid A) making her dad angry and B) let’s call her Kate!
Kate Dacey happens to be a professor. When she’s not teaching, she’ll more than likely be reading manga…and then write about it. A former reviewer at Pop Culture Shock (it’s no longer around), she started her blog The Manga Critic and found it fun to not be constrained by specific guidelines and deadlines. That was until she stopped blogging about two years ago, for a lot of reasons that get explained in this interview.
She’s back now, and looking to get back into the swing of things. In this interview, we almost take the temperature of manga licensing nowadays, how’s it feel like to get back into blogging, and how it was like to be a reporter for WKCR.
…Actually that doesn’t get asked or answered in the interview. You’re on your own everybody!
Organization ASG: So Kate, how did you get into manga? What attracted you to it?
Kate Dacey: Like a lot of folks my gateway to manga was anime. I’m not a big anime watcher but I got very interested in the Inuyasha anime and started watching that pretty faithfully. And then I discovered there was a comic that it was based on so I sought out the comic and I enjoyed reading the comic more than I enjoyed watching the show. I did enjoy the show but there was something nice about imagining the characters voices by myself, and thinking more about the world they inhabited and what it looked like rather than having that all spelled out for me by the animators and voice actors.
After I read the Inuyasha manga I started to look for other things like it and from there I started to expand, I started discovering CLAMP’s work, and I looked for more short stories by Rumiko Takahashi, and I looked at more things like Lone Wolf and Cub, and that’s what got me interested in manga in the first place.
OASG: What’s been your favorite manga to read over the years? You can name a few.
Kate: Well if I had to choose one manga to be left on a desert island with I think I would probably choose Black Jack. I never get tired of reading it, the stories are always fresh, I always find something new in it, and I think it lets Tezuka’s cartoonyness come out in the right way, that it’s always in service of the stories and it doesn’t really clash with the messages and what he’s trying to do. So I would say Black Jack is at the top of my list.
I’m also a big fan of Makoto Kobayashi, so Club Nine and What’s Michael are a couple of my favorites. I’m a big fan of Jiro Taniguchi — Benkei in New York is one of my personal favorites but I’ve also enjoyed Summit of The Gods, some of the food manga JManga licensed by him. And I’m still a big fan of Takahashi, I really love her short stories, especially the Rumic World Rumic Theater stories. I think that’s some of my favorite stuff.
OASG: Out of all the manga you’ve read this year, what’s stood out to you and why?
Kate: I was really pleased to see that Dark Horse and Vertical have been licensing so much Satoshi Kon works. I just picked up Dream Fossils and I’m working my way through that right now, and the illustrations are amazing and Kon is a really good storyteller, he’s a good short story teller, he’s also a good long-form storyteller. I’ve also read Seraphim. I don’t remember how many wings there are. It’s like 266 million wings! I always had to look it up while I was writing my review because I can never remember exactly how many wings it was. But Kon’s collaboration with Mamoru Oshii, which is an incomplete story, is really pretty amazing. The artwork is very crisp, the storytelling’s good, there’s a lot of breathing room and ambiguity in the story it’s not overly determined. And I’m sorry that they never finished it. The 17 chapters that they did write together are pretty tight and interesting and in person–
OASG: Sorry to cut in, but did you check out Dark Horse’s release of Kon’s Opus?
Kate: I did! Actually last year Brigid and I invited David Brothers to contribute to a roundtable discussion at Mangablog about Opus, and that was definitely on my short list for best manga for 2014. I thought it was fun, it was playful, the artwork is terrific, and I think Dark Horse found an elegant solution to the fact that Kon actually never finished it by taking some of his sketches and concepts and using that as a way of suggesting how the story would’ve ended. I thought it was a perfect solution — it preserved the work Kon did, it didn’t impose some guilt or sensibility on the material, and it gave the reader a little bit more sense of closure than if they simply ended it with the last published material for that story.
OASG: Did you know going in that it was unfinished?
Kate: I didn’t. I knew absolutely nothing about it other than the fact that Satoshi Kon was the artist and storyteller.
OASG: Ok, you’re just like me. I saw it in the bookstore, said, “Oh I have enough money, I’ll go buy it!” And I was just– yeah–
Kate: Right! I had absolutely no agenda, I just thought, “Hmm…sure, why not?” It looks nice, Dark Horse does a good job with their translations. I found Tropic of The Sea a mixed bag but it looked really good and I sort of figured that I had nothing to lose by trying it out, and I was really impressed by Opus.
OASG: What’s been the most surprising manga that’s been announced for license in the past year?
Kate: Well I would have to agree, when we had been emailing before and setting this up you mentioned Yowamushi Pedal, and I have to say that was surprising — not because I’m not intrigued by the title but because sports manga has generally done pretty poorly in the U.S. It’s also I think up to 39 volumes in Japan, and that seems like a really big commitment. Very few publishers in the U.S are publishing material that long, I think Viz is one of the only publishers that has a lot of things in its catalog that exceed 20 volumes, so I was really surprised by that announcement, although I’m excited and I think Yen Press has done some really interesting omnibus editions, they’ve treated material well when they’ve gathered it that way…and I think if anybody can connect with that readership that’s interested in it, Yen is gonna be successful at it.
OASG: Any other surprises?
Kate: I don’t know about surprises. I think a lot of publishers have been a little less ambitious in their licensing efforts. After the manga bubble burst, about 2009-2010, I think a lot of manga publishers retrenched and really spent a lot more time thinking about what would connect with the largest possible audience, and I think in recent years there’s been less effort to publish more marginal titles or things that might be historically interesting but don’t have a big readership, and that kind of material has been pushed a little bit to the fringes. So publishers like Drawn & Quarterly are doing some of that, DMP has been doing some of that with their Kickstarter campaigns for lesser known Tezuka titles, but I’m seeing less of that weird funky stuff. There was this sort of window and time for example when Viz was experimenting with seinen manga and online serialization of stuff from IKKI magazine, where it felt like we were on the verge of this kind of breakthrough and we would see a much more diverse manga market. And I really feel the manga bubble encouraged publishers to be more business minded, I guess, in their licensing decisions.
OASG: You mean like, in the past, they may not have been as business like?
Kate: Well I don’t mean that, I don’t want to imply that a company like Viz isn’t an extraordinary well run business. I think what I’m saying is that they realize they can’t afford perhaps to be as experimental, that the audience for manga changed I think a lot. The first generation of manga readers who embraced Sailor Moon and Naruto aren’t necessarily the folks who are buying Oishinbo or Blade of the Immortal — it didn’t turn into something where you graduated to another kind of manga after reading shoujo or shounen as your first manga. A lot of kids sort of just phased out of manga altogether.
So I think what seemed like a logical progression because there was a model for doing that in Japan didn’t really quite pan out that way here in the U.S and the kind of reader who’s buying Master Keaton is not the same reader who is necessarily buying My Love Story!! or something like that.
OASG: So throughout the years you had been reading manga, but then decided you wanted to write about it. How did you get into blogging the first time around?
Kate: Well!…I’m almost embarrassed to say this out loud, but I was one of many people who created a blog at TOKYOPOP’s social media website, they went through a brief phase where they thought they could create some sense of online community by giving people an open platform for blogging and posting images, that sort of thing–
OASG: How old was that?
Kate: That was like…2006? It was really weird because there were few adult voices, there were creators who were working with TOKYOPOP, blogging there, the editors were blogging there, and then there were a few other people who were interested in manga, either it’s because they were creators or critics and they were also in the mix. It was very weird because there were a lot of 13 year olds posting things like, “I’m in a small town and nobody understands what anime is and I feel so alone–” And I said, “Wow, I feel so old!” *laughs* reading those comments.
But somebody at Midtown Comics actually saw the reviews I was posting there and invited me to write for Pop Culture Shock, and that was at a time where Pop Culture Shock had a monthly readership of about a million people, so that was a really big deal, just to get on that platform and just writing about manga there. The other thing that happened is that I met Brigid Alverson and Brigid is phenomenal at connecting people. She has a real talent for sussing out interesting writers and publicizing their work, she’s incredibly positive and enthusiastic and she was a really big help when I was first starting to blog.
OASG: What’s been the best thing about blogging and blogging about manga in the manga industry?
Kate: I think for me, one of the things I enjoyed the most is getting to know people who are working in the industry, meeting people who were editing manga or marketing it or licensing it, and talking to them about what they did, and finding out why they joined the industry, and hearing what they like to read — sometimes there was a really big disconnect, especially with editors between the manga they were actually working on a day to day basis and the manga they most like to read in their spare time. So I think for me that was one of the great privileges of blogging.
I think also getting to interact with other people who liked manga when I was still running The Manga Critic website, I had people who came and commented on almost every review, we had a lot of good discussions, and I found that by being assertive, but not snarky, that I could engage with people who showed up with really negative comments. On the whole I think I was pretty lucky in that I dodged a lot of the really nasty comments that some female bloggers have attracted in the past, especially if you wrote a negative review of something like Highschool of the Dead.
OASG: So you first started blogging at Pop Culture Shock and that had closed down correct?
Kate: Well I had actually left before Pop Culture Shock closed down, partly because I had started at Pop Culture Shock and Erin Finnegan and I were the two people writing manga reviews there, and gradually I started bringing on more writers. As I did that, I found that I was spending more time mailing people books and editing their reviews than I was actually writing my own, and I decided that I would start my own website. So I left at the very end of 2009, and started my own website the following year. And for a while I found that very liberating. I didn’t answer to anybody, I could post 5 reviews a week if I wanted to, or just one, I didn’t have to worry about fighting with somebody else over who would get the privilege of to review the first volume of Black Jack or anything like that.
But I did find out it was a lot of work too to keep a website going like that, and I did miss the sense of community that I had when I was working with the other Manga Recon writers at Pop Culture Shock. So when Melinda Beasi created the Manga Bookshelf website I was really happy to join that, and I felt it was a really nice compromise. Each blogger got to retain their own individual identity, but you were a part of a much larger constellation of related blogs and we’re all focusing on the same thing.
OASG: But ok, you were blogging with those guys for a while, but then you stopped. You said you were done.
Kate: Yeah, I took about a 2 year hiatus from blogging partly ’cause I felt like my reviews were starting to get stale. I had this awful moment where I realized I started three reviews in a row with the same basic opening sentence *laughs* …and I was really feeling burnt out. I felt like I was reading the same book over and over and over again, like ‘Hey, the shy girl in class is really clumsy and she really likes a cute boy and he doesn’t notice her yet,’ and I’m like “Oh no, not another one of these!” And I was having a lot of difficulty saying something new or interesting about a lot of the books I was getting. So it was helpful to take a couple of years off from blogging. That was also the time my job changed a lot and the number of courses that I was teaching increased substantially so I was also focusing more efforts on lesson prep and grading and doing research on the subjects I was teaching. And in that time period I think I would’ve had less head space I would have had for manga anyway.
OASG: Now that you’re back, how’s it been like returning to write words and look at who’s covering manga and writing about it?
Kate: Well I think for me it’s fun to come back because I’m at a point where I can just decide whether I want to get back into the grind of reviewing just about anything on my doorstep or I want to be more selective. In the past I pretty much reviewed anything that publishers sent me, and I think that was part of the reason I reached a state of burnout. In an effort to try and review everything, I started — I wasn’t reading a lot that interested me personally, and it was becoming harder and harder to write about that. And people who do any sort of popular music criticism or movie criticism wrestle with the same problem. I mean I am astonished when I think about how many years Roger Ebert wrote great movie reviews because I know if I had to go to the movies every single week and watch 2 or 3 films and if they weren’t Lawrence of Arabia week in and week out I’d be pretty burnt-out in that job.
OASG: How’s it been like working with Brigid on MangaBlog?
Kate: It’s good because the focus is a little bit different. It’s not a review oriented blog, and in some aspects it’s an old school blog in that we’re doing a lot of link blogging, we’re combing through the web, looking for interesting things, and our goal is to point people to news, interesting articles about manga, so it’s a slightly different orientation to the material. But I do still think of myself as a reviewer than a journalist, so, in consultation with Brigid, I’ve been looking for ways to increase the books that I review and make that a more regular feature on the site. And so far I’m really enjoying it. I think I’ve been away from it long enough that I feel like I have new things to say about the books that I’m reviewing.
OASG: It looks like you’re trying new things, like yesterday you started the Manga Revue. So is the year going to be mostly focused on trying new things, seeing what sticks, what works?
Kate: Absolutely! Sometimes long reviews are fun to write and sometimes they start to feel like an assignment. Like write 500 words or write 5,000 words on, and I really find that sometimes it’s liberating to write a shorter review because you really have to be deliberative about what you put in there, there’s only so much you can say about the plot, and it really forces you to think about how you’re responding to the manga, what people want to know before they decide if they should buy this, and you know occasionally I’ll read something that I felt it needed a longer review. I think the Kon/Oshii review that I mentioned before that I felt like two paragraphs is not enough to capture the essence of it. I didn’t know I had some hundred fifty thousand words about that particular manga, but that’s an example of something where going longer is good, then when I compare that to how I reacted to JoJo, I didn’t really have that much to say about JoJo, other than the fact that I felt it was an early work and it showed.
OASG: So I know you got your hands on Dream Fossils, but I know you’re looking forward to other manga that’s being released this year. Can you share a few that you’re looking forward to reading?
Kate: Well I think this is going to be the year of Junji Ito. I noticed Fragments of Horror is coming out I think in June or July, also Cat Diary, which I was kind of surprised anybody licensed, but was still delighted to see that was on the list, so I’m definitely looking forward to those. I’m pleased to see so many good manga come back in new editions, I brought the first omnibus of Emma, I owned at one point the original CMX edition and it looks terrific. I’m looking forward to Dark Horse’s re-issue of Planetes in a single volume, I think it will be quite amazing, and I’m also looking forward to Ludwig B, which was a biography of Beethoven that Tezuka started near the end of his life. Tezuka didn’t finish it and left it at two volumes and DMP ran a Kickstarter campaign earlier this year to publish it. I was pleasantly surprised and discovered that there were a lot of people who were interested in seeing this book in print.
For me, I’m really excited about it, in part because it’s one of the most amazing evocations of musical sound on paper, which is something incredibly hard to do. There are lots of manga about musicians, rock bands, and things like that, but some of the pages in which Tezuka is drawing Beethoven at the keyboard are really amazing, and thoughtful, and sophisticated , and it kind of captures the spirit of the music, so I’m very much looking forward to that one.
OASG: Final question: Is there any manga company you’re looking at for the rest of year and going, “Ok, I’m looking forward to what you guys are gonna release!”
Kate: Ooh, that’s a tough one. I mean I always will pry whatever Vertical licenses. I don’t…necessarily like everything, I think I was one of six people in the mangasphere who didn’t really care for Witchcraft Works, just too much fanservice for me–
OASG: Even Cardfight Vanguard?
Kate: Pardon me?
OASG: Even Cardfight Vanguard?
Kate: *laughs* I don’t think I tried that one. I definitely–
OASG: But you said everything! *laughs*
Kate: I think that started running in the period of time before I got back in the swing of reviewing, but it’s almost like Ajin: Demi-Human is something that I would have necessarily picked up, but Vertical licensed it and I could immediately see why they licensed it and could imagine the market for it. I thought it was better than I expected, I started reading it and I was like, “Oh no, not another teenager with superpowers!” But it ended up being a bit more interesting than that. So Vertical’s a company that I trust…even though I’d say lately I’ll maybe stay with 1 out of 3 things I’d try from Vertical, but I’m always willing to try whatever they publish. I think Yen Press has an incredibly ambitious lineup, Kodansha does too, and Viz is solid, they always deliver good content. So I don’t know if there’s any one publisher that I’m watching with the idea that that particular publisher is gonna deliver the stuff that I love. I think most of the main publishers offer a pretty diverse slate of manga for 2015, 2016.