Archive for the Now This Is Only My Opinion Category


How Do You Solve a Problem Like Light Novels?

February 6th, 2011

There have been a lot of conversations on forums about the issue of why Light Novels do not sell well here in the West. Tokyopop discussed Light Novels recently on their editor’s blog and Seven Seas talked a little bit about the Strawberry Panic! Line when they put the third LN on hold.

Fans, of course, are sure that it’s all the publishers’ fault. They don’t sell them right, advertise them right, censor them, change the covers, don’t have enough babies who grow up to be people who buy Light Novels.

It’s well established that manga has a swiftly growing audience, but that the market has not grown with the same verve. Online aggregators of manga distributed without permission gain hundreds of thousands of readers, while those very same titles struggle to break even in sales.

Light Novels are a special problem. In Japan they primarily exist as franchise extenders. Of course there are some exceptions – and those exceptions are always the ones that are successful enough to turn the formula on its head. However, for a large number of LNs, the audience for the series/author/imprint already exists. There rarely is any need to promote beyond an ad or two in the magazines in which the the stories are serialized.

Here in the West LNs don’t have:

1) The magazines that serialize chapters monthly
2) Any other media tie-ins (unless they do and then the title is much more expensive to license)
3) The audience – LNs are, for the most part YA/older teen…maybe young adult… material. There are rare series which transcend this, but mostly it’s teens and early twenties.

In Japan, readers already know the material from Number 1) and 2) or follow the author. Here – this is rarely true. LN readers are, realistically, a niche of a niche, mostly because of other media tie-ins, like anime, games or manga. Most regular novel readers don’t know LNs exist and if they do, they don’t care. On top of that, you have the same problem as all other media in the anime/manga world – the audience is orders larger than the market.

Yes, there’s a teeny little problem with marketing and shelving. Let’s look at that rationally:

First, there’s the issue of marketing.

Let’s say you have an unlimited budget…where do you place a print ad to sell this great new book? You probably don’t know…because there really *aren’t* too many good places where you can put that ad. Name a good magazine for Teens. How about Older Teens? How about Young Adults? If you named a magazine, think about how many people you know who actually subscribe to it and read it. If you named something niche, like a Gaming magazine, imagine how many people who read that magazine might really want to curl up on the sofa with, say, Gosick. Okay, so I picked a magazine at random. GamePro, and checked their advertising rates. One ad – an ad that will run in one issue – for a 1/3 page ad is…$12,750. Name a LN that’s likely to sell to the readership of Seventeen magazine.

How many ads do you see when you read a magazine? How many make you call the number or buy the product?

Advertising only works if you can saturate the audience. That’s a lot of $12K ads.

And if you put in an ad on magazine/website, you only reach the people who see it, and notice it, which is a small fraction of people.

You might say – well, advertise it online – but of course that compounds the problem, because where people go for information is fragmented into thousands of sites, ad systems are fragmented into hundreds of affiliate systems and you still have the problem of people tuning out ads. For more on this see my discussion of promoting manga.

The conclusion – there is no way publishers of Light Novels can effectively advertise their products to reach a larger portion of a potential reading audience. They *could* advertise to librarians…and I believe some do. And then the problem becomes the Libraries’, to try and attract readers of those novels.

So that’s the problem with fans’ exhortations to “advertise more.”

Now, let’s look at the common wisdom that LNs would sell better if they were shelved in the fiction section, or with the YA novels.

The first thing that *has* to be said – bookstores are dying. Distribution without permission has become so widespread that children today have never been in a library or a bookstore before. They just assume they can get things for free online – and they don’t really know that it’s illegal or immoral. (When you do something wrong, you get punished. If no one punishes you…it must not be wrong to do.)

So, the idea that a book will sell better if it shelved properly in a bookstore is a fallacy from the start. YA audiences aren’t using bookstores that much in the first place. Nonetheless, YA fiction is a hot commodity, what with Twilight and Harry Potter and all. So you get your LN shelved in the YA or fiction section.

Now it’s competing with millions of other fiction titles. How are you going to get it noticed? There are *way* more fiction novels published every year than there are manga – even when Tokyopop was cranking out 10 titles a week. How many publishers are putting out manga regularly now? Viz, Tokyopop, DPM, Vertical, Yen, Seven Seas, maybe a few others. If every single one of these was popping out a lot of books – let’s say 50 books a week. There are (very roughly) 6000 books a week being published in America. Of course not every book ends up on a bookstore shelf, but fiction is a very, very competitive field – and YA lit, which is incredibly hot right now, is no less competitive.

Perhaps you decide to go for a row end cap display. This will separate your books from the pack a little, but then you’re back to the fact that bookstores are a dying breed. Only people who walk into that bookstore will see that display – which means you need to position those displays in high traffic stores, probably in major cities. These will have to be coordinated through your distributor – they are not cheap.

If you shelve the books with the Teen Lit or the Fiction, they will simply get lost in the rows and rows of authors whose name have some meaning to the audience. How well will Hasekura do compared with Meyer?

So you shelve it in with the manga. Now it gets lost in titles that are shelved alphabetically. How are people going to find it? Either way you go, you’re “wrong” according to fans.

Speaking of Meyer and Hasekura, let’s take a look at Yen Press for a second. Kurt Hassler has probably the most intimate knowledge of the book-selling industry in the manga world right now.

Yen licensed Spice and Wolf Light Novels. The “audience” for these novels have been hostile – very vocally – in every possible way. I have seen accusations that the novels were censored (they were not) that the new cover destroyed the artistic integrity of the books (this despite the fact that a slipcover with the original art was available…and that the original art was pretty basic.) The reality was that those fanboys – the established audience of the series – had no intention of buying the novels no matter what Yen did. All their complaints these were justifications of the behavior they were going to do anyway.

Yen then licensed and created a manga for Twilight – this instantly blew away any records of manga sales in America to date. It had weird looking typography, word balloons that obscured faces and above all, it was Twilight, an already much-maligned series. The fangirls who were the audience for this manga were also the market. It sold like the proverbial hotcakes.

There are two defining factors here: one, I believe that girls buy what they want more than boys do. In conversation last night about this topic, Sean Gaffney noted that all but one title on this week’s New York Times Best-Seller list of manga is “for girls.” Black Butler (also from Yen) has an astounding four volumes on the list and Hetalia has both of their released volumes. Naruto is the only series not explicitly “for girls” but it also has wide cross-over appeal…as most Shounen Jump stories do.

The second fact is the one that is most relevant to today’s discussion – to put it simply, Twilight had an a priori market. These fans know Twilight, they are devoted to Twilight and will buy Twilight materials.

The difference between marketing and selling a novel by Hasekura and one by Meyer is the difference between selling a novel you wrote vs one written by Stephen King.

The problem with Light Novels is this:

How do you promote and sell a book that 1) no one has heard of 2) has no *mainstream* media tie-in 3) no *where* to effectively advertise it 4) an audience that doesn’t want to pay for it 5) immense competition from domestic authors backed by larger companies with high-recognition names and major media tie-ins.

Figure that out and you have the winning formula for selling LNs.





Okazu around the Web

January 14th, 2011

Because I am quite literally too tired to write a coherent review today, here’s some other places you can read my thoughts, if you haven’t already.

Take a moment to read my essay in praise of Drama CDs over on Hooded Utilitarian.

I take a look at Japanese manga magazine Comic Beam over at Mangacast.

If you’re really a hardcore fan of me and that just isn’t enough, there’s also my recent post at SocialOptimized on Guest blogging.

Speaking of which – if you have an idea for something I haven’t covered here or a different perspective on something I have and you’d like to share it with the Okazu readership, feel free to send me an email with a suggestion for a Guest Post! I’ll be glad to consider it. ^_^

I’ll be back tomorrow with the YNN report!





Licensing Manga – the Miracle, the Message, the Moral of the Story

January 9th, 2011

日本語で

From time to time, I receive emails asking me how I got started in licensing and publishing manga. Recently, a regular reader here sent me a lovely email asking me, in a nutshell:

“How difficult and involved was it? Would you recommend it to others?”

Which I wanted to answer as a “Sunday Post” here on Okazu, because we are in an unprecedented age of freedom of communication and publishing is undergoing significant change at a rapid pace.

With that in mind, let me tell you a story:

A little more than ten years ago, I was becoming very interested in what is now referred to by mostly everyone as “Yuri.” There were some groups on UseNET that discussed the Yuri of various series, and a few places where conversation on Yuri in general were being held, but they mostly fell into two kinds: Lesbian Porn and Unlikely Pairings (you know what I mean, right? Totally straight girls draped over one another in one piece of splash art and suddenly they were a couple!) And some of the groups were overtly hostile to actual lesbians being interested. So, I decided to create a group that would welcome anyone who liked Yuri.

Okay, so a few years later, I had this idea. I would run an event in a lesbian bar in NYC, to celebrate Valentine’s Day. We would show the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie, and generally geek out. This was the first actual Yuricon event ever held and I still have NO idea what possessed me. Until the moment I walked into to Meow Mix, I had never been in a lesbian bar in my life, and maybe only been in a bar two or three times before. I had never run an event before, but saying that is a bit of a wank, because my family are compulsive volunteers and I certainly had been involved with the running of many events before. I chose Meow Mix, because they did Xena nights and I thought they might be cool with another kind of geekery.

And then a Miracle occurred.

Two Japanese women walked into the lesbian bar. One had somehow seen the listing in Time Out New York and decided to come with her friend. That person was Rica Takashima. Rica and I were staring at each other in amazement just two nights ago about what a miracle it was, too. We became friends, and one day I offered to publish her manga in English. That was my first license.

Rica and I went to Comiket, where I was able to meet and thank an artist I really liked. And invite her to an event I was doing….and ultimately to publish Tadeno Eriko’s WORKS anthology. That was my second license.

So, you see – everything I’ve ever done in Yuri manga was based on a miracle. Asking you to reproduce that would be a little weird. But that’s not the end of the story.

I began Yuricon in Social Media, before there was a name for it. UseNET, mailing lists, Yahoo Groups. And slowly, as I attended Comiket, I started to discover other circles I liked – and approached them through email, asking if I could publish old stories, stories that they had done years ago. I did that on purpose, because most creators stop caring about old work, work that isn’t licensed or remembered by anyone. A new story is precious – a story from 8 years ago…fine, do whatever you like.

So here I was, licensing and publishing without having the vaguest clue what I was doing.  I had massive learning curves on both the publishing side (because at first I was reinventing the concept of publishing doujinshi here, and then suddenly it morphed into actual book publishing) and the licensing side about which I knew *nothing.*

I’m the worst role model for this kind of thing, because I’m always like this. I start a thing before I know what I’m doing, then  reinventing the wheel – not because I don’t want to ask, but because I’m not doing what everyone else is, then by the time I get it all down, I change the rules, because I hate doing the same thing over and over. (^_^);;

But now the rules themselves are changing faster than I can change them, so here’s the Message – you have nothing to lose by asking. So many mangaka are on Twitter, have blogs, have email…you have *nothing* to lose by contacting someone whose work you love and asking them if you can publish it. The absolutely worst thing that can happen is they don’t respond or they respond with “no.” Then you’ll be depressed, regroup and move on.

A Miracle helps, but you can make your own miracles. DO a thing. Attend an event – heck, run an event. Draw, write, learn how books get published, study licensing, intern at a company, go to Comiket and introduce yourself to an artist. Communicate with them. Develop a relationship. Talk with people. You’ll need a lot of people to help you. I do not do anything I do by myself. I have the most amazing people helping me. Rica, of course, and people like Erin S. and Mari Morimoto, Komatsu-san and Ana, the artists themselves, my staff, my editors, my friends who have to listen to me go on and on about things, of course my wife, contributors from all around the world….not a single thing I do is something *I’ve* done – everything is something *we’ve* done. Together.

Bear in mind that ALC is a niche publisher. We are not a large company and we’re frequently working on a shoestring budget. This story is not the Viz story or the Tokyopop story. It’s a story that could star you.

Is it difficult and involved to license a manga? Yes.

Would I recommend it to someone? Yes.

The Moral of the Story is: If you don’t change the world, someone else will – why shouldn’t it be you? You have nothing to lose by asking.

(Update: Japanese translation by Komatsu-san. Thank you so much!!)

***

(マンガをライセンスするには － 奇跡、メッセージ、教訓)

時折私は、どのようにマンガをライセンスして、出版し始めるようになったかについて質問してくるメールをいただくことがあります。つい最近も、ある常連の読者さんから微笑ましいメールをいただいて、簡単にいうと、「どれくらい難しくて複雑なんですか？他の人にも薦めます？」という内容でした。「日曜版」としてその質問に、このOkazuブログでお答えしてみたいと思う理由は、私達はコミュニケーションの自由における前例のない時代にあって、出版もまた、急速な勢いで大きな変化を経ようとしているからです。

それをふまえて、話を始めてみますね。

10年と少し前頃に私は、現在ほとんどの人に「百合」と呼ばれているものに、興味を抱き始めるようになりました。UseNETには、様々な作品における百合について語り合っているグループがいくつか存在していて、百合について広く会話がされているような場所もありました。けれどそれらのほとんどは、二つの種類に分けられました。レズビアン・ポルノか、あり得ないカップリング(つまり、まったくの異性愛者である
女の子が、他の女の子にもたれかかっている、目を惹くようなイラストが1枚あるだけで、2人はカップルだといきなり決め付けられてしまうような!)です。さらにいくつかのグループは、現実のレズビアン達が関心を寄せてくることに、はっきりとした敵意を向けていました。だから私は、百合を好きな人なら、誰でも歓迎するようなグループを作ろうと決意したのです。

そしてその数年後、ある考えを思いつきました。ニューヨーク市のレズビアン・バーで、バレンタイン・デイを祝うイベントを開催しよう、というものです。映画「少女革命ウテナ アドゥレセンス黙示録」を上映して、オタクっぽい趣味をみんなでまったり楽しもうという趣旨ですね。結局それが、初めて実際に開催されたYuriconのイベントになりました。今でも、その時の私をなにが衝き動かしていたのか、全くわかりません。そのお店Meow Mixに足を踏み入れる時まで、私はそれまでの人生でレズビアン・バーに入ったことはありませんでしたし、バーそのものにも、数度しか行ったことがありませんでした。私自身はイベントを主催した経験はなかったのですけれど、自己満足に終わっても構いませんでしたし、私の家族が積極的にボランティア活動に参加していたこともあって、過去たくさんのイベント運営にしっかり関わってはいました。Meow Mixを選んだのは、以前に「ジーナ」(95～01年に放送されたファンタジーTVドラマ:訳注)のイベントも開催していて、また違う種類のオタクっぽいイベントもクールかも、と考えたからですね。

そして、奇跡が起きたのです。

2人の日本人女性がそのレズビアン・バーに入ってきました。その内の1人が、情報サイトTime Out New Yorkでの告知をたまたま見つけて、友達と来ることに決めたのです。その人物が、高嶋リカさんだったのでした。リカさんと私はこれを書いている2日前の晩にも、なんて奇跡だったんだろうとお互いを不思議な気持ちで見つめ合ったところです。私達は友達になり、ある時、彼女のマンガ(「リカってかんじ?!」)の英語出版について申し出てみました。それが私にとって最初のライセンスになったのです。

リカさんと私は日本のコミケに行って、そこでとてもお気に入りのマンガ家さんと会い、お礼を述べることが出来ました。それから彼女を私が開催しているイベントにも招待し、結果として蓼野絵理子さんの作品集「WORKS」を出版することになりました。それが私にとって2番目のライセンスです。

おわかりになるように-私が百合マンガ出版においてやってきたこと全てが、奇跡から始まっているのです。それがあなたにも起こるように願うのはちょっと変な話ではありますが、話はまだ続きます。

私はYuriconを、ソーシャルメディアがそう名付けられる以前に、その中において立ち上げました。UseNET、メーリングリスト、Yahooグループ。やがて徐々にですが、コミケに参加しながら、私はお気に入りとなる、また別のサークルを見つけるようになり、メールで連絡を取って、数年前に描いたような古い作品を出版出来ないかどうか訊ねてみました。それには理由があって、ほとんどのマンガ家は古い作品のことは気に留めなくなるし、そういった作品は誰からもライセンスされたり、思い出されたりすることもないからです。新しい作品は大事だけれども、８年前の作品なら……ああ、好きにしていいよ、という風に。

私は何をすべきか全くわからぬまま、ライセンスや出版をしていくようになったのです。まるで知識がなかった出版とライセンス双方の面で、私は厳しい学習局面を経てきました(特に出版については、当初「同人誌」を出版するコンセプトをアメリカで再構築しようとしていた計画が、突然実際の「本」を出版することに変わっていきましたから)。

この種のことにおいて、私は最悪のお手本でしょうけれど、私はいつもこうなんです。やり方など知らないうちに事を始めて、それからやり方自体を新しく考え出していく。他人に訊きたくないのではなく、そもそも他の人達と同じことをやっているわけではないのですから。そして全て理解する頃には、ルール自体を変えてしまうのです。なぜなら同じことを何度も何度も繰り返すのは嫌いだからです。

けれど今は、私が変えてしまえるようになるのよりも早く、ルール自体が変化していっています。だからここでメッセージがあります －「訊いて失うものは何もない」のです。たくさんのマンガ家さんがTwitterで発言していますし、ブログも持っていれば、メールでも連絡が取れます。大好きなマンガ家に連絡をして、作品を出版出来るかどうか訊ねることで失うものは、「何もない」のです。起こり得る一番最悪のことは、返事がもらえなかったり、もらえても断られてしまうことです。そうすれば落ち込んでもしまうでしょうけれど、気を取り直して、また進んでいけばいいのです。

奇跡は助けになりますけれど、自分自身で奇跡を作り出していくことも出来ます。イベントに参加し……いえ、開催しましょう。描いて書いて、どうやって本が出版されるのかを学び、ライセンシングについて勉強し、インターンとして企業に赴き、コミケに行って、マンガ家さんに自分を紹介しなさい。彼らとコミュニケートするのです。関係を築くのです。人々と会話をしなさい。あなたに力を貸してくれる人が、きっとたくさん必要になります。私も今やっていることを、自分だけでやっているわけではないのです。私には、助力してくれる最高に素晴らしい人達がいてくれるのです。リカさんはもちろんですが、Erin S.、Mari Morimotoさん, Komatsuさん、そしてAnaのような人々、マンガ家ご自身達、私のスタッフや編集者さん達、果てのない様々な私の話に耳を傾けなくてはならない友人達、それから当然、私のパートナー、世界中の貢献してくれるみなさん。私がやってきたどんなことも、ただひとつさえ、私1人で成し遂げたものではありません。全て「私達みんな」で成し遂げてきたことなのです。共に力を合わせて。

ALC Publishingは小さな小さな出版社だということを考えてみてください。私達はけっして大企業ではありませんし、ほんのわずかの予算で働かなくてはならないこともしばしばです。このストーリーはVIZ MediaやTOKYOPOPのお話ではありません。あなた自身が主人公になれるストーリーなのです。

マンガをライセンスするのは難しくて複雑ですか？　その通りです。
誰かに薦めますか？　もちろんです。

今回の教訓- 「もしあなたが世界を変えなければ、他の誰かが変えてしまうでしょう。どうしてそれがあなたではいけないのでしょう？　訊ねてみて失うものなど、何もないのですから」

(小松さんによる翻訳)





What Women Want From Comics

January 2nd, 2011

You may have noticed that Marvel, DC and their various imprints have been expressing confusion for some years as to “what women want” from comics. Call it ingenuous or clueless, I know I am not alone in being confused as to why it is just so freaking *hard* for the men in charge of these companies to figure out what women want. So, I thought I would help them.

I set up a (completely non-scientific) poll and asked woman who read comics to answer the questions. I had no particular agenda, but there will be inevitable bias, as I am human, with thoughts and experiences of my own. I received 424 completed responses.

Here are the questions I asked and the responses I received:

1. When you were young, did you read comic books you bought for yourself? (As opposed to reading your brothers’ comics or getting them from a parent or relative.)


1. Yes 286 67.77%

2. No 136 32.23%

2. What kind of comic books did you buy most (Choose One)?

1. Superhero 249  59.86%

2. Romance 7  1.68%

3. Horror 9  2.16%

4. War 0  0.00%

5. Manga 94  22.60%

6. Other 57  13.70%

3. Thinking about your favorite character from the comic books you read (or *a* favorite character) were they:

1. Female 242  57.89%

2. Male 176  42.11%

4. Still thinking about your favorite character, were they special because of:

1. Something they had (a magical object or talisman) 12 2.86%

2. Something they were (A Princess, a God, an Alien, etc.) 55  13.10%

3. Something they did (fought bad guys, solved mysteries) 147  35.00%

4. Some innate quality (a beloved icon, a charismatic leader, a furious fighter, a persistent snoop, etc.) 206  49.05%

5. Thinking about that favorite character, or any characters you liked the most what description below would best describe them? (Choose all that apply) 

1. Voluptuous 51  1.79%

2. Hard-bodied 97  3.40%

3. Outgoing/Friendly 189  6.63%

4. Tactiturn 72  2.53%

5. Idealized 91  3.19%

6. Realistic 154  5.41%

7. Popular 76  2.67%

8. Loner 161  5.65%

9. Ambitious 162  5.69%

10. Laid-back 83  2.91%

11. Princely 14  0.49%

12. Princessly 35  1.23%

13. Heroic 267  9.37%

14. Damsel in Distress 16  0.56%

15. Chaste 24  0.84%

16. Sensual 98  3.44%

17. Weak 16  0.56%

18. Strong 320 11.23%

19. Driven by Emotion 208  7.30%

20. Driven by Reason 162  5.69%

21. Fighting for Justice 295  10.35%

22. Fighting for Revenge 86  3.02%

23. Fighting to Save Humanity 172  6.04%

6. Thinking about comics you read now, are you likely to seek out the same kinds of characters as you described above? 

1. Very likely 200 47.51%

2. Somewhat Likely 137  32.54%

3. Neither Here nor There 55  13.06%

4. Somewhat Unlikely 21  4.99%

5. Very Unlikely 8  1.90%

I also asked two text questions:

Please describe the ideal character you would have liked to have seen in a comic as a child (to the best of your ability to do so.)

and

Please describe the ideal character that you would like to see in a comic now. 

For the all responses to the text questions – including the excitingly predictably attempts at trolling (you can tell because they contain synonyms for “penis”) – please visit this link. For the full results of the questions above, go here.

I will take the liberty of summarizing the results of this poll, as *I* interpret them.

Dear Marvel and DC – 

Women read comics. Women who read comics have been reading comics since they were children, just like men who read comics.

Women who already read your comics like superheros – male or female – who are strong, independent and who fight for justice.

Women who already read your comics would like to see female superheros with a dark side, and who don’t need to be rescued, but can find their way out of danger *on their own.* 

Women who already read your comics, would like to see more diversity, including more superheros of color, more LGBT characters and more body-type diversity. 

Above all, women who already read your comics, would like to see you figure out that what women want isn’t that complicated.

Sincerely,

Women Who Read And Buy Comics 





Top Ten Yuri Manga of 2010

December 19th, 2010

As always, writing this list is a struggle. Am I telling you the 10 I liked the most? Including lesser titles because I know you can get a copy? Am I merging English and Japanese titles to fill spaces, or separating them so I can include more?

There was a nice pile of manga on my possibles list when all was said and done, so I am going to separate out the English titles, otherwise they’d never appear on the list at all. Which means you’re getting a Top 5 in each language.

Let me remind you, as I always do, that these lists are *in my opinion* and therefore may not be your opinion. You are most welcome to add items you feel were noteworthy in the comments. Without further ado, here are my Top Yuri Manga Lists for 2010

Top Five Yuri Manga in English

10) Jormungand – Right, the Yuri is barely there, but what there is is openly portrayed for the one-sided (but not rejected or mocked) crush it is. Otherwise, it’s a ridiculous story full of guns and chases and people dying – i.e, a good action story.

9) K-ON! – One of the abiding qualities of anime and manga fandom is the insistence on seeing relationships where there are none. Mugi does that for you, so you don’t have to. Oh and by the way, the series is a delightful slice-of-life comic strip with charming characters.

8) Azumanga Daioh Omnibus – Azumanga Daioh was the first 4-koma style story to make it big over here, very likely because the anime hit first. It set the bar for those following it and when Yen put out a new edition, they brought us back to that magical moment when we discovered the Japanese comic strip. For letting us relive that, and reminding us what we’re looking for, the new edition gets #3 on this list.

7) Hayate x Blade – I’m not done talking about this series, even though this may or may not be it for us in English. (I don’t know Seven Seas’ plans any more than you do, so don’t ask.) For getting as far as Hitsugi and Shizuku being awesome in battle (background music and all) and giving us the slightest taste of Sid and Nancy, as well as all the wonderful shinyuu pairs and their Yuri-ish sensibility, Hayate x Blade is forever in my Top Two.

6) Gunsmith Cats Burst – The final moment of this series came with exactly the right note of melancholy, hope, sex and danger. Surrounded by car chases, gun fights, explosions and drugs, Rally Vincent conceded the one thing she could never truly keep to Goldie. And the story bowed out with a recognition of all that we had ever thought was true. In English, in the year 2010, this is my Top Yuri Manga.

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Top Five Yuri Manga in Japanese

5) Ohana Holo Holo – This story was an unexpected find. It’s not a “Yuri story,” but this tale of an alternative family far surpasses the confines of any category. A past love shapes a current relationship and there’s some sense that that love may not yet be dead. However, that’s not the point of the story. The point is that the family we make is as strong as any family we are born into. This is an excellent manga and I look forward to more.

4) Octave/GIRL FRIENDS/Aoi Hana/Renai Joshika/Sasamekikoto – These series are all, in their own way, creating a revolution. Dramatic, funny, sexy, cute, every one of these books did something special – they looked at love between women not as a fetish, but as a relationship. These books took us step by step through the process of feeling scared, ecstatic, alone, fulfilled, all the many and various ways that we can feel when we find ourselves attracted to another woman. These stories capture everything from first love to old loves rekindled in an refreshingly honest, no-punches-pulled way. This is the revolution we’ve been waiting for. Here it is. Girls loving girls, women loving women, portrayed with honesty and depth by artists who care to tell a story, not just frame a sex scene.

(Yes, yes, this is a cheat, by making this a 5-way tie, but it’s because the stories themselves take back seat to the intent here. I can sleep at night with this, so don’t complain. ^_^)

3) Rakuen Le Paradis – By far and away, my favorite of the quarterly anthologies I’m reading right now. Artists I like, telling stories I like, with a decidedly “talking to the adults in the room” flavor. This is not for the kiddies, and moe fans will be turned right off by most of what’s here. This is the magazine I’ve been waiting for for years. If I could give Yuri Hime one piece of advice, I suggest it use Rakuen as a role-model, so it grows up into a beautiful, poised woman.

I almost fudged this again and went for a tie. But no, I’m going to force myself to make a decision. It could have easily gone the other way. But here we go. My top two series of the year are:

2) Gunjo – There’s just about nothing left I can say about this series that I haven’t already said. Nakamura Ching-sensei is one of my heroes. She tells this remarkable story with her whole heart and soul and every single chapter I am flattened by it. Volume 1 is one of my prize possessions. Brutal, dark, touching, sublime…this series is still the most amazing thing I have ever read and I still have no idea where she’s going with it. Like I said, this easily could have been Number 1 this year. Gunjo is a masterwork.

1) Nobara no Mori no Otome-tachi – The sole reason this series made number 1 is because it led the pack in bringing Yuri back to shoujo manga. Yuri in seinen has never been a surprise, and in shounen has been used as a plot complication for many years, and it’s resurgence in josei has been on the rise for the past few years…the one place it was missing was shoujo. Shoujo Yuri is what got me into the genre and this series, this child of Maria-sama ga Miteru and Strawberry Panic!, has led the genre back full-circle. The series is utterly melodramatic, romantic, creepy, sexy – a perfect Yuri soap opera. Because I’m apparently a sap for Yuri in shoujo manga, Nobara no Mori no Otome-tachi makes my #1 spot for the year.

What was your top ten for 2010? I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments!