It used to be gospel among publishers that getting a book banned in Boston juiced sales. Can the same be true for Kindle? Digital Manga is banking on it; the Akadot retail site is offering all three of the books that were removed from Kindle (presumably for adult content) as a discount bundle. These are print editions, and the price, $18.99 for all three, is a considerable discount over regular retail, so it’s a good deal. The Digital folks have done well for themselves out of this whole affair, as the three books in question (two of which were deep backlist) have gotten a lot of attention; advertising them as too hot for digital is a pretty shrewd move.

Welcome to Shelf Porn. Our guest this week is blogger and manga fan Cathy Pajunen. Cathy had posted some pics of her collection on her blog, so I asked her if she’d be interested in doing an expanded tour of her collection for Robot 6. Thankfully, she said yes.

Remember that we’re also on the lookout for holiday-themed shelf porn this month. If you’ve got some swell DC or Marvel tree ornaments, or a Naruto-themed creche, take a pic or two and send them to cmautnerATcomcastDOTnet and we’ll post them here in the coming weeks.

And now, on with the tour:

The first thing you see in my apartment is the row of bookshelves I have lining the back wall of the living room. (My couch usually hides all but the top two shelves, but it was sent out for repair when I took this picture.) I’ve moved twice in the past two years so a lot of my current arrangement is a reaction to all of the packing and unpacking I’ve had to do. I also had to find an apartment with sufficient wall space to fit my shelves (but still within my budget) so I try to be a little more ruthless these days about what I buy or give away. In a perfect world I would have a second bedroom or a den to house my hobbies.

Last year (move #2) I decided I had too many things and tried to reduce the clutter. I ended up giving away over half of my comic books (I’m trying to switch to trades), about a third of my novels and then balked when it came to my dvds. Since space was the issue I ended up ditching the boxes and moved the discs into binders. It’s not horribly exciting to look at, but the row of black binders on that first bookshelf is actually 2 tall bookshelves worth of dvds. It’s both funny and sad to remember how amazed and happy I was about that.

The top half of the shelf are my newer graphic novels, dvds I still want easy access to and whatever manga I haven’t read yet. I like to keep them separate so I don’t lose track of where I am in a series, and the guilt helps to keep me from adding *too* many new books. In theory, anyway.

When I first organized my manga I tried to keep it in rough groups. Shojo on the first shelf, shonen on the second and a mix on the third and fourth (so that my least favorite titles didn’t all end up together). My shojo books have grown faster than the other types so now they’re slowly taking over the other shelves. Nothing really stays in the same place for very long though, as I move them around depending on how often I get new volumes or stop collecting a title. I also love to lend my manga and graphic novels to friends so I might suddenly need room for a pile of books that were just returned.

Part of bookshelves three and four. I try to layer things so that the books in the back peek out whenever possible. Since they’re not in alphabetical order, I can “lose” a series if they’re not visible and I forget where I shelved it.

My last shelf has most of my novels, but I also keep my Mouse Guard figures here. They were a Christmas gift to myself a couple of years ago.

My living room closet is home to my remaining comic books, a couple of boxes of older graphic novels and the 550 volumes of manga I wrapped in comic bags before my last move. My shelves were starting to overflow so I decided to store some completed series and things I didn’t reread. None of these boxes have labels (of course) and I’m dreading the day I have to actually find anything.

Since I have so many shelves covering my walls I tend not to put up a lot of pictures or art. I couldn’t resist buying this print from Imaginism Studios at the last convention I went to, though.

At one point I figured that if I were going keep buying random things they should at least be functional. My kitchen now has an Ouran High School Host Club tea tin and bag holder, some Starbucks city mugs I got on my second trip to Japan and a Chococat travel mug. I have a soft spot for Chococat.

I have four more bookshelves in my bedroom – two smaller ones for manga, a tall one with the rest of my novels and oversized books and (the most dangerous) a small shelf next to my bed where I keep things I’m reading or just finished. Most of my toys and figures live in my bedroom as well. I’ve resisted the urge to put out all of the action figures and toys I’ve collected, though. Most of my superhero toys are still packed away.

My tallest bookshelf is also home to my Studio Ghibli toys, a couple of Chococats, Invader Zim figures, a Wall-E and P-Chan.

Most of my anime figures are on this wall. At the bottom of the picture you can see a musical Totoro I bought in a craft village near Kanazawa. I also bought a Totoro teacup that I keep on my manga shelves in the living room. I’m afraid of breaking it so it’s display only.

My Ichigo Mashimaro, Fullmetal Alchemist, Tsubasa and Cardcaptor figures.

The other side has Azumanga Daioh, Maison Ikkoku, some School Rumble and Rozen Maiden is on the bottom.

My middle shelf holds another Fullmetal Alchemist set and Naruto.

The next wall is a little more random. Assorted Bat Family figures, some Bleach and a (stupid stupid) Rat Creature. The Batmobile is actually a Christmas ornament I keep out year round.

The opposite wall has a shelf with characters from Bleach, Escaflowne, Oh My Goddess, One Piece and Yotsuba&!.

I’m a huge Yotsuba fan and the last few birthdays and Christmases I asked for the Revoltech figures. I have another Yotsuba that presides over my computer desk. (Along with most of my Chococat things. I will spare you the picture, though.)

I keep my shonen-ai and yaoi manga on the smaller shelves in my room, generally because each publisher seems to put out different sizes which makes them hard to shelve with the other titles. They’re mostly organized by size but I try to keep volumes from the same manga-ka together.

My plush anime toys live on one of my smaller bookshelves. Mr. Saotome was the first (a gift from my brother about 15 years back), but my favorite is Momiji from Fruits Basket. I try not to buy a lot of plush toys because not only do they take up a bit too much room, but unless people understand *why* you have those particular plushies you end up with a lot of teddy bears as gifts. I don’t like teddy bears.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction

• Pop Matters has an interesting essay comparing Mike Mignola’s Hellboy series with the similarly themed Italian comic Dylan Dog.

As characters, they could be satanic siblings, or infernal in-laws: Hellboy, the Hades-born offspring of a witch and a demon; and Dylan Dog, in love with an undead woman who was likely his mother, and battling his nemesis, the devil, who could be his father. Despite their fantastic and often horrific circumstances, at heart each character is a working-class hero, just trying to get the job done.

• Sean Collins grapples with All-Star Batman and Robin: “The thing really is (to quote Grant Morrison’s Mad Hatter) very much cleverer than its rep as a goddamn-Batman meme generator would indicate.”

• Curt Purcell continues his ongoing look at the Blackest Night series and superhero decadence in general.

• Matthew Brady enjoyed Lamar Abrams’ Remake: “It’s pretty ridiculous stuff, but always funny.”

• Greg McElhatton declares Neil Kleid’s The Big Kahn “easily Kleid’s best work to date as a writer.”

• Brian Hibbs was shocked — shocked I tell you — to discover that Archie #600 was a fun read: “I mean, I’m certainly a “Betty Man”, and that makes a lot more sense to me than Veronica, but Mike Uslan’s script here is remarkably crisp, as well as filled with real drama and pathos.”

• Katherine Dacey on Ooku: The Inner Chamber: “For all its dramatic and socio-political ambitions, volume one isn’t nearly as daring or weird or pointed as it might have been. If anything, it reminds me of a BBC miniseries: it’s tasteful, meticulously researched, and a little too high-minded to be truly compelling.”

• Kinukitty reads the yaoi manga Black Sun and says “I can’t even think about this title without kind of flapping my hands and sputtering a bit.”

• Rob Clough reads and reviews more minicomics, something we all should do more of.

• The Daily Cross Hatch on Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit: “True enjoyment of this volumes ultimately seems to fall on a willingness to embrace the complementary sensibilities of ‘aw, fucking gross’ and ‘oh, fucking sweet,’ ”

• KC Carlson reviews Looking for Calvin and Hobbes by Nevin Martel, a book I was completely unaware of until now.

• Finally, Tim O’Neil has some thoughts on what makes The Thing so awesome.

Welcome once again to Send Us Your Shelf Porn. It’s like the old Queen for A Day show, but with comics.

We’ve got a really special, nay, massive tour for today as author, editor, critic, cartoonist and all-around renaissance guy Jason Thompson has pulled back the curtain and allowed us to peek into his extensive manga, comics and rpg collection. I think you’ll agree he’s taken some rather creative steps in organizing and storing his collection in a relatively small space.

Is it time for him to possibly seek out … brrr … a storage center? I’ll leave that to you, dear reader to decide, as I hand the reins of this column over to Mr. Thompson:

I didn’t always own so much manga. Some “Rose of Versailles,” some “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure,” some Kazuo Umezu, a little “Video Girl Ai” and “Maison Ikkoku”… I lived a simple life. That changed in 2006 when I got the offer to write Manga: The Complete Guide, and set myself the task of reading every manga available in English. One year and approximately 1000 reviews later, I found myself the owner of over 3,000 manga graphic novels, as well as numerous untranslated tankoubon and Japanese manga magazines. What’s it like to live in a studio apartment in San Francisco with this much manga? Step past these hoary gates and behold!

Here’s what you see upon entering my studio apartment. To the right are four bookshelves laden with manga. On the left are two bookshelves laden with a mixture of manga, nonfiction books and RPG supplements. Straight ahead is the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, where I heard a man shot in the thigh one night while I was watching “Rome: The HBO Series” at 1 AM. An ambulance came quickly, but there was a pool of blood outside the front door all night…. a cheerful opening to this manga episode of “Cribs”, huh?

My manga is divided up by publisher. This shelf contains all my Dark Horse and Del Rey manga. In the middle of it all, snugly cradled between “Le Chevalier d’Eon” and “Kitchen Princess,” is George, my koala bear from elementary school. Dude, what can I say. He just ended up there. Sitting above George are photocopies of Tomoyuki Saito’s “Dame Dame Saito Nikki,” an excellent manga about American-Japanese pop culture intersections which ran in “Dengeki Daioh” magazine for about a year before being abruptly canceled. (It was never collected in graphic novel format.)

In addition to reviewing manga for Otaku USA and Manga: The Complete Guide, I also edit manga freelance (checking the scripts, keeping the letterer and translator on schedule, writing back cover copy, writing lengthy emails to my bosses about why things shouldn’t be censored, etc.). These shelves contain manga that I’m working on at the moment, or have worked on, from Zatch Bell! to Drifting Classroom to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. The weights in the front of the shot are for exercise, although I also once tried duct-taping a few volumes of the “VIZ BIG Dragon Ball” together and lifting those instead. It worked pretty well. On top of the desk are various galleys and ARCs (advance reading copies) from different manga publishers.

These bookshelves contain my Tokyopop, CMX, and DMP manga, with a few stragglers from other publishers. In the top right area are some sketches I finagled while working as editor of Shonen Jump: a sketch of Piccolo by Akira Toriyama, and a sketch of Luffy by Eiichiro Oda. To the right of them is one of the “Pixel Maritan” language instruction books, which teach Japanese readers how to swear in English like a Marine. Literally. It was translated by my friend Anastasia Moreno, who swung me a copy. The Broccoli Books manga is out of sight behind the couch.

These bookshelves contain my manga from VIZ, ADV, Gutsoon!, DrMaster, Media Blasters, Aurora and a bunch of other companies. On the top of the bookshelf is Cosmic Encounter, one of my favorite boardgames. Down below is a copy of the Jerusalem Bible, which I’m reading for research for a Top Secret Project.

Now we go to the non-manga section of my bookshelves. Note the books on H.P. Lovecraft, religion, shamanism, evolution, Japanese language study, and most of all the whole row of RPG books! Tabletop role-playing games have been my passion for the last 25 years or so, manga only for the last 15. I know, I know… it’s shocking. But all the roleplayers on the planet seemed to come out of the closet after Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s deaths anyway, so I think I’m in good company. And it’s all research material for my new graphic novel project, King of RPGs, of course!

Here’s another bookshelf laden with manga, books on history, horror and science fiction novels, and more role-playing game books. Love that “Reign” and “Dying Earth.” Also that “Count of Monte Cristo” and “Gilgamesh” and “Nyambe: African Advenures.” I’m running a D&D4e campaign right now and posting the session on the King of RPGs blog.

A small section of my yaoi/Boy’s Love mawnga. My favorite authors include est em, Hinako Takanaga, Fumi Yoshinaga (of course), Ayano Yamane, possibly Saika Kunieda.

Having explored my front room and workspace, we now turn around and venture into the rest of the apartment. What awaits us in the kitchen and foyer…?

The foyer contains an old cabinet full of still more manga. But not only manga; there’s also some original art for my comic “H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” sitting in as near to complete darkness as I can get it. Above the cabinet is my snake mask I bought in Bhutan, my ladies’ wig for those late nights clubbing, and a heavy-duty plastic skull my dad picked up in medical school. They rest on a cushion of “Otaku USA” issues and miscellaneous Boy’s Love books.

This is the kitchen. Finally safe from manga here, eh? DON’T COUNT ON IT. As my manga collection expanded, I soon had to requisition space the original builders had foolishly intended for “food.” The area under the microwave contains mostly untranslated tankobon and old, pre-2002 VIZ graphic novels, from the days when manga was printed left to right.

Above the fridge are various curiosities and liquor bottles, and some high-class underground/art manga from publishers like Fanfare/Ponent Mon. And Raijin Magazine. The prize of the collection is the 1968 issue of Garo which Deb Aoki gave me for my 34th birthday.

Shelves originally intended for silverware…FULL OF MANGA! These are issues of “Morning” and “Morning Two” magazine.

What’s this? Another pile of manga! You can’t see it in the shot, but the small cabinet behind the table is also full of manga. This pile also contains a lot of Boy’s Love light novels, minicomics and other things which I’m not sure how I ended up with.

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This is my desk. On the left is an uncorrected printout of volume 1 of King of RPGs, drawn by my hard-working collaborator Victor Hao. The other pile of paper is my thumbnail sketches and notes. I find it easier to script if I draw everything out in thumbnail form first; the graphics hold together the flow of the story. Beneath the desk is my small collection of PULP and other really old manga published in pamphlet-comic format.

Okay, now I’m just showing off, but here’s a bunch of my D&D miniatures. The pile also includes a couple of miscellaneous lizards, crocodiles, dinosaurs and sea creatures, and trees, bought at Jeffrey’s Toys in San Francisco. I don’t buy that many miniatures, and I only use them for tactics-heavy games like D&D4e, but if you got ‘em, flaunt ‘em, right? The Ziploc bags contain little creatures like goblins, orcs, pirates and other random humanoids.

So…this is where I live. I’m still regularly reviewing and editing manga, so my collection continues to increase. My goal is to one day build a stairway of manga to the top of the Transamerica Pyramid, like Uncle Scrooge’s stairway of money in “Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories #157″. In the meantime, please follow my blog for more manga- and RPG-related ramblings, as well as a new comic I’ll be starting at the end of May.

Dave Stevens: Brush with Passion

* Dan Nadel reviews the Dave Stevens bio Brush With Greatness and in the process comments on Stevens’ work as well: “Stevens made a conscious choice to marginalize himself, to live within the bubble of fandom. He was a willful anachronism, frustrated by his chosen intellectual and artistic world but unable or unwilling to see beyond it.”

* A la Casey Kasem, Tom Spurgeon counts down (or really, up) the top 10 best comic series of all time. Quick, before you click on the link: can you guess what number one is based on this quote? “Three generations of American adults not only read some excellent comics in this magazine, they saw a great deal of an age-stratified pop culture through its lenses.”

* Speaking on Radio Canada International, novelist Miguel Syjuco offered an early (and, I think, first) review of Seth’s new book, George Sprott (click on the first part of the program link. It’s around the 12-minute mark).

* Steve Duin (who really, you should be reading regularly) has some nice things to say about Fantagraphics’ new collection of Nell Brinkley cartoons.

* The Jog/Tucker Stone review rundown of DC/Humanoids titles continues. For those keeping score they just finished talking about Enki Bilal.

* Graeme McMillan eviscerates that second half of Neil Gaiman’s two-part Batman story.

* Shaenon K. Garrity writers about her trip to Japan and how exactly she ended up there.

* Rob Clough reviews Miss Lasko-Gross’ A Mess of Everything.

* Derik Badman continues his look at Tezuka’s Phoenix series with a look at Volume 8.

* Kinukitty gets global with her yaoi coverage by looking at In the End, a German-made manga.

Earth X

• Having offered what may become the definitive critical take on Kingdom Come, Tim O’Neil looks at Alex Ross’ follow-up project, Earth X:

So, if Kingdom Come is about the reassertion of classically Juedo-Christian concepts of morality as filtered through fifty-and-sixty-year-old superhero comics, what’s the take-away for Earth X? Essentially, the story is about what happens when the superheroes begin to realize just how much their lives have been influenced by the interference of amoral space gods – down to the very ideas of morality and ethicality.

• I don’t mean to keep linking to The Hooded Utilitarian, but they have a new contributor, “Kinukitty,” who will be doing a regular column on yaoi and BL-themed manga. She kicks things off with a look at Aya Kanno’s Blank Slate:

The boy on the cover is pretty. So pretty. All the major characters are pretty. Cool, angsty-looking pretty boys with big guns. Did I mention that they’re pretty? They really are. I’m not sure who’s who all the time. I’m not always sure what’s happening. Don’t misunderstand – we’re not talking about confusion that rips space and time. We’re talking about a series of brow-furrowing, minor WTF moments that end with a quiet snort of “Oh, I don’t care anyway.”

• While you’re there I also recommend checking out Tom Crippen’s essay on Rorschach.

• Speaking of manga, David Welsh examines Mari Okazaki’s Suppli at the Comics Reporter. Also at CR, Bart Beaty praises New Wanted by Laurent Cilluffo.

• Rob Clough looks at the work of emerging artist Juliacks: “It can be a bit daunting to engage these sorts of comics; they demand that you accept them on their own terms or not at all. They can be difficult to begin and adjust to as a reader. Of course, once a reader has locked into this style, the stories become impossible to put down.”

Yaoi card deck, by Studio KOSEN

Yaoi Press and Studio Kosen have produced several decks of art nouveau-style yaoi playing cards that will undoubtedly please fans of the genre.

Because of the high production costs, the publisher is first testing interest in the card decks by offering a set on eBay (at the time of this post, the top bid was $61).

(via Japanator)