The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga returns

Mon, Jul 30, 2007

After slaving away over a hot graphic novel Ilya has finally managed to raise his head and get away from his work long enough to tell us that the second volume of The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga will be coming out this October. When I spoke with Ilya last year ahead of the first collection coming out he did remark that he hoped if it was successful that it might become an annual anthology, similar to Constable Robinson’s popular SF and Horror collections. He also hoped that it would offer an accessible entry point into manga for those of us who may read a lot of comics but have barely touched manga and, frankly, don’t know much about it. Which would include readers like me. I think he scored well on both points since it is coming back for second helpings (now with some colour sections too) and because I’m looking forward to it. Despite my general manga ignorance when I talked to Ilya he was just so damned enthusiastic about it that I ended up wanting to read it and guess what? I enjoyed it.

Of course being an anthology means there is some material you may not be partial to, some you will like more than others; that’s in the very nature of any type of anthology. But equally in such anthologies you are offered the chance to dip your toes into waters you’ve never swum in before, which is always a good thing for any reader to do in my opinion, keep broadening those horizons (something reading is extremely good at). It certainly worked for me and I found myself enjoying not only the parts I thought I might like (such as Jason Cobley and Neill Cameron’s Bulldog Empire) but material by creators I’d never heard of such as Asia Alfasi, which I probably wouldn’t have come across otherwise. If you are a manga fan already then this is a must-have – I mean, over 500 pages for so little money? Bargain. And if like me you are more wary around a genre you aren’t familiar with then it is also perfect because it offers a good jumping on point for you to sample a variety of creators and styles from round the world (and a number from right here in Britain) for very little outlay and, as I said, I know from personal experience you are going to find some new material you will like, then hopefully you’ll want to go looking for more. There’s a micro-site up here where you can have a sneak-peek preview of some material from the second volume, including work from Laura Howell, Mustashrik Mahbub, Ben Ang, Niki Smith and Eve Yap among many others.