Deb Aoki, who writes About.com’s manga blog, recently chatted with Elfquest creator Wendy Pini about her online yaoi adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. Plague victims and man-love - yummy!

Here’s a brief excerpt:

Q: How long have you been thinking about doing this story?

Wendy Pini: I first floated out the idea about three years ago, at an anime convention in Chicago. I was in artists’ alley with a bunch of other young, female doujinshi artists.

They knew that I was a professional artist, but they didn’t know about Elfquest so much. I asked them what they thought of an “R-rated” or X-rated” yaoi version of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, and they all squealed! With just that description, they knew that they’d be getting gothic romance and dark, sexy erotica.

I’ve never been adverse to doing adaptations of other people’s stories. I did a graphic novel based on the Beauty and the Beast TV series some years back, and really enjoyed that. Borrowing an idea and expanding on it is one of my favorite things to do.

So their reaction led me to think that this will work, as long as I can get Masque in front of that audience. I had a lot of work to do for my deal with DC Comics, but when that relationship ended, I was able to start on Masque.

Q: Has it been challenging to write for a new generation who has different tastes, interests and life experiences than yours?

Wendy Pini: With Masque, I don’t see myself as writing for a younger generation so much. I don’t think about that. I’m happy when I hear that women in their fifties are reading it too, because that’s my generation.

But if someone in their twenties sees it, well, it’s for them too. It’s for young women who are looking for something more than the typical high school yaoi manga story. It has more character development, more reasons why the characters get into their relationship.

VIZ has unleashed Rei Hiroe’s original Black Lagoon manga in the U.S. Excuse me while I do the Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy dance…

VIZ MEDIA DEBUTS BLACK LAGOON MANGA SERIES

A PT Boat Packed with Mercenary Couriers Lands on North American Shores

San Francisco, CA, SEPTEMBER 16, 2008 — VIZ Media, LLC, one of the entertainment industry’s most innovative and comprehensive publishing, animation and licensing companies, has announced the exciting North American debut of BLACK LAGOON, a manga (graphic novel) series by Rei Hiroe about a misfit group of mercenaries and their adventures on the high seas of Southeast Asia. BLACK LAGOON is available now from the VIZ Media imprint and is rated “M” for Mature audiences. It carries an MSRP of $12.99 U.S./$15.00 CAN.

Readers will lock ‘n’ load with Dutch the Boss, Benny the Mechanic, Revy Two Hand, and Rock as they seek adventure and fortune aboard their World War II-era torpedo boat, the Black Lagoon. In the treacherous underworld of the Russian Mafia, Chinese triads, Colombian drug cartels, crazed assassins, and ruthless mercenaries, it’s hard to know who to trust. But if you’ve got a delivery to make, and you don’t mind a little property damage along the way, you can count on the crew of the Black Lagoon! The action kicks off from the very first page as Rokuro Okajima, an average Japanese salaryman, is taken hostage by the crew during a mission to transport a computer disk with insider information that could bring down a major industrial conglomerate. But when Rokuro is sold out by his employer, he decides to join the Black Lagoon crew, who nickname him Rock and throw him headfirst into a deadly world of outlaw heroes, brutal villains, and blazing gunfights. Where he ends up is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for certain – he’s in for a wild ride!

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When Japanese publisher Yohan went belly up earlier this year, its’ passing was scarcely noted in Western media. Not that I would have expected any of them to run with the story - but Japanamerica author Roland Kelts points out that Yohan’s death is the tip of the iceberg revealing a disturbing trend towards cultural isoaltionism amongst Japanese youth.

But the demise of Yohan in the 21st century may signal something broader and even more worrying: a Japanese public turning increasingly inward, becoming more provincial and less global at a historical moment when it can ill afford to do so.

My colleagues at Tokyo University frequently complain that the English language skills of the current generation of Japanese youth pale beside those of students 10 or 20 years ago. Foreign studies departments at Japan’s major universities are now battling to keep enrollment numbers respectable.

A surge in support for nationalistic behaviors such as the compulsory singing of the national anthem and reverence for the flag at schools, combined with political leaders who sometimes dismiss well-documented evidence of wartime atrocities, has given the rest of the world a portrait of a Japan hopelessly out of touch with reality and gruesomely unhip.

More news on the yaoi craze threatening to swallow your children whole - this time, from the San Francisco Chronicle (’Brokeback comics craze‘):

“Yaoi allows for a kind of enjoyment - visual stimulation without the self-examination,” says Tina Anderson, a writer whose yaoi is published in the United States and Germany. “It allows you to distance yourself from the fantasy.” What Anderson touches on is the way heterosexual sex in entertainment caters to the male point of view. A common complaint among high school manga and yaoi readers is that male-female sex shows the woman and little of the man. Yaoi, on the other hand, shows the man, and as one 15-year-old remarked, “It shows everything.”

But the popularity of yaoi and the demand for pornographic man-on-man love has brought the industry to a crisis. Publishers polybag and label their books (some even put boilerplates inside their flaps, stating that all characters depicted within are 19 or older), but no amount of shrink-wrap can protect them from the content itself - or the resistance of the large chain bookstores to carrying it.

“Everything in print is available and orderable for our customers,” says Jim Killen, graphic novels buyer at Barnes & Noble. B&N carries mature fare like Preacher and From Hell but doesn’t stock everything its Web site does. But there is a certain line that the retail chain refuses to cross.

My question (and it was posed to me as well by our fellow blogger AnaKhouri) is - where’s the Yuri-love? Surely girl-on-girl action is compelling in its’ own right, yes? And yet I don’t see a comparable explosion in yuri manga.

If you don’t have a Half Price Books in your neighborhood, you should seriously consider moving. Case in point: last night I took my son book shopping and stumbled across this in the $1 rack, a used copy of Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain. I’ve been wanting to read this for years, but for some reason never grabbed it from my local bookseller.

After picking up my wife from the YMCA, I plopped down on the couch and tore through a quarter of the book before calling it a night. Black Rain is a wonderful piece of post-War writing, leveraging the horror of Hiroshima and the beauty of day-to-day life with equal measure. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, except for the black mushroom cloud that constantly hovers over the figurative horizon. The daughter’s diary, which is one of the book’s central narrative devices, is clever, allowing Ibuse to move about in time, orbiting that awful moment when Hiroshima was atomized by some unknown, cruel weapon from afar.

Ultimately, however, Ibuse’s book is about life, not death. The true draw is not the excruciating detail with which Ibuse describes the horror of the bombing (which he does - repeatedly), but the portrait of those left behind.

It’s raw and inspirational, and a truly wonderful read.

I won’t be anywhere near the 2008 BookExpo America show in L.A. this weekend, but the last couple of press releases from VIZ makes me wish I were…there are a metric ton of releases between these two sheets, so rather than post them in their entirety, I’ll just stick to the skinny:

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