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International Geographic 1.17 - Sayonara Greetings and welcome to the seventeenth installment of Comic Book Galaxy’s weekly column on manga, INTERNATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. I am your host, Rob Vollmar and this week we’ll be taking the column into uncharted territory as I end it. When I began IG in July, I did so with a couple of goals in mind: To write about some of the great manga that had accumulated on my shelf over the years as well as widen my own net by checking out first volumes of things that I sold but didn’t usually read. In regards to the first, as I look across my cluttered comics library at the manga shelf, I can see that I have essentially exhausted it. Yeah, it looks impressive on the shelf but divided into groups of threes and fours on a mostly weekly frequency, it only took seventeen installments to review nearly the entire collection. I did enjoy the challenge of writing about manga outside of my usual reading interests and stumbled across more than a few treasures as a result that found a home in my permanent collection. At the very beginning, I was aspiring to make INTERNATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC into a permanent, weekly column about manga and manga-related topics. What I didn’t count on was the immense amount of time and energy it would swallow in trying to meet that mandate week in and week out. Between managing a comic book store, writing for the Comics Journal, managing the business side of the US leg of BLUESMAN as well as my other creative endeavors with Pablo, creating my half of said creative endeavors, and writing this column, I’m pooped. It worked out that weekly I spent three hours reading, four hours writing, and roughly, another hour fine-tuning the graphics etc in order to turn out an installment that met my standard and, hopefully, yours too. This Wednesday, the Diamond Preview catalog containing the solicitation for BLUESMAN Book Two hits Direct Market stands all over America. For those who haven’t been following the story, BLUESMAN’s original publisher ceased publication and we were forced, mid-serialization to locate another publisher who would finish the job that someone else had begun. I’m comfortable saying that this was an incredibly spooky process and I’m grateful beyond words to NBM Publishing who recognized the potential of the series enough to gamble on completing the serialization. It’s a gamble that I am determined to make pay off for them. Surveying the situation, I decided that the time I’m spending doing comics and manga reviews would be better spent working to raise the profile of BLUESMAN and CASTAWAYS through promotion and proactively helping NBM to sell our books. So, for the next year, that’s what I’m going to be doing. Writing comics, working diligently to promote my work, and maybe even seeking out a work-for-hire job or two to help spread the word wider. I’ve very much enjoyed the time I’ve had to spend with you all and appreciated the e-mail responses and message board feedback I’ve gotten from this series of columns. If any of you feels a lack in your life from IG’s absence, I encourage you to write the proprietors of this web-site and demand a new manga columnist as soon as possible. Until then, that’s all I have for you. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll see y’all in the funny books. -- ROB VOLLMAR Rob Vollmar is the Eisner-Nominated writer of THE CASTAWAYS and BLUESMAN, both with artist Pablo G. Callejo.
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