Back from the holidays, and just starting to dig out from under the pile of work that accumulated in my absence. You might think that wouldn’t happen when everyone else is out, but there are a few factors that led to said pile.

First, there was the New York Anime Festival. Days lost in preparation, days lost at the show, days lost in recovery. It’s the dark side of doing conventions. I’ve talked about it before, and many other attendees will tell you the same thing. The shows are a lot of fun, but they take a lot out of you, and they eat your time like the Genshiken eat Pocky. Or like I eat Pocky, for that matter.

Then I left a week early for the holidays. No one to blame but myself for that one, but it was my birthday, and I wanted to spend time with my family.

Then there was Christmas. Because we manga and anime types work with the Japanese, the emails kept a-coming. See, the closest equivalent to Christmas in Japan is Valentine’s Day. And like Valentine’s Day here in the U.S., nothing really closes for the holiday. Fortunately, most companies are used to working with Americans and know not to expect anything from us during the week between Xmas and New Year’s. (In fact, the Japanese take an extended holiday around New Year’s, so they just started getting back to the office today after taking last week off.)

Sigh.

I’ve been reading a lot of the 2007 manga top ten lists the last few days. Some I agree with and some I don’t, but I can usually understand why most books end up on the different lists. Take Dragon Head, for example. It never managed to keep my interest past the third volume, but I see the craft and the quality in the work, even if it doesn’t appeal to me.

And there’s Publisher’s Weekly. PW has done a great job covering manga the past several years, and I know for a fact that several of their writers are big manga readers. So what in the world is going on with their “Top 10 Manga for 2007“? I haven’t even heard of most of these books. Why is there a Jeffrey Brown book here? I want to stress here that I’m not harshing on Brown’s work; I like his stuff a lot. But aside from the fact that his book has transforming robots, what does this have to do with manga? If anything, it’s an homage to the Transformers and Go-Bots cartoon that has about as much to do with manga as the Genshiken have to do with… uh… Spider-man. Or something like that.

 Deb Aoki over at about.com has been asking me for my top ten list of manga for… oh, a long time now. Ever since we did an interview back in October. I still plan to do that for her, but right now I want to go ahead and put together my list of my favorite manga series of 2007. A word of caution - you’ll find a lot of Del Rey Manga titles on this list. Hey, I’m the associate publisher, I’m allowed to be biased. Plus, I don’t have to pay for these.

10. Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service by Eiji Ohtsuka and Housui Yamazaki. Funny, interesting and cool. Several Japanese friends recommended this series, so I’m glad I gave it a try. I’m hooked.

9. Guru Guru Pon-chan by Satomi Ikezawa. GGP wrapped up this year, and it is, hands down, my favorite shojo manga. Many disagree with me, but I find the humor and romance utterly charming.

8. xxxHOLiC by CLAMP. Artistically, this is one of my favorite manga. Have you ever noticed that there are no shades of grey in the art in this series? It’s all black and white, almost like wood prints. I’m dying to get an original page and frame it for my home, but the Japanese don’t work that way. Sigh.

7. The Drifitng Classroom by Kazuo Umezu. It’s tempting to laugh at the over-the-top approach to this horror story, but once you get used to it, it’s really quite effective. 1970s horror as only the Japanese can tell it.

6. MPD Psycho by by Eiji Otsuka and Sho-u Tajima. A disturbing manga, to say the least, but a very satisfying read.

5. Emma by Kaoru Mori. I was in high school in the 1980s, so I remember a lot of nerds who were really into British television, thanks to PBS. Kaoru Mori is the Japanese equivalent, resulting in this touching and unexpected manga. (My friends will now be laughing at me for talking about nerds in high school as if I wasn’t one of them.)

4. Monster by Naoki Urasawa. Imagine The Fugitive as a manga, and you’ve got a pretty good image of Monster. Urasawa is a master; I eagerly await 20th Century Boys and Pluto.

3. Genshiken by Kio Shimoku. This is a manga that Kodansha editors were shocked to see sell well in the U.S. It wasn’t a surprise for us; a story about what it means to be a true otaku? How could that not sell here? In the final volume, we see the members of the Genshiken graduate, and this is where I finally understood just how great Shimoku is as a manga-ka. The chapter was completely dialogue-free, but we didn’t need any words. We now knew the characters so well in our hearts that we knew what they were saying.

2. Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwaki. Tokyopop published it before we did; TP pres Stu Levy called it “the manga I fell in love with.” People at Kodansha call it one of the finest manga ever created. And they’re right. Breathtaking, funny, and deeply terrifying, you’re missing out if you’re not reading Parasyte.

1. Phoenix: Sun by Osamu Tezuka. I can’t get enough Tezuka, and count this as my vote for MW and Apollo’s Song, both also released in 2007. My heart broke at the end of the book - not only was it a delicate, adventurous, deep story, it was also the Grandfather of Manga’s final work before his death. Dead at just 61, the world lost a master far, far too soon.

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