Although manga, The Walking Man is published in a form more typical to collections of art comics, with jacket flaps and thick, crisply white paper. That suits its subject matter well, positioning it to an audience who can appreciate a series of reflective encounters beautifully illustrated by Jiro Taniguchi. (Also suited to that audience, it’s been flipped, so that it reads left-to-right.) Each chapter covers one of the man’s walks, showing us what he sees. In the first, he’s just […]

This is a CMX book? What happened to the trade dress with the white backgrounds and the bright-colored corners? Where’s the heavy type set on a slant? Cipher is missing any identifying imprint information at all on the cover, leaving only the title, volume number, author’s name (Minako Narita), and a nondescript picture of a couple in winter. Looking at the spine — always a problem for these titles, since the CMX letters were as big as the title, causing […]