For the good part of 25 years, the thought of learning Japanese has flitted in and out of my mind. For most of that time, either inaccessibility of resources and/or time has kept me from putting any serious effort into it. In the last three years, I’ve made two abortive attempts, both ending after collecting resources, but never taking it anywhere. They say three’s a charm, so with this third attempt, I’m going to write about my experience, which I’m hoping will keep me on track. That’s the problem with self-study sometimes, motivation. I’ve set a goal of trying to reach an elementary level of reading that will allow me to read manga. Speaking is going to be secondary, but since it’s helpful to learning the letters, I will be working on it somewhat along side the reading and writing.
When Alex’s sister, Sarah, vanishes and all memory and evidence of her existence is erased, Alex is determined to get to the bottom of her sister’s disappearance. What better place to start her investigations than the Nightschool itself? But when she discovers that sneaking into the Nightschool isn’t as simple as it might seem, Alex enrolls as a student. But is she prepared for what she might find? By Sveltlana Chmakova Publisher: Yen Press Age Rating: Teen Genre: Supernatural Price: $10.99 Rating: Buy This Book The action in this volume moves to the titular Nightschool as Alex is forced to enroll in order to find out about her sister’s disappearance. We learn more about the school and it’s inhabitants as Alex goes through orientation and attends a class. We also see more of the Hunters as well as the seer Marina, as they relax and train at home, and more clues about the broken seal mentioned in volume 1 are dropped. In order to find her sister, Alex tries to enter the Nightschool, and is twice evicted, but not before meeting Ronee, another weirn that is somehow connected with the prophesy and Alex. So instead, she has to enroll in…
Nature vs Nurture The scanlation debate continues this week. The first salvo fired was by Kate Dacey of the Manga Critic blog. Spurred by a tweet that pointed to a link to a review of a Chrome plug-in for OneManga, she explains why a aggregator site like Onemanga is illegal. Johanna Draper Carlson replies with a post that readers of scanlations know perfectly well what they’re doing is illegal, and just don’t care. So is it the nature of the net, or a learned behavior? I think it’s a combination of the two, since a lot of kids are either hearing about the sites from their friends, or searching Google, and the aggregator sites always come up on top. And it’s going to take more than a “Just Say No” campaign to change things. Most teens, who are probably the majority of online readers, either don’t know or don’t care about copyright. Knowing is only half the battle, but as long as the illegal sites come up first in search engines like Google, behavior isn’t going to change. If publishers don’t try to take down these sites or offer legal alternatives, then readers are going to think they think it’s…
I’m a total girl geek. I read comics and manga, watch sci-fi and anime, and I love technology. One of the things I love about technology is the freedom it gives. It’s the great equalizer. With the advent of better and cheaper hardware and software, anyone can have their own radio and/or TV show. You don’t need to be in broadcasting or work at a radio or TV station to be seen and hear by millions of people. The tech I’ve come to love and really depend on are podcasts. They get me to and from work and sometimes through the long day. I can find podcasts on anime, manga, tech, astronomy, skeptic news and Doctor Who. I try to share at the manga ones on my This Week in Manga posts, but after listening to the latest batch I realized there was something missing from everything I listened too. A female voice.
I sometimes wonder where my obsession for collecting manga, for in many respects that is what I do, came from. It’s easy to assume that it started with comic collecting, but I wasn’t that big of a comic collector when I was growing up. There were a few series I followed, but it was nothing like the “gotta catch ’em all”, feeling I sometimes get with manga. It finally hit me, as I was driving home from work, listening to a podcast. I had grabbed the mp3 of a BBC Radio program, “On the Outside It Looked Like an Old Fashioned Police Box”. It’s a radio documentary about the old Target book novelizations of the Doctor Who TV series from the 70’s-80’s. This series of books made available all the episodes of Doctor Who long before there were VCRs or DVDs. And I used to read them. I was a big Doctor Who fan long before I was a manga/anime fan. And with the show not starting in the US until the 4th Doctor, Tom Baker, there was almost 15 years of the show that couldn’t be seen, but through the novelizations, could be read. As I’m listening to this…
Last night, on my way home from work, I was listening to the ANNcast podcast, episode 28, the one with the interview with Kurt Hassler of Yen Press. Near the end of the episode, they read off some questions take from fans on Twitter. One of the questions was about license rescues. Kurt’s response to it really bugged me. He started going off about why fans think they (Yen Press) would go “trolling” for titles from other publishers. The hosts of the show weren’t much better, basically likening license rescues to dumpster diving. Really? This is what Kurt Hassler and Yen Press think of fan requests and the titles they love and want to see completed legally? Does he really think that fans consider Yen Press to be a dumping ground for lost titles? Or could it possibly be, that fans respect what Yen Press does with their titles and are hoping to see a title they love, but wasn’t completed because the original publisher went out of business or cut back to their cash cow titles, completed with a publisher they know will do it justice? Do they really think everything published by other companies is just trash, and…
One of the fun things about writing this blog is the little surprises that pop up unexpectedly. I stumbled onto this title while researching Yuu Watase for my Noted Women of Manga post. Appare Jipangu! is a short series, only 3 volumes long. It was published straight to tankoban form instead of being serialized in a magazine. It ran from 1998-2003, at about the same time as Watase’s more popular series Ayashi no Ceres (Ceres: Celestial Legend). Yusura was abandoned as a baby and was found under a cherry tree with the Kogoumaru, a staff that turns blue when it is around people who are sad. Fifteen years later, Yusura is now known as the Hikeshiya, or “extinguisher of sorrow”. She wields the Kogoumaru to take away people’s sorrow and redirect it at the people who caused it. What make this series sound so appealing to me is that it’s a lighthearted adventure with the romance secondary to the story the story. The characters might seem typical for a manga. Yusura is hot-headed and tomboyish, and Samon, a guy she rescues from assassins, is practically blind with out his glasses, often mistaking objects for Yusura. But the whole set up…
Hollywood, Here Comes Netcomics! Netcomics, the Korean publisher that puts all their titles online for a per-chapter fee, is producing a film of their manhwa X Diary. There’s not much news out yet, other than Variety’s report which includes the names of the writer of the script, one cast member and the producer from Netcomics. But the news itself isn’t too surprising. Ever since Hollywood started coming to SDCC, and they’ve found that there’s an audience for comics based books, practically every comic company has been looking to get a title into production. Though, the premise of X Diary does make it a good candidate. It’s about a cartoonist and musician who break up as a couple, but try to make it as friends. It’s a topic that surpasses culture and could very well appeal to non-comic/manhwa readers. We’ll have to wait and see how production goes. Lots of titles get started only to stall not far into the process.
I’ve never been much of a romance fan, and have never read a Harlequin romance novel in my life. So, when I was given the opportunity to read some of the Harlequin manga released by DMP on their online manga site eManga, I decided to check some of the titles out. I read 7 titles in total, that seemed to run the gambit from historical to modern settings, and from chaste fade-to-black love scenes to those slightly more explicit, but not enough to rate a M rating. Some general observations first. DMP’s eManga site is very well done. The navigation is clean and concise, and easy to get around. The reading list displays all of your titles, including how long your rental will last. The manga reader is also easy to navigate. It allows for either one or two page viewing, as well as zoom in and out. The two page view fit my monitor just fine though, and I could read the text easily without zooming. My only complaint here was about the bookmark feature. It didn’t really work. I tried to use it, but it didn’t remember my page when I came back the next day. Luckily had…
St. Patrick’s Day is a decidedly American holiday that really isn’t celebrated or even mentioned outside of the US. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any good manga you can enjoy with your green beer and corn beef and cabbage. Now, admittedly, some of these titles are a stretch, but in the spirit of good fun, here are some titles you might find in a pot of manga gold.
Women creators in manga isn’t as an unusual thing as they are here in the US. Over here, publishers have special events to show that women can create comics, while in Japan no one even bats an eye at the idea. With March being Women’s History month, I thought I would highlight some of the women manga creators who have been influential in the medium in Japan and the US.
One Piece Exceeds 3 Million The print run for the newest volume of One Piece has been reported to be 3 MILLION copies. That’s right, 3 million. As the post points out, that’s even more copies than the Japanese edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which previous held the record for largest print run of a first edition. That’s quite an accomplishment, especially for a comic. American publishers can only dream of print runs like this. What’s really sad though, is how under appreciated One Piece is in the US. It should on the NYT list ever week with Naruto and Bleach! Viz is doing a good job of making the manga available with their 3-in-1 for the early volumes and the catch-up to the Japanese releases.