So, I fell behind on Shonen Jump. It’s been an eventful month or so. But, I’m caught up now, and ready to share by insights on the last two issues. The magazine has some new features, but no new permanent series to replace Yu Yu Hakusho. I really hope they don’t keep this trend going. One Piece, Naruto, Bleach and Ultimo are not enough to hold my attention for an extended length of time. I’d rather go to waiting for GNs for the few titles I want than to continue to sludge through some of these chapters month after month. One thing of interest I noticed as I was tossing the insert subscription cards. Shonen Jump is now offering 6 month subscriptions, just like Yen Plus. SJ‘s are less expensive, obviously, but with the current SJ line up, the Yen Plus subscription definitely feels like the better deal right now.
It’s the social season, and 17 year old Emma heads to London, with her family’s hope of finding a rich husband weighing heavily on her shoulders. One night, a mysterious man approaches her. A refined handsome face, curly black hair and deep blue eyes… Emma falls in love at first sight and shares with him her first kiss. 12 years later and now a widow, Emma visits the Earl of Greyston to discuss the marriage of her stepdaughter. It is the Earl’s younger brother who is betrothed to her stepdaughter, but the Earl never shows himself. While staying there, Emma spots the man she kissed all those years ago in a portrait on the wall…! by Karin Miyamoto, Gayle Wilson Publisher: DMP/eManga/Harlequin K.K./SOFTBANK Creative Corp. Age Rating: 16+ Genre: Historical, Romance Price: $4.99 Kindle/Digital Edition Rating: I’m not a big romance fan, but when I was given the chance to read some of the Harlequin romances from DMP, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. For the most part, I found the stories to be entertaining but formulaic. One story did stand out; Prisoner of the Tower. This is a historical romance that hits all the right…
When Isabella Swan moves to the gloomy town of Forks and meets the mysterious, alluring Edward Cullen, her life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. With his porcelain skin, golden eyes, mesmerizing voice, and supernatural gifts, Edward is both irresistible and impenetrable. Up until now, he has managed to keep his true identity hidden, but Bella is determined to uncover his dark secret… By Stephenie Meyer; Art & Adaptation by Young Kim Publisher: Yen Press Age Rating: Teen Genre: Supernatural/Romance Price: $19.99 Rating: Buy This Book INTRO: The book I’m reviewing now is called Twilight: The Graphic Novel Volume 1. I think I regret reading this, and I may never touch it again after setting my eyes upon it. But hey, as long as I’m allowed to bash it for what it is, I’m cool. Anyways, let’s talk about what the story is about.
Reprint-a-thon Tokyopop, after serious reduction in their catalog, has been slowly building it back up. Part of that build up is a reprinting of older titles that had become scarce, and difficult for fans to get a hold of. Now, fans no longer have to hunt high and low, go to trading sites or bid up to ungodly prices to get volumes of their favorite series’ as they reappear back in print. I’m of two minds about manga as a collectible. While I understand that demand can set the market price, is there really such a demand for titles to justify prices up in the $100s? Or is that just greed? As much as I enjoy my manga, it’s not enough to ever justify that kind of pricing, so kudos to Tokyopop for thinking of the fans and making these books available again. Bento Comics To Go A bunch of former Tokyopop creators and employees have gotten together and created a really interesting website. Bento Comics is a place where you can read comics online from creators like Queenie Chan and Svetlana Chmakova. Then, if you want to keep the stories, you can choose your favorites and create your own…
Playing pranks is nothing new, and April Fool’s Day, which started out as a European tradition has spread all over the world, with nearly every country practicing some form of it. While there are no manga based on this particular holiday, there are a few where playing tricks to fool the characters or the reader are at the heart of the story.
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…