Anime Boston/Wondercon Roundups Two comics/manga related cons occurred this last weekend. On the West Coast was Wondercon, the smaller, younger brother of SDCC, located in San Francisco. While more comics based, it seems Hollywood is taking every opportunity to jump on the popculture bandwagon. Manga related, Viz Media had a booth, as did CMX, Last Gasp, and EigoManga. Deb Aoki of Manga.About.com has an overview of the con as well as links to other coverage. Over on the East Coast, Anime Boston took place. While mostly an anime con, many manga bloggers attended and even held panels. Vertical, Inc. had a panel, and Ed Chavez, marketing director for Vertical as well as creator of Mangacast hosted a panel of manga bloggers. The big news from the Vertical panel was the license of a title from a mangaka once published by Viz Media. Calling it “Manga Series R” the clue is that the “R” refers to either the mangaka’s name or manga’s title. I voting (hoping) its Leiji/Reiji Matsumoto. Brigid Alverson has a full rundown of the Vertical panel at Robot 6, and you can hear the audio from the Manga Mania panel by scrolling down to the Ninja Consultant’s like…
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…
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…
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.
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.
And the Battle Rages On The debate over scanlations continued this week, coming out of the brouhaha over Nick Simmon’s “homage” (his words) to Bleach. It grew out of the post by Deb Aoki at Manga.about.com, where comments exploded, with readers of scanlations coming to scans defense, while anti-scans tried to convince them otherwise. This “debate” led to a post on Anime Vice by a guest writer who tried to defend his reason for reading scans. More debate continues in the comments there as well. Watching people’s reactions to the scanlation debate has been interesting to say the least. It’s like discussing religion, politics, or “dubs vs subs” in the anime community. There is no real debate going on, because there are two groups with a set of beliefs that they are a prepared to defend to the death it seems. It’s become a shouting match with both sides making points and counterpoints to each other’s arguments. So, it becomes like talking to a wall, with neither side gaining ground or able to claim victory. While it does appear to be a wasted effort, these debates can be useful. You don’t argue with a fanatic to change their mind, you…
Coded Licenses After the debut of their new website for manga, Bandai Entertainment puts up some license news. They’ve announced two new titles to add to their Code Geass line. Code Geass: Knights and Code Geass: Queens are both anthologies each with a slant toward a demographic. Knights is written to appeal to the girls, and Queens is for the boys. There are several short stories that are written by different mangaka. This is good news to me, since I love the Code Geass franchise, both anime and the manga. I really like that these are anthologies, giving us not just a lot of different stories with our favorite characters, but a lot of different looks as well. I’ve grown quite fond of anthologies, and getting more narrow ones like this would be great.
A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Words You hear that phrase all the time, but then you get hit with something that proves the truth of it. GodLen of Anime Vice shows how some of the long running titles in Shonen Jump have changed over the 8 years it’s been around. IE, not much. The eternal cycle of shonen titles didn’t used to bother me that much, but they have started to get to me of late. At least they have in Bleach. GodLen totally got that one right. I might argue with him over Naruto. I don’t know that Naruto has gotten quite as emo as he portrays. Ichigo is MUCH more emo. At least Kishimoto showed Naruto’s change slowly over 40 volumes. Ichigo goes emo at the drop of a hat. One Piece…yeah, there’s not a lot of change except for the addition of more pirates. But for that series I say, “If if ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Learning Japanese from popular culture such as anime and manga is nothing new. Mangajin, a magazine from the early 90’s used manga to teach lessons. In fact, it’s exactly these things that inspire westerners to want to learn to read and speak Japanese. The Japanese have recognized this and have created a website to help learners of their language. But it’s not exactly what you’d expect. The website, anime-manga.jp doesn’t show you manga panels with translations. No, the purpose of the site is to help teach learners about colloquial expressions that often show up in anime and manga, but not in textbooks. Languages are fluid, they are always changing. Anime and manga, which are all about popular culture reflect these changes, which often stump new readers who don’t live in the culture and see and hear these changes. On the site, you can see and hear expressions from typical characters from anime and manga such as school age boys and girls, butlers, and samurai. You can even hear an Osaka dialect from an old man! I’ve heard people try to discourage others from using anime and manga as a resource for learning Japanese precisely because of the colloquialisms. But in…
Moveable Manga Feast Moves Out In a massive collaboration, several blogs have gotten together to review the same book on the same week, as suggested by David Welsh of the Manga Curmudgeon blog. It kicked off this week, with Sexy Voice and Robo, with new reviews going up every day. You can find an introduction to the book and all the reviews posted here. From the long list of reviews, this turned out to be a big success with such a wide breadth of reviews, both good and bad. This is a shining example of the power of social media. An idea on Twitter became a week long celebration (or panning) of a title, bringing together the mangasphere. I just think that’s cool.
One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall Last Friday night, news started coming in over twitter that Amazon had pulled the buy buttons from all of publisher MacMillian’s books from their website. The books could only be purchased there from 3rd party sellers, and this was for both print and digital books. This included all of their imprints such as First Second books, Tor, and Seven Seas Entertainment. The New York Times then broke the story that Amazon and MacMillian were arguing over Amazon’s $9.99 pricing for e-books. MacMillian, one of the 5 publishers who had signed on to Apple’s iBooks store with the tiered pricing plan, now wanted Amazon to do the same. Amazon’s reaction was to pull MacMillian’s books. You can get a lot of links to reactions here. By Sunday, Amazon had posted to their blog that they would have to give in to MacMillian’s demands, and as of this writing, the publisher’s books were being made available again. This has been brewing for quite some time, and it seems only with the advent of the Apple iPad and iBooks store that publishers seem to be embolden enough to push for the tiered pricing. While the iPad/iBooks is…
But Is It Contagious? Love to love it, or love to hate it, the release of the Twilight manga is eminent. Manga fans have been expressing (mostly) their disdain for the series and a NIBY attitude about it. Shaenon Garrity, a respected writer about manga points out that the themes in Twilight are nothing new. In fact, the themes in Twilight are not only prevalent in shojo, a lot of it has been done before! So quit whining about it. In the end, it’ll do more good than harm. Someone needs to be able to challenge Viz, and right now, it seems like Yen Press’ adaptations are the only ones with the steam power. See the NYT Bestseller List below.