Manga Xanadu

This week was Banned Books Week, a yearly reminder of the importance of protecting our right to read what we want. This year focused on comics, graphic novels and yes, manga. You might think with manga not being so well know it would fly under people’s radars, but as manga has grown in popularity over the last decade or so, it has come increasingly under fire. Some of the titles challenged are also among the most popular. Dragon Ball, the first series, wasn’t just challenged, it was straight out removed from Wicomico County Public School libraries in Maryland in October of 2009. Based on a complaint by the mother of a 9-year-old, the series was removed from elementary, middle-school and high school libraries for depicting “nudity, sexual contact between children, and sexual innuendo between adults and children.” If you just looked at some of the panels in Dragon Ball with no context, you might agree. But in context, most of the claims made against the series are for comedic purposes and are closer to what you would see on “America’s Funniest Videos” than you would the Playboy Channel. In May of 2010, Death Note was challenged by the mother a…

This news item seems rather timely. I’ve been catching up on my backlog of Library Wars: Love and War over the last few days. Banned Books Week is next week and I wanted to try to review them for it. I have a love/hate relationship with this title. The story is well written and I love the characters, but I can’t handle the dystopian future it portrays. The censorship, hardball tactics by the Media Betterment Committee, the push to destroy books that some disagree with for the “betterment of society”  just leaves an empty pit in my stomach, and makes it a difficult series for me to enjoy all the time and re-read. It seems it won’t be a struggle for me for much longer. The November issue of Hakusensha’s LaLa Magazine announced that Library Wars: Love and War would be ending in the next three chapters. This would put the series finale in the February issue due out in December. There are currently 13 volumes out in Japan, and Viz Media, the US licensor of the title, just released volume 12 in print and digital. The series is based on a light novel series that went 4 volumes, and resulted…

This week is Banned Books Week. On this blog I have spoken against any attempts at censorship of manga. I strongly believe in the freedom of making any book available to be read, and that it should be responsibility of the individual, and in the case of children, the parents, to decide if the book is appropriate. What that means basically is that if you don’t like a book in the library, then don’t read it. If you don’t want your child to read a book at the library, don’t let them check it out. What you DON’T get to do is decide that a book can not be made available for me or my child read because YOU have objections to its subject matter. Over the past year, two manga titles were challenged in public school libraries, because some parent thought the material in it was “inappropriate” for children. What they really meant was that they didn’t like it and didn’t want their children reading it. Therefore,if their children couldn’t read it, then no other child could read it either. They made the challenges “for the children.” You know, that wonderful phrase politicians and other leaders like to pull…

Have We Lost Our Soul? Monday started out with a bang as new spread quickly on twitter and then the blogs that Go! Comi’s website had expired. Gia Manry of Anime Briefs caught the expiration first, and attempted to contact someone through voice, but couldn’t get ahold of anyone. No official word has come back from any reps of the company, which doesn’t bode well for its future. The speculation that the manga company for sale in Southern California was Go! Comi gets stronger by the minute. Even though this news wasn’t all that surprising, it is still a bit of a shock, and I hope there are some publishers out there willing to “troll” the Go! Comi licenses and give us some hope of seeing them through to the end. Jus don’t look to Yen Press for that. Another Tremor in the Manga Market And the news didn’t improve any on Tuesday, as Publishers Weekly broke the news that Viz Media had laid off 60 employees, or 40% of their total. The Doomsayers didn’t come out for this, but there was a lot of worry for the Signature/Ikki line, since it’s not a cash cow in regards to sales….

I don’t get upset about many things.  I tend to go with a “live and let live” policy.  If what you’re doing isn’t against the law, and isn’t hurting anyone, then as a rule, I don’t have a problem with it.  I may not agree with it, but I’m not going to tell you you can’t do it because I don’t like it.  But one of the things I have little tolerance for is censorship. And that’s exactly what these two library workers colluded to do.  Cook can dislike League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier all she wants, but that DOES NOT give her the right to keep a book from circulation because she believes a child might find it.  It’s not her job to police the library and decide what’s proper for other people’s children to read.  It’s for the parents, and the parents ALONE.  The library makes this responsibility clear to parents when they sign for library cards for their children.  Cook challenged the book, as was her right, but acted like a sore loser when her challenge was denied and chose to keep the book to herself.  To protect the children. Who cares about any of the…

A situation has arisen at Tokyopop.com that I don’t think should be kept only there. As many of you may know from Brigid’s posts on the Mangablog, people have been frustrated about the condition of the Tokyopop.com website. Namely, since the “upgrade” to 2.0, it has been buggy and not well managed. One of the users of the site, an artist known as Sixxx, has been very vocal about the bad code and poor management on her blog. Last weekend, she was banned from the site and her profile was wiped from the system. Sixxx was a popular person around the site. She was on the front page every day as a “Most Popped” user. Her art was used as avatars, and was often featured in other blog posts. She also spoke her mind about the problems on the site. Her posts weren’t mean or nasty. They were written by someone who obviously cared about the site and was frustrated at what it had become. Apparently, after another venting on her blog, which Sixxx had the comments set for moderation before posting, the webmaster of Tokyopop.com, Matt Paladino, aka MP (who was also on Sixxx’s ignore list) left a comment…

Whatever happened to this old adage? It tells us that looks can be deceiving, and by making a judgment based on what’s on the outside will make us miss what’s on the inside, which is what really counts. ANN has just reported a story from South Carolina about a mother that complained to a Books-a-million store about a manga being the children’s section based solely on the cover. What makes this a story is that the bookstore acquiesced to the parent’s complaint and is now moving the manga section away from it’s core audience. All because ONE parent complained. The book in question, Absolute Boyfriend vol 1 by Yuu Watase, feature a boy in a gift box. The only parts of the boy that can be seen are his chest and knees, with the nudity only implied. What galls me about this story is that it was the mother that was offended. The mother of a boy, that came in to shop for her son. She wasn’t offended after her son picked up the book and she looked at what he picked. No boy would pick up a series called Absolute Boyfriend. And once again a rush to judgment is…