Movable MANHWA Feast This week started the June edition of the Movable Manga Feast, with one slight change. The manga is actually a manhwa, or Korean comic. The title chosen was The Color of… Trilogy. These three books are about a young girl growing up in turn of the century Korea. This edition’s host is Melinda Beasi of Manga Bookshelf. This Feast has turned out to be different, and not just because the books are from Korea. There were a lot more unfavorable reviews this time compared to other feasts. Most participants had more things they didn’t like about the trilogy than did, and were more than happy to express them. Some of the conversations spilled over onto Twitter. While I had my own problems with the trilogy, I just didn’t see the sexism that many other bloggers did. At least, not in the way that they did. Many had strong feelings about the books, but I didn’t. I didn’t see anything to really get worked up about. And even though the book is about the daughter, I found myself relating more to the mother. But that’s probably because I’m a mother of 2 daughters myself. If you haven’t checked…
About Freakin’ Time! The big news of the week was announced on Tuesday. Manga publishers in both the US and Japan have banded together to create a coalition to fight online piracy. They are starting with manga aggregator sites with make it easy for scanlators to put their titles up in one place and for readers to find and read them easily. 30 sites have been targeted, though no names have been mentioned. Though you can be sure Onemanga will be one of them, as they got a lot of press last week about making Google’s top 1000 websites. The Mangasphere had a lot to say about this, and you can find a lot of the reactions rounded up here. Bloggers have been going on about this for a while, and it’s about time publishers did something. For all we know, this might have been in the works for a while, to first get the Japanese publisher to band together, and then bring in the US publishers. While this initiative won’t complete wipe out piracy online, as long as gets the aggregator sites off as the first result in Google when searching for some titles, I’ll be happy. Looking for…
Cons for the Holiday Two cons ran over the long Memorial Day weekend. Anime North is a Canadian convention, and blogger Lissa Pattillo attended. She has two extensive posts about the con, dealer room, and panels she attended, with a third for the last day possibly on the way. Over on the US west coast was Fanime. Several west coast manga bloggers attended and had a meetup. Deb Aoki has a photo gallery of her three days there. There were no big announcements from either con, but with Anime Expo and San Diego Comic Con coming up in a month, that’s understandable. Still check out the posts for what smaller, reasonable cons are like. Stretching the Manga Buck I’ve talked about Bookcloseout.com before several times. It a great site to get remainder books for a decent price. The problem with the site has been that it’s mostly only Tokyopop manga that ‘s been available. Not that I haven’t gotten some good titles at great prices, but some variety would be nice. Blogger Tangogant recently discovered another publisher has joined Tokyopop. Yen Press titles, particularly their Korean manhwa titles have appeared on the site. The books are available at 60% off,…
May Movable Manga Feast This month’s movable manga feast featured the Vertical title To Terra… a sci-fi shonen from the 70’s. It was hosted by Kate Dacey of The Manga Critic blog. Reviews for the title were a lot more varied than on previous titles. People definitely had their opinion of this series and had no problem expressing it. You’ll find an introduction to the series and all the links to the participating reviews at the top link. Well, That’s a Surprise Here’s something that shouldn’t shock reader of Hunter x Hunter. It’s going on hiatus. Again. What is this? Once a year at least, this title has to stop? Is this something in Togashi’s contract? If he hates writing this series so much, why doesn’t he just cancel it. Or hand it off to an assistant. At least do something to give fans closure. This is like a bad relationship, and someone’s gotta stop the vicious circle. This Actually Is! Dark Horse, which has started to feature titles on Facebook, recently had one entry on Ghost Talker’s Day Dream, which included the news that the series would be returning in September. The title was previously reported cancelled, so this…
Do you “Size” Up? Inspired by a conversation on Twitter about what it means to be a fan, Ed Sizemore of the Manga Worth Reading blog tries to clarify his position. I bring this up because there has been a lot of talk about digital piracy and it’s effects on manga publishers. Ed’s view is basically that you can only call yourself a fan if you invest yourself, time and money, in the thing that you love. While I can see where he’s coming from, I can’t say I completely agree with his position. I don’t think there should be parameters put on what makes someone a fan of something. Being a fan of something, whether it’s TV, movies, or manga, shouldn’t be contingent on how much time you spend talking up a show or buying everything sight that branded with it. I’m a fan of Castle, but I don’t feel a burning need to buy the book or DVDs. I’m fine with watching the show every week. Does that make me less of a fan than someone who makes Lego Castle and Beckett figures? I don’t think so. By the same token, people or borrow manga from a friend…
More Simon and Schuster Sightings The sharp eyes of Michelle Smith of Soliloquy in Blue has spotted some more manga listings on Simon and Schuster from Viz. Two of them we already knew about; Grand Guigol Orchestra and Cross Game. But then four new titles showed up scheduled to come out at the end of the year. Kurozakuro is scheduled for November, and the rest, Kamisama Kiss, Psyren, Itsuwaribito are scheduled for December. I can’t say any of them really inspire me, but I’ve been surprised before. I am saddened by the news of no sign of Story of Saiunkoku. I loved the anime, and am so dying to read the manga! Hopefully the new Kaori Yuki title, Grand Guigol Orchestra, will help to pass the time. Del Rey Ousts X-Men: Misfits & Wolverine: Prodigal Son The weekend ended with a bit of downer as news and confirmation of the cancellation of first X-Men: Misfits and then Wolverine: Prodigal Son came out on Twitter. This seemed to be surprising news as X-men: Misfits seemed to have sold fairly well, hitting the New York Times best seller list for a few weeks. But the creators of both series say Del Rey…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ikki Takes a Holiday You might have noticed that the Ikki Comix website hasn’t had any updates for a while. Well, that’s because they’re taking the holidays off. There’s no word about when the updates will return, and hopefully this is just what they say, just an intermission and not a break that becomes a hiatus. Ikki’s got some great titles that deserve the exposure that the website gives them. So take this as an opportunity to get caught up!