In this week’s news: September’s Movable Manga Feast, digital manga vs print, Twitter on AX, Del Rey’s future, manhwa, banned books week, New York Times best sellers, podcasts, and the Manga Village roundup.
Open Mouth. Insert Foot Get a bunch of creative people together for a gripe session, and sometimes magic happens! That’s what happened on Twitter recently as several manga creators through out their own two cents (yen) about not just illegal uploading, but the people doing it. When someone posted on twitter of having uploaded Rei Hiroe’s entire manga Black Lagoon, the mangaka, in jest, wished pancreatic cancer on the uploader. Fellow mangakas Kazuki Kotobuki and Kouta Hirano joined in, coming up with more imaginative forms of death on the uploader. Bet that guy is sorry he tweeted that. I still don’t get all this disrespect people want to show the creators of the books they claim to love. While I don’t think they need to be worshipped, how about just some common decency? Or is that to outmoded for the 21st century? Not As Easy As It Looks People are always complaining about the translations in manga, that it’s not literal enough, or that it’s too “Americanized”. At SDCC, several translators in the industry got together for the panel Manga: Lost In Translation panel. It features many well known translastors and was moderated by William Flanagan, who is about as…
It’s been a slow week for news, part of which can be blamed on the Twitter DDOS attack Thursday and Friday. My reading list is way down too. I spent the week writing my Black Jack thesis and reading graphic novels for Good Comics for Kids Summer Reading Challenge. I should be back to reading more manga this week. Maybe.
Manga’s version of the “Sub vs Dub” debate Found this on Twitter via aicnanime: Helen McCarthy weighs in on the OEL manga label debate, and she puts into words something I’ve always thought but don’t think I’ve ever expressed properly: And that’s the reason. Semantics is the study of meanings, and to writers and historians, meanings matter. Fans and businesses exploiting the power of the word ‘manga’ are tapping in to one of the oldest magics known to man – the belief that real names have real power, and that attaching a name to a thought or act can give it weight, can bring it into being. But to me, attaching the word ‘manga’ to non-Japanese comics doesn’t change anything important about those comics, and may well dilute and weaken the power of the word in its original form.
There’s been a lot of talk in the media lately about Twitter, especially with Ashton Kutcher reaching 1 million followers and Oprah joining and getting 220,000 in one day. And, while it might be nice to follow celebrities like them, it might get real boring real fast. I know when a technology has reached a saturation point when my Mother asks me about something. She’s not very techie (she’s just started using a cellphone), and prefers running her old Mac with OS7 than a PC. She asked me, “What is Twitter?” The more complicated answer is to say, it’s a microblogging platform that can be used for marketing and networking. With the addition of celebrities, it’s become a sort of voyeuristic way to watch what the rich and famous are doing, if, in fact, it’s the rich and famous doing the actual tweeting, and not some assistant. But if this is all you do with your twitter, you will probably become one of the “Twitter Quitters”, who give up after a month.