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 ...
E-books have been in the news a lot lately, what with the iPad, Amazon vs Publishers, and the Nintendo DSi XL all relating to e-books or e-readers in someway. But none of this news has really had much of an impact on manga readers except to build up hope that we might one days see manga on these platforms. Well, finally news comes from Japan through mobile manga provider NTT Solmare, that 3 publishers will not only be bringing out m...
You know you’ve hit it being online when you’re thought to be part of some big conspiracy. I’ve always wondered about conspiracy theorists. Why do they feel the need to concoct some big, elaborate theory or have some big shadow corporation controlling everything? There are people who believe NASA’s trips to the moon were hoaxes (Mythbusters disproved their theories). And there are people who believe the U...
Schools may lock up the the night, but class is in session for an entirely different set of students. In the Nightschool, vampires, werewolves, and weirns (a particular breed of witches) learn the fundamentals of everything from calculus to spell casting. Alex is a young weirn whose education has always been handled through homeschooling, but circumstances seem to be drawing her closer to the Nightschool. Will Alex manage to weath...
With a long list of wish lists and license requests, and not too good a prospect on getting a lot of those titles in English for whatever reason (too long, too old, too niche, etc), it makes a manga fan seriously consider learning to read Japanese. Why go through a middleman when you can go straight to the source? And Japanese tankoban are cheaper, even with the exchange rate, to buy. But learning a new language can be intimidatin...
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. T...
In a previous post I spoke of the Nintendo DS as a possible e-reader. With their latest announcement, it seems that Nintendo is finally answering that call in the US. The DSi XL, originally launched in Japan in November 2009 as the DSi LL, will be coming to the US in March. Along with the new gaming device, which has bigger screens, will be the 100 Classics e-book cartridge that I spoke of in the previous post. While the e-book ca...
Since I started the week with a Kaori Yuki title, let’s stay with that theme. And since vampires are all the rage this year, let’s make it a vampire manga. Yorugata Aijin Senmonten – DX aka Blood Hound is a one shot volume that was serialized in Hana to Yume from January 2003 to June 2004. Blood Hound is about Rion, a loudmouthed teenager who goes to a host club full of vampires looking for her best friend. She b...
I was late in discovering Kaori Yuki’s work. It wasn’t until Shojo Beat and Godchild, which was one of the debut titles, that I learned how great her work was. But before Godchild and it’s prequel The Cain Saga, another series by Kaori Yuki was released in the US. That was Angel Sanctuary. This 20 volume series was first released by Viz in 2004 and completed it’s run in 2007. The story is about Setsuna ...
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 Bl...
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...
There’s no real news in this month’s Shonen Jump, which is kind of surprising. You’d think they would want to start hyping any new titles coming soon now. But not this month. So what do we learn in this issue of SJ? I learned that Bleach has entered the endless “lather, rinse, repeat” mode of shonen manga. I still don’t find Gin Tama funny, and the magazine is going to get boring real fast i...