Wednesday links

Let’s start off with something cool: It’s in Japanese, of course, but this video about CLAMP gives a fascinating glimpse of the foursome at work in their studio (note shelves and shelves of manga—and wine). (Via Manganews)

PW Comics Week has two very different manga stories this week. First up is an article on Blame! creator Tsutomu Nihei, who came to manga after working for a New York architect; PW says he “has redefined and re-created the cyberpunk genre for the current generation of manga readers.”

The second piece is about the global manga Biker Girl, which was published by Hyperion this month. Here is a preview. The book reads right to left, which is an interesting departure for a traditional book house. The story, about a girl with a magic bike, is “an appealing mix of adventure, female empowerment and romance brought alive by Takashima’s vibrant illustration,” according to PW writer Kate Culkin, and is designed to appeal to manga readers and non-readers alike.

That makes an interesting lead-in to this livejournal post on comics for women, or rather, the lack thereof. The writer has some interesting reflections on shoujo manga and why it’s not enough, and then notes that shoujo aside, the companies making comics for women are not the traditional comics publishers but traditional book houses. Well worth a read. (Via the invaluable When Fangirls Attack.)

At MangaCast, Ed Chavez has some thoughts about flooding the market (ADV) versus starting small and building from there (Del Rey, DMP), and some advice for ADV, now that they have a new investor:

Maybe they can get new faces who know manga in there, as David from Love Manga suggested. I as a reader would consider that huge plans from them.

Hear, hear!

Can’t get enough of Death Note? Check this out: the “final” volume, which includes a four-page one-shot, explanations of the “mystery” of the story, and a card with L’s real name.

The North Jersey (?) Herald News has a nice article about cosplay at AnimeNEXT. It manages to be interesting and informative without lecturing or smirking; I think the reporter struck just the right tone.

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Comments

  1. The CLAMP video was a great find. It’s interesting to see the group come out of the self-imposed public exile with this and their convention appearances. I wonder if the advent of their immense Western popularity (and the potential for earning some bucks from it) had anything to do with things…

  2. While that livejournal post was rather excellent in some of the systemic (mal)practices that prevent the Distinguished Competing Houses of Ideas from ever effecting any real sustainable ways of attracting a female audience, it seems to make a few generalizations that don’t sit well with Jamila and me.

    First of all, her dismissal of shoujo as counterfeminist pabulum is based on a picture of shoujo manga that is filtered entirely by whatever gets exported to the U.S., as if that were somehow representative of shoujo in Japan itself.

    That’s like drawing conclusions about the value systems of independent filmmakers based solely on films distributed by Miramax. But the fact is that manga distributors seem to focus on a ya-lit audience of pre-teens and up, an audience that they’ve concluded to not be interested in manga featuring something more than counterfeminist pabulum.

    Oh, and to say that “In Japan, it is acceptable for a man to grope a teenage girl on the train.” is two hundred fifty six shades of problematic. That train molesters are rampant is not the same as being ‘socially acceptable’.

Trackbacks

  1. […] I discussed the matter at length with Samurai Tusok, and he has an amazing way of bypassing the geek babble and insulted sputtering, and distilled it into the following, in the form of a comment on MangaBlog: […]