Archives for June 2006

Tony Salvaggio reviews Basilisk and Dogby Walks Alone in Calling Manga Island, and finds plenty to like about both of them.

Pata tips us to the next manga innovation: lawyer manga

Ed Chavez has been busy: At MangaCast, he reviews Madtown Hospital and Hotel California, both from Netcomics, and Battle Vixens, in addition to posting the Japanese manga magazine covers for the week.

At Completely Futile, Adam looks at weekly Japanese manga magazine sales.

Scary yaoi story from the Toronto Star. (Link is to a Livejournal page by sensorglitch because I couldn’t find the story on the Star’s site. And I found this on When Fangirls Attack.)

New blog alert: The Translation Dojo is the blog of Wiliam Flanagan, a translator who has worked on XXXHolic, School Rumble, and Tsubasa, among others. (He seems to do a lot of work for Del Rey.)

University of California, Irvine, is offering a course in anime and manga. Well, OK, it’s the UC Irvine Extension, but it’s still cool. It sounds like an applied manga course, actually:

Aimed at screenwriters seeking to expand their writing skills and passionate fans of manga and anime, the course will have students applying methods of story and character development found in manga to screenwriting, advertising, information publishing and other creative endeavors.

And the teacher is a professional screenwriter, Northrop Davis, whose anime/manga work includes successfully pitching Battle Angel Alita to Fox.

It sounds too good to be true, but according to this press release, a company called Stickam will be offering a free, live video feed of Anime Expo. Also, Mick Takeuchi, creator of Her Majesty’s Dog, will be there.

And I’m pulling this up from the comments, because it made me laugh: On the post below, about Del Rey, Jack Tse says,

Del Rey Manga itself is like a shonen manga in how it powers itself up every few months.

Del Rey has posted its release calendar for the rest of 2006 (pdf file). I could get all snarky about being six months late, but hey, at least they did it!

Here’s a sneak peek at their new series:

Not on the calendar but due out on June 27 is Kurogane. (Link is to the preview.)

July 25

Q-Ko-Chan looks rather kawaii from the cover. Del Rey has no info, but Anime Castle supplies the standard writeup:

Kirio is the iceman at school: brilliant, cool, and distant. But now Kirio’s cool is in for a real test. Up in the sky, a giant robot is seen battling a fleet of gunships – and then lands right at Kirio’s front door and rings the bell! Which is just the last thing Kirio needs. After all, he already lives in a world gone mad: a grim, near-future Earth where neverending war is a fact of life. But could it really be that the worst threat of all is what’s shown up on his doorstep: an alien invader robot with the face of an adorable girl?

Air Gear: Here’s Del Rey’s writeup:

Itsuki Minami needs no introduction–everybody’s heard of the “Babyface” of the Eastside. He’s the toughest kid at Higashi Junior High School, easy on the eyes but dangerously tough when he needs to be. Plus, Itsuki lives with the mysterious and sexy Noyamano sisters. Life is never dull, but it becomes dangerous when Itsuki leads his school to victory over some vindictive Westside punks with gangster connections. Now he stands to lose his school, his friends, and everything he cares about. But in his darkest hour, the Noyamano girls come to Itsuki’s aid. They can teach him a powerful skill that will save their school from the gangsters’ siege–and introduce Itsuki to a thrilling and terrifying new world.

I prefer the Manganews summary:

Brought to you by the artist who knows his boobies and his fighting. Oh Great!’s brings us Air Gear. You can easily think of Air Gear as another Tenjou Tenge but with skater gangs. Again you are blessed with hot girls and lots and lots and lots of fighting and stuff.

August 29

Suzuka: This is rated M (18+) and priced a little higher than usual at $13.95. There’s no other info in the Del Rey catalog, but again Manganews has the scoop:

Akitsuki Yamato, 15 years old, moved to Tokyo to enter high school. He’s now staying at the public bath house managed by his aunt! What was supposed to be the start of a normal life is now “heaven and hell” in this public bathhouse and women’s dorm! One guy in a forbidden “flower garden”!? Something has to happen… it’s inevitable!

With that many exclamation points, it has to be good!

December 26

Gacha Gacha: Next Revolution

I got nothin’. Too early, I guess.

The administrator at the Princess Tutu Livejournal Community lays down the law: Princess Tutu is not magical girl shoujo. This post is actually about anime, but I think the points apply pretty well to the manga (I haven’t read this one, although it’s in the house somewhere). Her criteria are: It has to be originally from Japan, the protagonist has to be a girl under 16, the girl has to have unusual supernatural powers (as opposed to the ordinary kind, I suppose), the story has to focus on those powers, and the intended audience has to be under 12. I’m not sure where Princess Tutu falls short, but a lively debate follows in the comments.

The conversation is interesting in itself, but what’s even more interesting (to me anyway) is the admin’s contention (in comments) that all anime can be classified by genre:

This isn’t a matter of “fairness,” this was originally conducted as a scholarly approach to a specific form of media. All media can in some way, shape, or form be categorized into a genre and thus a subgenre.

Magical girl (mahou shoujo) is a specific sub-genre in Japan, she says, and

It is not up to American fans to define what the Japanese-origined subgenre is.

I don’t think this has much of an effect on the average fan (and note that ANN calls Princess Tutu “magical girl” in their encyclopedia entry). This writer is an academic, and she’s being analytical.

But I’m not sure the genres are so clear-cut. Even the publishers often classify books as more than one genre. And while the Japanese market books in a certain way to Japanese readers, it doesn’t necessarily follow that these books must be marketed in the same way to non-Japanese readers. Yes, I believe genre, or at least the perception of genre, is influenced by marketing as well as the contents of a book.

Livejournal member pink lightning gives her take on the debate here.

(Via Telophase.)

In my other life, I’m a freelance writer for North Shore Sunday, which covers the area north of Boston, all the way from Saugus up to Marblehead and points beyond. I’d like to do a story on manga and anime fans on the North Shore. If you’re interested in being interviewed, drop me an e-mail at the address on the right. It doesn’t matter if you’re a casual reader or a serious otaku—I’m looking for a range of people.

If you want to see what my articles are like, here are a few samples:
An interview with Sebastian Junger about “A Death in Belmont”
A story on Art Spiegelman
A theologian critiques “The Da Vinci Code”

The Beat picks up on this conversation (which has grown since I linked to it yesterday) about yaoi on a Christian parents’ bulletin board, and notes that cooler heads seem to have prevailed. Here’s a snippet from one poster:

Yaoi is “hot” right now and getting a lot of press, but it’s only one subset of a bigger picture. I think if you look at the self-imposed rating system on the yaoi titles, you’re likely to find 16-up or 18-up on the covers. So…I think part of what is involved in this issue parental responsibility. You’re not likely to allow your 12/13 year old to browse the bookstore unsupervised in the romance section or the new age section or even general fiction…don’t let them browse in the manga section unsupervised.

I’m glad the conversation is so reasonable, and that someone from within the community pointed out that all manga is not porn and not every book has to be safe for children.

This thread began with a warning that has been around as long as parenthood, although the internet makes it easier to propagate: hidden dangers to your children. It usually starts with a well-meaning parent who is genuinely shocked by something and wants to warn others: “Do you know there’s porn in manga?” I’m glad that in this case, other parents followed it with a reasoned response. In the Victorville library case, the same sort of discovery turned into a crusade and resulted in a perfectly good book being pulled from an entire library system. Trust me, we don’t want that.

This conversation makes me hopeful that there won’t be a major backlash against yaoi manga, or any other mature manga. If there is, we on Team Comix need to keep in mind that Christians are not monolithic. The most visible members of the religious right may thunder on about the evils of porn and the “homosexual agenda,” but the people in the pews are more reasonable. (Certainly that’s been my experience as a Catholic.) Dismissing or insulting them will only make things worse, and possibly alienate a group that’s really on our side.

I checked out the manga reviews on the Christian anime site, Christian Anime Alliance. The people who wrote them seem to genuinely like manga, and their take was closer to “not for kids under a certain age” than “this book should be banned” or “reading this will make you go to hell.” They even had nice things to say about Love Hina! The Christian otaku certainly bucked my stereotypes, and as a semi-churchgoing soccer mom who can’t get enough of Death Note, I hope I’m bucking someone else’s stereotypes as well.

In this week’s Flipped, David Welsh manages to find a few manga he doesn’t like.

At Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon takes a look at the Bookscan graphic novel numbers for mid-May and talks a bit about what the numbers do and don’t tell us. He provides the actual list, which is heavy on the manga—exactly the opposite of Diamond’s graphic novel list—demonstrating once more that bookstores are where people buy manga.

From the German site Animey, here is an interview in English with manga-ka Gosho Aoyama, creator of Detective Conan (link is to a fan site), which Viz retitled Case Closed. (Via Ikimashou.)

Am I the only one who thinks that a Rurouni Kenshin plushie is just plain wrong? How can he kick butt if he’s all soft ‘n’ fuzzy?

The Duluth libraries are ready for summer with plenty of manga for the kids.

“You could put the phone book in manga and it would be a bestseller,” Richgruber said. “They are flying off the shelves.”