Quick start to the week

After five years of writing about comics for Time.com, Andrew Arnold is calling it quits.

Over at Newsarama, Chris Arrant sat down with Viz veep Alvin Lu for a chat about the Viz Signature imprint. Lu, who is both VP of Publishing and Editor-in-Chief, said that “quality and sophistication” are the defining characteristics of the line, rather than any particular reader demographic, although he admitted that the titles so far do skew toward the seinen. He went on to say

it’s the kind of manga that an experienced manga reader would come to and immediately appreciate. It may be the kind of comics that require some education to fully appreciate. To that end, the lineup is selected with the idea of building recognition for the authors as much as the individual titles – many are icons of the manga genre. Tezuka, Umezu, Saito, Urasawa, Inoue: anyone in tune with manga culture understands these are legendary names, ones that will go down in history, and that the works in our Signature line represent these master artists working at the peak of their powers.

He also talks a bit about the way Golgo 13 was put together and the marketing campaign for Naoki Urasawa’s Monster, part of the point of which was to get Urasawa’s name out there, presumably to pave the way for future titles. And it’s nice to hear Lu say that the imprint has been a success so far, and they are looking to add new titles in the future.

MangaCast has happy news for Yotsuba&! fans: volumes 4 and 5 have been spotted on Amazon. Also at the MangaCast: Ed posts audio of the Go!Comi panel at NYCC and the latest doujinshi ratings and new member Pea writes about manga in Indonesia.

Good news for fans of Comics Worth Reading: Johanna has collected all her manga reviews on a single page, Manga Worth Reading.

There’s an interesting rights dispute going on in Korea right now, according to this article in The Hankyoreh: A comics writer named Bang Gyeong-su is suing cartoonist Lee Hyon-se over Internet rights to Bbongjjak, a comic the two worked on together. According to the story, Bang was the writer but received no official credit; the comic was published under Lee’s name, and everyone assumed Bang was just his assistant. When Lee sold the internet rights to a batch of his works, including Bbongjjak, Bang stepped forward and demanded his cut. Other writers are rallying around Bang and demanding a share of earnings from their comics. Lee is the Chairman of the Korean Cartoonists Association, so it’s inevitable that this would be a high-profile case, but it also raises issues of creators’ rights and internet royalties. (Via Blog@Newsarama.)

OK, the writer calls manga “anime novels,” but I gotta love this manga 101 newspaper article because it leads with a woman in her 40s who reads so much manga her bookcases are falling over. Let’s just say that strikes a chord…

The LA Times writes about the Chinese comic Bad Girl.

Reviews: Leroy Douresseaux checks out vol. 1 of Mamotte! Lollipop at the Comic Book Bin. Reviewers at The Star of Malaysia are reading vol. 1 of Mugen Spiral, vols. 1 and 2 of Zombie Powder, and Calling You. Manga maniac Julie reviews vol. 3 of Emma for MangaCast and vol. 1 of Apothecarius Argentum and vol. 5 of Skip Beat for the Mangamaniaccafe. Erica Freidman got snowed in so instead of going to her sister’s wedding, she reviews Scape-God. Here’s her last graf:

The violence quotient is quite high, so if large gouts of blood and beheading don’t appeal, you might want to skip it, same if bathing loli scenes, or random drunken misbehaving desperate lesbians bother you. But then, if that’s true, why are you reading Okazu? ;-)

I think I read it for the drunken misbehaving desperate lesbians, actually.

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Comments

  1. > I think I read it for the drunken misbehaving desperate lesbians, actually.

    That just made my day. :-) Same here, obviously.

    Cheers,

    Erica

    Hungry for Yuri? Have some Okazu: http://okazu.blogspot.com