What to read this week? The MangaCast crowd post the full list and their picks.
David Welsh picks out the good stuff from Diamond Previews.
Kokoro Media takes a look at DC’s investment in Japanse manga publisher Flex Comics:
What interests me is that DC and Flex seem to be following the scanlation model of marketing: they want Web-heavy advertising before converting manga titles to print. But I question how they plan on getting the word out about Flex — the readers who watch BitTorrent and scanlation sites for the next big manga title don’t necessarily think to visit a corporate site. (On the other hand, Tokyopop has any number of manga readers on its mailing list.) And in order to earn purchasing decisions, DC/Flex will have to include something extra with their bound editions: new colour illustrations, interviews, gift certificates for related merchandise, or something similar.
Johanna hops on the Jump the Shark Express and lists the manga series she has stopped reading. As this is clearly the conversation of the week, I’ll ask you all: Which series have you dropped? Let me know in comments.
The Daily Telegraph has more on those Kaplan vocab guides from Tokyopop.
Sexism roundup: Two bloggers express concerns about the depiction of girls and women in manga; another blogger responds. There are some interesting conversations in the comments sections. (Via When Fangirls Attack.)
Reviews: Lots of brief reviews today. The Anime on DVD folks serve up another helping of Small Bodied Manga Reviews, and Carlo Santos takes on Tezuka and Yotsuba&! in the latest Right Turn Only!! Chris Mautner looks at Fanfare/Ponent Mon titles at Panels and Pixels. At Comics 212, Christopher Butcher checks out three yaoi titles from 801, Affair, Bond(z), and vol. 1 of Ichigenme: The First Class is Civil Law… At the MangaCast, Ed Chavez has an audio review of vol. 2 of Sweety and vol. 2 of Chun Rhang. Reviewer Holly Ellingwood has a busy day at Active Anime, posting reviews of vol. 7 of Skip Beat, vol. 5 of Kami Kaze, and the yaoi anthology Othello. Bill Sherman of Blogcritics reviews vol. 12 of Death Note; there is a spoiler, so don’t look if you haven’t already figured out how it ends. At Coffeeandink, Mely turns her discerning eye on The Building Opposite. Manga Life’s Dan Polley checks out vol. 12 of Wallflower, vol. 7 of Pastel, vol. 1 of Dragon Eye, and vol. 1 of Aquarian Age Juvenile Orion. At the Mangamaniaccafe, Julie posts mini-reviews of vol. 3 of Zombie Powder and vol. 4 of Emma. Kethylia finds a lot not to like about vol. 1 of Beck.
I’ve dropped Deathnote and Tsubasa. I dropped Naruto, too, but last month I went and bought all the volumes I was missing. >sigh
I’ve seen this meme sort of spread around the manga blog world and I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with series I stopped reading. After walking around my house and staring at all the many, many manga series cluttering up my shelves, I was only able to come up with a few:
Ranma 1/2. (English) Back in the day, it was practically the only *series* around. After 10 volumes I had pretty much exhausted all the jokes and gave it up. I was a little loathe to get rid of the books, though and held onto them for years, just because those unflipped, poorly reproduced pages were a piece of history, both mine and American manga’s. When I did get rid of them, the shelf space was taken up and overrun immediately and I practically forget I had ever owned them, until now. :-)
Patlabor. (Japanese) God how I wished my Japanese reading skills were up to it, but they weren’t. I can usually make enough of a series to at least follow it basically, but the level of technical jargon was so over my head for the Patlabor manga, I just gave up. NOT because I got tired of it, though. I just got tired of beating my head against it.
Kodocha. (English) Plain and simple, it took too long for the manga to catch up with the anime I had seen, and I got tired of retreading the earlier storylines. By the time the manga reached the part I cared about, I didn’t care anymore.
KarenKano. (Japanese) The early bit that ends with the play is so stellar, I ran out and picked up the next few volumes with relish, I couldn’t wait to find out what happened. Then I started to follow the story in the magazine, so I’d get the most current issue. And then…it came to a crashing halt. The side story became so long and involved and miserable that it killed any and all feeling I had ever had for the series. I never read the last couple of volumes – and apparently am happier for it. What a bloody waste.
I’ve read pretty much everything I’ve started through to the end. Even when the end took 20 years to be written, like YajiKita Gakuen Douchuuki. :-)
Cheers,
Erica
Hungry for Yuri? Have some Okazu!
http://okazu.blogspot.com
I left my list on my blog, which should show up in the sig.
Ditto with Erica on KareKano- I loved it, but suddenly it was going off on multivolume tangents that I just wasn’t interested in. As for what else…Fruits Basket stalled abysmally as well, and oldies like Ranma, Oh! My Goddess and Inuyasha dragged endlessly into dozens of volumes with few interestingt twists. I think it’s largely a case of “what’s out” as well; god knows I buy in multivolume, impulse induced chunks, so if I’m waiting multiple months between volumes, the fervor wears off.
Oh my, that’s a long list, and I don’t even have them anymore, I simply put most of them into gift parcels to friends who also read manga (English to English friends and German to German friends) and send them on. Let me think about recent stuff….
THIS CONTAINS HUGE SPOILERS
Ghost Hunt (up to Volume 6):
Shadow of the excellent FruitsBasket summaries was nuts about this series, it was the first translation effort of hers. With the publication of the anime (in Japan) she revealed that it was a light novel series (by the writer of Twelve Kingdoms) and that the anime and the manga didn’t go up to the end there, which is where the story shines. She posted selected excerpts of the light novel and what had been left out of the manga (not to mention that the US translation wasn’t that accurate) and I decided that if I couldn’t get the full personal story of the people involved, then it was just too much horror for me.
Gals! (up to vol 5): Ran just didn’t have any development though her two friends did. I wanted her to develop, too.
Only the Ringfinger knows (Vol 1): having read some more Boy’s Love in printed and scanlation form made me aware that this is full of cliches of school love and lost interest in the continuation.
X1999: (up to volume 16) the story was interesting but it got too dark for my taste, especially when the sympathetic little sister/childhood sweetheart got killed AND it took ages for the volumes to come out, so I let it go.
Demon Diary (read it all): nice build up and then it petered out in the end.
The Empty Empire (vol 1): interesting plot, but too confusing for me.
+Anima (up to vol 3): got too repetitive with the outsider hate
stereotype.
Oh my goddess!(up to vol 26): There was some strong storytelling there and some great arcs with their friends, but Keichi and Belldandy never developed their relationship beyond a certain state. They seem to have regressed, and there’s only goddess fighting and intrigue now. That’s not why I read it in the first place.
Apothecarius Argentum (vol 1): nice character artwork and three well-developed characters (king, princess and the apothecarius), but a plot or a storyline of a romance doesn’t seem to exist, it’s all what’s the next sickness to develop and how can he heal it.
Boy princess (up to vol 3): strong characters badly drawn (as in they can’t be taken for one another) and a good story, but the love story of the main characters develops too slowly for me.
Can’t lose you (vol 1): too over the top start for this melodrama, even with my prior knowledge that it was manhwa.
Chobits (all of them): It had me right up to the end, and then I couldn’t believe that the hero would be able (with the kind nature but normal sexual appetite he had) to keep his hands off her FOREVER, or even that this had been planned as THE ULTIMATE TEST OF TRUE LOVE. So I gave it away.
Crossroads (up to vol 2): when she got into a relationship with the teacher, and that guy not even truly love her, that was it for me.
Couple (vol 1): nice artwork but the romance started out boring.
Day of Revolution (all): the fact that the guy just accepted he was supposedly more female, so he’d have to have an operation. And then all his former friends were after him AND a girl…
Demon Ororon (all): BRILLIANT characters and storyline, but in the end she’s left to live on on her own. I couldn’t take that.
Doubt!! (all): perfect shool shoujo storyline up tovol 5 and in vol 6 the cliffhanger of vol 5 is eplained with two panels and the mangaka completely changes the story. What the heck?
Dragon Voice (vol1): nice idea but I didn’t like the boygroup members except for the main hero.
Girl Got Game ( up to vol5): she had overcome everything, had her romance and then like the silliest school girl she ran away in fear. I lost it then.
… so I’m down to G now, I’m sure others have further opinions and I don’t know if I can get to z without breaking the comments, I think I’ll stop here.
^^
with Boy Princess of course I meant they CAN be taken for one another *sighs for ability to edit comments* and all this although I tested it on my own blog. Heh.
I grouped them by language and reason for dropping them. The number in brackets () is the last volume I bought. I didn’t list all the series I dropped after only sampling volume 1 (that’d be about another 2 dozen series).
German
lost interest:
Bastard! (12)
Crayon Shin Chan (2)
Detective Conan (7)
Fake (2)
GTO – Great Teacher Onizuka (4)
Inu Yasha (30)
Manga Love Story / Futari Ecchi (10)
Nadesico (3)
Neon Genesis Evangelion (7)
One Piece (14)
Rocket Man (2)
Rurouni Kenshin (12)
Video Girl Ai (4)
Vision of Escaflowne (2)
turned bad:
Captain Tsubasa (2)
ExaXXion (3)
Seraphic Feather (4)
Tenjo Tenge (2)
English
lost interest:
Prince of Tennis (7)
turned bad:
Alien Nine (2)
Lupin III (6)
French
lost interest:
Anneau des Nibelungen, L’ (5)
C’était Nous {Bokura Ga Ita} (2)
Ceux qui ont des ailes [Takaya] (3)
Escadrille des Nuages, L’ (2)
Satan 666 (4)
trying to catch up some day:
Bleach (4)
Flame of Recca (9)
(Hope the formatting comes through.)
Hehehe… that’s why there are manga cafe and rental places. People in Japan only buy the series they really loved. The poor folks here has to buy tankoubons sight unseen. Extremely unlikely in Japan, unless you’re a fan of the creator and you buy all his or her works. But once you start buying, you never, ever stop buying. If you just want to check something out or read an interesting but unloved series, there’s always the cafes. Buying a book you don’t love is just, well, silly. Soon, soon the backwaters of the West will catch up…
Do you know a lot of people who buys tankoubons never read them? They go directly to the bookshelf as a symbol of their love. Actually a true otaku would buy 3 copies – one for eternal storage on the bookshelf, one to flip through gingerly and smell the prints, and another one to lend to friends for “conversion” purpose.