Hope for CMX licenses, Kodansha winners online, and those damn anime kids

The judges in Kodansha’s fourth Morning International Comics Competition have announced the winners, and the top prize goes to Korean creator Kim DaeJin for his rather surrealistic tale The Unreverberating Echo. As I observed at Robot 6, the judges seem to be a lot happier with this year’s selections than they were last year.

At PWCW, Kai-Ming Cha looks at manga publishers’ efforts to go digital, after successfully shooting down the biggest of the bootleg manga websites.

David Welsh takes a look at this week’s list of new releases. Melinda Beasi’s pick of the week is Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. And the Comics Village team goes over their haul from last week and calls out their favorites.

I didn’t bother reading ICv2’s interview with DC’s co-publishers Dan Didio and Jim Lee, but I’m glad Sunday Comics Debt did, because they picked up on something I missed: The discussion of CMX, DC’s late, lamented manga line. Here’s Jim Lee:

We had great staff, and Asako Suzuki was instrumental in spearheading the CMX line. I think we had some relative success given the licenses we had. But if you look at what’s shaking out in the market right now, from what I can tell, it’s just a very few, very dominant licenses that account for the bulk of the business and everything else has fallen to the wayside.

We looked at a number of different alternatives. We talked to a number of key publishers there about alternatives and then we couldn’t make the numbers work. The numbers on CMX were, comparatively, super low compared to the rest of our offerings and just reached a point where it made more sense for us to be out of the business than to continue struggling with it.

Lee also says that other publishers (he mentions Dark Horse by name) have expressed interest in some CMX licenses, so there is a possibility that some of the series may be rescued.

Teacher and cartoonist Sean Michael Robinson muses about “those damn anime kids” and art teachers who somehow think that kids who like drawing their own manga are a problem. He also shows off some pretty fine examples of their art.

A Danish museum is drawing fire (images may be NSFW) for holding a manga exhibit that includes images from porn manga, including Swing Out Sisters, Bondage Fairies, and The Spirit of Capitalism, all of which have been published in the U.S. According to the Copenhagen Post, unnamed critics are calling the show “child pornography,” and the Danish Psychological Association opposes the show, but the curator says the whole point is to stimulate discussion.

Tony Yao takes a look at the psychological aspects of the scanlation debate, particularly the reactions to Yana Toboso’s lament, at Manga Therapy.

News from Japan: I don’t usually cover anime news here, but this is a big story: Satoshi Kon, the director of Paprika, has died at the age of 47. Kon actually worked as a manga-ka before moving over to the anime side of things.

Reviews

Leroy Douresseaux on vol. 2 of Akira (The Comic Book Bin)
Penny Kenny on vol. 2 of Arata, The Legend (Manga Life)
Julie Opipari on vol. 14 of InuBaka: Crazy for Dogs (Blog@Newsarama)
Shannon Fay on vol. 51 of One Piece (Kuriousity)
Katherine Farmar on The Prime Minister’s Secret Diplomacy (Comics Village)
Michelle Smith on vols. 1-5 of Sugarholic (Soliloquy in Blue)
Billy Aguiar on World of Warcraft Shadow Wing, vol. 1: The Dragons of Outland (Prospero’s Manga)