MangaBlog

Manga Moveable Feast update: Michelle Smith and Melinda Beasi devote this edition of Off the Shelf, their discussion column, to the Color of Earth trilogy. At The Manga Curmudgeon, David Welsh objects to the portrayal of sexuality in the story. Michelle Smith reviews The Color of Heaven at Soliloquy in Blue.

The Hooded Utilitarian’s roundtable on marketing manga to adults continues with a brief note from Peggy Burns on Drawn & Quarterly’s success with gekiga manga and a longer essay from Ryan Sands on the nature of indie manga, illustrated with plenty of examples.

Yesterday, Deb Aoki reported on the “shell game” scanlators are playing with the publishers; at Robot 6 I did a little more digging and found some supposedly deleted series on my iPod. I also daydreamed a bit about my ideal comics store, one geared more toward the tasets and preferences of women than men.

News that Media Blasters has apparently put three volumes on hold causes Lissa Pattillo to speculate about the company’s health.

Del Rey has announced that it will publish two more Odd Thomas graphic novels, bringing the total in the series to four.

Translators Alethea and Athena Nibley discuss conveying the subtleties of another language in their latest column at Manga Life.

News from Japan: A manga version of the TV anime Mobile Fighter G Gundam is in the works. ANN also has the latest comics rankings from Japan.

Reviews

Deb Aoki on vols. 1-3 of Butterflies, Flowers (About.com)
Danica Davidson on vols. 5-8 of Click (Graphic Novel Reporter)
Danica Davidson on vols. 1-3 of Do Whatever You Want (Graphic Novel Reporter)
Susan S. on Fevered Kiss (Manga Jouhou)
Julie Opipari on vol. 10 of Gantz (Manga Maniac Cafe)
Kristin on vol. 1 of I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow (Comic Attack)
Snow Wildsmith on vol. 2 of Itazura Na Kiss (Graphic Novel Reporter)
Snow Wildsmith on Kingyo Used Books (Fujoshi Librarian)
Leroy Douresseaux on The Last Airbender: Prequel: Zuko’s Story (The Comic Book Bin)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 2 of Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Snow Wildsmith on vols. 1-9 of One Thousand and One Nights (Graphic Novel Reporter)
Jones, one of the Jones boys, on vols. 10-12 of Phoenix (Let’s You and Him Fight)
Nina Stone on vol. 1 of Pluto (Romancing the Stone)
Laura on vol. 5 of Shinobi Life (Heart of Manga)
Zack Davisson on vol. 1 of The Times of Botchan (Japan Reviewed)

The Hooded Utilitarian is sponsoring a roundtable on marketing manga to adults this week, titled Komikusu (Japanese for “comics); Noah Berlatsky posted a brief introduction yesterday, and Erica Friedman refined the argument she made earlier at Okazu about a sustainable market that includes scanlations. Today, I offered some marketing tips and Kate Dacey adds some common-sense ideas of her own. Stay tuned, because Noah has a lot more planned for this week—and be sure to read the comments threads!

Melinda Beasi keeps us up to date on the latest Manga Manhwa Moveable Feast posts and hosts Erica Friedman’s review of The Color of Heaven. Over at her own site, Tangognat revisits her original reviews.

Scanlation wars update: While it looks like the publishers have won the initial skirmish with the pirates, Deb Aoki has a thorough article at About.com this morning that explains that it’s not so simple. As blogger Kimi-chan explained a few days ago, both MangaFox and AnimeA claim that they have removed manga at the publishers’ request, but in fact they only blocked the links from the home page. If you find the manga via Google or if you already have it bookmarked, it may still be available. Deb had mixed results trying this herself, and it seems that as news of it spread, the admins at those sites started moving more aggressively to take down the series. This is similar to what happened a few months ago, when some internet vigilantes tried to shut the sites down by alerting Google to the fact that they run mature manga (a violation of the Google Adsense terms of service). The sites removed the links but savvy readers could still find the manga.

David Welsh and Brad Rice check out this week’s new releases.

Gottsu-Iiyan posts the first part of his translation of an interview with Takehiko Inoue and Eiichiro Oda at The Eastern Edge.

News from Japan: The baseball manga Major is coming to an end.

Reviews

Leroy Douresseaux on vol. 9 of 20th Century Boys (The Comic Book Bin)
Andre on vol. 2 of The Battle of Genryu (Kuriousity)
Julie Opipari on The Clique (Manga Maniac Cafe)
Rob McMonigal on vol. 3 of Dororo (Panel Patter)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 5 of Gatcha Gacha (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Zack Davisson on Kitaro’s Heaven and Hell (Japan Reviewed)
Miriam Gibson on vol. 1 of Kobato (Manga Life)
Laura on vol. 1 of Library Wars (Heart of Manga)
Becky Fullan on Suggestive Eyes (Manga Jouhou)
Emily on Watashi ni xx Shinsai! (Emily’s Random Shoujo Manga Page)

The June Manhwa Moveable Feast has begun, and Melinda Beasi starts us off with an introduction to the Color trilogy (The Color of Earth, The Color of Water, The Color of Heaven), which is the topic of this month’s MMF, while Daniella Orihuela-Gruber and Lori Henderson check in with the first reviews.

Melinda also rounds up some recent reviews of manhwa in her latest Manhwa Monday post.

In case you’re afraid you missed something, Lori Henderson rounds up the past week’s manga news at Manga Xanadu and Erica Friedman posts the latest edition of Yuri Network News at Okazu.

Kate Dacey looks at this week’s new releases.

At Manga Desu, Andrew continues his series on the girls of shonen manga with an analysis of Winry from Fullmetal Alchemist.

Helen McCarthy looks at another manga creator whose works are unknown in English, although she is very influential in Japan: Nanaeko Sasaya, a member of the Magnificent 49ers group.

Deb Aoki has the 411 on Tokyopop’s America’s Greatestui Otaku tour, which will be launching soon.

Tech talk: The IEEE Spectrum, not a publication we usually link to around here, has a story about a super-scanner that can scan in an entire book in about a minute; you just hold the book under the device and flip the pages. This would be a huge leap ahead of the old-school methods of cutting a book up and scanning in the pages one by one, and the application is obvious—too obvious:

In fact, Watanabe told me he was particularly interested in scanning manga comics. Imagine, he said, if all of Japan’s vast manga archives, at libraries, homes, and elsewhere, could be rapidly scanned and shared among manga fans around the world. That’d be nice. Alas, when he contacted one publisher, they didn’t like his idea and forbade him from using their books for testing the scanning device. Watanabe currently uses a mock book he made himself.

Reviews: Kate Dacey posts short takes on Afterschool Charisma, Bamboo Blade, and Higurashi When They Cry at The Manga Critic. The Manga Recon team presents their own short reviews of recent releases in the latest edition of Manga Minis. Carlo Santos takes a close look at some new manga in his latest Right Turn Only!! column at Anime News Network.

Michelle Smith on Adolf 5: 1945 and All That Remains (Soliloquy in Blue)
Kristin on vol. 1 of Afterschool Charisma (Comic Attack)
Connie on vol. 5 of Baby & Me (Slightly Biased Manga)
Richard Bruton on The Box Man (Forbidden Planet)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 3 of Children of the Sea (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Michelle Smith on vols. 1 and 2 of Claymore (Soliloquy in Blue)
Tangognat on vol. 1 of Flower in a Storm (Tangognat)
Connie on vol. 10 of The Gentlemen’s Alliance+ (Slightly Biased Manga)
Leroy Douresseaux on vol. 7 of Gestalt (The Comic Book Bin)
Sesho on vol. 4 of Happy Mania (Sesho’s Anime and Manga Reviews)
Sam Kusek on vol. 1 of Kingyo Used Books (Manga Recon)
Charles Webb on vol. 2 of Laon (Manga Life)
Shannon Fay on vol. 1 of Millennium Prime Minister (Kuriousity)
Sean T. Collins on Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka (Attentiondeficitdisorderly)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 10 of Vampire Knight (A Case Suitable for Treatment)

The latest entry in Jason Thompson’s House of 1000 Manga series is Monster Collection, a game-based manga that does more than just put its characters through their paces.

Scanlation updates: At du9, Xavier Guilbert takes issue with the standard narrative that is shaping up regarding the effect of scanlations on manga sales. At ANN Brian Hanson, a.k.a. The Answerman, engages his readers a bit on the topic, including this nice shoot-down of the argument that the publishers had better come up with their own digital distribution:

If Warner Bros. arrests the guy in Chinatown selling bootleg DVDs, they don’t owe it to anyone to send a guy down the street corner selling new DVDs of current films in theaters for one or two bucks.

The Hooded Utilitarian is hosting a roundtable on marketing art manga; I will be contributing, along with Erica Friedman, Ryan Sands, Kate Dacey, Ed Chavez, Shaenon Garrity, and Deb Aoki. Noah Berlatsky starts us off this morning with a brief introduction.

Derik Badman visited the Garo manga exhibit in New York, and he has commentary and photos to share.

The Toronto Star is looking at the status of girls in G20 countries as part of the run-up to the G20 talks in Toronto. Since this is MangaBlog, not The Economist, we’re only going to highlight this article, which actually makes an interesting point: Girls use cosplay and kogal culture as a way to evade the rigid, old-fashioned expectations of their culture. Why yes, that is a huge generalization, but you could also argue just the opposite, that the depiction of girls and women in manga (buxom, compliant, shy, and super-sweet) reinforce those traditional mores.

The next Manga Moveable Feast is going to focus on manhwa, and Melinda Beasi has instructions for all those who want to participate.

News from Japan: Comic Bunch and Comic Yuri Hime S magazines are both ending publication, although Comic Yuri Hime S will be folded into its sister publication, Comic Yuri Hime, which will go from quarterly to bimonthly publicaton. Canned Dogs has a bit of background on Comic Bunch.

Reviews: Margaret O’Connell compares two fujoshi-oriented manga, My Girlfriend’s a Geek and Fujoshi Rumi, in an entertaining essay at Sequential Tart.

Leroy Douresseaux on vol. 8 of 20th Century Boys (I Reads You)
Ken Haley on The Art of Blade of the Immortal (Manga Recon)
Kelakagandy on vol. 4 of Black Bird (kelakagandy’s ramblings)
Melinda Beasi on vols. 1 and 2 of Black Butler (Manga Bookshelf)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 4 of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Johanna Draper Carlson on Dining Bar Akira (Comics Worth Reading)
Kate Dacey on vols. 1-3 of Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (The Manga Critic)
Becky Fullan on vol. 1 of Kurashina Sensei’s Passion (Manga Jouhou)
Leroy Douresseaux on I’ve Moved Next Door to You (The Comic Book Bin)
Connie on Maniac Shorts Shot (Manga Recon)
Eduardo Zacarias on vol. 25 of One Piece (Animanga Nation)
Lissa Pattillo on vol. 3 of Rin-ne (Kuriousity)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 3 of Soul Eater (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Lissa Pattillo on vol. 2 of Stepping on Roses (ANN)
Marsha Reid on vol. 4 of Sunshine Sketch (Kuriousity)
James Fleenor on vol. 1 of World of Warcraft: Shadow Wing (Anime Sentinel)

The anti-piracy coalition announced last week seems to have jumped right into the fray: Deb Aoki reports that MangaFox has pulled down over 200 series. In a forum post, an administrator stated “Our boss is trying to negotiate with them, any updated news, we will let you know.” The list of deleted manga is here. In the forums, the fans go through the usual stages—sadness, indignation, dismissal. I rounded up a few of the responses at Robot 6, and Lissa Pattillo does a good job of answering all the arguments at Kuriousity.

ANN talks to Digital Manga president Hikaru Sasahara and gets a few more details on Digital’s online manga plans, which would allow fans to legally translate the manga:

The program is set to feature over a thousand manga titles or as many as “a few thousand,” mostly in the boys love genre, to establish a following before branching out into other genres and possibly novels, Sasahara said. The business model will allow for DMP, the Japanese licensors, and the translators to each receive a cut of digital sales, and additional revenue will come from derivatives such as advertising, and possibly television or other adaptations of manga titles. Titles that perform well online may also go into print.

The program has apparently been in the works for over a year, and Sasahara mentioned that Digital plans to invite potential translators to the office—at their expense—for a presentation on the program. Digital has been putting already licensed and translated manga online at its eManga.com site for about two years.

Oguie Maniax posts a possible model for an online manga site; the catch here, and people seem to forget this, is that the pirate sites make money in part because they aren’t paying a dime for content. It’s easy to turn a profit on internet ads when your costs are relatively low; when you have to pay creators, editors, and translators, it doesn’t work so well. Digital’s initiative eliminates most of those costs from the front end, but even so, all those people will have to be paid eventually, or the whole thing will fall apart.

Sean Gaffney checks out this week’s new manga, and Johanna Draper Carlson takes a look at the August releases.

Shaenon Garrity lists ten defining manga—and explains what they define—in her latest column at comiXology.

At Masters of Manga, Marc Bernabe shows a video of Kimagure Orange Road creator Izumi Matsumoto drawing.

David Welsh has a license request and some manga suggestions for Rachel Maddow.

News from Japan: Alive manga-ka Tadashi Kawashima died of liver cancer at age 42. He continued to work even when seriously ill, and he mangaed to finish the series and even start another one before his death on June 15.

Reviews: Scott VonSchilling leads the pack with the first review I have seen of Vertical’s much-anticipated Chi’s Sweet Home, at The Anime Almanac. EvilOmar has a fresh batch of short manga reviews at About Heroes. Tangognat takes a quick look at some new Tokyopop titles.

Zack Davisson on vol. 4 of Animal Academy (Japan Reviewed)
Michelle Smith on vols. 19 and 20 of Cheeky Angel (Soliloquy in Blue)
Emily on Danshing Girl (Emily’s Random Shoujo Manga Page)
Ken Haley on vol. 1 of Dorohedoro (Manga Recon)
Michelle Smith on vol. 3 of Happy Cafe (Soliloquy in Blue)
Ed Sizemore on vols. 2 and 3 of Natsume’s Book of Friends (Comics Worth Reading)
Diana Dang on vol. 1 of Portrait of M and N (Stop, Drop, and Read!)
Zack Davisson on vol. 2 of Portrait of M and N (Japan Reviewed)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 5 of Shinobi Life (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Kristin on vol. 10 of Slam Dunk (Comic Attack)
Sergar on Twin Spica (Genji Press)
Kate O’Neil on World of Warcraft: Mage (Mania.com)