Found in translation

Some quick links and good reads:

My German is not very good, but the upshot of this article seems to be that costumed manga girls overran the Leipzig book fair. It’s pretty funny to run it through BabelFish:

With some one sees eighty per cent of the Pobacken, nearly all runs around on dangerously high rubber paragraphs. “the girls are condemned dangerous”, say a dealer, who gezimmerten tried, to guard its from raw boards one guest and.

I’m not letting my girls wear rubber paragraphs of any height until they are at least 16.

On the AoD blog, the much more thoughtful translator Tomo Kimura discusses some of the decisions she made in translating Full Moon o Sagashite.

Australia discovers Osamu Tezuka: The National Gallery of Victoria is having a show on the godfather of manga later this year. The manga market is small at the moment; Australians spent AU$750,000 last year on manga, while U.S. sales were the equivalent of AU$164 million. But Australia has its own home-grown manga/anime magazine, OzTaku, and its own manga expert, Monash University assistant lecturer Craig Norris. Here’s Norris’s take on why manga will catch on down under:

“For many fans, one of the things they find so refreshing about manga and anime is it’s not trapped in Australia. It’s not the Crocodile Hunter or Crocodile Dundee, it’s not Kath and Kim, it’s not this Australian image. It’s a global, cosmopolitan, sci-fi, futuristic, beautiful boy kind of image. It’s everything that Australian pop culture isn’t giving them at the moment; it’s the stories that aren’t being told indigenously,” he says.

The Calgary Herald has an article that focuses on movies made from graphic novels but contains some interesting nuggets, including this:

To graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, cadets from the class of 2006 must study Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a graphic novel set during the Iranian revolution.

And this comment from writer Stephen Weiner on the popularity of manga:

“I call it the content revolution,” Weiner says. “The format is the same, words and pictures, but the stories are drastically different. The stories have been so limiting for so long in comic books, that it sort of took the rest of the world to show us what can be done in comics.”

Weiner also voices what most of us know, that book sales figures understate sales of graphic novels:

“The same way the New York bestseller lists just take certain stores into account, graphic novel sales often don’t take into account independent comic book store sales.”

Speaking of manga sales, the February numbers are out and David Taylor at Love Manga has posted and interpreted them. Tokyopop did a little better than Viz this month, with Loveless making a strong debut, perhaps because of pre-release buzz. At Precocious Curmudgeon, David Welsh adds his take.

Also on Love Manga, a nice roundup on the Rising Stars of Manga entry that bears suspicious similarities to Blade of the Immortal. Besides side-by-side postings of the panels (which has been done elsewhere), the post is worth reading for the comments. Lillian Diaz-Pryzbl of Tokyopop weighs in:

Heh. The whole Samurai Zombie being selected thing can entirely be attributed to the fact that none of the three editors who decided on the top 20 entries (including myself) have read Blade of the Immortal (for shame!). I thought, “Hey, this looks a lot like one of those dark, rough-edged samurai manga,” but no connection was made beyond that. :-)

As for what to do next, Diaz-Pryzbl notes that

originality is a factor in our final judging (which was done two weeks ago, actually), and originality in plot and concept was also something that this story was lacking, even before the plagiarism came up.

But some of the commenters are critical of Tokyopop for not taking the story down from the RSoM site.

If you’re wondering what to buy next, TangognaT reviews Absolute Boyfriend and Golgo 13.