The Japanese manga illustration magazine SS is looking for submissions with the theme of “costume.” ComiPress has the guidelines.
Asahi.com looks at two new magazines with otaku appeal, Mechabi and Phantom.
Mechabi editor Yuichi Matsushita, 26, says his biggest competition is doujinshi. The magazine’s title is a combination of the words mecha and bishoujo, and the content is heavily otaku-oriented:
For example, in an interview with Foreign Minister Taro Aso, the interviewees ignored diplomatic issues or questions about the upcoming Liberal Democratic Party presidential election and repeatedly asked the foreign minister about a rumor that he had been seen reading Rozen Maiden, a girls’ manga, at Haneda Airport. In interviews with singer Gackt and anatomist and writer Dr. Takeshi Yoro, the magazine asked only about videogames.
The magazine concept came in third in an in-house contest (which really makes me wonder what the first two were) but publisher Kodansha allowed Matsushita to start it up as long as he kept up with his regular job of editing science books. Somehow that makes it sound even… geekier.
“In the future, we’d like to include stories about railway otaku and carrier pigeon fanatics. And we try to avoid creating bad feelings between different generations or disputes over who is otaku and who isn’t,” Matsushita says.
Admirable! Phantom is edited by a novelist called, I kid you not, Toru Honda. She specializes in light novels (raito noberu) and is trying to expand the audience from the young-adult crowd to older readers.
Just as manga, which became popular in Japan after World War II, expanded adult culture by creating a boom in gekiga (comics with realistic narratives), industry insiders are hoping that light novels will come to represent Japanese pop culture just as manga do.
… and the Americans are right behind, with Tokyopop’s plans to translate novels and Seven Seas’ licensing of the Boogiepop novel/manga/megaplex.
ComiPress translates a Japanese magazine article about the economics of being a manga-ka, which is one of the occupatoins on the Japan’s wealthiest people list. You wouldn’t know that from the one they chose, Yoshiko Chijiwa:
When asked about her annual income, she replied, “I cannot possibly survive with only manga (cry)”.
Chijiwa’s work appears in the monthly Dessert and is not collected in a tankoubon, so she has to teach to supplement her income.
“I think it varies from magazine to magazine, for example, a monthly magazine would be around 10,000 yen per page. So if one draws 25 pages in a month, then the manuscript fee for that month is roughly around 250,000 yen,” says an editor from an anonymous manga magazine.
Of course, the pay probably goes up if you’re regularly serialized and your work is collected.
