The cat is out of the bag, so I’ll go ahead and link: the beta version of Dirk Deppey’s new/old blog journalista is up. (You can comment on the new site here.) He starts off with a post on why some people think Bandai’s warning about not fansubbing Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society is of interest to comics readers. Basically, the same principle applies to scanlation: The company seems to be going after those who fansub licensed material while perhaps tolerating those who stick to unlicensed anime. Check it out, and then you can rinse your brain with fandom_wank’s take on the whole thing.
On a more serious note, Otaku Champloo suggests that we come up with a manga canon, like the literary canon we all studied in undergrad school, a list of the essential manga, as it were.
As learned from the discussion of Western Literature Canon, it’s a great way to institute standards on stories. Simply put, it could save us from intellectual stagnation. Having a canon challenges writers to create a story that could change the world of manga forever. More so, it serves as a standard to perhaps, keep us away from those raunchy sex-infused shoujo stories.
I would have thought raunchy sex-infused shoujo stories were the canon, which shows how much we need one.
Completely Futile annotates the latest volume of Fruits Basket.
At Tokyopop, ChunHyang72 laments both the lack of content on many Tokyopop blogs and the lack of attention to the blogs that do have content. She points out that Tokyopop CEO Stu Levy is blogging and no one seems to have noticed because they’re too busy saying how bored they are and asking who’s your favorite Fruits Basket pairing. A commenter has some advice for Mr. Levy:
Maybe he should’ve followed it with more punctuation and emoticons.
XD! Until Tokyopop comes up with some way to sort the blogs (such as an editors’ section and a friendslist), ChunHyang72 remains our best guide to the site; I’m subscribing to her RSS feed so I won’t miss anything. But its a shame an outsider has to do this. Maybe they should just hire her.
Maybe if Stu were more relevant. He doesn’t show up at actual TP manga panels anymore. I might see him in state of the comic industry events and I know I saw him in a TP soccer shirt this year, but when I think of faces/names that go with TP I think Lillian DiazPryzbl, Peter Ahlstrom and in a way that makes me get spirally emoticon eyes Jake Forbes (as he was with TP and is now writing for a TP title).
I tend to remember their Global titles more than their licensed titles now. Especailly after they switched to their adjusted version of a quarterly release.
Yeah the TP site is dead for me. I cannot use it and now find it as helpful as ADV’s or AnimeWork’s. But the reason is not the blogs there. I could have easily avoided those. I just cannot navigate the place… still. So if I should check out Stu I could pick up his own RSS (which I decided I had to have because he is the CEO of the MangaRevolution) and I can then avoid feeling as if I ran into a strange, Rozen Maiden fansite (mainly because of the color scheme) complete with random corporate non-manga vertical ads along the sides (I already have AT&T phone service thanks…. but the win a Mustang by Texting TPOP had me wishing I had a cell phone).
I still like GoComi for my blogging and manga but their blog doesn’t use RSS. I wonder why?
Uh…’cause we didn’t think of it when we built the Go! Comi website last year? Anyway, that’s the best excuse I can think of on the spur of the moment.
We’re about to impliment some changes in the site and we’ll definitely look into putting an RSS feed on the blogs. Since we post somewhat sporadically, it’s an excellent idea.
David: While you’re at it, could you please allow permalinks? At the moment I can’t link to individual blog entries. Awesome blog, though.
lol. it would have been easy to think that shoujo stories would always be those raunchy lovey dovey types since they’re so popular. I reckon hating shoujo for a while since everything that came out was Mayo Shinjo or similar to her work.
Thank god for others like Natsuki Takaya and Tomoko Ninomiya who just gave us better stories under the shoujo world. There is, of course, Rose o Versailles which changed my life forever. (;_;) Oscar. There should be better reads out there, hence wouldn’t a canon be lovely?
ChunHyang has been an indispensible part of the TP website. I’m glad more people are catching onto her blog. I wouldn’t of found half the interesting content on TP I have if it wasn’t for her. I know so much content is lost in a sea of pointless posts, art someone found on google, and endless fansubs, that TP expects users to “self police” [not a bad idea, but some kind of mild moderation would be nice]