This will probably be a quick post as I’m blogging from the air-conditioned comfort of the first-class lounge in South Station, Boston. I’m heading out to Chicago shortly, so I’ll be off the air until tomorrow afternoon. To get myself in the mood, I’m bringing Train+Train along to read on the way.
Meanwhile, we do have some news. Fred Gallagher follows up on the Megatokyo website (scroll down) about the news that Kodansha is publishing a Japanese edition of Megatokyo, and he has another exciting bit of news as well: He’s about to become a dad, which is even more awesome. Incidentally, I e-mailed Fred to ask if the Japanese edition would be flipped, and he said it would not. In fact, the preview will start in the “back” of the magazine to avoid confusion. I wonder if the last page will have a big “Stop! This is the back of the book!” message in Japanese.
Tokyopop finally has their revamped website up. Opinions?
And that means I can link to ChunHyang72’s latest Tokyopop Round-Up.
PWCW posts their bestseller list, which is interestingly varied this month but includes less manga than usual.
ComiPress reports that one of the people arrested in Japan in May for file-sharing manga via Winny may face a year in prison.
The Sweatdrop collaborative has a new podcast up, featuring Emma Vieceli, Hayden Scott-Baron (Dock), Laura Watton, Morag Lewis. Also, Emma Vieceli is blogging about her recent trip to Japan.
Bozu’s circus: Ed Chavez expands on the concept of “bozu” at Precocious Curmudgeon.
Asian pop culture expo draws 80,000 people—in France! Not a surprise, really; I think they’re a bit ahead of us, manga-wise. (Via The Beat.)
Reviews: The new weekly Sequential Tart has a nice piece up on vol. 2 of Antique Bakery. The Anime on DVD crew serves up some Small-Bodied Manga Reviews. Erica Friedman takes a look at vol. 2 of Applause at Okazu. At Slightly Biased Manga, Connie checks out vol. 7 of Lupin III, vol. 3 of Ouran High School Host Club, vol. 7 of Cantarella, and vol. 2 of To Terra. Julie takes an early look at vol. 4 of Absolute Boyfriend at the Manga Maniac Cafe. At Prospero’s Manga, Ferdinand gives low marks to vol. 1 of Avalon High: Coronation, and Miranda isn’t much more enthusiastic about vol. 1 of Million Tears. Blogging on the new TokyoSpace, Andre reviews vols. 1 and 2 of To Terra.
The new site is very, very buggy. I’ve had difficulty logging on, and I’ve found most of the links in this week’s round-up (at least the ones pointing to Tokyopop pages) are not working.
That said, the site looks 100% better—the interface is much simpler and much easier on the eyes. TP’s core users will love the bells and whistles: clans (a.k.a. fan clubs), scrapbooks, games, ringtones, etc. And fogies like me will be pleased to know that TP staff and creators have been given their own section of the site (STARS-TP Family for editorial and marketing folks; STARS-Rising Stars for artist pages).
On the downside, the catalog is hard to browse because titles are now listed by volume, not series. There doesn’t seem to be an index page that allows a quick overview of the catalog, though new filters allow browsers to sort the catalog by title or popularity. I also noticed that TP has removed the RSS feed buttons from user profiles, which makes me wonder if it will be possible to continue subscribing to individual blogs at the site.
Like ChunHyang72, I still found a lot of “issues” at the TP site and this is after I was a beta tester for the site…However, like noted above, the site is easier on the eyes and seems to incorporate a lot of the Web 2.0 features that everyone is screaming about (I work in marketing/PR).
Hopefully, the site will be fully “online” in a few weeks as everyone reports dead links and other bugs.
Train+Train! Great choice…though most of the first volume is about getting TO the train. Might be appropriate, though.
I’m not too happy with all the changes to the TP site. My biggest issue is not being able to log in! Yesterday I could log in for seconds, and today I can’t at all! I don’t know if I’m happy with the page layouts either. As ChunHyang72 stated, the catalog is a mess with individual volumes listed instead of just by series. And I couldn’t stay logged in enough to tell, but it looks like you can’t customize the blog pages anymore with banners. And I had just created some new ones too!
I know big changes like this are hard, but I’m really wondering if some of the changes were really necessary.
I share your pain, phoenix; I’ve never been able to log in thus far on their new interface, and can only stare disdainfully at the rather vague top bars [which some brilliant marketing exec has labeled things like “Life” and “Hot”] and try to figure my way through all the excess bells and whistles.