The Tocqueville Connection has a brief article on the manga that won top honors at Angouleme.
Elae reports that the site for the German doujinshi anthology Kappa Maki is up.
Culture Corner: Asahi.com reviews Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization.
The folks at The Star of Malaysia are busy: Max Loh reviews CLAMP North Side, Pauline Wong reads vol. 2 of Beauty Pop, and Kazuki checks out vol. 2 of Genju no Seiza.
The culture wars continue, sort of, at Comicsnob, where non-manga-reader Bob Holt reaches out and discusses what manga does well. Meanwhile, at Shuchaku East, Chloe gives her take:
Evidently, American comics never really felt compelled to take an interest my readership; it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise when I return the favor.
Also at Comicsnob: Matt Blind takes a shot at compiling a weekly manga watch list.
At Yaoi911, Alex is showing how he creates a yaoi manga step by step. The latest post is the inked version. The webcomic interface is pretty cool too, although the page is a little bigger than my puny iBook G4 screen can handle.
ChunHyang72 posts another manga minute, guiding readers to all the good stuff on Tokyopop—which, I must say, has improved a lot over the early days.
At the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Wilma Jandoc and Jason Yadao look over five different manga series, including one they are glad ADV dropped.
Reviews: Hung at the BasuGasuBakuhatsu Anime Blog thinks vol. 5 of Kamui is the best so far and prefers vol. 1 of Welcome to the NHK to the anime. At Active Anime, Holly Ellingwood reviews vol. 7 of Hana-Kimi and vol. 2 of Black Knight. Down at the Mangamaniaccafe, Julie gives a gentlemen’s C to vol. 1 of Lovely Sick but gives a better grade to vol. 2 of Night of the Beasts. At Comicsnob, Matt Blind reviews vols. 1 and 2 of Angel Cup. PopCultureShock’s Katherine Dacey-Tsuei enjoys vol. 1 of Shaman Warrior. Precocious Curmudgeon David Welsh reviews three titles from CMX, Canon, Go Go Heaven!! and Oyayubihime Infinity. And there’s a weekend flurry of activity at Slightly Biased Manga, where Connie posts reviews of vol. 1 of Let’s Be Perverts, vols. 4 and 5 of Revolutionary Girl Utena, IC in a Sunflower, vol. 1 of Gerard & Jacques, and vol. 10 of Detective Conan.
The Comics Reporter reports that Non Non Ba, by Shigeru Mizuki, took the prize for Best Album at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinee in Angouleme, France. This was the first manga to win that honor, according to reporter Bart Beaty. What, you never heard of it? Christopher Butcher included it in his roundup of French manga a couple of days ago:
So I didn’t recognize the name, but following a viewing of the Takeshi Miike movie “The Great Yokai War” I did a little bit of digging on “yokai”, the various Japanese forest spirits and demons that make up Japanese mythology. It turns out that Shigeru Mizuki is probably the best-known manga-ka of yokai stories, and his ‘Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro’ is considered a shonen horror classic. NonNonbâ appears to be Mizuki’s newest manga, another yokai tale about a boy who befriends a yokai and the problems it causes to his day-to-day life.
More background: This looks like Mizuki’s website, although it’s a bit hard to tell as it’s in Japanese. There’s some author information at the bottom of this page, and NY Arts has a really interesting interview with Mizuki, in which he talks about the origins of his work.
UPDATE: Sebastian leads us to a preview (zipped PDF) in the comments.
Yesterday I went to Vericon, a sci-fi/gaming/fantasy/anime con at Harvard, not because I’m into any of those things but because Shaenon Garrity, whose Overlooked Manga Festival always causes me to erupt in unseemly whoops of laughter, was part of their webcomics panel. I was late to the panel (which I blogged about for Digital Strips) but afterwards I had the opportunity to chat with Shaenon about her work as a freelance editor for Viz and how she chooses overlooked manga. I’m hoping we will be able to do an interview in the near future; in the meantime, here is her latest OMF, in which she takes on the only slightly overlooked Ode to Kirihito
A Tokyopop operative interviews the duo known as Peach-Pit.
John Jakala’s defense of manga, discussed below, was sparked by Fantagraphics art director Jacob Covey’s blanket pronouncement that “manga is crap.” (It looks like Covey has erased that post.) Leave it to Simon Jones of Icarus to reveal that in fact, Fantagraphics does publish manga. Ero-manga. Pretty good ero-manga at that. Oh, the irony! (Icarus link is NSFW.)
Meanwhile, at coffeeandink, Mely says even within the shoujo genre, there is a lot of variety in art styles. A commenter disagrees, and an interesting discussion ensues.
Animeblogger Hazel turns her hand to manga from time to time, and whenever she does it’s worth a look. Here are brief reviews of manga-related books and a list of “manga I’m not sure exists.” The latter is a handful of titles that list January release dates but don’t seem to show up in catalogs or elsewhere, including the elusive Sweet Cream and Red Strawberries, by Kiriko Nananan. And she checks out some series debuting in January.
MangaCast has the scoop on some new series from Udon, as well as the week’s doujinshi ratings.
At the Mangamaniaccafe, Julie samples vol. 2 of Chibi Vampire and vol. 2 of Baby & Me. Okazu’s Erica Friedman enjoyed vol. 7 of Yuri Hime much more than the previous volume. Anime on DVD’s Jarred Pine has mixed feelings about vol. 1 of Utopia’s Avenger. At Active Anime, Blake Waymire opens the door to vol. 1 of Banya the Explosive Delivery Man and Holly Ellingwood reviews vol. 2 of Punch! At MangaCast, Ed reviews Blood Alone, Council of Carnality, and Unbalance Unbalance.
At Sporadic Sequential, John Jakala opens up a can of whupass on the all-manga-looks-alike crowd. David Welsh adds his list of manga creators who eschew the big-eyes-big-hair style. And ChunHyang72 drops in to make an excellent point:
What bothers me most about the “manga is crap” screeds: the hostility directed at manga readers, especially girls and women. Snarky spandex fans need to stop arguing that manga only appeals to squealing 15 year old girls who wouldn’t know Frank Miller from Francis Bacon. NOT TRUE. Those squealing 15 year old girls you’re dissing… they’re actually buying comic books. Lots of them, in fact.
She’s right. The teenagers that I know who read manga take their comics just as seriously as do the spandex and art-comix crowds, so even if they were the only readers of manga, I don’t see what the problem is. As it happens, they’re not; anyone with half a brain knows that there’s a huge diversity of manga out there that is attracting a wide range of readers. As Jakala points out, even the most visible manga, the ones that hit the Booklist, don’t really share that moe style. To claim otherwise isn’t just ignorant, it’s deliberately obtuse.
UPDATE: Dirk Deppey weighs in as well, pointing out that this is really about shelf space as much as anything else.
The press release below the cut is really telling you that Go!Comi will be doing portfolio reviews at NYCC. But check this out:
Does this mean Go! Comi is planning to start publishing original material? Creative Director Audry Taylor answered this important question with a cryptic smile. “Come to our panel Saturday at 2:00 PM and you’ll find out.”
But unless they get a kick out of disappointing people, it’s hard to imagine why they would do portfolio reviews otherwise. The whole press release is pretty cryptic, actually.
GO! COMI ANNOUNCES PORTFOLIO REVIEWS AT NYCC
Manga publisher Go! Comi has announced that it will be hosting portfolio reviews for the first time ever at their booth during New York Comic Con. The reviews will be held at booth 564 on Saturday February 24th between 10:00 AM and noon. If you are talented, ambitious, and have a portfolio, the editors at Go! Comi wants to see your work.
Does this mean Go! Comi is planning to start publishing original material? Creative Director Audry Taylor answered this important question with a cryptic smile. “Come to our panel Saturday at 2:00 PM and you’ll find out.”
“We’re going to have a lot of fun at this con,” she confided. “There’s an artist I can’t talk about. There are free posters I can’t give you a sneak peek of. There are announcements I can’t discuss. There’s promotional art in the works that we can’t show you. There’s a website that isn’t online and banner ads that aren’t running yet. We’re working hard here at Go! Comi not to tell anyone anything.”
ABOUT GO! COMI: Upon the release of its first books in late 2005 Go! Comi immediately gained a reputation for the excellence of its series, its top-notch production values, and its incredibly paranoid upper management. Among the manga series Go! Comi has reluctantly released to the public are Cantarella, After School Nightmare, and the best-selling Her Majesty’s Dog.
