MangaBlog

Lots of goodies out on the internets tonight!

This week’s new comics list presents David Welsh with a dilemma. No such problems at MangaCast, where Ed runs with the Fright Night theme and introduces the newest member: David “Love Manga” Taylor!

SF Weekly has a lengthy examination of yaoi that starts with a great definition:

Japanese comics that tell stories of beautiful young men falling desperately, passionately in love, and often having enthusiastic butt sex.

… and quickly brings up the backlash issue:

While one should never underestimate the anger of a cultural conservative forced to confront gay sex, yaoi can also push the buttons of people who consider themselves open-minded. The broad genre encompasses a number of titles that go no further than light romance, but others deal with unsettling themes like rape, incest, and bestiality. Add in the fact that many of the boys drawn in the manga style look like they’re about 12 or are identified as being under 18, and it begins to seem like yaoi is inviting lawsuits.

Writer Eliza Strickland has really done her homework on this one, and it shows. It’s long but a fascinating read.

Here’s another one: Manganews asks whether dividing manga by genre has any meaning, and of course the readers answer.

Simon Jones adds his two cents on PWCW’s CPM rebound story.

ComiPress has some gossip from Japan: Bleach artbook, Claymore anime (saw that one coming!) and three series being dropped from Weekly Jump.

Infinity Studios is doing sort of a reverse Tokyopop: They sent out press releases announcing their cool new blog, but when you go to their site, it’s not so easy to find. Front and center is… a list of their new titles. How novel! (Go over to the upper right and click on “Forums & more” to get to the blog.)

At Blogfonte, Mitch checks out the latest from Go!Comi, After School Nightmare and Night of the Beasts. Over at AoD, Jarred reviews Mitsukazu Mihara’s Haunted House and Julie Rosato enjoys Audition.

A word from Down Under: Mini (yes, the car) is sponsoring an exhibit of Osamu Tezuka’s work at the National Gallery of Victoria. Here’s the Mini spokesperson, Alexander Corne, explaining why:

“The NGV is quite a funky, forward-looking gallery, so it fits with the Mini feel,” says Corne. “We had an exhibition [sponsorship] with them last year, and a large number who attended were in the core Mini demographic of 18-39 years old. “

“Astro Boy and manga comics is another area where we think there are a lot of people in the Mini demographic. They’d be switched on to what Tezuka Osamu is all about; he’s an icon in Japan.”

Click the link to see their photos of Minis dressed in manga.

That’s the lead story at PW Comics Week, with CPM head John O’Donnell summing it up thusly:

“We took some heavy punches,” says O’Donnell about the recent restructuring. “It’s like we went through emergency surgery. We’ve been rehabbing and now we’re walking around again. We hung in there and made the changes that were necessary for us to survive.”

CPM never filed bankruptcy, but the Musicland chain did, and since Musicland accounted for 30% of their DVD sales, CPM suffered as well. Anyway, they’ve taken their medicine and now they are back, and at Yaoi-Con they announced 17 titles to be published between now and next summer, including a new one from Youka Nitta.

O’Donnell says the house will likely “add stuff as we go along” in the second quarter. “We’ve got hundreds of licenses bought and paid for that we had to put on hold,” says O’Donnell.

That’s kind of interesting. I wonder what they have on ice. More from O’Donnell:

He compares today’s hot manga market to the development of the anime market, noting with dismay the fast rise in the number of titles. “Everyone with a book with big-eyed characters is jumping in the market trying to play the market share game,” he says. “They don’t care if they’re losing money. It’s ‘whoever publishes the most titles wins.’ We can’t compete with that. We don’t have a parent company we can go to for more money. We live and die by our business sense.”

I’m not sure he’s right about the first part. It seems like the smaller companies, like DramaQueen and DMP (which he cites a few lines later) and Go!Comi and Seven Seas, are doing just the opposite, starting with a few titles and tending them carefully. The pile ’em high strategy didn’t work out so well for ADV, and a lot of people aren’t to thrilled with the way it’s playing out for Tokyopop either (although you can’t argue that it works for Viz). So it’s nice to hear that O’Donnell will be substituting “business sense” for mass quantities of new releases.

Attention Vertical: ComiPress posts a review of a Japanese illustration book of Osamu Tezuka’s work. What’s interesting about the book is that it shows how much Tezuka revised his art.

Whenever an original picture was to be published in book form, it was reconstructed by Tezuka like a puzzle, with a great many number of retouching, cutting, and pasting.

The review cites several examples of this from the book. The painter Matisse once commented that he had to work very hard to make his paintings look so easy; this book seems to illustrate that point.

In other art book news, Newsarama interviews Tania del Rio about Mangaka America, which comes out tomorrow. Del Rio co-authored the book with her husband, Will Staehle. It’s a nice solid interview with plenty of sample art, and it’s nice to hear del Rio directly address the biggest criticism of the book so far: the title.

Some will say that Americans automatically cannot be considered mangaka because they’re not Japanese. However, we disagree. The title alone is intended to express the fusion of East and West into a new style. We’re treating it as a loan word that is given new meaning by our own culture. Also, it’s interesting to note that the original books that inspired us, Japanese Comikers 1 & 2, use an English loanword, “comics” to describe their Japanese artists. It works both ways!

At MangaCast, Ed was only able to record part of the Broccoli panel at Yaoi-Con, but to make up for it he’s giving away a Disgaea calendar. And he also posts audio of the 801 Media launch panel.

Tangognat gives three out of five stars to Good Witch of the West but admits she probably liked it less because she saw the anime first.

TIME online’s Andrew Arnold reviews three horror manga: Museum of Terror, Octopus Girl, and Ode to Kirihito. Strange bedfellows indeed, although Arnold seems to enjoy them all for different reasons. Ryan & Evan at Same Hat! Same Hat!! just got Kirihito and haven’t read it yet, but they devote an entire post to raving about how great it looks. (Both links via the Vertical Blog, which is always good reading even when they don’t have a new book out.) And the North Jersey Media Group reviews Kirihito as well. I’m about three-quarters of the way through Kirihito myself, and I find it hard to put down. It’s everything everyone says it is, plus a really good story.

My treat for making it through Monday is settling back with David Welsh’s Flipped column. This week it’s extra tasty as David lists ten things he likes about Antique Bakery.

It’s the Manga Monday before Halloween at Comics-and-more, and they’re celebrating with reviews of volume 3 of Octopus Girl and volume 2 of Hino Horror.

Comic Book Bin reviews Haunted House and isn’t all that excited by it.

The Charlotte Observer offers a brief review of Star Trek: Shinsei Shinsei.

Over at Tokyopop, ChunHyang72 posts another great Tokyopop site roundup and makes fun of Stu Levy’s variegated posting style.

The June blog has found a great website for yaoi readers: Beautiful Androgyny, which is sort of an encyclopedia of translated and global yaoi manga, DVDs, and doujinshi, with plot summaries and other useful info. It looks like a good site to check out if you’re afraid you’re running out of books to read.

I vote that the most talked-about article this week will be ICv2’s analysis of the Cartoon Network effect on Bleach sales. They lead with this statistic:

Comparing the first four weeks of Bookscan sales after the first appearance of the Cartoon Network effect, sales of Bleach Vol. 1 were 52.4% of the numbers attained by the first volume of Naruto in 2005.

Sales of Bleach are up, mind you, they just haven’t reached Naruto levels. And while it’s a little early, ICv2 is already speculating that Bleach won’t have the same staying power. David Welsh analyzes the article and brings in some points that ICv2 left out, such as the importance of time slots.

John Jakala got a bargain on manga—and you can too, but only if you act fast.

If you’ve been following the “Shoujo Manga: Girl Power” exhbit and it’s not coming to your town, take heart: The home page has lots of images and info, a link to order the catalog, and a link to organizer Masami Toku’s Visual Culture page, where you could get lost for hours… (Via When Fangirls Attack.)

Deutsche Mangaka lives up to its name and translates a profile of German manga-ka.

Reviews: Tom Spurgeon has a great review of Tezuka’s Ode to Kirihito that includes a peek at why it’s so good. Ed Chavez likes Close the Last Door, a salaryman yaoi title from June. At Comics Worth Reading, Johanna reviews volume 2 of Steady Beat.

Why do Japanese manga magazines use colored paper? ComiPress has the answer.

MangaCast wraps up its Yaoi-Con coverage with audio of the Watanabe Asia and BLU panels.

Also at MangaCast: links to previews of Eden, Boogiepop Dual, and Black Knight.

ANN has an interview with Amy Reeder Handley, author of Fool’s Gold.

On the ANN forums, Ali Kokmen of Del Rey notes that Broccoli has a new distributor and defends Diamond against a poster’s vague comment that there have been complaints. At Icarus Comics, Simon Jones picks up the thread and notes that complaints aren’t necessarily a bad thing—they show we care—and that if most of them are directed at Diamond, well, maybe it’s because Diamond is all there is.

I’ve been linking to Shaenon Garrity’s Livejournal a lot lately, so I was interested to find this interview with her on Comixpedia, in which she discusses manga and her own comics, Smithson, Narbonic, and Li’l Mell.

The Star of Malaysia has an article about the making of the Death Note movie.

JP Meyer is does a double take at by Dramacon 2.

At Comics Worth Reading, Johanna reviews volume 1 of Tail of the Moon. At MangaCast, Christian posts a text review of volume 2 of Emma.