MangaBlog

Volume 11 of Naruto slips to number 27 on the USA Today booklist, from last week’s record high of 21. Volume 11 of Negima debuts at number 88 and volume 9 of Fullmetal Alchemist rises from 299 to 103.

Thursday is new comics day this week, because of the holiday. MangaCast runs down the new manga with their usual idiosyncratic picks of the week.

At Tokyopop, Telophase’s latest column gives the history of women manga-ka and how they have changed manga.

I’m sort of Tokyopop’d out, but if you’re not, Love Manga unpacks the PWCW story.

Tania del Rio just got her advance copy of Mangaka America, and you can take a peek at her Livejournal site.

How much does Jack Tse love Love Roma? So much that he put together a tribute podcast featuring many manga pundits offering their takes on LR. Full disclosure: he asked me to participate, but I’m the one person on earth who didn’t like it.

Rivkah says Tokyopop is not exploiting her. So there!

Forum moderation in action: Would it be so hard to do this on TokyoSpace?

Short stuff: David Welsh is enjoying Rumic Theater, a collection of short stories by Inuyasha/Maison Ikkoku/Ranma 1/2 manga-ka Rumiko Takahashi. And the Manga Junkie is reading Himawari ~ Ken’ichi Legend, a 4-koma manga about an office lady and her very strange father, but she admits it doesn’t translate well. (He poured curry on all his rice! He brought a durian on the bus! Horrors!) Enjoy her review, because this is one book that will probably never be translated.

Christopher Butcher has posted an open letter to Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley, explaining just what the problem is with Tokyopop’s online exclusives program. Partly, it’s that he feels betrayed because Tokyopop is taking away titles he worked to build an audience for, and partly it’s that he’s worried it will happen again.

If I do not speak up now, I fear that any mid-list titles you produce, titles that do solid business for us but are not exemplary in any way, will also disappear.

UPDATE: Lyle has some thoughts on how Tokyopop might be repeating the mistakes of others.

In this week’s PW Comics Week, Kai-Ming Cha has a nice profile of Seven Seas, which has emerged in the past year as a publisher that gets it right on a number of levels, including a good website that really boosts the product and readable manga that will transfer easily into other media.

Also, Calvin Reid rounds up reactions to Tokyopop’s web exclusives. The first sentence minces no words:

Tokyopop’s plan to sell a selection of poorly selling and new manga series exclusively through its Web site was met with a wave of criticism and anger from many comics shops, adamant that the move is a misguided betrayal of the retail community.

No burying the lede here! Reid is upfront about the fact that these are manga that aren’t selling, and that the retailers are pissed anyway. Then he brings in Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley to answer the criticisms.

“It’s interesting that people are so fascinated in about 20 books out of the 500 we publish each year,” says Kiley. “It’s not like we’re talking about Fruits Basket or Kingdom Hearts.“

And, he adds, it’s all about the shelf space, which is, after all, finite. But to Chris Butcher, the online exclusives are a harbinger of things to come:

“Our fear is that we order Tokyopop books, and three or four volumes later, they decide it’s not profitable enough for them to ship them to us. Which books will they stop selling [to retailers] because they decide to sell online? It keeps us guessing.”

Kiley says Tokyopop could actually shift books from online exclusives back to stores if they sell well. But this has a whiff of bad science about it:

Asked why the books need to be sold exclusively and why consumers weren’t at least being offered a discount, Kiley says it is a “control” on the experiment. “If this is to be a real test, it has to be a special, controlled environment to get a real assessment, without having sales bleed out through other channels. We need to know if people will begin a series online. Discounts would skew the market.”

Uh, no. Almost everyone who buys manga online is already getting a discount, so not offering discounts only skews the market toward failure.

Well, vacation is over and people are posting! Just some quick links, as I’m writing on deadline today (for a paying gig).

At the MangaCast, Ed has mixed emotions about Tokyopop taking on Neighbor No. 13. And he mentions Stu Levy’s eight-part interview with Santa Inoue, another post that would have gotten lost if someone hadn’t spotted it.

Also on Tokyopop, Lillian Diaz-Pryzbyl goes all Elizabeth Barrett Browning over Off*beat.

ChunHyang72 adopts the imperative voice in Four Manga You Ought to Be Reading. And she’s right!

It’s a Hana-Kimi lovefest! (Via When Fangirls Attack.)

At the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Jason Yadao isn’t buying the Tokyopop exclusives. (Via Journalista.)

Ho hum: Naruto tops the Book Standard GN chart for the second week in a row.

Manga 101: Knife Tricks explains the manga thing. A fun read even if you already know it all. (Via When Fangirls Attack.) And the charmingly named AfterElton.com has a primer on gay relationships in manga, with a special focus on Gravitation.

Labor Day is over; time to pack away the beach towels and white shoes. It promises to be an interesting autumn, though, with lots of manga goodness coming our way. Here are some treats for the first day of school:

David Welsh’s Flipped column, aptly titled “Brain Food,” reviews two promising new series, Eternal Sabbath and Yakitate! Japan.

Would you like some curry with that? In the latest Manga Curry no Maki, Ed Chavez and my partner-in-podcast Jack Tse recap the summer cons, with some tart observations about how the publishers are doing. It’s a must-download!

History lesson: Tina Anderson gives a brief rundown on Bara, which is boys love for boys. Copiously illustrated.

Europe: bigger than America? That’s the conclusion of this report, translated by ComiPress, from the Japan External Trade Organization. The report estimates the manga market in France and Germany alone at between 20.6 and 23.6 billion yen, as opposed to 20 billion yen in the U.S. in 2005, and concludes,

The largest oversea manga market is not America, but Europe

I’m not sure that’s true, actually, as I seem to remember China and Thailand being big manga consumers. But the comparison between the U.S. and Europe is interesting.

Writers and artists wanted: ALC, the publishing arm of Yuricon, is now accepting submissions for its yuri anthology, Yuri Monogatari.

A weekend treat from ANN: four interviews with Japanese manga-ka, all done during the Taipei Comics Convention. Three of the interviews are notable for an almost total lack of content; the manga-kas’ answers are bland and noncommittal. But Ryoko Fukuyama, creator of Nousatsu Junkie, opened up a bit more and was very articulate about her creative choices. I note that this title has been licensed by Tokyopop but isn’t listed anywhere on their site; it sounds interesting so I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

Manga Monday: Comics-and-more is strangely attracted to Flowers and Bees.

Peeking over the artist’s shoulder: Michael Shelfer shows how he did the art for Star Trek: The Manga, from initial concepts to final toning.

This newspaper story about romance comics includes some interesting comments on manga from an art historian, Katy Klaasmeyer, who curated a show of romance comics and manga:

“I had never read a comic book,” says Klaasmeyer, 29. But in going through a private collection of comics from the ’50s and ’60s that is in the campus library collection, she was struck by the romance comics’ limited image of women and their options. “Every story was the same story,” says Klaasmeyer. “It was a ski retreat in Aspen, or a ranch in Texas, where the woman was jealous or the man was jealous, and it ended with a big kiss and a marriage proposal. For someone of my generation, it’s hilarious to read that.”

In researching manga, Klaasmeyer found stories more to her taste. “There was one called ‘Absolute Boyfriend,’ about this young girl whose standards are way too high and she can’t get a boyfriend. So she goes online and orders a boyfriend, and all her friends are jealous. I read manga avidly now,” she says. “It really awakened something in me.”