MangaBlog

Let’s get to the best news first, from the ANN account of the ADV panel:

When questioned about the release of the next volume of Yotsuba@!, Williams replied that it is tentatively scheduled for the first quarter of 2007.

The fact that this makes me happy is a sign of how low our expectations of ADV have become: At least it’s not on indefinite hold.

June announced six new licenses at its panel:

Kurashina-sensei’s Passion
La Vie en Rose
Waru
Wagamama Kitchen
Fake Fur
Paradise on the Hill

Yaoi Suki has links to retailer info, Love Manga has cover scans. The response to this lineup at Love Manga was basically a yawn; no one thought it was hard-core enough, and some said La Vie En Rose isn’t even BL. However, June’s parent company, Digital Manga, had another announcement: They are starting a new company, to be called 801 Media Inc, which will publish over-18 BL titles. Love Manga tries to figure out what this is all about. Digital also announced one other title, Flower Of Life, by Fumi Yoshinaga of Antique Bakery fame.

According to ANN’s report of the Broccoli panel, the company announced one new license, Disgaea 2, based on the game of the same name and a logical follow to another recent license, Disgaea.

Tokyopop announced Heaven!! for the second time, having already mentioned it at SDCC. According to the ANN report,

Tokyopop will be moving several of its manga to online exclusives, which can only be ordered from Tokyopop.com. Currently scheduled titles for this exclusivity are Atomic King Daibogan, Neck and Neck (starting with volume 6) and The One. Da-Mi Seomoon’s Rure, coming out in March 2007, will also be a Tokyopop.com exclusive.

The Japanese manga illustration magazine SS is looking for submissions with the theme of “costume.” ComiPress has the guidelines.

Asahi.com looks at two new magazines with otaku appeal, Mechabi and Phantom.

Mechabi editor Yuichi Matsushita, 26, says his biggest competition is doujinshi. The magazine’s title is a combination of the words mecha and bishoujo, and the content is heavily otaku-oriented:

For example, in an interview with Foreign Minister Taro Aso, the interviewees ignored diplomatic issues or questions about the upcoming Liberal Democratic Party presidential election and repeatedly asked the foreign minister about a rumor that he had been seen reading Rozen Maiden, a girls’ manga, at Haneda Airport. In interviews with singer Gackt and anatomist and writer Dr. Takeshi Yoro, the magazine asked only about videogames.

The magazine concept came in third in an in-house contest (which really makes me wonder what the first two were) but publisher Kodansha allowed Matsushita to start it up as long as he kept up with his regular job of editing science books. Somehow that makes it sound even… geekier.

“In the future, we’d like to include stories about railway otaku and carrier pigeon fanatics. And we try to avoid creating bad feelings between different generations or disputes over who is otaku and who isn’t,” Matsushita says.

Admirable! Phantom is edited by a novelist called, I kid you not, Toru Honda. She specializes in light novels (raito noberu) and is trying to expand the audience from the young-adult crowd to older readers.

Just as manga, which became popular in Japan after World War II, expanded adult culture by creating a boom in gekiga (comics with realistic narratives), industry insiders are hoping that light novels will come to represent Japanese pop culture just as manga do.

… and the Americans are right behind, with Tokyopop’s plans to translate novels and Seven Seas’ licensing of the Boogiepop novel/manga/megaplex.

ComiPress translates a Japanese magazine article about the economics of being a manga-ka, which is one of the occupatoins on the Japan’s wealthiest people list. You wouldn’t know that from the one they chose, Yoshiko Chijiwa:

When asked about her annual income, she replied, “I cannot possibly survive with only manga (cry)”.

Chijiwa’s work appears in the monthly Dessert and is not collected in a tankoubon, so she has to teach to supplement her income.

“I think it varies from magazine to magazine, for example, a monthly magazine would be around 10,000 yen per page. So if one draws 25 pages in a month, then the manuscript fee for that month is roughly around 250,000 yen,” says an editor from an anonymous manga magazine.

Of course, the pay probably goes up if you’re regularly serialized and your work is collected.

Newsarama interviews Jake Forbes about his new Tokyopop title, Return to Labyrinth, based on the Jim Henson film Labyrinth.

Naruto takes the train: ICv2 tells us that Viz is doing a major promotion with San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit, which includes putting Viz characters on BART tickets. Will these be the new collectibles?

Love Manga checks the USA Today charts and finds three manga, from three different publishers: Tsubasa, debuting at #95, Naruto, in its tenth week on the chart, at #133, and Kingdom Hearts, in its fourth week, at #148.

… but not mine. I’m kind of burned out on it, actually.

David Taylor really didn’t like the article I linked to yesterday, and his critique has some merit: The author hasn’t read much yaoi. This is because the number of works available in English is still pretty limited, in content as well as numbers. I don’t have as much of a problem with this as David and Tina do. As I’ve pointed out before, “Japanese manga in translation” is very different from “Japanese manga”; the language, the available materials, and the cultural background of the readers are all very different, and I really think the two are separate categories. So while I agree that the whole world of yaoi is bigger than what Jason described in the original article, I also think it’s legitimate to limit a critique to what’s available in English.

David Welsh has some good comments on the limitations of translated yaoi and also responds to Tina’s criticism that writers fixate too much on the why-do-women-like-yaoi question:

I have to say that virtually every mainstream media article about manga that I’ve read has featured just that focus: why do fans like it? Teen-ages from Orlando to Des Moines to Anchorage have been cornered in bookstores and libraries and junior high schools and quizzed on this subject by reporters, whether they’ve got Fruits Basket or Naruto or any number of other books in their backpacks. It’s an entry point for reporters who don’t necessarily know a lot about the subject, and (more importantly) it’s an essential aspect of the story for readers who are possibly even less familiar with manga.

In other words, yaoi readers are not being picked on, although it may be tiresome to answer the same question over and over again.

And then David talks about the yaoi he likes, which is always a welcome distraction.

In a post cleverly titled “Even a Gaijin Can Draw Manga,” Bento Physics takes on the question of global manga. Here’s the key quote:

I believe that OEL manga should be an aspirational ideal and not a marketing/publishing conceit, that ideal being that non-Japanese creators who choose to write comics using the forms and conventions of manga as a ‘narrative style’ rather than just its visual tropes.

David Taylor jumps right in:

Someone needs to let Tokyopop know that. Being the more dominant OEL producer in the US they do have an overwhelming tendency to release works that fly the whole gamut of that quotation above.

Of course, there is considerable range even among Japanese manga. I tend to agree with Tania Del Rio that what defines manga is not so much character design as a method of storytelling. One of Scott McCloud’s definitions is that the artist often uses several panels to describe a single moment. Or, as Matthew and Jamilla say,

For example, manga makes use of a lot of temporal decompression across multiple panels that spread beyond the confines of one page.

and they found a really awesome example.

David points out that “OEL manga” is really a marketing concept, and that’s true, but it’s a useful one. The manga publishers, both here and abroad, have created a standard manga template. We expect manga to be a trade paperback of a certain trim size, price, and format. I think that’s useful, in that it encourages people to try new things within that format.

Consider Afterlife, which is this weird dystopic comic about the afterlife. Tokyopop sent it to me, but I can see myself picking it up in the store because it would be on the shelf next to the other stuff I read, and I usually like Tokyopop comics. Whereas if it were published in some other format, it might not be carried by my bookstore, or I might pass it by because it’s too weird looking. Superficial, but true. I do believe people make decisions this way. It has certainly proved to be a winning strategy for Harlequin, the Strathemeyer Syndicate, and even the publishers of chick lit.

Carrying that analogy even further, I think publishers like Yaoi Press are probably helped a great deal by the fact that they are working in an established genre. If they tried to publish those books without Japanese manga as a precedent, they might not be so successful. People are more likely to try something new if they can classify it first.

Most global manga do fit the popular concept pretty well; I wouldn’t be fooled for a minute if Marvel did a black and white, trade paperback version of their comics, even if it read right to left. But I do think there’s room for a lot of variation, and I like to see publishers supporting creators of new work (some of which is going to suck, but that’s the price we pay) and making interesting comics more accessible to readers.

The LA Weekly has a nice article about Yoshihiro Tatsumi, but it doesn’t go into depth like this week’s PW Comics Weekly piece. If you only have time to read one, go with PW.

Ginger Mayerson of the Lincoln Heights Literary Society interviews Makoto Tateno, the creator of Yellow, and vanquishes a spider.

In her new Tokyopop column, Telophase, a.k.a. Stephanie Folse, explains how the roots of shoujo manga lie in the theater—and a railroad owner’s need to sell tickets.

Local boy makes good, writes Mail Order Ninja.

For our UK readers, the Tanoshimi site is live. David Taylor has a critique.

Here’s today’s question on Ask Dave Taylor:

Dave, do you know anything about Japanese comic books or “Manga”? An IM pal of mine has been trying to convince me to buy some of his hentai, which he says is an “adult” form of manga, but he gets all upset when I ask him about the stories in his books. So am I the only clueless person on the planet? What is Hentai?

Since it’s Dave Taylor, not David Taylor, we get an answer involving big eyes and a suggestion to do a Google search. Here’s my internet tip: Don’t buy manga from an “IM pal” who is reluctant to reveal its contents.

Wai Wai treats us to cold case files, manga-style: a crime fiction manga casts doubt on the identity of a real murderer.

The Japan Times reviews the Honey and Clover movie.