MangaBlog

We are nothing if not eclectic here at MangaBlog. The LeRoy (New York) Pennysaver reports that Elizabeth Kovach, a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, received a Ralph P. Kepner Memorial Scholarship “Excellence” Award from the Rochester Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication for her booklet, “The Impact of Manga on the United States Print Industry.”

I found that to be a very interesting subject. What on earth would the impact of manga be? Do you have to use special inks to get all those patterned backgrounds just right? Does the right-to-left thing mean you have to set up the presses differently? As a former book editor, I tend to notice how books are printed, and I see a huge amount of variation among manga, in the type and quality of paper, inks, and covers. It’s intriguing to me that manga are important enough to have affected the U.S. printing industry at all.

Full disclosure: I got my Master of Fine Arts degree from RIT, in printmaking, which is a million miles away from printing. But it is one of the few places where you can actually study commercial printing, and I always thought that was kind of neat.

In this week’s Drawn & Quartered column from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Wilma Jandoc and Jason Yadao takes a look at ADV, a company that is becoming notorious for never finishing a series. They crunch the numbers:

Analysis of an animeondvd.com database and Diamond Comics shipping lists shows that out of 79 series the company has announced since 2003, 43 have been canceled outright or put on indefinite hiatus. Another 11 were announced in 2004 but never released.

Jason and Wilma weren’t able to contact anyone at the company to figure out what is going on. However, in March 2005, according to this post from Thought Balloons, Publishers Weekly got word that ADV had laid off about 25 employees from its manga division.

Company president John Ledford pointed to a saturated market and discerning customers as contributing factors. “Anyone can see that there’s only so much shelf space available to manga and to anime,” he told PW. “We’ve adjusted our schedule to keep pace with the opportunities for shelf space.”

The restructured manga unit will focus on publishing “winners,” according to Oarr, who said the company will release about 50 titles this year, down from about 80 in 2004.

It sounds to me like he read the market exactly wrong; sales are growing, shelf space is expanding, and ADV has a product that people actually want. Take a look at this thread on the ANN forums. People are beating down the door to get the next volume of Yotsuba&!, but ADV won’t sell it to them. What’s wrong with this picture?

Communication seems to be a big part of the problem. The ADV manga home page was last updated in September 2004. (The anime section does get more attention.) Yotsuba&! isn’t even listed. Their catalog only lists the first volume of Cromartie High School, arguably their hottest selling property, and that listing bears the discouraging words “sold out.” And unlike other publishers, who have spokespeople that answer the phone and even drop in on forums, ADV wouldn’t even talk to a reporter.

Are they trying to chase readers away? If so, they’re doing a good job. But if they’re trying to sell manga, well, time to try another tack. Like giving the customers what they want.

A blogger from Dublin named Katherine has some interesting reflections on yaoi. Katherine is recovering from a recent yaoi binge, and after reading so much of it, she really saw the conventions of the genre, such as the fact that despite the lovers are two men, they tend to fall into stereotyped male/female roles, down to the submissive partner having bigger eyes than the dominant one.

The idea that there might be a sexual relationship between two people of equal strength would never enter your head if yaoi was your main source, and you have to wonder: do gay Japanese teenage boys borrow their sisters’ yaoi manga and get confused by all this, thinking that that’s what it means to be a boy who likes boys? It’s a depressing thought.

Still, she allows that the fact that both partners are male is a bit “subversive.”

She goes on to talk about some of the standard plot devices. I don’t read yaoi, but what she wrote certainly crystallized a lot of the reviews and commentary that I have read. In the end, she concludes that it’s just as well she’s given up on yaoi:

It’s fun enough, if you’re into that kind of thing and you’re just being self-indulgent, and there are occasional gems — the gorgeous Kaze to Ki no Uta (Song of the Wind and the Trees, for instance — but my God, the laziness of most of the writing drove me up the wall. Just because it’s pornography doesn’t mean you don’t have to make the characters distinct, you know.

Here’s another find from the forums, this time the Anime News Network Forums. A poster discovered that the Pulp magazine website is still up. Pulp was a magazine published by Viz in its pre-Shonen-Jump days and it featured a much edgier and more mature mix. The site has interviews with creators like Naoki Yamamoto and Junko Mizuno, reviews, and articles about manga and creators. There’s lots of non-manga content too, articles about films and music. The site is a bit frustrating as there isn’t much content from the earlier issues online, and very little manga, but it’s still an interesting read. If you only read one story, check out the nine circles of manga hell. Note that the content here is much more adult, in every sense of the word, than Shonen Jump.

Asako from CMX drops in on the Anime On DVD Forums to announce that CMX is working on their website (thank God!) and you can go to this page to get to some previews. The previewer pops up a pdf window, which always runs a little slow on my computer, and for most of the titles there are thumbnails on the left so you click on each page rather than a “next” button. I’m not totally sold on that format.

In other CMX news, Ed reviews Gals at MangaCast.

I went to see my dad at the nursing home today, and the nurse and several other employees, all of whom are from other countries, were clustered around the TV. “World Cup?” I asked. They were delighted that I actually knew what it was.

I stopped talking before I admitted that the only reason I knew was because I listened to Ed’s soccer MangaCast and linked to the ComiPress item about Captain Tsubasa endorsing Kirin Nuda. But, you know, a year ago I would have been completely oblivious, rather than slightly aware. So I guess I learned something.