MangaBlog

Manga was a slightly bigger presence among the Harvey Award nominees this year, not that that’s saying much. Dramacon was nominated for Best New Series, and Blame, Buddha, and The Push Man made the Best American Edition of Foreign Material category. Congratulations to all the nominees!

That was one suggestion for the page that ended up as RSOM Refugees. Check it out for a peek at manga that were submitted to Tokyopop’s Rising Stars of Manga but didn’t make the cut. Some of it is pretty good anyway.

There’s a lot to like about this article in PingMag – The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things” about Gez Fry, an American illustrator living in Tokyo. There’s the guy’s art, which is great, and his discussion of technique, which is interesting, and his account of how he gave up his plans to be a diplomat so he could be a freelance illustrator and follow his wife to Japan. And there’s some interesting commentary on manga versus American comics. It starts with his reflection on the throwaway nature of Japanese phonebook manga:

I think that there are big fans out there who buy the whole collection of a particular Manga artist, but the majority of the pieces don’t get collected, that’s true. But I think that this disposable mentality is one of the reasons why Japan’s comics market is so healthy!

…

In America for example they treat comics like artwork. They keep it really clean and collect it, which sounds cool from an art point of view, but the whole industry is completely deteriorating because it takes too much time and effort to create the pics. They can’t ever get a long story like this and have to keep it really simple – therefor the reader’s finally lost interest! Compared to 20 years ago the American comics in the market are a small percentage of what they used to be.

Fry also contrasts the American and Japanese approaches toward creating comics:

First of, they have an assembly line to make the comic: 6 different people each in charge of different aspects of the comic, which then often feels a little disjointed. In Japan there is quite a hierarchic system: one boss having a vision and a style telling all his assistants exactly what to draw… which seems to work better for the story in the end.

But he admits he couldn’t work the Japanese way. Fry also talks about his other projects, designing game characters and the stuff he does just for fun. Well worth a click!

Eclipse at ComiPress has launched an ambitious new feature, Backstage, in which he takes an in-depth look at manga and anime blogs. The first edition is a peek behind the scenes at MangaBlog and my other project, Manga4Kids. Check it out!

Ed has posted the final MangaCast award nominations. Now the deliberations begin. I’m one of the judges, so I’ll be taking time to read and reread as much as possible. Here, from Ed, are the others:

Jarred Pine (MangaCast/Anime on DVD)
David Taylor (Love Manga)
Erin Finnegan (Ninja Consultant//Manga Recon)

Adam Arnold (Seven Seas – Senior Editor/Writer – Aoi House)
Tony Salvaggio (Comic Book Resources – Staff Writer)
Isaac Alexander (Manga Enthusiast/Convention Organizer)

Zoe A. (manga reader)
Brian C (manga reader/letterer for Broccoli Books)

The awards, named the Yomis, will be handed out in July at the San Diego Comic Con.

Margaret OConnell’s coverage of the “Brokeback Manga” panel at NYCC in this month’s Sequential Tart goes way beyond your typical con report. This long but well-written article covers a lot of bases, including who reads yaoi, why women like it, and possible controversies involving the subject matter.

Although a BeBeautiful representative claims that only adults are depicted having sex, and the books carry disclaimers to that effect, OConnell casts a suspicious eye on that claim, pointing out that college students in Japan don’t usually wear uniforms, but characters in yaoi often do. And I liked this:

As for BLU Manga, Lillian Diaz-Pryzbyl said, “We don’t edit for content, although we may live to regret it. We try not to license things that may get us in trouble.”

Apparently the folks at Tokyopop learned from CMX’s problems with Tenjho Tenge.

Diaz-Pryzbyl gets extra points for mentioning the similarities between yaoi and slash fiction, and translator Emi Chiusano connects the dots, saying that in Japan, the term “yaoi” refers to slash doujinshi, fan-drawn comics that put two male characters from existing series into a romantic relationship. Because those comics are often amateur productions and more focused on sex than character development, she said,

respected manga-ka like Youka Nitta found it rather disconcerting to hear their work referred to by Western fans as yaoi, which to them carried connotations of something amounting to pure porn with little or no redeeming social value.

Regarding the level of explicitness, this was an interesting insight:

When one panelist suggested that perhaps younger teen readers preferred the milder, less sexually graphic material, yaoi manga-ka Youka Nitta replied that her experience suggested the exact opposite. Judging by the feedback she received from readers of her own work, younger fans wanted harder, more explicit material. As for the more chronologically adult readers, the older they got the more romance they wanted…

Nitta also spoke of the importance of having strong female characters in yaoi manga, saying, “There’s no country with just men.”

OConnell also covers the BeBeautiful panel that followed, although it reads a little differently since the recent news that parent company CPM is having financial difficulties and that Peter Tatara (who showed up for the panel wearing cat ears) is among the many employees who were laid off last week.