MangaBlog

Just passing this along from About.com.

Fifth Dimension LTD is looking for a manga/anime artist to do pencil work and possibly some inking as well. This is a new comic company with plans to release their first manga in 2007 to the Japan market; US and Europe to follow.

You can follow the link for the contact info. I did a Google search and came up with this, which may or may not be the company in question.

So here’s a question that relates to the issue in the previous post: If a British company produces a comic for the Japanese market, using non-Japanese talent, would you call it manga?

Anime News Network has a peculiar story about Tokyopop edging away from the terms “OEL manga” and “world manga.”

Susan Hale of Tokyopop explained that OEL is innapropriate because many of their titles originate from non-anglophone creators, for example Yonen Buzz, which was originally published in German.

So maybe NJ manga, as in, Not Japanese, is the term to use? Nope. Tokyopop is appropriating a new term and putting their own spin on it:

In an interview for the upcoming issue of Protoculture Addicts, Tokyopop Editorial Director, Jeremy Ross, explains, “The fact that manga fans have largely stopped using the term Ameri-manga (which has negative connotations) and are referring to it as OEL for Original English Language (which is at least neutral) and more recently, global manga (this more respectful and accurate term surfaced on www.pseudome.net, among other places) is but one indicator of the growing respect for our manga creators.”

You know, this reminds me of the campaign to rename Jerusalem artichokes as “sunchokes,” and prunes as “dried plums.” Unless people actually use the term, the people pushing it just look stupid. The fact that “global manga” has bubbled up from the grass roots (if you can call pseudome that) makes this one a little more likely to succeed.

This brings a new timeliness to Chris Arrant’s article on manga nomenclature at Comic Foundry

At the end of the day, there is one thing pretty much everyone can agree on; it’s comics. Manga is comics. “Superman” is comics. Political cartoons are comics. “Calvin & Hobbes” is comics. Instead of classifying comics by the country of original or the style it’s drawn (as style is subjective), a more reasonable approach would be to take cues from your local library and classify by genre. Yes, comics would be its own section away from mere words written on a page, but inside this comics section would be sub-sections based not on the origin of the creator, but by the subject matter of the story.

Think about it: If Ozuma Tezuka, Bryan Lee O’Malley and Frank Miller each wrote a fictional novel about the same subject, no matter how differently they’d write it, it could all be filed in the same section: fiction.

I’m not sure I’m ready for that, but I think we’re moving in that direction.

I’m still buried under a huge project but hope to be done by the weekend. In the meantime, some fun things have popped up on the web.

At Mangacast, Ed and Jarred have posted the latest edition of Manga Curry No Maki, which looks at Basilisk ES, and Worst, and reveals the first winner of their contest.

Here’s a chance to legally read some Japanese manga online: Super Jump has put up some first chapters on their website. The instructions are in Japanese, but ComiPress, the source for this tidbit, has helpfully translated them:

To view the chapters, click on the titles (halfway down the page, will highlight red) and click the circular icon that says “1話まるごと試し読み”

That’s the top circular icon, if your Japanese is as bad as mine.

On Manga Island, Tony Salvaggio is looking at two Seven Seas entries, Unearthly and Captain Nemo.

The new Sequential Tart is up.

Chris Arrant has posted a thoughtful article on OEL manga at Comic Foundry. I’ll be commenting on this once my onslaught of work is over and I have time to think again.

Monkey Punch is coming to Metrocon.

Here is a cool photo of the entrance to a manga cafe.

It’s not manga, but British girls’ comics had a lot of the same appeal that shoujo manga has now, as well as similar structures and themes, so I was happy to see this blogger give a shout-out to my girls Bunty, Judy, and Mandy. (Via When Fangirls Attack.)

ICv2 wakes us up this morning with the news that Netcomics is branching out into two new genres. Your Lover is a shoujo title about the love affair between French painter Marie Laurencin and poet Guillaume Appolinaire. Lethe is a sci-fi tale set in the future, about a battle between two civilizations that left earth centuries before and evolved in different directions.

A press release on the Netcomics site gives details on these and other tales. It looks like the fall list includes several shoujo titles, so this should be interesting.

Over at Precocious Curmudgeon, David Welsh is tallying his purchases for this week. He’d better start taking the bus, because Anime On DVD ferreted out news of whole slew of new titles:

From Go!Comi, fourth volumes of Cantarella, Crossroad, and Tenshi Ja Nai!! are forthcoming on July 31. (Third volumes on May 31. Ouch.)

Digital Manga Publishing is releasing the fourth volume of Ikebukuro West Gate Park on August 29.

Last week (I’m a bit late with this) AoD got word of some new Viz licenses; first volumes out later this year:

Cain Saga
Hayate the Combat Butler
La Corda d’Oro
O-Parts Hunter
Punch
Reborn
Read Or Dream
Tail of the Moon

And here’s the big list, AoD’s summary of Viz’s newly announced releases for the rest of the year and for January 2007. There should be plenty there to keep David happy. And broke.

ICv2 is bullish on manga. They estimate total retail sales of manga in North America in 2005 as $155 to $180 million, and they also revisited their 2004 estimate of $110 to $140 million and decided the true number was closer to the higher end of that range.

The bottom line here is that in 2005 sales of manga rose at a strong double digit growth rate that would be the envy of any other publishing category.

And the growth continued in the first quarter of 2006, according to the retailers they spoke to. They spotted three key trends:

1. a bigger disparity between sales of the top and bottom titles on the top 50 manga list;

2. increased presence of shoujo manga in the top 50

3. increased interest in new genres such as josei and yaoi manga

Here’s their top 10 for last quarter:

1. Naruto
2. Full Metal Alchemist
3. Kingdom Hearts
4. Fruits Basket
5. Tsubasa
6. Death Note
7. Rurouni Kenshin
8. Negima
9. Bleach
10. Loveless

I might add that every series on that list except Negima is represented somewhere in our house. I will also speculate that the presence of Death Note and Negima indicates the maturing of the manga market, and the fact that they share space with Kingdom Hearts indicates that the manga creep is beginning—the market is extending up and down the age range from its tween-teen core.

Anime sales saw a bit of a slump and movies were more popular than continuing series. As a consumer, this makes perfect sense to me; anime as it has been sold in the past few years is too little content for too much money. Fortunately that trend seems to be reversing.

Anyway, it’s good news all the way for the manga contingent, and I hope the strength of the market encourages publishers to start licensing some more challenging properties.