MangaBlog

One of the interesting things about OEL manga is that many of the creators have blogs, so we can check out how the next volume is coming along. It helps pass the (long) time between volumes.

Let’s see how everyone is doing. Rivkah took a few weeks off from Steady Beat after NYCC:

feel like I’ve been lazy, though I know I haven’t, by any means, because I’ve been doing other Very Important things. ;_; But it shouldn’t take much to finish the last pages by the end of the month, and I just remembered that I’m ahead on inks and tones, but still . . . bleh. I put WAY too many backgrounds in book 2, and though it looks good . . . they take forever to pencil and ink. ;_;

Queenie Chan, on the other hand, seems to have kept her nose to the grindstone; she’s working on chapter 10 of The Dreaming, which is due out in November.

M. Alice LeGrow hasn’t updated her blog since February, but she’s probably pretty busy right now as the second volume of Bizenghast is out in June. Check out the reviews on the right-hand navbar for a chuckle.

Amy Hadley, a.k.a. Tentopet, chronicles the ups and downs of the creative life on her livejournal site—check out the graph. The first three chapters of Fool’s Gold are up on the Tokyopop website. This looks like a great book, and I’m looking forward to reading it when it comes out.

Some happy news at The Sad Circus by the Sea, Rikki Simons’ blog. Ranklechick and his Three-Legged Cat, the latest creation of Rikki and wife Tavisha, is available via Amazon and Barnes & Noble. No word on when Shutterbox 4 is due, however.

Rikki got stung by an offhanded criticism on the Tokyopop OEL blog and it spurred him to eloquence:

And really, kids, elitism is in no way clever or cool. It doesn’t make you smart, special or important to be an elitist. It makes you a non-creator trying to wear create pants. Elitism is an easy sickness wrapped in a dogma.

And then he proceeds to critique the critics!

Svetlana Chmakova must be hard at work on Dramacon, because she hasn’t posted to her livejournal site since the end of February, when she was still recovering from NYCC. Her last post about work was in mid-February, but it’s good news:

Like I mentioned, the script for the second Dramacon is DONE. It was very difficult to write, the first one was much easier—things just sort of fell into place then. But this one just wouldn’t come together right. I had to cut out characters and entire scenes, sew it back up and then beat it with a bat to make it live (because I am too cheap lazy practical to do that whole Evil Genius Lab thing and harness electricity from lightning or whatever). The good news is that the effort’s been worth it, or so I’ve been told by my lovely proof-readers.

Reading all these blogs is very reassuring to me. It’s good to be reminded that I’m not the only one who has mood swings, creative despair, and surly critics. (Fortunately, not too many of the latter at the moment, but that probably means I’m not doing enough.) And it also makes me happy to think of all those creative people sitting at their computers working on the next volumes of all those series that I just can’t wait to read.

UPDATE: I just realized that The Beat is featuring new creators and has a link to Amy Kim Ganter’s blog. Ganter is the creator of Sorcerers and Secretaries, which was released last month. Her blog has plenty of good links and commentary and is worth adding to the daily reading list.

Worth reading: Manga maven Telophase has an article up on Tokyopop’s Manga Online discussing the stylistic differences between OEL and Japanese manga. She has a great eye and a knack for explaining what makes good manga work; check out her livejournal for much, much more.

I’ve had a flurry of paying work, so posting will be light this week, but Christopher Butcher has posted a nice response to my Is Viz sexist? post that includes an interesting discussion of manga pricing.

David at Love Manga has covers of some new manga, Vampire Knight (Viz), Cold Sleep (Digital Manga Publishing), and Moeyo! Takara Corporation and Warera Takarara Corporation (Dramaqueen).

Speaking of Dramaqueen, they have previews up on their site of two books due out this month, Challengers and Vision of the Other Side. This is a new company and I’m interested to see what they have to offer.

The MTV News article below has a sentence that should send chills up every parent’s spine:

We’re hoping that the readers here will begin to see manga as a medium where it’s very similar to soap operas or whatever they see on TV, except it’s in print,” said Yumi Hoashi, whose parents forbade her to read manga but who is now the editor in chief of Viz’s mighty Shonen Jump manga anthology,

(Emphasis is mine.) Yeah, that worked well. After reading that quote, I immediately banned Shakespeare, broccoli, and all forms of advanced mathematics from my household. I’ll let you know how that works out.

MTV News writes about the popularity of manga with special emphasis on yaoi. Be Beautiful publisher Masumi O’Donnell explains that women find yaoi appealing because it combines romantic stories with beautiful men. Artist Youka Nitta comments that in Japan, older women prefer less explicit, more romantic stories, while the younger women are just the opposite, adding, “And the women [readers] are often not doing so well with their husbands.” And Tokyopop’s Lillian Diaz-Przybl explains why these books are more appealing than, say, a Harlequin Romance:

“As a woman you’re automatically intended to associate with the female character in that situation,” she said. “Even in things that I would consider feminist and good examples for women you don’t always really associate with that character. That might not necessarily be who you want to be. Boys-love manga totally flips that on its head.”

The article spends a brief moment on the possiblity of backlash, but Tokyopop CEO Stuart Levy doesn’t seem to be too worried:

“We’re just trying to represent all kinds of storytelling, all kinds of people out there, all kinds of lifestyles,” said Levy. “In fact, we’re going to do Christian manga too. We have a feeling if you’re reading one you’re probably not going to be reading the other.”

MTV has a video to accompany the article, but it won’t run on a Mac, so I’m not even going to diginify it with a link.