MangaBlog

This article in the Chicago Tribune* is a manga primer for the unhip. We learn that manga appeals to girls as well as boys, the plots are more complicated than in superhero comics, and, yes, the characters have big eyes. What caught my eye, though, were these figures:

Sales of manga reached $125 million in the U.S. in 2004, according to ICv2, a publishing company that tracks retail sales of items including action figures, collectible card games and comics. That’s up from $100 million in 2003 and $55 million in 2002, according to ICv2’s publisher, Milton Griepp.

Later, we are told

“Manga had been just about doubling in growth every year since about 2003,” Griepp said. “Compare that to American comics, which are growing only in the single digits.”

But the figures he just gave don’t bear that out. In fact, it looks like the rate of growth is slowing: From 2002 to 2003, sales increased by $45 million, or 82 percent. Not bad. But from 2003 to 2004, they only increased by $25 million, or 25 percent. (ICv2 didn’t provide any figures for 2005.) Unless he’s comparing apples and oranges somehow, I don’t see any doubling.

*Registration may be required. If so, feel free to use the excellent services of bugmenot.com.

I left Borders staggering under a load of manga yesterday, so expect some quickie reviews later in the week. In the meantime, here’s what some other folks are reading. Jarred Pine at Anime on DVD reviews the first volume of Reiko the Zombie Shop and finds it interesting but overly violent.

And at Dave Ex Machina, Dave got snowed in on Sunday and spent the day reading manga. He admits

Since I’m not interested in boys trying to be the ultimate ninja robot fighter, wispy men oddly attracted to each other, teen-age romance, and wacky “Oh no! When I kiss you, you turn into one of 17 origami figures!” antics, it’s tough for me to find manga I dig.

Nonetheless he has a few nice things to say about Hikaru No Go, a series I’m just starting. (Thanks to Tangognat for pointing me in Dave’s direction.)

Manganews Forum provides more details about the three men arrested for posting manga on the internet without getting copyright permissions.

The website, 464.jp (pronounced “Read!” in Japanese), was intended as promotion for the manga and internet cafe “Ichigo” in Oota-ku, Tokyo. Touted as “Free Manga Browsing,” the scans amounted to over 17,000 volumes, including 1,300 titles by nearly 700 authors. Nine titles named in the investigation were Akamatsu Ken’s “Love Hina,” Akimoto Osamu’s “Kochi Kame,” Adachi Mitsuru’s “Touch,” Ichijou Yukari’s “Tadashii Ren’ai no Susume,” Inoue Takehiko’s “Slam Dunk,” Urasawa Naoki’s “MONSTER,” Shigeno Shuuichi’s “Initial D,” Takahashi Rumiko’s “Maison Ikkoku,” and Fujisawa Tooru’s “GTO.”

In September 2005, several major manga publishers and an association of authors warned suspect Muramoto Toraji, 52, to cease distribution, but by December the website was still open. On January 5th, publishers and authors complained to the police, who investigated the website.

One of the suspects, Muramoto Toraji, explained,

“To promote the manga cafe, we showed 1 or 2 pages of each title, but I thought if we were going to get caught infringing copyrights anyway, let’s show all of them. I thought we could pay the copyright fees later.”

“Later,” in this case, may have meant, “after we start charging for content.” The site was about to start charging for views and the proprietors had already collected 2 million yen.

Manga news links to two stories in Japanese; this one from Asahi Shimbun has a nice photo of a cop (I assume) with computers and lots of manga.

Previous links:

Three arrested for posting manga on the net
More on the manga arrests

Anime News Network brings news of a possible first: Brandeis University professor Kerridwen Luis (actually a grad student) has adopted the manga Rica ‘tte Kanji!? by Rica Takashima as a textbook in her anthropology course. Here’s just the first sentence of Luis’s description of her course:

This class will cover some (not all!) of the current ethnography dealing with non-heteronormative sexualities cross-culturally.

(The course syllabus is here.) Here’s how David Welsh described the book in a Flipped column last July:

Fed up with the “forbidden love” nature and downer endings of much of the lesbian manga she’d read, Rica Takashima decided to take matters in her own hands. She wanted to read a happy story about girls in love, even if she had to write and draw it herself.

David managed to write seven whole paragraphs about the book without ever using the term “non-heteronormative sexualities,” which may explain why I enjoy his columns so much.

Elsewhere in the ivory tower, hushed preparations are being made for the first issue of Mechademia, which bills itself as “An academic journal for anime, manga, and the fan arts.” Unlike the blogosphere, academia moves at a stately pace: The first issue is due out in Fall 2006, and they are currently accepting submissions for the Fall 2008 issue. (Hat tip: Manga Talk.)

For the truly hard-core comix wonks, there is the Comics Scholars Discussion List, but be warned, they sound serious. Anyone who uses emoticons probably need not apply.

The Japan Times Online has a followup on the article posted below about three people who were arrested in Tokyo on copyright violations charges. According to police, the three admitted scanning manga and posting it online without getting proper copyright permission.

Manga publishers are apparently worried about bootleggers encroaching on their turf, and with good reason:

“We estimate the total online publishing market will come to around 9 billion yen for the year to March, and comics will account for some 5 billion yen of it,” said Tetsuro Daiki, an official of the intellectual property management section at Shogakukan Publishing Inc.

According to the article, manga publishers and artists joined with the Association of Copyright for Computer Software and police to make the arrests.

“We don’t know yet whether the case is the tip of the iceberg, but there are strong possibilities that similar cases will emerge,” Hiroshi Katsurayama, a legal official at the Association of Copyright for Computer Software, told a news conference.

But they shouldn’t come as a surprise: The article states that “manga industry officials” (I’m picturing a group of salarymen with a bad attitude) had warned the website operators repeatedly that they were breaking the law.

This article from something called TMCnet gave me pause.

An Internet cafe owner in Tokyo and two other people were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of posting popular manga comics on an Internet site without the consent of the authors and publishers, the police said.

The arrests, the first in Japan related to Net distribution of manga, came after the “cyberpatrol” unit of the Fukuoka prefectural police found suspected violations on a website dubbed 464.jp in October last year, according to the police.

The police say that all three admitted to scanning manga and making it available on their website without getting copyright permissions. It’s interesting that the arrests weren’t made until last week, shortly before the site was planning to shift from free to paid viewing.

Nine authors and three publishers have filed complaints about the site.

The copied manga included a police officer story, “Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari koen mae hashutsujo,” by Osamu Akimoto, and a basketball series, “Slam Dunk,” by Takehiko Inoue.

(Interesting that Slam Dunk is one of the works in question; last year, the Japanese publisher Kodansha pulled its manga Eden No Hara off the market after the author, Yuki Suetsugu, was accused of copying from Slam Dunk. Seems people can’t keep their hands off it.)

This incident raises all kinds of interesting questions. As a writer who likes to get paid for my work, I appreciate the importance of copyright protection. When I was an editor, getting reprint permissions was an important part of my job, and I’ve always been a bit perturbed by the ease with which people scan stuff in and put it on the Internet.

Still, I see the sense of the first post in this thread on the Manganews Forum, which argues that scanlating is OK as long as the manga isn’t licensed to other countries. The logic is that you’re actually helping the author, because once a book builds a following it is more likely to be licensed, bringing in extra income for everyone. My own two cents would be that you’re unlikely to deprive the author of income because an untranslated manga is unlikely to sell many copies before it is licensed. On the other hand, I have no problem agreeing that once it’s licensed, scanlating is out of bounds:

when you scanlate licensed manga, you deprive manga-ka of their royalties. So do us all a favor: don’t scanlate licensed manga. And when the published version comes out in your country, support the author by purchasing the book. It’s the very least we can do.

It’s worth reading the whole thread to get some different insights into the question, as well as this rather dyspeptic view of human nature:

a majority of people will download things illegally even if they know that they are harming the companies, manga-ka, the whole Comic industrie. They would probably do this even if they knew that every chapter they downloaded killed a fairy.

After all, given a choice between paying for somehting or getting it for free, people will usually go for the freebie. And that is why, whether it is motivated by pure or venal impulses, it is illegal to steal someone’s work.