The Jackson County Floridan has an interview with Michael Shelfer, whose work is featured in Volume 5 of Tokyopop’s Rising Stars of Manga series. It took about five years of serious work for Shelfer, who is 24, to get noticed.
Best quote:
“I drew a lot of stuff blowing up, nothing too deep, but I hope it’s entertaining. The characters have traditional weapons, like swords, but also have nuclear devices.”
I’m departing from the topic for the first time in the history of this blog, in order to pick up on Tegan’s Blogaround Challenge.
First, two observations, one technological, one political.
1. Cheap flatbed scanners rule. Apparently everybody has one, all the better to scan in covers and select pages from their vintage comic collection.
2. Comics bloggers seem to be a leftish bunch, judging from the politics mixed in with the scans.
Oh, just for free, a third observation: Many of the blogs on Comic Weblog Updates don’t have a lot of comics content. If they’re funny, I don’t care.
On to the blogs.
1. The Comics Curmudgeon I read this regularly, so it’s kind of cheating to include it, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity go by to give props to Josh and the Comics College of Cardinals. This is the rare site where the comments are as good as the blogging (and the blogging is wicked good). Warning: may cause sudden and violent addiction to Mary Worth, Apartment 3G, and Mark Trail.
2. The Hurting As a Comics Curmudgeon fan, I gotta love a blog that has a weekly out-of-context Mark Trail panel (although, I’m sorry to say, they’re not out of context for me). Even better are the composite covers for imaginary comics, i.e., The Wolverine vs. Soren Kierkegaard (“Fear and Trembling in the Mighty Marvel Manner”).
3. Polite Dissent. A doctor reads the comics. Informative and well written.
4. Sequential News and commentary, with more international content than other blogs I’ve seen. Despite the unlovely design, I’ll be back.
5. news from me A nice mix of comics, unintentionally funny stuff (Costco is selling an original Picasso? And you can return it if not satisfied? Consider the possibilities!) and liberal politics. The author seems to be a Blondie fan, which makes him, well, different.
6. Suspension of Disbelief fact-checks the comics so you don’t have to. Is the Empire State Building north or south of the Flatiron Building? Is there such a thing as a collapsible longbow? How many jurors would a civil trial in New York City have? It’s all in here.
7. Filing Cabinet of the Damned Even funnier than it sounds. The interviews with obscure comic book villains alone make it worth a look, but be sure to scroll halfway down to learn why “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and “Where’s Waldo” are among the most harmful books of the last two centuries.
8. Precocious Curmudgeon David Welsh, writer of the “Flipped” column at Comic World News blogs on comics, with special attention to manga. Like “Flipped,” witty and well written.
9. Thirty-two Pages of Love Down at the far end of the Long Tail, we have a blog devoted entirely to romance comics. Earnest and entertaining.
10. Komikero Comics Journal Another specialized site, this one focusing on Filipino comics. Great visuals!
A final observation: Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag, do you have any idea how powerful you are? As I was doing the blogaround, I kept crashing into other people who were doing it too. It’s a Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog world out there today.
Peace out!
Hey, when someone’s right, they’re right. I refer to this post, 7 Mistakes for your First Week Blogging, which I wish I had seen last March. The very first mistake: “Don’t launch until you have a theme.” And I quote:
I can’t emphasize enough how strong the correlation is between failing in the first week and having the default WordPress theme.
Oops! I beat the odds and made it through the first week, but the point is well taken. I toyed with some designs when I first started the blog, but ended up getting distracted and wandering off to something else. After that, I just focused on the content, not the look.
No more. We have a look. It’s an evolving look, with plenty of work left, but at least it’s not a bland stretch of blue. And we even followed another piece of advice from the same post, “Make your own header image.”
Now I need to work harder on the “Don’t skip entries” part.
Thanks to Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag at Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog for putting me on to this bit of good advice. As Instapundit says, read the whole thing.
From the Mainichi Daily News, an article that is almost as good as its headline: Snotty schools see measly manga in a new light.
According to an article in Cyzo magazine, universities are offering manga courses as a way to attract students. Last month, Kyoto Seika University set up a manga department, the first in the country, but others are hiring manga artists to teach individual courses. Best name for a new professor: Monkey Punch, creator of the series “Lupin the Third.”
The article then wanders off into interesting territory, noting that manga sales have dropped sharply since 1996, which means prospective manga-ka have to think seriously about the market. An unnamed member of the Kyoto Seika faculty comments
“Manga like ‘Spirits’ and “Morning,’ which target white-collar workers of the present and future, are the ones to look at. Salarymen are now facing a situation of radically changing values that are unlike any other time in the postwar era. Gone are the ideas of promotion by age and lifetime employment and in their place are wage levels decided by performance and ability.
White-collar workers are caught up right in the middle of this maelstrom of changing values. These two magazines have been unable to create characters with an outlook that meets the changing value system of the times and consequently their sales figures have dropped out of the bottom of the market.”
Megan B. Moore at Broken Frontier reviews a couple of the initial offerings from the Shojo Beat imprint, including Fushigi Yugi: Genbu Kaiden, Ouran High School Host Club, and one of the current favorites in our household, Ultra Maniac. Moore comments,
one thing that stood out to me was that, with one exception, the dominant “girl meets cute guy and develops a major crush” theme in most manga is either absent or sidelined in these first volumes.
Which is fine with me; I don’t object to romantic storylines, but I like to see variety, especially for kids in this age group.
Incidentally, the concept of co-branding the books with the magazine has worked spectacularly well with my daughters. They already know that they will probably like a book with a Shojo Beat imprint, and they forced me to buy “Ultra Maniac” immediately after seeing the little disc of it that was included in the first volume of the magazine.
Both (postmodernbarney.com) and Focused Totality mention their frustrations with manga publishers’ web sites. Different ones: Dorian at postmodernbarney couldn’t find info on the newest yaoi titles on the Tokyopop website, while Mark Fossen at Focused Totality complains that the website given on the back cover of Yotsuba&!, published by ADV Manga, is wrong. In fact, Yotsuba&! wasn’t even on the site—I had the same experience and wound up linking to a fan site when I first mentioned the book. My own pet peeve is that Viz doesn’t have a search engine on their site, which makes some titles simply impossible to find without resorting to Google.
It seems that for a market as youth-oriented as manga, having a really good web presence should be a no-brainer. I’ve seen plenty of good fan and review sites; it’s the big boys who are dragging their feet.
