Icarus Publishing

Galleycat reproduces a Hachette Book Group announcement that it too will seek to set prices on its e-books, essentially siding with Macmillan’s argument in their fight with Amazon.  This is probably why Amazon’s initial actions against Macmillan were so harsh and swift… they didn’t want anyone else to join them.  But the flood gates have been opened; Amazon cannot remain competitive if it chooses to remove 2 of the top 6 publishers from its catalog (especially now, when one of them publishes the Twilight series of books).  It also seems likely that other publishers may join Hachette and Macmillan soon in their opposition.

Manga publisher Yen Press is a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group.  Its soon to be released graphic novel adaptation of Twilight broke into Amazon’s top 10 bestsellers list on the first week it became available for pre-order.

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Related… Antick Musings demystifies the Macmillan/Amazon fight, while the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America has aligned itself with Macmillan by removing all Amazon links from its site.  (First link spotted via Journalista)

Edit: In the comments section, KingTaco expresses his distaste for the hypocrisy of those oh-so-forward-looking writers.

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Via MangaBlog, Question Riot interviews Sabrina Heep, letterer and touch up artist for Viz, about the finer points of localizing manga.  Does Yen headhunt?

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Bleeding Cool reports that retailer Heavy Ink received a cease and desist from lawyers representing TV personality and nip-slip auteur Olivia Munn demanding all copies of an unreleased comic featuring her name and likeness be destroyed.  The retailer responded by saying they were not the publisher (it’s Antarctic Press), and that they would not remove the item for sale when it does come out, citing parody defense.  However, this isn’t just a free speech issue, but a right of publicity issue, because her name appears in the title of the comic.  This is more like the case between Fantagraphics and Harlan Ellison, which was settled out of court but was pretty much a lop-sided victory for Ellison.  Even if this were a First Amendment case, based on the descriptions of the comic, it would be difficult to argue it is a parody of Olivia Munn.  The real legal definition of parody is far narrower than most people on the net would like to believe.  Munn is not the subject of serious critique or ridicule in the comic.  It’s also neither a biography with any academic value, nor a documentary of real events.  She is, in essence, an actress playing herself in a fictional comic which she headlines. That’s the difference between this comic, and all the unauthorized biographies from Bluewater… those merely report factual events in the form of a comic.  Should Munn’s side see this through to trial (the wisdom of such a move aside), Antarctic Press’ position would be very weak.  (But a friendly warning to lawyers before y’all go sue-happy – comic publishers have no money.)

Intellectual property law website Anchor Plate has a great, simple break down of the legal theories involved.  The post also points out that Munn’s image has been used without permission on a porn comic website famous for doing exactly that with celebrities (in fact, I seem to recall the website had some earlier legal troubles for a Pirates of the Caribbean comic, but I can’t find anything on it at the moment).  (Last link spotted via Robot 6)

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Weird thought of the day… since Apple doesn’t allow porn manga on Apps, but does allow the Kindle reader for iPhone, and Amazon does allow porn manga (at least the light yaoi variety), might we see some publishers start offering e-books through Kindle that are actually formatted to take advantage of the iPad screen?  I know that Amazon’s e-publishing platform automatically resizes images to best fit the Kindle, but might they be convinced to lift that restriction?  What about running Kindle Apps on the Kindle reader for iPhone?  That would be crazy…

ANN has a pictorial of the master Range Murata at work, whipping up a portrait on a Wacom Cintiq in under an hour in front of an admiring audience in Taiwan.

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CBR profiles Torajiro Kishi’s Devil, a manga made specifically for Dark Horse that is infused with “Western” comic visuals.

Manga readers should already be familiar with Kishi.  His adult manga Maka Maka was released in the US by Media Blasters.

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The Torontoist speaks with Christopher Butcher about the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, his fascination with Japanese manga as an industry, and all the blogging he does.

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Yaoi Press elaborates on the publisher’s failed attempt to make one of its books available on iTune Apps.  The publisher went to great lengths to remove any potentially objectionable content, but the book was rejected without comment.  In absence of an explanation, we can only assume that Apple, or a lone App reviewer at Apple, has an issue with the theme…

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Should newspaper companies subsidize laptop and tablets/pads?  There are two problems this plan might not address… 1) People don’t want to pay for news anymore, period.  So unless paywalls are erected industry-wide, across all platforms (i.e. websites, news aggregators, Yahoo, Google, etc), subscriptions won’t work.  2) A lot of the pain papers are feeling now comes from falling ad revenue from both print and web.  What is different about distribution through iPad, that would convince advertisers to pay more than they do on websites?

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Ooh, the manga Aki Sora by Masahiro Itosugi will be getting its own OVA series.  Itosugi sensei is the author of our own Wish of My Sister.  So congratulations to her.

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Spotted via ICv2… Global License reports that efforts are underway at Toei Animation to “revive” the Sailor Moon anime.  The relaunch will be international, with Italy being the first country to receive a broadcast.

Original creator Naoko Takeuchi is said to be involved, which raises the question of how the manga fits into the brand revival plans.  Sailor Moon was long out of print until only a year ago, when Kodansha was given permission for a re-issue (Takeuchi had a falling out with Kodansha after the publisher lost some manuscript pages of another manga she had been working on). If there is to be an international revival of the manga, one obvious candidate for a US publisher would be Kodansha USA.  In fact, Sailor Moon came up often during the rumor phase of the company.  If Kodansha wants to ingratiate itself to the most hardcore of manga fandom, this would be its biggest opportunity.  Yet, even after making its official debut with 2 books, Kodansha and its immediate publishing schedule, if it even has one, are still very much shrouded in mystery.  So this may not be a safe bet.

Kodansha practically severed all ties with Tokyopop, the original US licensee of Sailor Moon, so we can cross them off the list.  Might Del Rey be interested in Sailor Moon?

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Have you ever wanted to sound like an authentic Osakan?  Or learn how to say STFU like a proper lady from the upper echelon of society?  Then this is the site for you.

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Hey, you notice something?  Range Murata, Torajiro Kishi, Masahiro Itosugi, and Hiroki Otsuka (from last post)…  all of them have, at one point or another, drawn porn manga (Murata’s contributions being mostly confined to doujinshi and art books).  Now they all enjoy some level of mainstream success.

Would they be where they are now, had they not been allowed to draw ero?  Is ero not a point along each one of their artistic paths?

Long-running Asian-American pop culture magazine Giant Robot is seeking donations to fund a year’s worth of issues.  The publishers have been hit with decreasing ad revenue, increasing production costs, and shrinking distribution options.

Giant Robot has the distinction of being the oldest magazine to have regular anime coverage, and was a major positive force during the beginnings of the designer vinyl toys scene.

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The Wall Street Journal takes a look at how iPad has sparked pricing chaos for ebooks, while Deb Aoki gets a few manga publishers to share their thoughts on Apple’s involvement in the business.

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An excerpt from Time Out New York on upcoming erotica-related events in New York:

Not only does NYC welcome dork love, but erotic anime illustrator Hiroki Otsuka found that his work flourished here. “In Japan, my comics are porn,” he says, “but here, people appreciate it. They don’t only see it as porn; it’s art.”

Oh, how I dearly wish that were true.

Hiroki Otsuka’s art exhibit Cup Noodle is currently open to the public at Shag until March 28th.

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PW has more on the Macmillan Amazon thing… this time from the perspective of literary agents, and the Author’s Guild.  The articles intimate that the battle isn’t over, and some Macmillan titles are still not available from Amazon, despite the e-retailer’s earlier announcement that it would restore them.

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Apparently, lolicon is such a common theme in Japan, a movie about it barely turns any heads.

You know, Jeremy Irons still catches flack in this country for starring in the film version of Lolita…

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This is a little unexpected… video game website Kotaku chronicles the (ongoing) development of the international doujin game, Katawa Shoujo.  For those not familiar with the project, it is a visual novel about disabled girls, inspired by character designer Raita and created by denizens of 4chan’s /B/.

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Writing for Robot 6, Brigid Alverson has an interview with creator Phil Foglio on selling comics online, and the seminal adult comic series XXXenophiles.

Interesting read of the day… CBR has an interview with IDW’s Director of E-Publishing Jeff Webber.  You’d think they’d talk about iPad, but the conversation focuses for the most part on how well the company is doing on Sony’s PSP.  The game machine maker has given its comic partners a lot of support, something that seems to be missing from Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble.

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Aww… David Welsh has ended his Flipped! column after five years to focus on more personal writing, ostensibly at Precocious Manga Curmudgeon.

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Spotted via CNet… the Amazon versus Macmillan standoff didn’t last long.  Amazon blinked.  But they remained recalcitrant in their statement, branding Macmillan as a monopoly that used its massive clout to pressure the small online bookseller (a slight majority of the blogosphere I’d come across seems to view the roles quite differently).

Macmillan’s print books never should have been involved in this way, and I’m glad someone at Amazon either paid attention to prevailing public opinion, or one of their lawyers sounded an alarm bell.  But as for the core issue of e-book price points, that debate is still very much up in the air. But it’s now in the hands of consumers, where it always should have been.

From a consumer’s point of view, Amazon’s logic about lower, uniform e-book pricing is nearly unassailable, but we must not delude ourselves about Amazon’s true intentions; this is about grabbing and keeping market share while dozens of competitors loom over the horizon.  And for Macmillan, this is likely about maintaining margins (since Amazon’s cut from every book sale looks to be closer to that of a distributor rather a retailer, arguments that publishers are saving money on distribution are either misinformed or insincere) or protecting their other customers, specifically the brick and mortar variety.

There may also be a more technological reason Amazon is keen on the 9.99 price point.  It seems for Apple’s iBooks, publishers will try to maintain a $14.99 ceiling, while justifying that price with “value added” content such as videos – something the current generation of Kindles cannot do.  The iPad is leapfrogging the Kindle hardware, so Amazon needs any advantage it could find to keep its customers loyal until their next major hardware revision.

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The iPad will not support Flash.  Apple defended that decision by saying most Mac OS crashes are caused by Flash.  This did not sit well with Adobe.  One of its employees posted a series of simulated iPad screenshots of popular web sites that use Flash.  Among them was a porn website.  It has since been removed at the request of Adobe.

It was awesome while it was still up there. (And you can see a screen cap here.)

But on to a more serious issue… Apple has tried to block porn from the iPhone and iPod, but it still finds its way on there.  And much of it is pirated, in part due to Apple’s refusal to provide porn a legit distribution avenue.  So the iPhone and iPod  are drawing porn viewers (and presumably so will the iPad), are benefiting from porn… but they block any revenue from reaching porn vendors, do all they can to lock them out of the marketplace.  How is this fair?  Isn’t this anti-competitive, an unfair business practice?  Why hasn’t any lawyer pounced on this?

Yeah, I suppose it’s a little frivolous, but I’d like to see it anyway.

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The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics is looking for submissions.  Guidelines are provided in this handy PDF file.

I’ve never read one of these, but as the URL indicates, this is a British publication, and I instinctively trust all of Her Majesty’s subjects.

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I’ve already lost.

In addition, I’ve also failed miserably to keep my New Year’s resolution, which was to stop abusing ellipses…

Hmm, I guess this would be part 2 of my reaction to iPad.  There are too many angles to consider, and I’m not sure how much I have to say, or don’t want to say, on the subject.  So maybe this is part 2 of Nth, or part 2 of 2.  Anyway.

As a print publisher, one of my tendencies is to look at devices and think how their design replicates the experience of reading on paper, how it may affect the print business, and brick and mortar retail, etc.  A lot of readers do that too.  But that’s biased.  Narrow-sighted.  Artists are probably looking at the iPad and asking “how will this change my art?”  This has greater implications than all the hype about the LongBoxes, the ComiXologies, all those new publishing paradigms.  Let me give you two examples which, on the surface, seem rather trivial…

Increasingly, on Japanese mangaka websites, you’d see these comics whose panels are arranged into columns that seem much too tall.  If you were looking at the image on a browser that resizes them to fit the screen, you might think you were looking at a strange, broken vertical line.  It’s yonkoma on steroids.  Some Western artists have begun to adopt this odd paneling style, yet not all of them understand the reason behind it.

Can you guess?  Here’s a clue… hardcore yaoi readers probably run into this kind of manga more than anyone else.

These super-long rectangles, panels arranged in a single column… they’re made for consumption on cell phones.  Each panel fits the phone’s width perfectly, so the reader only has to scroll in one direction – down – to enjoy it.  Reading on cell phones is a popular pastime for young women, hence the greater percentage of this kind of comic being yaoi.  Working in this format, the artist has to change the way she draws, the way she places word balloon, discard the blank spaces between panels, consider the scrolling effect rather than the page-turn effect… it’s basically a new dialect in the language of comics.  Manga is becoming specialized for the cell phone, and the format is not transferable to print.  That is key. The cell phone is not only the target format, but the exclusive format for this kind of graphic storytelling.

The second example doesn’t deal with comics at all, but music compression.  The quality of an audio recording lies in its dynamic range – the amount of high and low frequencies that is preserved.  (This Rolling Stones article explains audio dynamic range quite well).  To compress audio into an MP3 file, the dominant digital format, the dynamic range is reduced, which introduces noise and gives MP3s their “crispy” sound.  Serious audiophiles can readily notice this reduction in quality.  But a study (which I can’t locate at the moment, unfortunately) which polled its subjects on their music preferences found that younger listeners were more likely to prefer lower quality recordings that replicated the crackle of MP3s.  They had grown accustomed to it because of the ubiquity of compressed audio.

Now let’s bring it all back to comics.  The iPad and devices like it approximate the paper medium in many ways, fall short in some areas, and offer features that cannot be reproduced on paper.  How could this change the way artists approach making comics?  Would they look at how the iPad is similar to paper, and accentuate the qualities of print comics, or use its extended functionality to go in a direction that is completely divorced from print?  Could the device become so popular, that artists decide to target it as the primary format so that it is the superior medium to view their work, utilizing paneling techniques that just won’t translate to a static 6.625″ x 10.25″ page?  And as the MP3 example shows, when quality differences are minor, familiarity trumps it.  Digital devices still have a long ways to go to match the quality of print, but they may not have to do that to supplant print, they just need to get close enough.  The iPad doesn’t need to have unassailable technology.  With the help of comic creators, it just needs to redefine the fundamental expectations of the general public, to shift the goal post for what a comic should look like, what it should offer.  Create a new dialect of comics to usurp all others.

What that dialect may sound like, I do not know.  But I pray to the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster that it’s not motion comics.

Edit: both Journalista and The Beat have a bevy of punditry links for your consideration.

Edit 2: Matt Blind reminds us all that the criticisms against the iPad have an eerily familiar ring to the ones lodged at the iPhone and iPod at their initial launches.

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Missed it… ICv2 reports that Wisconsin-based printer Quad Graphics has acquired the Canadian printing company formerly known as Quebecor.  At one time, Quebecor was the largest printing company in the world, and despite financial problems, it is still the printer of most comics sold in the United States.

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Spotted via MangaBlog… British comics historian Paul Gravett offers up his list of the 18 best manga releases of 2009.  I kind of wish he had saved the two spots given to Akira and GitS for a couple other books… they were not new translations, and in the case of GitS, not even out of print.

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For you amusement… are Chinese characters sexist, and need they be changed?  This person apparently thinks so.  I dearly want to believe that this is a parody.