Kokmen dismisses Kodansha rumors; Navy manga a hit with military otaku?

…And now it begins.  Tomohiro Kato, the one behind the murderous attack in Akihabara on Sunday, actually foretold of his plans on the Japanese message board 2channel.  Additionally from the AFP:

Kato reportedly had a strong interest in comic-book and video-game subculture.

This is the first English news report I’ve read to specifically make those claims.  (In all honesty, even without this connection, a few Akiba otakus have already given the whole fandom a huge black eye through their ridiculous on-camera behavior during news coverage of the massive tragedy.)

Edit: Journalista has more news links.

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ICv2 interviews Tokyopop’s Mike Kiley on the restructuring of the company, which essentially boils down to a defiant rewording of the original press release and divulges few new details.  As a counterpoint, former employees posting at PreCur reveal that they… well, they can’t reveal much at all.  Their severance package is tied to a non-disclosure agreement.  Not unusual, but still somewhat telling in and of itself.

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Japanator spoke directly to Del Rey’s Ali Kokmen on rumors of Kodansha’s US manga aspirations and got the straight dope.  Or did they?  On one hand, while Ali Kokmen is Del Rey’s head of marketing, has intimate knowledge of all their dealings with Kodansha, and is an all around cool guy… he’s not Kodansha.  On the other hand, rumor-starter Cthulu may be the octopi-faced being of unimaginable terror and the most handsome of the Old Ones, but his admittedly second-hand, uncorroborated recounting of off-the-cuff whispers between equally mysterious distributors has already changed once.  One outcome would be exciting (in a morbid way) for industry watchers, while the other is more plausible.  Think I’m going to sit on the fence for a little while.

Edit: The great thing about rumors is that they beget more rumors.  The Beat’s Heidi MacDonald has been hearing tales of an imminent move into the US manga market by Kodansha from other sources for a while, though none say the Japanese company is ready to end all current licensing relationships to do it.

The same post also claims that foundering book retailer Borders returned a publisher-suffocating 80% of unsold Tokyopop stock.  Somewhere in the basement of a superhero-only comic shop, two guys are high-fiving each other and crowing “where’s your messiah now, biatches!?”

Comic212′s Christopher Butcher aims to find out more about the Kodansha rumor.  Del Rey isn’t the only Kodansha licensee out there…

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Via Slashdot, Computerworld has a write-up on the oncoming rush of e-paper technology, but the thing that caught my eye is a small blurb about a Xerox-developed technology that allows images and text printed on paper to fade away after a designated amount of time, similar to self-degrading DVDs.

Wow, bringing DRM to dead-tree publishing.  This is an idea so simultaneously clever and inane, it can only be described as imbecilliant.

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Stars and Stripes says the Navy’s experiment with using manga to reach out to the Japanese public is a success; 300 copies were handed out within 3 hours on the first day of the book’s availability.  Feelings on the deployment of the USS George Washington were still mixed among those who picked up a copy, but the book does seem to deliver the American perspective with the kind of candor that countless press releases could not.  Plus, old military ship otaku dig it; manga is the new baseball.

(Note: Stars and Stripes is published by the US Department of Defense.)