COPA defeated x3; 7Seas serializes comic in city guide

Every year someone wonders whether Icarus Publishing has gone out of business because we don’t have a booth at SDCC.  Look, we’ve NEVER gone to SDCC.  It’s just not our scene, man… 

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Somehow I missed this… Journalista–> Slashdot–> Wired brings word of the third defeat for the Justice Department and COPA, the Child Online Protection Act.  The never-quite-law sought to require websites with any “adult” content to incorporate age verification, such as through credit card numbers.

This tidbit made me snicker… apparently one of the ACLU lawyers involved with the case is named Chris Hansen.  No, don’t sit down!  Run, you fool!

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Taking a cue from Tokyopop, AnimeOnDVD Mania.com reports that Seven Seas will be serializing the original comic “Ninja Diaries” in the pages of Metromix, a ”one-stop local entertainment guide on where to go and what to do in LA.”  Well, that’s according to their own website.  All I really know is that the LA Times has been spamming my mailbox hard about it, and I’m nowhere near Los Angeles.

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Yaoi Press is seeing a lot of new sales through the Google Book Search program, in particular for the “Yaoi Hentai” series, because of… the word “hentai.”  Hmm, I wonder how many purchasers got a really unexpected surprise in the mail.

Speaking of which, “hentai” is a word I’ve actively avoided using with our own output, because it’s not very accurate and, in some ways, rather insulting.  Maybe I’m going about it all wrong…

Umm… hentai hentai hentai. 

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Tiamat’s Review is host to a debate over the appropriateness of rape in BL manga, or manga of any kind.  It doesn’t take long for the old standby of “it’s so bad, it’s bad even in fiction” to be trotted out.

Rather than taking the usual approach of attacking this as selective absolutism (which, frankly, is too easy), I want to address the assumption that the depiction of rape itself is what excites certain readers, instead of being merely a convenient storytelling device that’s been a staple of all kinds of genres, even those by and for women (swashbuckling pirate romance, anyone?).

As much as porn manga, whether it be the male or female-oriented variety, is about the visuals, I think most readers also look for an emotional connection with the characters… and in stories which depict rape, that empathy most often lies not with the sexual aggressor, but the character subject to that aggression.  Come on guys, you all can admit that when you read ero manga, sometimes you put yourself in the role of the female character.  For you readers of yaoi, your concerns are more often with the man on the bottom, not the top, because that’s where all the emotional turmoil is.  Allowing readers to project into a character’s emotional state is something manga does exceedingly well (perhaps to the point of being taken for granted), and it’s the conflicted ecstacy that stirs fans of porn manga, rather than just the sexual act.  It just so happens that the idea of rape draws up very intense emotions, which is convenient for a medium that is at its best when showing extremes.  (This is why the most important visual quality that I personally look for in manga is how well drawn the facial expression are, beyond how anything else is rendered.  I’d imagine this to be true for yaoi readers as well.  Of course, feel free to make your disagreement known if that isn’t the case.)