Wii-less in Colorado; Witchblade manga; how comics will chew you up and spit you out, steal your credit cards, and leave you for dead on the curb

Well, I hope you’re all happy… I didn’t get a Wii this weekend because I was finishing up work on the next issues of Comic AG.  No Zelda, no Super Monkey Ballz, no Raving Rabbids for me.  Boooo!

I missed the PS3 too… but that was by choice.  There’s just no reason for me to pick it up unless Silent Hill 5 is a PS3 exclusive.  (And I’m really looking forward to SH5, because of all the games in the series, the first ones to launch with each new generation were the best; the first game with the 32-bit era, and Silent Hill 2 with the PS2.  Anyway…)

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ICv2 has the details on Top Cow’s upcoming Witchblade manga (ウィッチブレイド丈琉) release (and this time it’s actual manga, i.e. a Japanese production initially published in Japan, not just a reformatted collection like Tomb Raider.)  I’m not posting this out of interest in the property per se, but because Top Cow will be employing a very interesting release strategy, one that harkons back to earlier manga publishing philosophies of the Eighties: to localize as many aspects of the book as possible.  Witchblade is to be published in the traditional “floppies” format, with flopped, colorized artwork.

Before you people start shouting heresy, Top Cow is presumably not targetting this book to manga readers at all, but to traditional comic readers.  This is buttressed by the fact that Bandai will release the same book in the “authentic” manga trade format that the market overwhelmingly supports.  In any case, Top Cow is poised to answer an interesting and important quandary… are some comic readers rejecting manga because they feel alienated by the flopped art and lack of color, or simply because they dislike manga and are married to traditional Western-style comics?  I don’t think the answer will be in Top Cow’s advantage, although they’ve had success developing a good fan base in Japan with exactly the same strategy, in the opposite direction, reformatting their original Witchblade comics into tankoubon favored by Japanese readers.  We will know soon enough whether a traditional comic format and coloring is enough to convince Top Cow’s core audience to give this new iteration a chance when Diamond’s top 300 list for February comes out.

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Since everyone is linking to this, I’m going to link to it, too… Occassional Superheroine documents with unflinching honesty and brutal snark her tribulations at a big-name comics publishers… I’ll just call them “Seedy Comics”… containing everything from workplace sexual politics, mental and physical abuse, to the bursting of very sensitive orifices.  Apparently, working at a mainstream comics publisher is more scandalous than we could ever dream to be.

And since I have nothing insightful to say about this, other than it’s a great read and you must start from the first post, I’ll point to these initial reactions.  Makes that How to Make Money like a Porn Star comic seem all the more tame and ironic, doesn’t it?

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Thanks once again to the same keen-eyed reader for pointing this out… Right Stuf is having a sale on Patchwork.  168 pages of wholesome porn for less than a 10-piece bucket of the colonel’s chicken?  That’s just wrong.