JAST partners with Nitro+ | Photoshopped image lands man in jail

July 6, 2009 in Manga Minutiae, Potpourri | 9 comments

All the important people were at AX.  I would have been there too, but the convention organizers refused my demands for a chauffeured limo, 8 Disneyland full passes, and a continuous supply of green M&Ms.

But you don’t need to have been there… Anime News Network, Anime Vice, MangaBlog, and Manga.About.Com have coverage of all the festivities.  If there’s one thing you must look at, though, it’s photos of scantily clad women the anime-oriented, 2nd day keynote speech by Shawn Kleckner of Rightstuf International.  His observations and predictions about the US market, if not entirely new, were very thorough.

As far as manga annoucements go, the biggest one is Viz’s intention to give One Piece the Naruto Nation treatment (maybe they ought to just release all of them as box sets from now on).  And the only news related to ero is JAST USA’s new partnership with top flight game maker Nitro+ (Nitroplus).  An English website for the new venture has already gone live.

Edit: Robert’s Anime Corner Store bemoans reduced, or zero involvement by industry players at the largest North American anime convention.  Yes, shame on all those who weren’t there!

Edit 2: I would love to know the chain of events that led to this comment by Atlus staff.

Edit 3: Onii-chan no Ecchi podcast AX, with additional insight into how recent troubles for ero on both sides of the Pacific are affecting local eroge publishers.

Edit 4: Manga Xanadu thinks Viz may have few screws loose.  But you never know until you try… and Viz is perhaps the only manga publisher that could afford to try.  That in itself says a lot.

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Holy yoga flame, that’s a good Dhalsim.

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Publisher’s Weekly profiles a newly-invigorated Vertical Inc., offering clues to the future direction the publisher may take with manga: Editorial Director Ioannis Mentzas professes an interest in seinen manga, and recent hire Ed Chavez is probably more knowledgeable in the genre than anyone else working in the industry right now.  Seems they’re ready to make many cool things happen.

On a related note, this looks 120% awesome.  That extra 20% comes from the word “Fatty” being in the title.

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Missed it… according to CNN, a Tennessee man is being charged with 31 counts of “aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor” for having three sexually explicit pictures of adult women whose faces were digitally replaced with those of girls.  (Check out the horribly smug CNN television report to see why you should never rely on cable TV news.)  The man has not had contact with any of the (6, I presume) people in the photos.

 This is just shy of the Handley case in obsurdity, but similar… it’s another case involving “simulated” porn, which SCOTUS has twice found to be constitutionally protected.  (Found via Slashdot, which also has a follow-up essay that hypothesizes a correlation between those who think the man should not be guilty, with their mathematical prowess, or the empirical thinking skills that form the foundation of its mastery.  Actually, I think I just see a left brain/right brain dichotomy here…)

9 comments

  1. Randall Fitzgerald on July 7, 2009 at 1:00 am

    I talked to a friend from North Carolina and even he thinks its ridiculous. AND HE LOVES JESUS!

    Here’s hoping that any tiny amount of reasonable thought will prevail here.

    1. Simon on July 7, 2009 at 6:05 am

      What I’m really curious about is how the pictures even came to the attention of the police or the DA. Was he flaunting them online, passing them off as genuine? But even then, Miley Cyrus would have a stronger defamation case than the ludicrous charges the state is filing against him.

      And the worst scenario, and unfortunately the most likely one, is yet another guilty plea. People need to fight this…

      1. Randall Fitzgerald on July 8, 2009 at 4:02 pm

        Another thing that is curious to me, there were three photos, how did it get to 31 counts of aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor?

        And don’t most crimes involving the term aggravated tend to involve something a bit more violent and physical than what this guy was doing?

        Maybe the cops are just trying to set some reasonable precedence by having these ridiculous charges laughed out of court!

        Or! Maybe it’s just a kneejerk reaction amongst idiots who thing that the first thing you should do when you see something that you don’t agree with is turn to the government to make it go away.

        Aww, I depressed myself…

        1. Simon on July 8, 2009 at 7:19 pm

          Well, that’s just legal strategy. It’s kind of like bargaining at a flea market; the DA will try to scare the defendant by saying “we can nail for for all this crap, that’s 130 years,” in hope of the now scared-shitless defendant will take the first plea bargain offer tossed his way.

  2. Draneor on July 7, 2009 at 5:36 pm

    Other than the Nitro+ deal, you also missed that MangaGamer licensed Shuffle!, Higurashi, and D.C. II. Granted, Higurashi isn’t ero…

    Kind of funny that part of the Japanese industry is going into turtle mode while other companies, like Circus, Navel, and Nitro+ are trying to expand worldwide. I just hope people buy it…

    1. Randall Fitzgerald on July 8, 2009 at 4:09 pm

      Well, D.C.II is a given, though they didn’t bring it up at all during AX to my recollection. But since Circus is the parent company for mangagamer it makes sense they’d put it out at some point.

      And Higurashi is just the doujin version, so meh. MEH! Though, yeah, Shuffle. Shuffle and Navel’s stuff is less exciting to me than Nitro+’s catalogue.

      Now we can wait and see who gets AliceSoft. That’ll be fun.

    2. Simon on July 9, 2009 at 1:40 pm

      The smaller the company, the fewer conflicting interests and entanglements there are, the easier it is to get this sort of thing off the ground. It’s true of any industry.

  4. hirohisa4president on July 8, 2009 at 11:36 am

    maybe he was doing that for requests by people like nude fake celeb photos?

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