Scarlet Desire, Tohru Nishimaki’s looks-so-wrong-but-feels-so-right Oedipal teasefest, is shipping out this week. Since it made it into the country, rest assured that it has been vetted by all the proper authorities. Incest… it’s aaaiiiight.
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Comics Worth Reading summarizes a “webinar” held by TokyoPop. The most noteworthy thing here is not any of the particulars of the virtual panel, but the webinar itself; it’s a very direct outreach to bloggers, who have become an integral news source for the fandom, and an obvious attempt to rise above or completely bypass the competing noise one finds at more conventional, and expensive, venues (such as AX). CWR is the only blog that has a write-up, though… or maybe I’m just not browsing at all the right places. Do take a look if you have a vested interest in manhwa, Kindaichi, or CSI. (Not me. I’m all about Law and Order: SVU.)
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Writing at ComiXology, Jason Thompson gives a critical examination of the theme of moe and its relationship to lolicon manga. (Spotted on MangaBlog)
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Deb Aoki continues her excellent coverage of the just concluded AX with her report from the OEL panel, although the best soundbites come from other industry folk who were not present, but followed Aoki’s Twitter feed. Some of them were quite brutal to TokyoPop.
Here’s a potentially unpleasant thought: There were certainly missteps taken during TP’s early forays into original comics (even the panelists admitted to them, except for the most egregious one… usurping complete copyright control). But it seems to me that those mistakes should have had minimal impact, and at least should have been expected. The real issues were not those unique to OEL. The sales levels the panelists alluded to, the ratio of hits to misses, quality versus speed – none of those things were out of the norm for the typical comics publisher… and TP wasn’t actually doing anything different than typical comics publishing. So if the results were dictated not by particular failures on TP’s part, but the common nature of the market, then the problem really rests with expectations -on the part of TP, creators, and readers- more than anything else. In other words, even if TP had done everything right, the state of their program still might not be any rosier.
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Next season on SVU: the guy that runs a hentai manga publisher is found murdered. :D
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Regarding why no one else might have written about Tokyopop’s webinar: It was presented as a test effort, a “beta” of sorts, so there were only a few (6-8?) attendees, and it wasn’t at all clear that it was expected to be covered. I half expected someone to respond and say “well, we didn’t really expect that” or “I didn’t know we should write it up”.
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This question might be a bit old, but I still just want to check:
A while ago, like a year or two, you guys were about to licens works by great mangaka Chataro… What happened to that deal? I’m a long time Chataro-fan, I’ve even fantranslated some of his works for the internet, but I’d kill to get official english versions of his great works!
Heard about this a while ago and haven’t hear about it since.Regards Steven Landerson
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Simon, your comments on the nothing new nature of OEL panel are poignant, but I noticed a couple messages touched on throughout. I really wish people would just get off the comics vs. manga kick, but it’s a little ridiculous to hear people in publishing scoffing ‘manga’ as a publishing buzzword in a panel on OEL manga. The undertone of those sorts of statements is laying it solely on the readers for buying into the marketing. Another constant message throughout, ‘Young artists, go DIY and we’ll be here to critique the shit out of it. That’s our support system.’
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Onto more important news, why do American publishers insist on making ‘moe’ all about chomos?
‘I know that when Japanese people say moe, it can mean any kind of loving fandom, from train moe to sci-fi moe to girls-with-glasses moe. In that way, moe is just another nerd-word like otaku.’ – and then he brings it right back to all the pedostuff. Sure, you could argue, ‘Nuhuh, moe means nothing but a desire to molest real live children in the US, you plebeian,’ but every one of those examples for ‘Moe: The Real Molestation of Actual Children Through Thought Crime’ is Japanese in origin.
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I guess america hasnt seen japan’s moe military comics magazines then lol
akibablog features those all the time XP
I’d hate to see americans reactions to moe ero guro now thatll really cause an outcry of the niche of a niche of manga fans support the artists.
@simon since scarlet desire came through customs guess that means aki sora would as well right?
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So, not that I’m looking for supporters here, I just want to sort of posit the question… what’s with all the internet superheroes bashing moe and a loli lately? And why are most of them painfully off-base about just about everything they say?
My patience is sort of starting to run thin on all this bullshit. They just want to draw fanatics in and make themselves seem like experts on something they only know insomuch as they dislike it. WHATEVER, MAN. I’m just in a bad mood about those fuckers lately.
It’s easy to stand up and talk about things you don’t like when they’re unpopular. And in the case of the moe article, we have a published idiot missing the point entirely and trying to force and obtuse point home by insisting that there’s something sinister in the use of a single word.
Also, OEL manga is garbage. It always will be garbage because the people who make it aren’t worth shit. I could go on about that, but I’m feeling lazy right now.
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I was in on the webinar too and I assumed that they wouldn’t talk to bloggers if they didn’t want the news to get out, but I came in late so I wasn’t sure. (The time was horribly inconvenient for those of us on the East Coast.) Anyway I was just too busy with other stuff to blog about that particular session, but I probably will follow up on some of the things that were discussed, so it was useful from that point of view. Being a former newspaper reporter, I take the official presentation as a starting point, not the entire story.
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Pingback from Global manga realities « MangaBlog on July 14, 2009 at 4:48 am
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I think unlike the average Marvel/DC reader, manga fans actually expect their comics to not suck.
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The one thing the commenters seem to have missed in the OEL panel conversation was the concept of *time.*
The Japanese manga industry is 50 years old. American comics are over 80.
The American manga phenomenon is less than 10 years old. There was no process put in place for growing into an industry. Books were licesned, did well, or not. Artists were hired to do whole tankoubon, without the process of assisting a known artists, learning the ins and outs, gettinga few random chapters in a magazine (because there were no magazines in which to do that) and then being assigned a short series, then a longer one.
In 50 years it won’t be an issue. Right now it’s all baby steps on every side.
Cheers,
Erica
Hungry for Yuri? Have some Okazu!
http://okazu.blogspot.com-
Comics between Japan and the US were actually very similar back in the day until the Comics Code and Superhero hegemony stopped the US industry from evolving naturally into what Japan has now. I can see your point about a budding manga industry in the west, but in the US, there’s been a lot of resistance to the difference that manga represents over the years and some of that resistance, in some cases resentment, still needs to be straightened out.
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Erica Friedman:
> The Japanese manga industry is 50 years old.
Actually, it is much older than that—even the modern manga industry is over sixty. See the second chapter of Frederik Schodt’s Manga! Manga!, “A Thousand Years of Manga”, pp. 28–67.
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