Via Daizex —> ANN… two Maryland schools (one elementary, the other a middle school) will be removing Akira Toriyama’s classic boys adventure manga Dragonball from its libraries, after a parent complained about its contents to a county council member. The dramatic quotes from said council member Joe Holloway:
“In cartoon format, it depicts nudity, sexual contact between children and sexual innuendo among adults and children”
“The drawings and story lines are disgusting”
The early volumes of Dragonball did have a great deal of sexual (or I guess, what puritanical individuals would percieve as sexual) comedy, much of which actually played on Goku’s complete and utter naivete of gender roles and boundaries; Bulma’s no-pants flash and constant incontinence, Goku’s predisposition for free-balling, Roshi’s dirty old man persona, and a certain memorable match in the first tournament come to mind. But disgusting? Imagine if some of the more risque Bugs Bunny cartoons were made today. Would Holloway say they promoted transvestism, bestiality, and sexual sadism (re: Little Red Riding Rabbit)?
Hmm… yeah, he probably would, or does. I just lost my train of thought.
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Anime Vice reports Kodansha and Akita Shoten have entered into a partnership in which Kodansha will be representing Akita Shoten in domestic and international markets for the purposes of licensing (merchandise, foreign publishing deals, etc.) Not sure if this has a direct connection with Kodansha Comics, but it certainly could…
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Spotted via MangaBlog… The Manga Critic condenses the faux-controversy around the cover of Spice and Wolf and lambastes fantitlement (lovely word), while still disapproving of Yen’s art direction. The cover certainly has lost a bit of the understated grace of the Japanese original…
Look guys, considering the design of most books in the fantasy and romance categories, just be glad the fontage isn’t raised and in metallic silver.
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Spotted on The Beat…Herve St-Louis argues against creator ownership and the “cult of the creator,” the idea that creator-owned, self-published comic books are inherently better than corporate (i.e. Marvel and DC) comics.
Copyright control, in and of itself, doesn’t magically transform a mediocre artist into a grand master. And I don’t think any sane person would make that argument. Rather, like any other creative industry, profit motivation encourages better talent to enter the field (it’s what makes this a profession), and creator ownership is the surest way to guarantee a fair share of that profit. In fact, creator ownership is, I believe, the major factor in the divergent artistic development and fortunes between American comics and Japanese manga (or the rest of the American book publishing industry, for that matter), more so than the influences of any particular artist, the aftermath of World War 2, or the reading habits of commuters (that’s just silly… sorry, Mr. Warren Ellis.) Corporate ownership has lead to a very real creative stagnation… the vast majority of Marvel and DC comics are still based on characters that are half a century old, because they are seen as properties first and foremost, to be perpetuated as long as possible. There are certainly many great individual artistic achievements by creators working within the confines of these “universes” and canons, but all of it was done at the cost of invention. Corporate ownership has a set of motivations that drives mainstream Americans comics toward repetition instead of embracing the new. And all of that is unnecessary… original novels still get made into very profitable movies, and Japanese manga companies don’t need full copyright control to operate. Herein lies my biggest disagreement with St-Louis’ piece… creator ownership doesn’t have to mean self publishing, and publishers don’t have to wrestle copyrights away from creators in order to function and profit. Yet St-Louis treats the two as the same and cherry picks Image Comics, while ignoring the richness of material and success of the greater book publishing world or alternative comic book publishers who’ve done much to attract new audiences to the art form, and whose artists might actually earn more from their creations than anyone at the big two. Even the biggest alt-comic box office bomb will earn more for its creator than The Dark Knight does for all the artists who worked on Batman in the last twenty years.
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You know what still gets me, Simolimobeanarino? These people talk about how American companies continue to screw up everything they release but they never bother to learn Japanese so they can enjoy the original works.
THAT’S WHAT I DID. YOU CAN DO IT TOO! THEN NO ONE CAN RUIN ANYTHING EXCEPT THE PUBLISHERS, ARTISTS, EDITORS, FANS, AND SIMON!
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Blech, if someone wants to read nothing but Batman and X-men, they’re welcome to it, no creators are sending their properties after them for it.
You make some really great points though. I think the only real quality bogey that could be tossed at indie books it would be a ‘cult of DIY’ and the perception of the indie writer/penciller/inker/colourist/letterer/editor/publisher superstar as the only alternative creative option to superhero books. In the case of something like Cerberus, as someone had pointed out in the comments, the ability to divvy up those creative rights allowed Sims to pull a great background artist to serve his property the best quality it can get. A good contrast to that commitment to one’s own property: Byrne gets paid his weight in gold to develop a property for Marvel’s ownership and shits out ‘Lost in a Snowstorm,’ and a couple other issues until he drops it to Mignola, whose style of idea that are terrible for Canadian superheros worked out magnificently for his own creative property.
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