Critical reading for the day: AnimeNation’s John Oppliger takes an objective look at moe anime and discusses whether the trend is actually over-running the anime industry.
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After more careful consideration of user response, MangaGamers has reversed course and will not remove any CGs from Soul Link and Higurashi. A small number of CGs were originally removed due to concerns over US law, and recent hyperbolic coverage of Japanese games by foreign media.
I want to reiterate that MangaGamers (and JAST, and Eros, and adult anime producers, and the yaoi publishers to some extent, and retailers who elect to support these products, and ourselves of course) are taking enormous risks for fans just by releasing this material at all, and this is not something fans should speak of lightly. The potential loss of personal freedom is real. And then there are factors that most aren’t aware of, or neglect to think about. For example, credit card payment processors, who as private businesses are not beholden to free speech, may reject any account based merely on a single objectionable image on a website…
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ICv2 has a 2-part interview with Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson (part 1, part 2), focusing primarily on how the company’s various product lines have coped with an all-around difficult 2009. The second half of the interview talks almost exclusively about manga; DK is one of the few direct-market -oriented manga publishers (or, I should say, one of the few who optimizes manga to best serve their appropriate markets), so their experience with the ongoing chain bookstore meltdown has been decidedly different from other publishers. Richardson also made some surprisingly trenchant observations about comic retail’s self-fulfilling obsession with old characters, and risk averse attitude towards new books; you don’t hear this often from publishers at the top.
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The nook has been hacked. Neither this fact nor the speed with which it was accomplished is surprising, only that the device offered up no resistance to tampering at all. Ironically, given all the middling reviews the nook has received thus far, this development may actually reignite excitement for the device, at least among the nerd contingent. Now somebody please make a better PDF reader, an image browser, or post technical specs for the nook post haste.
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For your amusement: Would you like to be part of a revolutionary creative team to work on the “first true American Manga?” It’s a simple job; the characters have been fleshed out already, the rest is up to you. It’s probably work-for-hire, so you don’t have to worry about creator rights or anything time-consuming like that.
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I’m not sure people really get moe. Most people think it means ‘lolis’ and the rest tend to think it means ‘cute’, but it’s more tied to a culture with shamanic traditions and marginalised religious rites than something that could be summed up through Sola Scriptura style interpretation.
Mike Richardson is great. He has this nice ‘no bullshit, this is just the way it is’ way about him and he only turns it up a notch or two when he’s talking about the exciting stuff.
Not sure a ‘true American manga’ would be the first stage of a multi-media property by design, but what do I know?
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There are already a number of “true American manga,” even by the strictest definitions.
Peepocho by Felipe Smith, for example.
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It’s sad to think of how much control is taken away from creators (of pornography) when Big Business America gets involved. In fact, you could even say that the power Visa (and other credit card companies) hold over the porn industry is actually the american patriarchy at work. It was really hard for women to have any sort of creative control when it came to pornography, up until they started making their own indy porn. However, when credit card companies started making decisions about who could make pornography (and they do), the female indy porn movement pretty much died (with a few exceptions). So porn power stays in the hand of men (for the most part) because of the decisions made and the rules/fines enforced by major credit card companies.
Of course, I say all of this as a casual observer, and not an industry professional.
By the by, I don’t usually draw women, but I just sketched this out for a friend and thought you might enjoy it on a personal level :D
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a50/ScrumYummy/gi121509.jpg
(Also, do you tag something like that NSFW when you are sharing it with someone whose job it is to look at it all day?? Serious question.)Also, that Craig’s List ad was delightfully entertaining. Thank you.
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Speaking of MangaGamer, Simon, have you heard of this:
http://www.mangagamer.com/r18/Titles/CatalogBook/1
They are apparently adding a “Comics” section to their site, though it’s currently empty.
Someone else discovered the search tags for the future section:
http://www.mangagamer.com/r18/Titles/SearchBook?keyword=
>Big Boobs, Bishojo, Collection, Fantasy, Hardcore, Mature Woman, Older Sister, School, Series, and Younger Sister
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Can I go ahead and put in my vote to be an expert witness on the MangaGamers trial? Haha.
Someone’s got to fight the fight sometime, Simon. We know YOU don’t want to do it… still, I wish it was over something a bit more substantial and being tested by a company more familiar with that sort of thing.
Like Del Rey. Random House set the precedent for obscenity being horseshit a long time ago with Ulysses so it’d be nice to see them do it again.
But then, that’s assuming anything comes of it to begin with. Even then, the fact that they took the shit out tells you that they have legal counsel. I think they know what’s going on.
Oh well, you take what you can get.
Still, the Handley case already showed that unless someone with some quality lawyers gets in the game, a motherfucker is going to go to prison. What’s frustrating is that there is already a fuckload of precedent saying that private collector cannot be tried for possessing obscene material and adapting that to drawings of non-existent characters who appear in a form we commonly associate with young humans would have been a pretty easy case. Ask your lawyer friend about it. She oughta know. If that’s her field.
But those were somewhat landmark cases so she should at least know what I’m on about.
Also, OH MAN! Ehren is doing that whole thing backwards. You have to bring something useful to the table for that to work. That is, you have to be the artist. But then, every asshole fancies themself a writer so every artist thinks they can just make up their own amazing stories. *sigh* Oh well. TO THE MOON!
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