Comiket begins; LJ anime/manga communities under threat?

Japanese blog Moeyo has the first big photo album of Comiket 72 day one.

Not too many fun things to look at yet because it’s 8/19, the third day of Comiket, that is reserved mainly for adult-oriented circles.  For those of you lucky enough to be there, several of the artists we’ve published will naturally be exhibiting at Comiket on that day:

• Syowmaru ( 東 I-30a [我儘堂] )
• Tohru Nishimaki ( 東 P-24a [D-LOVERS] )
• Fujio Okamoto ( 東 ヌ-54b [おたふく亭] )
• Rego Yokoi ( 東 M-05a [オノマトピア] )
• Yanagi Yuki ( 東 P-05a [妄想庭園] )
• Yuuki ( 東 N-48b [桃色窃盗団] )
• Tanuki Kamogawa ( 東 O-31a [鴨川屋] )

…And even if you’re not going there, go visit their websites anyway and see what they’ll be showing at the con.

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PingMag has an interview with Japanese-to-Italian/English translator Simona Pini that should be of interest to folks wishing to enter the manga industry through that front.  Panini sounds like a pretty good gig…

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I’m linking to this short story about a pair of otaku-hunting sibling scam artists not because I find their tactics surprising, but because there are far more dastardly tricks for the easily-lured and intimidated nerds of akiba that this petty extortion scam is shockingly underwhelming and lacking any creativity whatsoever.  Where’s the Charles Atlas-esque “bully pretends to pick on girl, otaku rescues girl, girl takes otaku to love hotel and handcuffs otaku to bed and leaves him with nothing but underwear and an overwhelming suicidal shame” scam?

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According to Giapet at A Geek by Any Other Name, Live Journal has deleted several anime/manga based communities.  Details seem sketchy, and I’m not a frequent visitor to such sites myself, but it seems the impetus for the deletions were again related to fears of depictions of minors in sexual situations.  Given the strange machinations which were behind the last well-publicized (and embarrassing) purge at LJ, this might be something to keep an eye on…