In an attempt to get some use of my Anime Network subscription, I recently started watching Wedding Peach and noticed the above list of magazines in the opening credits.

I had heard of Chao (actually Ciao), a shoujo magazine targeted at young girls – its current series include Gokujo!! Mecha Mote Iincho (the 2nd season of the Mecha Mote anime debuts in April) and Kirarin Revolution ended last June. However, I was unsure about the others until I did some research.

In addition to the original Wedding Peach manga serialization in Ciao, there were variations that ran in the “Journal of Learning” series of publications (小学館の学習雑誌) aimed at grade school students. The Third Grader version was the same as the original but the rest had different illustrators/authors: the Study Kindergarten and First Grader versions were done by Konomichi Ayumi, the Second Grader version by Fujii Midori, and the Fourth Grader version by Tachibana Mami.

I was unable to find a Sprout magazine – there is a manga called Sprout by Atsuko Nanba – and Kindergarten (幼稚園) seems like it’d be similiar to Study Kindergarten (学習幼稚園) except with maybe less of a focus of writing. Wedding Peach ran in the former from May 1995 to April 1996.

(My main source was this section of the Wedding Peach article on Wikipedia Japan. Please correct me if I misinterpreted parts of it.)

While looking around for some comics stuff, I came across an issue of Manga Twister I had bought a few years ago in Düsseldorf.

Manga Twister is a now defunct German manga magazine that had six shonen and shojo series in each issue and each half was twisted 180 degrees from the other. Yen Plus has a “reorient your brain” warning in the middle of each issue when the reader finishes the A part (manga) and is ready to move onto the B part (manhwa & OEL/world manga) but it doesn’t have a genre specific warning like Twister did.

If you started with the shonen side, you would see a warning after the end of the last series about the following pages containing sunshine, happiness, romance, and girls. Correspondingly if you began on the shojo side, you’d encounter a similar warning that the pages to follow may have communism, stormy clouds, poison, and males.

In the middle of the issue is where the next one is previewed and where the “twisting” action happens. In the pages surrounding this are a word puzzle contest with prizes, four pages about Milk Crown’s manga-ka Mizuto Aqua, a reminder of what manga volumes were coming out that March, letters & fanart, and a few ads for other EMA manga (Imadoki!, xxxHolic, Chobits).

If you continued on after twisting, you would see another warning about the content to come. “Achtung! Du betrittst jetzt die Jungs-Zone/Mädchen-Zone! Lesen auf eigene Gefahr!” (Attention! You are now entering the boys’/girls’ zone! Read at your own risk!). These pages are on the other side of the sheet of paper from the “Danger” warnings.

Like I mentioned, Manga Twister is no longer being published by Egmont Manga & Anime (EMA) – its last issue was in October 2006 and the mag lasted three years. There are two German manga magazines currently in circulation: Carlsen’s shojo-oriented Daisuki and Schwarzer Turm’s quarterly Paper Theatre, which features German artists (Germanga?). Manga Power, the first of its kind, ran from 1996 to 1997 and then from 2002 to 2004. Carlsen-run shonen magazine BANZAI! ran from November 2001 to December 2005.

While it is easy to point at the availability of news on the Internet and young people’s desires for instant gratification as main reasons (which they are), there is another contributing factor: decreasing advertising revenue across the board for newspapers and periodicals. Along with Anime Insider, it was announced that that same day that Blender would no longer be produced in print form but still maintain its website. Unfortunately, the complete divestment of AI’s staff combined with sluggish online updates rule out a web-only avenue for the brand.

I don’t have many personal feelings toward Anime Insider except for being something I occasionally bought when I saw it on newsstands. They did have interviews and a manga preview in each issue but not much beside that appealed to me on a consistent basis. I will admit that the Flash in Japan made me aware of Flame of Recca (or was it Animerica?) and Kaze no Stigma — FUNimation will release Part 1 of the latter on DVD June 30th. A coupon screw-up by Best Buy in issue #50 happened to provide fuel for a post back in Nov. 2007.

The magazine will be missed as part of a shrinking magazine market (only Otaku USA and Protoculture Addicts, both bi-monthly, remain) but I will not mourn its absence, partly because their final issue is very video game focused. I do wish that the writers are able to find work elsewhere, either in print or online.

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien, and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the fukú — the ancient curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still dreaming of his first kiss, is only its most recent victim — until the fateful summer that he decides to be its last.

Diaz described Monster’s Johan as “one of the weirdest, most attractive psychotic masterminds in literature” and mentioned other characters like Nina, Inspector Runge and Eva as components of Tenma’s “epic quest”. I am idly interested to see how US sales of the manga are affected by this mention in a mainstream magazine and I might have to take a peek at Oscar Wao because it seems interesting…and because it won an award, like Monster won the 2001 General Shogakukan Manga Award. (I also want to check out The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps for a different reason.)

And yes, I did discover that ANN wrote about this two weeks ago during this post’s composition but it was news to me so I’m posting about it anyway.

A few days ago I received the first of four expected issues of PiQ magazine (produced by PiQ, LLC) and after reading most of it, I have to say I am already beginning to prefer it to Newtype USA, its previous anime- and manga-focused iteration. Those two subjects are still covered but the focus of more on a greater variety of entertainment including comics, video games, sci-fi, and American cartoons. For instance, there are features on Appleseed Ex Machina; Avatar, which I still haven’t seen despite many recommendations; Invasion U.S.A., a Marvel comic beginning next month; Code Geass; and the currently on hiatus Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Playing along with the theme of covering many bases, a section called “The List” profiles ten new things the editors like the most and think would interest their readers. The recommendations in April’s issue range from “magicpunk” anime Tweeny Witches to Adult Swim show Frisky Dingo to comic-book history book The Ten-Cent Plague.

Finally, their “Monitor” section this month is anchored by five anime industry people weighing in on the future viability of anime and also contained are a couple music reviews, a short glance at Asian films, tips on assembling a mech kit, and a talk with the co-founder of Legend Entertainment, once-publisher of PC adventure games. In said anchor, Monica Rial tells fans that they have the power, Amos Wong thinks the moe phenomeon among the Akihabara crowd is partly to blame, Rob Bricken says anime is in a zombie-like state, Jonathan Clements reminds us “the end of the world” has happened before, and Bandai Visual BOSS Tatsunori Konno suggests the American side might be “catching its breath” after two decades of rapid growth.

Even though my interest has been “piqued” by this first issue, I’m going to hold off on subscribing until at least the fall, when I get a more stable address. [It has a cover price of US$6.99 (CAN$7.99) and the subscription card inside offered 12 issues for $40 ($3.33/issue).] I will certainly flip through it when I pass by the magazine stacks in the local Borders every couple weeks. I recommend anyone to pick up an issue and at least checking it out to see if its tone and layout works for you.

I was looking through the old Animerica issues I bought at Sac-Anime and found a short focus piece in the August 1999 issue: “Be An Anime Missionary”. Some of the advice Tom Root gives for bringing your friends into the fray may be dated with Battle Chasers and FFVII references but other elements are still viable such as the diversity in convention attendees. Reading this and the other issues I got give me a sense of where the fan community was nine years ago; actually I have one from December 1996 when laserdiscs were being sold at $45 a pop alongside VHS sub or dub releases. For some reason, I enjoy reading about the American market before it really began to grow. Anyway, I also found a couple neatly worded ads, which I put after the cut.

“Science fiction is exploring the human condition…under EXTREME circumstances!!!”

“Do you like Jazz or the Blues?” – Cowboy Bebop/Blue Submarine No. 6

I just got this month’s issue of Newtype USA in the mail today and was a bit surprised when I began flipping through it. Among their regular two-page series spreads were eight consecutive vertical spreads (16 pages in total) that composed the Japanese half of their Anime Invasion ‘08 theme. This caught me off guard since I don’t remember them doing this in the past. When I read a magazine I might be fine turning it sideways to read it maybe once or even twice but it gets to be uncomfortable if it happens on a regular basis. I might get used to it but it’s bugging me right now.

On a positive note, I was glad that many of the “new style” layouts involve currently airing anime such as Bamboo Blade, Ghost Hound, Dragonaut, and Rental Magica. I’m also making a poll about this topic so let your voice be heard there as well as in the comments about whether you prefer vertical or horizontal photo spreads or simply don’t care.

After the jump: some more vertical spread pics and, for comparison, the two horizontal layouts that bookend them in the volume.

Remember a couple weeks ago when I posted about the decline in manga sales in Japan? Well, this month’s issue of Wired Magazine has a feature story about Japan’s manga industry as well as a 10-page manga-style history of Japanese comics in the United States. The main article begins at a dojinshi market called Comic Ichi, shifts to providing the reader a sense of the art format’s influence within Japan, and returns to the topic of dojinshi artists while suggesting that the pool of enthusiastic artists could hold hope for solving the industry’s issue of homogeneity.

The author Daniel Pink is quick to remind his readers that almost all the works – his estimate is about 90 percent – at this and similar markets blatantly violate copyright. It’s so prevalent that Pink suggests that:

…an American intellectual property lawyer probably would not have lasted more than 15 minutes. After cruising just one or two aisles, he would have thudded to the floor in a dead faint.

Pink pointed out that most of these dojinshi are putting the borrowed characters into new situations and bringing to the forefront themes, relationships, and plotlines that lay under the surface in the official stories. He gives an example of a 24-year-old bank employee who is bored with her job and draws an alternate universe comic of Chibi Maruko-chan where the characters have aged properly and face teenage issues.

The reason why Japanese publishers are not suing the fan artists is there is an “unspoken, implicit agreement” (anmoku no ryokai) between the two groups. One of the doujinshi gathering organizers is quoted as saying:

The dojinshi are creating a market base, and that market base is naturally drawn to the original work….[The convention floor] is where we’re finding the next generation of authors. The publishers understand the value of not destroying that.

Pink states that that particular business model “helps rescue the manga industrial complex in at least three ways” – taking care of their customers, allowing them to find new and potentially rising talent, and providing them with cheap effective market research of what is popular among the core audience. He then brings up Lawrence Lessig’s concept of a conflict between the “read only” and the “read/write” cultures in relation to his proposal that the Japanese intellectual property laws could be adjusted to allow for dojinshi writers to be properly protected and not viewed in the eyes of the law as no different than photocopies – what Pink calls “a misalignment between the emerging imperatives of smart business and the lagging sensibilities of old laws”.

Overall, I thought the article was interesting to read for the opinions of those involved. The manga history also gave me some new information and there were some funny panels in it like a giant Pikachu being milked and Astro Boy wondering what Spiderman has that he doesn’t.

So the new poll question is: should there be a lower-priced, DVD-less version of Newtype USA? I’m not including a price in the question but I would assume that the cheaper version would be around $10 given there is still the glossy pages and a poster insert. This isn’t a suggestion per se that the DVD inserts should be subscriber-only but I do think that the subscribers should continue to get the DVD edition and perhaps also be offered the opportunity to get a cheaper DVD-less subscription.

The old poll was “Do you own multiple physical copies of any anime or manga?”

29 people voted: 21 said (72.4%) yes and 8 (27.6%) went with no.