Posts Tagged “Manga”

When the anime adaptation of Kobato. was announced earlier this month, I thought I would go back to some of the later volumes of Newtype USA, where the manga was serialized in English before the magazine shut down. The first chapter I found, chapter 9, began with Kobato looking around the city for cold beer on a hot summer day as suggested by her stuffed animal guide, Ioryogi-san, who told her that the proliferation of beer gardens would trump “Cool Biz” in its ability to combat global warming. After enjoying that chapter, which marked the end of a prologue of sorts, I found a previous one (ch. 4) where Kobato kept an elderly woman company on New Year’s Day. I liked that one as well so I now find myself catching up on the manga.

The basic plot is that Kobato Hanato, a naive girl, tries to ease the wounded hearts of troubled people in order to fill a bottle with their bad feelings. When she finishes filling the bottle, she will be able to go to someplace where she deeply wants to travel. Where exactly is not revealed at first but one might put two and two together and make an informed guess when they notice she always covers the top of her head with various hats. She begins to helps out at a nursery school and meets two people who have been seen previously in the comic but never directly crossed paths with her.

Thinking about why I am attracted to the manga, I think it is the combination of Kobato’s determination and Ioryogi’s fits of frustration when Kobato screws up. I would like for it to be properly published in the US and I am sure it will garner a certain level of sales as a CLAMP property. It wouldn’t be a 21st-century title from them without some small nods to other franchises and the ones in this manga include a bakery sharing its name with one from Chobits, the daughters of Kobato’s landlady are named Chiho and Chise, and Misaki from Angelic Layer can be seen during Kobato’s search for free beer samples. (I am discovering such references through online research, just like I did when watching Tsubasa Chronicle, since I possess a insufficient familiarity with their catalog of works.)

This morning, I received the following e-mail message from Manganovel:

Manganovel Service Information Bulletin
—————————————

Manganovel
December 12, 2008

Termination of Manganovel Services

Dear Manganovel Users:

Please be advised that we will terminate all Manganovel services on February 27, 2009. Towards this, we will discontinue the following services as of today:
?User Registration
?Point Sales
?Posting of translation by Manganovel Users

Users who currently hold “points” will receive an e-mail from us around January 15th, 2009, detailing how to use those points.

For the meantime, Manga will be available for purchase if you have points, and you can also enjoy free manga.

We would like to extend our thanks to you for using Manganovel services.

Contact
For further information, please contact usercontact@manganovel.com.

I signed up for an account in October 2007 soon after its launch, downloaded the viewing software, and didn’t do much after that. The concept was that users would buy packages of points in order to purchase raw digital chapters or volumes (some of which were free) and different language translations uploaded by other users. Those users whose translations were bought received points in their account if they decide to charge for them (they could also offer gratis translations), which they could use to buy more digital manga. That’s a rough explanation from memory - I hope it sufficed.

I thought it was an interesting system when it came out but I quickly realized that the points currency was stuck within it (no cashing out) and that I didn’t really feel like trying to translate Japanese into English or German just to use that revenue to buy more chapters or translations of digital manga. I’m sure some dedicated users will miss the site and its weekly addition of chapters and/or user translations and it may have allowed budding translators an opportunity to practice their skills. It was an experiment in digital manga distribution using low-profile titles and though it may not have caught on in a large way, it did launch 10 months before DMP put up its eManga rental site and that must be worth something.

It seems like nary a few months pass before another one of Scott’s entries into his Anime Almanac weblog spawns a multitude of partisan objection. The latest incident involves an challenge between himself and the Reverse Thieves, whom I don’t regularly read but are apparently well-known, to confront each other’s comfort boundaries. For Scott, it was yaoi manga (specifically, the two-volume Gerard & Jacques) and for the not-quite-Robin Hoods, it was Kodomo no Jikan. (I have read neither work involved in the challenge so I have no opinion subjectively on either.)

The back-and-forth between author and readers (not between the two blogs) mainly focused on Scott’s reaction to a rape scene in the second volume of his assignment - he has since written an addendum on the matter - but there remained something in his original final paragraphs which I still felt the need to formally comment on in writing.
Read the rest of this entry »

After seeing Baka-Raptor’s comparison of Soul Eater and Bleach and viewing an out-of-order-for-me episode during a club Halloween party, I began to think of how this emerging shonen franchise would differentiate itself in its foray into a broader North American consciousness. But I was surprised that the first manga volume is scheduled to come out a FULL YEAR from now in October next year! (The first light novel volume of Spice and Wolf is slated for a December 2009 release with a six-month schedule so that may be more painful for restless readers.)

Out of the five manga that debuted in issue 1 of Yen Plus — Soul Eater, Sumomomo Momomo, Nabari no Ou, Higurashi, Bamboo Blade — only Higurashi will have its first volume come out this year with the others making their individually bound debuts in May 2009 or October ‘09, the latter being the case for Soul Eater. While I initially thought that the long delays were part of a “syndicate first, bind later” strategy and still do, I believe Yen Press is purposely holding back Soul Eater’s initial volume release in order to promote it using Atsushi Ookubo’s (the artist’s) prior work, B.ICHI - the same type of cross-promotion appeared at the end of the Japanese 1st volume. The desire to gain more subscribers to its monthly magazine contributes to the delay of all the serialized titles by having readers to consume individual slices from different types of figurative bread rather than eat whole loafs at a time. (Not sure if that food analogy worked…) The monthly meting out of individual chapters should provide an consistent and slightly less intensive workload for those assigned to such projects, which is a good thing for a relatively small operation compared to the more established industry names.
Read the rest of this entry »

This blog takes no official position on smoking but it does support multicolored skies.

In this edition of Potluck: reaction to Mario Parva’s interview and to some unsubstantiated Amazon listings, a different sort of team blog is born, and a small morsel of anime sales data.
Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE 10/10: I received a response from someone at the Times to my comment but didn’t check the email until today. I have added the reply at the end of the post and I feel satisfied with the explanation they provided.

This afternoon I was reading a so-so article penned by the New York Times’ Motoko Rich about how publishers and libraries trying to use video games to spur youth reading. Rich has written numerous pieces in the past for the Times about the publishing industry so one would imagine she is able to properly describe origins of printed works. Unfortunately, she slipped up in the closing paragraphs of the piece that ran in today’s paper when mentioning two particular manga titles (emphasis added):

Noah Tropp, 14, who participated in Ms. Steinkuehler’s program [that explored whether the reading gamers do through guides and forums might serve as a 'gateway drug for literacy'] for several months this year, regularly reads sites like gamewinners.com and supercheat.com. While looking for hints online, he read about “Death Note,” a novel based on a Japanese video game. Over the summer, he read it.

Noah also wrote about the games and other pastimes on a group Internet forum. “I was so surprised because he does not like writing,” said William Tropp, Noah’s father. “I said, ‘Why aren’t you like this in school?’ ”

In one posting, Noah recommended “xxxHOLIC,” a graphic novel based on Japanese manga cartoons.

“You should check it out if you get the chance,” Noah concluded, “and it is a good book!”

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, ANN reported that numerous Kodansha and Bbmf manga such as Hataraki Man and Keroro Gunsou have been or will be added to the Japanese iTunes App Store to be read on iTouchs and iPhones. The chapters are mostly priced at 115 yen (a few are free in the case of Keroro and many BBmf offerings) and are in both English and Japanese, which I guess is why these are apps for that functionality alone.

An slightly different offering under the “Books” category is a 3-volume, 53-page Yoshitoshi ABe doujinshi called Pochiyama at the Pharmacy for 600 yen, which I would like read except I don’t currently own an iPod touch - a condition I hope to rectify in the near future as there is a rumored price drop/update happening next month. It would be my first Apple hardware product ever even though I have previously used Macs in campus computer labs and played with an iPhone inside an AT&T store. All those free games… [Just after posting this, I found out ANN wrote a story about Pochiyama a hour before. Whatever.]

I guess I should also talk about DMP’s initiative to also provide digital manga to the masses. Their method involves renting a volume for 72 hours for $4 that can be upgraded to unlimited use by re-renting for a total of $8, but the starting 3-day limit shouldn’t be a detraction for many people. The current offerings are BL and how-to drawing books, neither of which particularly pique my interest - Gia had some recommendations of non-yaoi titles they could add such as Enchanter. The interface was not perfect for me because while Panel Focus zooms in on each panel so you can read the text, I read manga while surveying the whole page. Luckily, I was able to switch to actual size at medium scaling and just drag around to see the rest.

The chapter drop-down menu, keyboard shortcuts and bookmarking features are nice touches that compete with Tokyopop’s online “player”, which allows you to view opposite pages simultaneously with readable text but at a lower resolution that what DMP is offering. (How do you play manga, anyway?) The eManga site is easier to remember and to navigate than Tokyopop’s site so I might use it in the future to preview titles or even rent one. The points system has a logical ratio of 100 pts to $1 but the option to actually add points 1,000 at a time isn’t available at the moment.

Last week, I finally added an overdue comment policy explicitly telling readers not to post or request links to illicit material after seeing yet another comment asking where one can read the Karin (Chibi Vampire) manga online:

OMG Can enyone tell me where i can get Chibi on line!!!! its driving me crazy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One of the unspoken rules of participating in viewing fansubs/scanlations is to not publicly ask for where to obtain such illicit goods. (Another is not to monetize it through donations or subscription fees but that’s another subject.) If you really want to read or watch content for free, then do your own damn research - it’s not that difficult, sadly. While I don’t believe that scanlations have as severe an effect on the manga industry as fansubbing does to anime, it can still breed the feeling that one deserves to read something for free.

I personally have not read or looked for scanlations for about a year and that was just to see what Shirow Miwa’s Dogs and Sakae Esuno’s Mirai Nikki were about by reading a few chapters. I will try to check Dogs out further whenever it hits American shelves along with Maid-sama, Shinji Ikari Raising Project and some others I can’t recall at the moment.

That short list of my anticipated releases says something about my limited interest in the manga scene, which makes my authoring of this post a bit strange from my standing as a fringe reader. I never understood the rationale of complaining that something became licensed in your region because that means it becomes more easily accessible; this is more so for manga than anime because you can now read them in paper form, assuming you couldn’t read Japanese and didn’t have a Kinokuniya nearby. You can even sit on a couch in a bookstore and read whole volumes - I don’t care, just stop complaining that you cannot access a series or, worse, brazenly continue to do so.

Saying that you’re reading it in a browser and not downloading is a faulty excuse just as watching an licensed anime series on YouTube, Veoh, or even Crunchyroll is - you are still consuming the media in a non-sanctioned manner assuming it hasn’t been uploading by the actual rights holders.

I have since removed the comments that involved links or requests but you can read them in chronological order after the jump, with the links obviously taken out.
Read the rest of this entry »

Variety is reporting that Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt’s Plan B have acquired the rights to adapt Mark Crilley’s four-volume OEL manga Miki Falls into a movie with Sera Gamble, a producer and writer for “Supernatural”, attached to the project as the scriptwriter. Crilley is best known for his Akiko series of comic books targeted at 9- to 12-year-olds; all four volumes of this latest series are being published on HarperCollins’ HarperTeen label.

Miki Falls‘ beginning plot is that Miki Yoshida is starting her last year of high school when she falls in love with new boy in town Hiro, except that he doesn’t want anything to do with her or her town. She decides to be his friend but she finds out he is a Deliverer, someone who monitors couples about to break up and snatch their before it dies to pass onto another couple. Deliverers are forbidden from falling in love but Miki ignores that rule and acts on her ambitions. The series takes place over the seasons of a year so it would seem natural for the film to start in spring and end in winter.

Greg McElhatton from Read About Comics’ reviewed of the first volume, Spring, last July and described it as “well-rounded” with a “very soft, relaxing art style” that could appeal to readers outside its intended audience. All Ages Reads, whose review crew is a teacher and her grade-school daughters, also liked the series and recommended it for the 10-and-up crowd as the romance is confined to kissing. In September, Brigid at MangaBlog published the full version of an interview she conducted with Crilley in July 2007 for a Publisher’s Weekly article (that’s where I got the story description).

I was flipping through a recent issue of Time Magazine (July 14th) that was lying around the house and saw a feature called “Famous Authors’ Guilty Pleasures”. What struck me was that Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz chose the Monster manga as his, although I probably shouldn’t have been surprised after reading the front flap of his immigrant-family novel, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao:

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.