Sorry for the slowdown in posting. The lab has been really busy lately and I usually sneak time at work to write, something I haven’t been able to do lately. On top of that, I have an illustration project I need to spend some time on. I did want to at least say New Gundam! Yay! [...]
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Manga is (in my opinion, of course) the the best format we have for graphic storytelling, so it’s no surprise that North American publishers are trying to create their own manga content. Why, then, is the market still dominated by imports? I think the main reason is that American manga publishers don’t exactly know what makes [...]
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Given his popularity, I’m not sure why Hayao Miyazaki’s beautiful watercolor manga haven’t been licensed for publication in English. Miyazaki produced several full-color stories that appeared in the back pages of the magazine Model Graphics, many of which were later collected in the book Day Dream Note. One story collected in Day Dream Note, “The [...]
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I have this recurring problem where I’ll pick up a shōjo title and I’m not in the right mood. Of course, I don’t know that I’m not in the right mood, so I keep having the problem. I react to the absurd plot contrivances and irrational behavior as if they were happening in the [...]
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About a week or so ago DC Comics invested in a Japanese electronic manga publisher called Flex Comics. Speculation has been that DC was primarily interested in Flex’s distribution technology, currently used for putting manga on the web and on mobile phones. But this PW article seems to suggest that DC is more interested in [...]
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Birdy the Mighty is a silly sci-fi adventure with a destructive super-heroine and spaceships and monsters, and it’s exactly the sort of story that got me hooked on manga when I was in high school. My tastes have change a lot since then, but sometimes a bit of simple, throw-back fun is refreshing. Tsutomu Senkawa and [...]
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Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is a slice-of-life manga set in a peaceful, post-apocalyptic Japan. If you re-read the statement above, you may be able to see why writing this review has been such a challenge. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is set in a post-apocalyptic society that is completely peaceful. There’s no shortage of resources, no hording, no warlords [...]
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There are already quite a few good blogs out there reviewing new release manga. For the brief history of this blog I’ve kept to recommending scanlations, mostly, because I want to point people towards things that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise hear about. Sometimes, when something really good comes along, I’m going to break that editorial [...]
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I’m joking, it’s not that dire. Kokoro reported it, Simon at Icarus Publishing (so very NSFW) and Brigid at MangaBlog passed it along, and I felt it warranted a quick comment. The short of it is that a Japanese court held a server operator liable of unauthorized storage of copyrighted material on their servers. The [...]
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Sorry, short one today. Jury duty tomorrow (ug!) and work’s been busy. It’s a bit ironic that the creator responsible for perhaps the most stylistically stereotypical anime, Dragon Ball, also produces some of the least visually clichéd manga. Akira Toriyama’s Cowa is about an unbearably cute cadre of tiny monsters, lead child vampire Paifu (who also [...]
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