I was quite happy to see Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ new comic SAGA on the cover of this month’s PREVIEWS catalogue for a couple of different reasons. For one it’s an independent, fully creator-owned series from Vaughan, whose “Y The Last Man” and “Ex Machina” are at least partially owned by DC, despite him creating them from whole cloth. For another it’s the highest-profile work Canadian Fiona Staples has ever done, and she’s wonderfully talented and deserves all the accolades sent her way. It’s another high-profile book for Image and I’m always happy to see them in the spotlight. And the cover features two action/adventure heroes, one with a sword and one with a gun, a man and a woman standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and the woman’s even breastfeeding her baby. If there’s a better “our family against the whole universe” image I can’t really think of what it might be.

Then I thought “Maybe I should point this out on the blog, this is a cool thing.” Then I thought “If I’m the first one to point out breastfeeding on the cover of Previews and the cover of a comic book, it’s just going to tip-off some neanderthal who objects to a woman’s breasts (but covers that up with some other sort of rationalization).” Then I thought “I’ll just enjoy that it’s happening, let those who would object discover it for themselves.”

Cut to: Vaughn and Staples end up with a feature in USA Today! As expected, the wide release/distribution of said image did bring an unsavoury objection from someone in comics, in the form of a nasty little screed from Dave Dorman, since deleted. I had a list of awful conservative comics ‘pundits’ who I thought would be the first to take a swipe at the image… Dave Dorman though, who’da thunk? His objections mostly centered around the fact that the image of a baby being breast-fed was inappropriate for children to see (think about that for a moment), and that the act of breast-feeding on a comic cover was exploitative, but unspecifically exploitative, as the rest of his post seemed concerned with “women having it all” and what not… it was a muddled and confused thing, that post, very irrational and for someone like me an absolute joy to read. Basically, whatever point he may have thought he logically had was so totally obfusticated by his puffery and indignation that he came off, rightly, like an ass.

Now of course the reactions/round-ups have been posted (I’ll link to my friend Andrew Wheeler’s because maybe he gets paid by the hit or something: http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/01/09/saga-fiona-staples-dave-dorman-breastfeeding/), and people on the internet have torn a strip off of Dorman. As I’ve noted, Dorman has pulled down his post and is doubtlessly going to follow-up explaining that he was ‘misunderstood’ doesn’t find breastfeeding objectionable, just that it’s been exploited for this comic, yadda yadda yadda. Same old bullshit internet spin cycle, no one is accountable for anything, everything’s misunderstood, and it all gets swept under the rug as soon as Marvel makes an announcement about a new variant cover or some other such bullshit.

I’m just saying, congrats to Vaughan and especially Staples, on a great-sounding new series, on a lovely piece of promotional artwork, and on the boost to your sales that will surely follow a 10s of thousands of people being made aware of your series that might have missed it otherwise, even on the cover of Previews.

- Chris
P.S.: If Dave Dorman is reading this, hey, I like your work. Sorry you said something stupid on the internet. As someone who was there for the ‘birth’ of internet comics journalism, which you now find yourself trapped in, I strongly suggest you just flat-out apologize, with no conditions or ‘explanations’. Anything else will just be incessantly picked apart by blogs/websites/angry fans, who honestly have nothing better to do until Marvel makes that variant cover announcement. Just “I’m absolutely sorry, I spoke entirely in haste without thinking, my apologies to the creative team, I wish them well.”  That will placate all but the craziest of commenters. Then spend a few days and figure out where all of that anger is coming from inside you about breastfeeding and maybe try and work that out, because… yeesh.

Mom: “Do you think this Starfire is a good hero?”

7 Year Old Girl: “Not really.”

“Do you think the Starfire from the Teen Titans cartoon is a good role model?”

*immediately* “Oh yes. She’s a great role model. She tells people they can be good friends and super powerful and fight for good.”

“Do you think the Starfire in the Teen Titans comic book is a good role model?”

“Yes, too. She’s still a good guy. Pretty, but she’s helping others all the time and saving people.”

“What about this new Starfire?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s not doing anything.”

- Go read the whole brutal exchange at IO9

It’s like they took this comic by David Willis and made it real, and somehow sadder.

Look, since everyone is weighing in on this thing: Not every comic needs to be for every audience. Not every depiction of someone being slutty is a problem–even in superhero comics. I think it’d be lovely if the[second] biggest company in comics gave a damn about creating a diverse line of books that appealed to people other than straight white dudes, 24-40, which would make the occasional sexual inference and cheesecakiness less de rigeur. I would absolutely adore that–I’d sell more comics! There is an inherent weariness to this argument, to reaction to these books, and it creeps me out a little bit that a mom is putting a picture of her sleeping preteen daughter on the internet to make a larger social point about appropriateness of content. We’d all do better to engage the material we enjoy and discuss and promote it, or better still, create our own material to enjoy and ignore the rest of the shit entirely.

BUT ALL OF THAT SAID: DC Comics, Scott Lobdell, Cheesecake Artist #827, You Screwed The Pooch on this one. For all of our sakes own up to radically sexualizing a children’s character that is still in reruns for children today, admit it was a mistake, fix it. That’s it. “People did not like this new direction, we’re going a different way, we appreciate your passion.” Fix it.

Fix it.

- Christopher

Japan: Tradition. Innovation.
May-October 2011. Opens May 20th, 2011.
Canadian Museum of Civilization
100 Laurier Street
Gatineau, Quebec K1A 0M8
(Just on the other side of the river from Ottawa)
http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/whats-on/event-detail&EventId=302

So, I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this on the blog, but one of the coolest things I did last year was act as a special consultant on popular culture to The Canadian Museum of Civilization, for their new exhibit on Japan opening this week. Japan: Tradition. Innovation. is a unique look at the Edo-period origins of contemporary Japanese technology and design. Focusing specifically on consumer goods–things that we interact with every day–the show breaks down 400 years of cultural innovation into five themes; travel, automation, social status, consumer culture, and entertainment. Comparing woodblock prints to manga, contemporary Japanese street-fashion with armour and traditional garb, robots to mechanized dolls–it’s all cool stuff.

I specifically helped acquire materials for the manga and anime collections, including first-editions, cels, and some cool ephermera. I’m excited to see how it’s been placed into the context of the larger collection. It was an amazing opportunity to dig through all kinds of cool old manga and anime at Mandarake during my last visit to Japan (Oct/Nov 2010), divorced from my normal concerns of finding cool stuff to bring back to The Beguiling. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a bunch of first-edition Tezuka manga at the store, but I doubt they’d sell with the expediency that we’d need them too to make any sort of profit. Buying for a museum has a very different set of criteria. Oh, and as a special note, I’d like to thank everyone who helped me identify some of those pieces, it was very cool of you and I really appreciate it. Feel free to ask me for a favour in future.

Oh, and speaking of The Beguiling, the awesome comic and graphic novel store which I manage, we also acted as a sponsor of the exhibit! We’ve donated hundreds of manga to the exhibition’s “reading room”, which is essentially a wall of manga you can hang out and read at. It’s also roughly 50/50 French-language and English-language translations of Japanese material, which means we could include a bunch of stuff not yet available in English. I feel really good about the mix of manga included too, because it covers not only popular and contemporary series, but also classics, “art-oriented” works, and works that seek to explain certain Japanese customs, aspects of the culture, and traditions through manga. Oishinbo is as prominently displayed as Naruto, A Drifiting Life and The Rose of Versailles and Doraemon all getting equal face-time. So exciting!

The exhibit has a special opening this Thursday, May 19th at 6pm, for Museum members and the press only. I’m going to be there to see the public’s reaction to it for the first time, and I’m pretty excited! If anyone from the Ottawa/Montreal area will be there and would like to get-together and talk manga, drop me a line! If you can’t make it this week, don’t worry, the show’s on until October and I’m hoping we can put together some exciting programing at the Museum featuring manga and anime experts and professionals over the course of the summer. I’m also going to try to do a report on the exhibit here on the blog, if I can manage to remember my camera. :)

For more on the exhibit, check out http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/whats-on/event-detail&EventId=302.

- Christopher

–

ARTISTS HELP JAPAN: TORONTO RAISES $20,000
Toronto comic artists and DJs band together for Japanese Quake & Tsunami Relief

Artists Help Japan: Toronto is proud to announce that their 12 hour live art/DJ event on April 17th was an extraordinary success, raising $20,000 towards Tsunami and Quake relief in Japan.

Spearheaded by a consortium of Toronto illustration studios, the Artists Help Japan: Toronto event was the local iteration of a charity movement begun by Dice Tsutsumi at Pixar. The Toronto edition featured live art and DJ music, a silent auction and dozens of artists selling commissioned drawings, which raised about $18,000 over the 12 hour event. Event organizers UDON Entertainment have stepped in with an additional $2000 donation to help bring the final total to $20,000, with all proceeds being donated to the Canadian Red Cross.

The organizers of the event would like to thank all of the talented artists, illustrators, and DJs who donated their time and expertise, and the hundreds of Torontonians that came out in support of this event. The organizers will continue their various fundraising efforts over the weeks and months to come, including a series of special auctions featuring artworks donated by artists at the fundraiser! Look for details on these auctions in the next week.

Some words of thanks from the organizers:

Erik Ko, founder of UDON Entertainment: “I have a lot of friends and colleagues in Japan who were affected by this unfortunate event. I felt a real need to try and lend a helping hand to the people there and I really appreciate so many people supporting us! Thank you so much!”

Bobby Chiu, head of Imaginism studio: “People were incredibly generous with their money that day. It was truly touching to see a city come together to support the people of Japan.”

Alvin Lee, comic artist on Street Fighter and Birds of Prey: “It was awe inspiring to see the outpour of support and compassion from Toronto’s Art and Music scene. To give back to a country that has influenced so many of today’s artists, including myself – I felt like it was the least I could do.”

Krystle Tabujara, Library Services Coordinator for The Beguiling: “Having recently travelled to the Pacific Rim with my partner, I felt an obligation to be a part of such a great cause. It was an honour to be working alongside some of Toronto’s most talented artists.”

Jim Zubkavich, writer/creator of Skullkickers from Image Comics: “All of us involved with this event feel a deep connection to Japan and we’re ecstatic that so many people came out to show their support. To the artists, musicians and donators – Thank you everyone!”

Christopher Butcher, manager of The Beguiling and Director of the Toronto Comics Art Festival: “Japan has been an inspiring, near-mythical presence in my life since I was very young, and their culture and traditions have had a huge influence on my writing and career. Coming together with so many like-minded people to give something back has been similarly inspiring, and I’m humbled by the generosity of our volunteers, artists, DJs, and the hundreds of attendees who came to the event. Thanks everyone and please, if at all possible, don’t stop giving.”

The organizers would also like to thank the many volunteers and supporters who helped make the event a success, including: all of the wonderful artists and publishers who donated art and other items for our silent auction; Jeff at Imaginism; Michael, Akiko, Magda, Marc, Andrew, and Shane who helped out on the day-of; Peter Birkemoe and The Beguiling; Joe Saturnino and the entire staff of Revival.

ABOUT:

Artists Help Japan is a charity movement initiated by Dice Tsutsumi, an art director at Pixar Animation Studios, who was also behind 2008 Totoro Forest Project to help preserve Sayama Forest in Japan and Sketchtravel Project, to gather the force of communities of artists and creative minds around the world. We believe artists have special roles to contribute to the society. http://artistshelpjapan.blogspot.com/

Artists Help Japan: Toronto was spearheaded by Imaginism Studios President and illustrator Bobby Chiu, who was contacted by Dice Tsutsumi to run the Toronto event. Working with Illustrator Alvin Lee, UDON Entertainment CEO Erik Ko, writer/artist Jim Zubkavich, and Christopher Butcher of Toronto comic book store The Beguiling and the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, the team brought together Toronto’s diverse and exciting artistic community to engage the public in an unprecedented fundraising endeavour.

Participating artists at Artists Help Japan: Toronto included: Agnes Garbowska, Alex Milne, Alvin Lee, Bobby Chiu, Brian McLachlan, Chip Zdarsky, Dale Keown, Eric Kim, Eric Vedder, Francis Manapul, Jason Bradshaw, Jeff Lemire, Jim Zub, Joe Ng, Julie Faulkner, Kagan Mcleod, Kalman Andrasofszky, Kei Acedera, Ken Lashley, Marcio Takara, Marcus To, Michael Cho, Ramon Perez, Ray Fawkes, Scott Hepburn, Stuart Immonen, Svetlana Chmakova, and a number of other local artists who showed up on the day of the event to offer their support and assistance!

Participating DJs at Artists Help Japan: Toronto included: Riviera [Perfecto,Myth, Kinetika NYC], Felix & Gani [Milk. Audio], Lazy Ray [Nighttrackin'], Gerrence [Nighttrakkin'], Alvaro G [Kings Of Late Night], Roland Gonzales [Studio+], Carlovega [Studio+], Jason Ulrich [Lab.Our Union],Shingo [Hot Sauce], Uncle Matty & Dutty Maus [The Beacs], and Illscience.

All proceeds from Artists Help Japan: Toronto will be donated to the Canadian Red Cross, specifically earmarked to aid in Japanese earthquake and tsunami relief. http://www.redcross.ca/

SPONSORS:

Revival Bar has been entertaining guests, visitors and fans as a premium event space since 2002. Revival generously donated the use of their main space for the Artists Help Japan: Toronto event, and donated $1 from the cost of every drink towards fundraising efforts. http://www.revivalbar.com/

The Beguiling Books and Art is Canada’s premiere source for comics, comix, and high-art funnybooks. Visit us online at http://beguiling.com.

TORONTO—Toronto’s Illustration and Artistic Community comes together on April 17th in a 12 hour art-event at Revival. The unique event will raise money to aid relief efforts in Japan following the devastating recent earthquake and tsunami there. Spearheaded by a consortium of Toronto illustration studios, the Artists Help Japan: Toronto event is the local iteration of a charity movement begun by Pixar Art Director Dice Tsutsumi. The Toronto edition will feature live art shows, a silent auction, and dozens of artists and illustrators selling commissioned drawings, with all proceeds benefiting the Canadian Red Cross.

“As artists we are tremendously inspired by Japan and Japanese culture,” says Bobby Chiu, the illustrator, teacher and founder of Toronto’s Imaginism studios behind the Artists Help Japan: Toronto event. “We were all personally affected by the quake, tsunami, and resulting damage. It is important to give back for all that Japan has given us, and we can think of no better way to do so than with our art.”

Artists Help Japan: Toronto will feature more than 24 artists and illustrators from the Greater Toronto Area creating original drawings for 12 hours! This is an unprecedented opportunity for the general public to commission an original drawing from a professional artist and watch its creation in process; the artist’s fee will be donated entirely to the Canadian Red Cross.

In addition:
- Dozens more cartoonists will donate original art, books, and other rare items to be featured in a silent-auction on-site at Revival Bar.
- Live art demonstrations from Toronto Illustrators on stage, with the final pieces to be auctioned off live at the event
- $1 from the sale of every drink at Revival Bar will be donated to the Canadian Red Cross.

Admission to the ARTISTS HELP JAPAN: TORONTO event is free, and all ages are welcome. The event will run from 12 Noon to 12 Midnight.

ABOUT:

Artists Help Japan is a charity movement initiated by Dice Tsutsumi, an art director at Pixar Animation Studios, who was also behind 2008 Totoro Forest Project to help preserve Sayama Forest in Japan and Sketchtravel Project, to gather the force of communities of artists and creative minds around the world. We believe artists have special roles to contribute to the society. http://artistshelpjapan.blogspot.com/

Artists Help Japan: Toronto is spearheaded by Imaginism Studios President and illustrator Bobby Chiu, who was contacted by Dice Tsutsumi to run the Toronto event. Working with Illustrator Alvin Lee, Udon Entertainment CEO Erik Ko, writer/artist Jim Zubkavich, and Christopher Butcher of Toronto comic book store The Beguiling and the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, the team hopes to bring together Toronto’s diverse and exciting artistic community to engage the public in an unprecedented fundraising endeavour.

All proceeds from Artists Help Japan: Toronto will be donated to the Canadian Red Cross, specifically earmarked to aid in Japanese earthquake and tsunami relief.http://www.redcross.ca/

SPONSORS:

Revival Bar has been entertaining guests, visitors and fans as a premium event space since 2002. Revival has generously donated the use of their main space for the Artists Help Japan: Toronto event, and will be donating $1 from the cost of every drink to the fundraising efforts.http://www.revivalbar.com/

Hello Friends,

The Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow is proud to present the Toronto Premiere of Yosuke Fujita’s comedy FINE TOTALLY FINE on TUESDAY, April 5th at THE REVUE CINEMA at 7:00PM. 100% of the proceeds from this screening will be going to Japanese earthquake/ tsunami relief. TICKETS ONLY $8.00 AT THE DOOR!

Yosuke Fujita has made a truly feel good indie comedy with his story of Teruo (YosiYosi Arakawa), a tree trimmer whose mission in life is to make the scariest haunted house experience in Japan. He enlists the help of … his best friend Hisanobu (Yoshinori Okada), a hospital administrator, in his bone-chilling plans, but Hisanobu is starting to doubt if two guys heading into their 30′s should really be spending their time trying to scare the life out of people. The lives of these two friends takes a turn when accident prone artist Akari (Yoshino Kimura) comes to work at Hisanobu’s hospital. Can wanting to terrify people, growing up and falling in love co-exist in these two slackers’ lives?

100% proceeds from this screening of FINE TOTALLY FINE will go directly to SUPPORT JAPAN – GAMBARE/ JustGiving, a relief fund created by Yuko Shiomaki, the president of PICTURES DEPT., the distributor of FINE TOTALLY FINE. Japan is facing its greatest crisis since WW2. Please come out to see a great film and to help those in need! Read more about JustGiving here: http://justgiving.jp/c/3385

Thanks to Pictures Dept. and Third Window Films for making this event possible.

SEE THE TRAILER HERE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIVJxdcRuI&feature=related

READ A REVIEW HERE: http://jfilmpowwow.blogspot.com/2009/01/review-fine-totally-fine.html

Hope to see you all at the screening on the 5th!

Best,

Chris MaGee

Founder & Editor & Chief
The Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow

I’m having a tough time with what’s going on in Japan right now. I never visited Sendai but we did travel through/nearby in 2009, on our way from Nikko to Aomori. It’s further south than I had thought, about half way between the northern tip of Japan’s main island and Tokyo. Travelling by train I saw a lot of the countryside; the news reports from the area matched my memories of travelling which has made the disaster more personal. I still can’t imagine what it’s like for the people who are there though, and my sympathies and condolences go out to everyone affected.

I’ve donated a few dollars and watched the news constantly, and at this point there’s not much else to do. I did want to put up a brief post saying that I hope things get better, and if you’ve ever enjoyed my travelogues or photos of Japan I hope you’ll consider donating a few dollars to the various organizations trying to aid folks in distress.

I recommend: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/, who are the first organization to send people and aid into the hardest-hit areas.

Also the Red Cross is setting up a relief fund. If you text REDCROSS to number 30333 in Canada, or 90999 in the U.S., you can donate $5 or $10 really easily and every little bit helps.

Thanks for anything you can do,

- Chris

“One of the things I most hate to see on manga-related forums are comments like, “I’m interested in this series, but I don’t know if they’re going to cancel it, so I’ll wait a bit and see if it continues.”

“You know what practically GUARANTEES that something will get dropped from publication? Not putting your money where your mouth is and picking up volume 1.

“This sounds snarky, and I know everyone has to prioritize his or her budget, especially in tight times, but seriously—this is a business that relies heavily on perceived demand, and how do we know there’s a demand for a title if no one is picking it up?  I think there’s an idea in the fandom that the manga market is a lot bigger than it actually is, and if you pass on a volume for now, enough people will still buy it that it’ll stick around for a while. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the case–Manga is a hit-driven business, and most series only get one chance to get out there and succeed.”

- Tokyopop Representative “TPHENSHU” on the realities of manga publishing

Someone named “TPHENSHU” on the Tokyopop website addresses the question of why certain series “go on hiatus”, by turning the practice around and blaming it on the fans.

See, here’s the thing. The rest of that article (http://www.tokyopop.com/TPHenshu/tp_article/3180353.html) is actually a really straight-forward, plainly spoken explanation of how book publication, distribution, and sales works. It’s a smart explanation, and incredibly helpful. Some of the finer points are disagreeable to me personally (particularly the enthusiasm for print-on-demand, though that at least is somewhat tempered by describing it as an ‘emerging’ technology) but at the core of the article is a very real problem; the combatative attitude between this Tokyopop employee–and really Tokyopop in general–and their fans. You don’t start off an answer to a frequently asked question on your website by complaining about your customers. You don’t do any one of dozens of weird aggressive things Tokyopop has done over the past 10 years or so (running Sailor Moon in the same magazine as Parasyte? Really?), but that’s a big one.

And the thing is I don’t disagree with the frustration expressed by the TP staffer. Standing behind the counter at the store, it can be brutal to hear customers say things like “I really like that series but I’m not going to buy it because they might drop it half way through.” Hell, it’s even more angering to hear a customer (or potential customer) say “I’m not going to buy that because I already read it online.” But if I responded to such comments with, say, “People like you saying things like that is what’s killing manga!” I would get creeped-out, blank looks as the once-potential-customers backed out of the store, never to return.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is unacceptable.

If you want to be “that guy” who attempts to treat every uninformed statement by a potential customer as a “teachable moment,” go ahead. His name is Jeff Anderson. (Admittedly I do pick my battles on this front, only engaging folks on the subject of piracy who, after saying something dumb, twig to the fact that saying something like that out loud was at least slightly socially inappropriate in a store dedicated to selling such material.)

But look at the history of manga publishing in North America and you can see it’s filled with unexpected and unfair treatment of customers, particularly in regards to series dropped in the middle of runs. Even putting aside the incredibly poor business decision of randomly insulting your customers, how can you really blame anyone who’s had their heart broken when it comes to a favourite manga series for being cautious on future series? A reader who has 14 volumes of a never-to-be-completed 26 volume series looks at those books on their shelf and feels personally and financially betrayed, a loss of hundreds of dollars, dozens of hours, all from a company who won’t even acknowledge the fact that they’re cancelling the series publicly, or the reasons for it. Manga publishers’ behaviour regarding series cancellation (“going on hiatus”), and Tokyopop’s in particular, have been absolutely abhorrent. For them to criticize their fans for ill feelings that they created?

Poor form.

- Christopher

Censoring Manga for Fun and Profit
Featuring Christopher Butcher from The Beguiling
Wed Feb 23, 2011, 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
@ Lillian H. Smith Library, 239 College Street (just east of Spadina)
FREE, Registration required

There are the changes you know about, when Japanese manga (comics and graphic novels) make their way across the Pacific to North America–translation, localization, touch-ups–and the changes you might not. Beguiling Bookstore manager Christopher Butcher talks about the many surprising and unfortunate ways manga are censored in North America, as artistic integrity is sacrificed out of fear and a desire to maximize profit–and what you can do about it! The presentation includes ideas and images intended for a mature audience. Register in person or call 416-393-7746. A Freedom to Read week event.

–

Hi everybody! Chris here. As you can see above, I’m going to be doing a talk on manga censorship, why it’s done, and what you as readers can do about it (hint: the answer isn’t scanlations). I actually gave a short interview about the talk to Vit Wagner at The Toronto Star yesterday, and you can see it online (and theoretically in the paper–though I missed my chance to grab a copy) at thestar.com.

I just wanted to point out (as I will in the talk) that this event owes a huge debt to Jason Thompson, who has really pioneered this discussion and whose presentation I’m using as a springboard for my own. Jason has very kindly allowed me use of his research and images, and I’m extremely grateful. I highly recommend that you check out what he’s had to say on the matter of censorship at these links:

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/editorial/2008-12-11/christopher-handley/jason-thompson
http://www.tcj.com/manga/sakura-con-2010-censorship-in-manga/
http://khyungbird.livejournal.com/ – His Livejournal

…and to check out his weekly column House Of 1000 Manga every week at:

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/house-of-1000-manga/

As for my talk, it’s going to go after particularly heinous examples of censorship, get into some of the reasons behind the changes, and into a larger discussion about censorship and manga in regards to the new laws in Tokyo and with our own beloved Canada Customs. It should be a lively discussion. Oh, and there will be adult images shown, so get parental permission before coming out kids!

- Chris

Hi there! My name is Christopher Butcher and in addition to running this fine blog, I’m also the Director of the 2011 Toronto Comic Arts Festival, or TCAF as we call it. TCAF is an annual comics event held in Toronto, Canada, inside the massive Toronto Reference Library. It attracts about 12,000 people over two days, and features readings, panel discussions, interviews, gallery exhibitions, and a massive exhibition of talented cartoonists from around the world, selling and displaying their wares. The next Festival is May 7th and 8th, 2011, and you can find out more about it at http://www.torontocomics.com.

Earlier this week, it was my great pleasure to announce that TCAF will be welcoming acclaimed Japanese manga creator Usamaru Furuya to the 2011 Festival. Furuya-san will be on hand to support his brand new English-language manga Lychee Light Club, published by Vertical Inc. and which will be debuting at TCAF. Furuya-san’s series for VIZ Media‘s Shonen Jump Advanced line, Genkaku Picasso, will also be finishing its three-volume serialization in May with the third volume possibly making an early appearance at the show. We appreciate the support of Vertical Inc., VIZ Media, and Japanese publisher Ohta Books in making this appearance happen–it’s a rare and unique thing to have one manga creator at a North American event–last week we announced the fabulous Natsume Ono as a Featured Guest–but to have two such talented and Japanese cartoonists is frankly unprecedented.

I want to talk a little bit about Furuya-san’s work. First and foremost, he’s one of my personal favourite cartoonists. He’s a unique, compelling, and incredibly talented creator with a vivid back-catalogue of work. His manga is incredibly varied, first appearing in North America in the cutting edge manga magazine Pulp with the series Short Cuts, published by VIZ Media. This humourous exploration of Japanese youth culture, and where it intersects with the ‘adult’ world, moved rapidly between strips, and sometimes in the same strip, from outré to shocking to laugh-out-loud funny to bizarrely touching, and is fondly remembered amongst alt-manga fans… myself included. Quite honestly much of the deeper appreciation for Japanese culture that I’ve developed came out of Short Cuts and its serialization in Pulp, a fact which is doubtlessly horrifying several of the people who read this. It shouldn’t be so surprising though–Short Cuts engaged an emerging Japanese youth culture and also explained it to a larger Japanese audience, and to have something like that translated for a North American audience was about as ‘inside’ and ‘authentic’ as you could get. Floppy-socked Japanese school girls, taking paid dates and listening to the hottest visual rock bands, all of this is taken for granted as a staple of Japanese culture from a North American vantage point here in 2011; in 2000 it was revelatory for me. The serialization in Pulp and the two-volume collection published by VIZ Media were enormously affecting; I’ve read and lent the series out many times.

An excerpt from Short Cuts. © Usamaru Furuya

A page from Palepoli. © Usamaru Furuya. Click for full size.

His debut manga Palepoli ran in the seminal underground manga magazine Garo, and has been lightly excerpted in North America in the sadly out of print works Secret Comics Japan (an amazing anthology of alternative Japanese comcis featuring the likes of Junko Mizuno and others) and Tokyo Edge (a mostly-text guide to Japanese underground culture written by the Editors of Pulp). Furuya’s mix of surrealism, superior craft, and an unwillingness to be bound by social mores in Palepoli was instantly appealing to me, and repeated rereadings of those precious few pages have revealed even greater depth, meaning, and humour. I wish, one day, that the series would be translated into English.

And that was it for a while.

Pulp sadly folded, taking with it the majority of alt- and underground manga releases for a little while, and seriously stalled manga-for-grownups for a little while, and the industry became very focused on boys adventure comics and girls romance comics for a little while. Not a bad thing, but not generally where my interests lie. Luckily Furuya’s career continued unabated in Japan, and surprisingly, in France. Owing to our bilingual heritage we stock French comics (including manga) at The Beguiling where I work, and new works from Furuya would appear from time to time. His manga are championed by Nouvelle Manga movement originator Frederic Boilet (whose own comics have been published in English by Fanfare/Ponent-Mon), and consequently where anglophones had a 9 year gap between Furuya projects, popular series like La Musique de Marie, Le Cercle du Suicide, and the recent Tokyo Magnitude 8 have continued to impress French audiences. His work is also very popular amongst scanlators and the grey market, it must be said, though I feel like popularizing that fact will hinder future releases of his work.

On that note, it was on my trips to Japan starting in 2007 that I started picking up Japanese editions of Furuya’s manga. By Japanese language skill is still almost non-existent, but anyone who’s looked at one of Furuya’s manga will agree that you can get a lot out of the drawings. I own 10 or 11 of his works in Japanese, and I’d love for them all to be replaced one day with English editions. His 51 Ways To Save Her was one of the announced but unreleased works from the doomed CMX manga line. Will we see it one day?

Recently, surprisingly… almost bizarrely, Furuya showed up again at VIZ with Genkaku Picasso, a gloriously demented short manga series about the inner lives of teenagers, and a boy tasked by God with helping the lives of those around him using his profound artistic talent. One element of Furuya’s work I haven’t touched on is his incredible draftsmanship. His work has a clarity and skill that is above average even in Japan, and he’s an expert at the human figure (especially cute girls…). He’s also incredibly creative, drawing objects and situations that most people couldn’t conceive of… and when you’re drawing the dreamish, nightmarish inner worlds of teenagers, that is a skill that will serve you very well. The series looks great, and is hilarious and disturbing and entertaining… of much more interest to an older audience than the “Shonen Jump Advanced” tag might imply.

Which brings us to Lychee Light Club, debuting at TCAF from Vertical Inc. I’ve got the Japanese version, and while gorgeous it’s certainly bizarre–learning that the series is actually a comedy (a dark comedy), set against the beautifully rendered violence and gore of the original? Well that’s going to add a lot I feel. But really, let me say again, the book is gorgeous. I’m really looking forward to reading it in English.

It was also just announced that Vertical has picked up another 3 volume series from Furuya, debuting this September and being released every two months, so I have that to look forward to too! And quite honestly, so do you. I feel incredibly lucky to share the work of one of my favourite manga-ka with all of you, and for those of us who’ll be in Toronto this May getting to meet him will be an additional thrill. Even if you can’t come, make sure to check out Genkaku Picasso, track down the two trade paperbacks of Short Cuts, and pick up Lychee Light Club when it appears in stores this spring.

And learn French. Musique de Marie and Suicide Circle are highly unlikely to be released in English.

For more on Furuya, check out:

- Unofficial Website: http://www4.airnet.ne.jp/mikami/UsamaruFuruya/en/index.html

- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Usamaru-Furuya/204452936604

- Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usamaru_Furuya

- Lambiek (Short Cuts era): http://lambiek.net/artists/f/furuya_u.htm

- Anime News Network: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/people.php?id=7174

- Future Shipwreck’s Appreciation: http://futureshipwreck.com/2010/07/usamaru-furuya/

- Christopher

“We have a difficult time talking about things in comics. This is weird in that any reasonably large Twitter feed will tell you that people in comics talk all the damn time. So it’s not lack of practice, obviously.

“A lot of what was specifically distressing about the reaction to the video was how many old, corny, early Internet argument constructions still hold sway, ways of arguing that that should have been dragged into the light and staked a long time ago.

“That people shouldn’t be allowed to complain unless they solve the problem they’re complaining about is a ludicrous notion given two seconds thought.

“That a huge subset of superhero comics fans chose to regard this video as they’ve processed every argument since 1974 with a critical component — as some sort of full-bore assault on themselves and their tastes — is just sort of pathetic at this point.

“That comics people tend to cede to corporations some “right” to do whatever the hell they want as long as they don’t get put in jail, without criticism, because that’s the obligation these companies have to their stockholders remains stunning to me. It’s alarming partly because it’s a repugnant view, or at least I feel that way, but also because the history of comics is full of examples of companies and businesses acting humanely rather than inhumanely, making a choice of one thing over another on the basis of something other than ruthless self-interest.

“After 15 years working in comics and 14 and a half months on the comics Internet, I never need to see the word “hypocrite” again.

“Ditto the idea that anyone that criticizes anything does so from a cross-armed position of moral superiority and it’s that assumed smug state, rather than the argument or issue itself, that needs to be brought down.

“We have a lot of hang-ups, the comics community, and it will be much easier to move forward if we’re honest about when those come into play. We might at least try to find new ways of saying these things, so that we know something is being said instead of clichés being brandished. This wasn’t our finest discussion.”

That’s a quote from Tom Spurgeon’s rather lengthy reaction to Eric Powell’s video trumpeting creator rights. I’ve broken it up because Tom tends to write very densely and in a way that isn’t particularly friendly to the people that most need to hear his message (140 characters, Tom), and this is the internet, and I can do that. Go read the whole article, http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/index/a_brief_reaction_to_a_video_thats_already_been_taken_down/.

- Christopher

But I don’t doubt for a minute that dropping the code had nothing to do with Art and everything to do with The Bottom Line.  Much like during the time period where Marvel dropped the comics code, DC is in a period of intense financial and creative adjustment. Marvel spun their move as edgy and creator-driven, DC’s spinning theirs as a move towards ‘accuracy’ in ratings by having different age criteria, but ultimately what it comes down to is: it costs money to be participate in the comics code authority. How much money, I’ve got no idea, they don’t publish those figures and last I heard it was next-to-impossible to join the CCA. But regardless of how much it costs, any amount of money is more than just coming up with your own system and not paying membership dues.

I might not have immediately thought of this as a cost-cutting maneuverer if it hadn’t been for some of their other recent, penny-ante cost-cutting behaviour; they’ve stopped shrink-wrapping their dust-jacketed hardcovers for one. In a move that is probably saving them about 25 cents per book, DC has decided to send all of its dust-jacketed hardcovers to market sans the shrinkwrap that has protected them for lo, these many years, in a move that will almost certainly see more damaged books. We had a damaged dust jacket on the Starman Omnibus Volume 6 this week actually, that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It’s frustrating as a retailer to have that happen, for a dust-jacket, but many collectors are particular enough that a ding in a dust-jacket is unacceptable, and so the whole book is either more difficult to sell, or unsellable. Why did this happen? Well someone did the math and figured that the increase in damages would cost less than shrinkwrapping everything, and so a very nice thing that DC did went out the window, a tiny cost-cutting exercise on books that range in price from $30 to $60.

It’s a bummer.

I don’t really have much to say about their most loudly-touted cost-cutting manouver, reducing the price of their line to $2.99 a book (but with 20 pages of story content instead of 22), I think it’s a win-some/lose-some sort of decision that will attract certain customers while putting off others, who might already feel like the comic book format isn’t the best deal going.

Oh, and here’s a thing that hasn’t got much attention: They’re cancelling trade paperbacks. Here are a few recent ones:

**********

DC COMICS CANCELS ORDERS ON AZRAEL: KILLER OF SAINTS TP
DC Comics has cancelled all orders on the AZRAEL: KILLER OF SAINTS TP (DEC100247). This title will not be published.

**********

DC COMICS CANCELS ORDERS ON THE AUTHORITY: THE LOST YEAR BOOK TWO TP
DC Comics has cancelled all orders on THE AUTHORITY: THE LOST YEAR BOOK TWOTP (NOV100254). This title will not be published.

**********

Which, I mean lets face it, those are two VERY low selling books, but time was DC would publish both of those books, despite the low sales, just because they solicited them and were following through on a promise to the customer. Now, they’re not publishing books that don’t sell well, it’s one of those things that’s both amazing and obvious at the same time.**

I’ve also heard rumblings that I cannot really talk about that DC is going back to press on fewer titles than ever right now. Basically if it’s not making a certain sales target, it doesn’t get reprinted, regardless of whether or not it’s volume 1 of a series of trades that are still coming out. So DC fans, if you want a trade paperback, I humbly suggest that you buy that trade paperback when you see it–those books might not be in print more-or-less indefinitely anymore.***

Which all puts into perspective a quote I read from either Alonso, Quesada, or Brevoort a few weeks back, just after the editorial shake-ups at Marvel that had people promoted all over the place. One of them, and I wish I could find that interview for you, basically repeated the truism that DC doesn’t have to make money at comics, they get all that big licensing money and so they don’t have to worry about sales and things and that’s why things are different at Marvel. Before the last few months I’d be inclined to believe that, but it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that the bottom line is starting to really matter at DC, as they pinch pennies, opt-out of membership dues, and decide to stop killing trees for books no one seems to want.

Good on them.

- Christopher

* I’m sure I’ll grow out of it.

** I’m all for publishing Art that doesn’t sell well but is of quality, literary or artistic. Sales are not the only barometer of quality, and I applaud those who believe in a work so strongly who decide  that despite apathy of hostility from the marketplace that a piece of art must be seen: bravo. But publishing Azrael trades that no one wants makes the Lorax cry.

*** As an aside that doesn’t directly tie-into this essay, I will note that there are positive changes in DC’s Collected Editions dept. as well, including the fact that much-demanded-by-retailers graphic novels of SUGAR & SPIKE and FLEX MENTALLO have finally, finally been added to the publication schedule. Shake-ups all over, it seems.

But I would submit even 2 hours after that ‘news story’ has been posted, any other ‘news site/blog’ talking about that story has a responsibility to bring more to the story than “Here is the news that another site posted! I’m including all of the news they posted, but I’m not adding anything, thereby ensuring that you don’t need to visit their site.” It’s doubly problematic because, while you are linking them you’re creating no reason for your readership to follow that link back to where the news originated, so that’s kinda cheap, AND you’re also adding nothing, because as you yourself have pointed out: the news is already out there, what you’ve done is entirely superfluous. Entirely.

So if you feel like you need to have the information contained within the news item reposted to your site, in part or (sigh) in full, it would be nice if you could add something. An opinion, either yours or that of a colleague of the subject. Or Erik Larsen, he has something to say about everything. Further, if you’re reposting the content of someone else’s news item but it is no longer “new”, but you are doing things like saying “…and no one knows how signing this contract with DC will affect Creator X’s creator-owned work,” then you’re not just superfluous–you’re LAZY. Because let’s face it, if I (me) can call up DC Comics or the Creator in question and get an answer to the question you’re raising, and do it in under 5 minutes, then YOU could’ve done the same thing. You just didn’t want to. You decided the post was good enough, and really it wasn’t. It was weak and lame and you should’ve worked harder.

And here’s the kicker, rather than just reposting the content of someone else’s news, you could’ve generated content! You could’ve had exclusive information–NEWS–of your own, if you could’ve answered how this would affect Creator X’s creator-owned work, which means that everyone would link to You AND the site that broke the news. Cool beans!

Linkblogging is linkblogging, yes, but if you’re going to go to the trouble of pulling what is essentially a link out into its own post at LEAST make sure the 5 Ws of basic journalism are covered before you hit publish. It would ensure a much-better informed readership, and better site statistics for you. Win-Win.

Thanks,

- Chris

Those strong feelings are part of the reason why I rarely participate in comics journalism or the discussion thereof anymore. The other part is that I have moved, with the creation of TCAF and my general… being-around-ness… from a commentator to a content producer. Tearing into a comics journalist or journalism site, while often necessary and frankly personally rewarding now has the added bonus of blowing back onto creators, stores, and organizations I work with. Big picture, there’s not much to be gained. So it was probably ill-advised that today, when creator Jess Fink started complaining about the superhero-centric focus of most comics websites (at the expense of every other kind of comic being created), I offered my 2 cents.

My thesis? The reason “comic” sites write more about superheroes is that those stories get more views. Most of the bigger comic websites are advertising driven, and there’s just not a ton of money out there in mid-sized ad-driven websites. Every unique visitor counts. Every pageview counts. And, flat-out, there are more people interested in superheroes, on average, than there are literary comics, or even non-superhero genre work. I personally believe that there is a possibility for a greater segment of the population to enjoy literary and general fiction than genre fiction, but the numbers right now say otherwise. Simple economics, most literary comics are stand-alone graphic novels that print what, 4k-10k for the midlist to moderate hits? That’s respectable, that’ll make the publisher and the creator money. But an average superhero book from DC or Marvel is doing 20k-30k, which is already 2x to 6x more, and it’s doing that every month. To say nothing of the filthy pirates who don’t pay for comics. It’s just more eyeballs.

And when you add superhero movies to the mix, or the possibility of superhero movies, that draws in an even bigger section of the general public–”people who see movies.” It’s a bit like what Patton Oswald was talking about, the mainstreaming of nerd culture. It’s the steady mainstreaming of nerd websites to make them palatable and interesting to general audiences–for the huge pageviews, and the advertising dollar that goes with them.

How much hype did Scott Pilgrim get for that last book? How much did it get for the first 2 or 3 books? Did the media attention for volumes 5 and 6, the attendant interviews with O’Malley, profiles, background articles, all of that, did it numerically outweigh all of the press that every other Oni book combined got in the year 2008? Or 2007 and 2008 combined maybe? That’s the game. Sure it sucks to be Cory Casoni at Oni Press fielding 450 press requests in 8 months for one book when you’ve got 65 other releases to promote and media cannot even hear you when you pitch them unless “that guy, you know, Scott Pilgrim, unless we can get him to talk about the other books that you publish and he says which ones would also make good movies.” Sucks but that’s the game.

Smart PR people at literary comics publishers, or independent genre publishers (Cory Casoni of Oni Press included) can and do place stories all the time though. When you’ve got a book with a good angle, or you’ve got a movie deal, or you’ve got the prospect of a movie deal, or you’re just really f’ing persistant, you can get the corporate comics sites to pay attention. It particularly helps if it’s a genre fiction book–zombies, crime, sci-fi, military, whatever happens to be most popular at the time. Those stories are great, but they generally get considerably less commentary, less attention, and fewer page views than say… speculating on the cast of the possible Ant-Man movie. That’s why (generally) you’re not going to see much at those sites that isn’t specifically designed for the big audience. It’s gotta be the favourite of an individual writer working there or something similar. Ultimately the people working at these sites get paid by ad revenue, and the articles that get the most views are the ones that generate that revenue, and those are generally superheroes, or superhero movies, or according to Bleeding Cool, superhero porn movies (Batporn #1 article 18 weeks running).

And I Mean This: Not that there’s anything wrong with that. At least, not specific to comics, the comics industry, or comics journalism.

Because lets face it: Corporate journalism on the whole is kind of sliding into the abyss, isn’t it? As above so below; ratings equal ad dollars equals a capitalist society, and so CNN runs stories on celebrity pets or whatever nonsense will keep them from sliding into total obscurity, while Fox News just out and out lies to people, every day, demonstrably filling them full of fear making them terrified to turn off the TV, and man, that’s how you score the big ad dollars! Make people afraid to turn the channel.

So who gives a fuck if corporate comic news site ‘a’ is mostly concerned with the recent developments of the green lantern or the wolverine? I don’t buy the argument that they’re ‘supposed’ to be concerned with anything in particular besides making sure the lights stay on. And really, there are so many much larger, much more pervasive, and more damaging problems facing comics as an industry than books I personally like getting less media attention than books I do not care for. Sure, it’s all tied together, distribution, fair contracts, and the attention a book or creator receives, but one of those things is the weak link in the importance chain.

No, corporate sites have a corporate responsibility to sell, and the masses seem to be most engaged by things I’m not that into, and so those sites pretty-much disappear off my radar. I actually feel good for not knowing how much people hated JMS’ Superman “grounded” stories until it popped up in the year-end-reviews on sites I do read. I feel like a good person for not having known that. I am glad that the few comics news sites in my feed reader–ComicsReporter.com, Robot 6, The Beat, PW Comics Week–do not generally bother me with the 3-5 press releases that Marvel send daily (seriously) that I get in my inbox anyway, informing me that NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME (got that one twice last year) and that THE ONLY PLACE TO GO FOR MARVEL COMICS IS MARVEL.COM TO DOWNLOAD THEM (that one was my favourite). Thanks, guys and gals.

And if you’re like, a douche, who wants to pull one sentence out of context in order to hammer me with some imaginary straw-man argument, let me save you the trouble: I know I’m biased, I know I’m not being particularly fair to people who want to earn a paycheck and/or parlay their interview with a creator into working at the same company as that creator. I’m not cut out for producing regular content day in and day out, I totally couldn’t hack the comics journalism game and pay my rent. BY ALL MEANS feel free to write me off. But I’ve been watching internet comics journalism since Newsarama was just a dude on Usenet, and I didn’t much like him, so I feel like I’ve got enough time and experience invested despite my biases (and failings). Hell, because of them.

Ultimately what it comes down to is, the content I find disappointing and weak and shallow is the stuff that attracts the biggest audience of crazy people in the comments section arguing about how shallow it is, and every comment is worth actual money to those sites. I’d like to do something about it, contribute more blogging, more reviews, more journalism, but I did 3 dozen interviews, thousands of blog posts, and wrote a book over the last 10 years, and I think for the time being I’d rather curate comic shows and sell good books and help out individual creators and publishers I like. Only so many hours in the day.

So, yeah, Comics Journalism isn’t what I want it to be, but luckily that is someone else’s problem. If that’s you: Good luck!

- Christopher
P.S.: The solution is for writers to find a balance not only between “what sells” and “what they love”, but in representing the entire medium in new ways. If everyone is covering every Marvel and DC press release, then no one is building a loyal audience. If you’re covering those press releases and sneaking an article about Moto Hagio’s revolutionary speculative fiction in shoujo comics of the 1960s or Jim Ottavianni’s new Richard Feynman biography from First Second onto IO9.com, then you’re going to hook someone at your site who’s going to stay for the long haul because you’ve offered content that no one else has. My 2 cents.

I came across Spurge’s thoughts on NYCC last night, and the thing that stuck out at me was that he thought despite giving out 2900 press passes, the show did not get 2900 press passes worth of coverage. Now, while I might suggest that NYCC organizers Reed being able to sell access to 2900 members of the press is worth it’s weight in gold (let alone free admissions to the Comic Con), I will admit that my own coverage was somewhat anemic and so I thought I’d follow-up with my thoughts on the show.

I will also intersperse those thoughts with photographs so you don’t get bored.

My first thought on NYCC, and this is brutally unfair I know, is that Reed has utterly and completely blown it with this show. What I mean by that is that they had a chance, a real chance, at doing a book- and comic-oriented event, that engaged people with the work. There’s a lot of room within that description to have famous people and spectacle, but the promise of NYCC–to me–was that this could be a book show, a comics show, a successful event that could be the antithesis of San Diego Comic Con’s Freak Parade.

Make no mistake, New York Comic Con is a Freak Parade.

And that is exactly what the organizers were hoping for.

Like I said, this is a profoundly unfair thought… It’s not kosher to judge the relative success or failure of an event based on what you hoped it might be. Sure, that first year was more modest, with (to my recollection) less of a focus on stardom and more of a focus on creators/authors/artists. Modest, publisher-oriented booths, programming that centered equally on the business-side and fandom-side of things. Maybe it was the then-presence of a reasonably vital Wizardworld: Chicago to take some of the burden off of NYCC needing to be the North-East version of SDCC, but that first year, it looked like NYCC could turn into anything.

And anything is what it seems to have turned into.

Walking in the main exhibition entrance, one was greeted by a giant booth which blared Michael Jackson songs all weekend. There was a stage with dancers–you could even get up and dance with them–trying their best to capture and replicate the late pop-singer’s moves as directed by a videogame (out this Christmas!). It’s hard not to smile when you come across a giant stage with a Michael Jackson impersonator and backup dancers aggressively “Beat-It”-ing; it was a genuinely fun moment.

It just also happened to be the death-knell for NYCC as a comics/book event.

Massive video-game booths taking up huge swaths of the floor, give-away masks/hats/swag bags, all that was missing was a giant golden throne. Maybe they needed it on set.

So yeah, NYCC has become SDCC-East, which is personally disappointing (because I already _go_ to SDCC), but I think we’ve covered that. How did it succeed as SDCC-East? Well, the part of me that wants to be invited next year is inclined to be more charitable than I otherwise might, so let me say first and foremost that a the show was  intensely marketed, and people showed up, and they had a good time. Those are, to my mind, the three most positive things I can say about the show.

Personally, I’d take issue with the way it was marketed, the number of people that showed up, and why people had a good time, but that’s because I’m kind of curmudgeonly.

Last one first: I had a great time in New York last weekend. Seriously, it was great, and the con was a good part of that, and I’m grateful for that experience. I met a lot of wonderful people and met people in person for the first time, it was valuable personally and professionally. That couldn’t have happened without NYCC being a big-enough draw to get all those folks, myself included, out to New York in the first place.

But has been pointed out online already, how much of an excuse does anyone really need to go to New York City in the first place? It’s AMAZING, I ? NY a great deal and would go every weekend, if I could afford it.

Not to discount NYCC’s good fortune at taking place in NYC , but I feel like that’s the starting point, the plateau: “Hey, this is New York City. People are gonna wanna come.” There are more people in NYC than in all of Canada; you’ve got a massive built-in audience, a massive talent-pool, it’s easy to get to, plenty of hotels, and an international tourist destination. Unless you don’t want people showing up to your event, it’s easy to get people to come to your event… or at least a hell of a lot easier than San Diego. Or Toronto for that matter. It’s easy to have a good time in New York, and hella-easy for nerds to have a good time if you throw a bunch of them in a big room together. That isn’t the best indicator of success, it might not even be a particularly good one.

Which brings us to the crowds: Thank Christ No One Died. I don’t say that lightly, I really don’t. The show was a zoo, particularly Saturday 12-4, wall-to-wall people. San Diego at its absolute worst. The aisles were too narrow in the main hall by at least 2 feet, and they were far narrower in the Small Press Pavilion on the south side of the convention centre. Worse still, the Small Press Pavilion was adjacent to artist alley, and the aisles didn’t match up creating HUGE human-traffic jams in the aisle that connected them.

Overstuffed.

This isn’t just bitching. I mean, it’s bitching, I’m not backing away from the tone of this as unnecessarily cranky, but Saturday at the show felt legitimately unsafe at points. I really felt like very little thought had gone into the layout of the hall from a safety/traffic point of view. Whether they had a layout that needed to be entirely trashed because of the construction or whether they came up with a bad design, the layout needs to be severely changed for 2011. Wide main aisles/throughfares to move people quickly from one end of the show to the other, fewer exhibitors crammed near essential services like escalators and washrooms(!), and what the hell was with the massive, empty space at the entrance to the south hall? Maybe we could’ve spaced out some of the Small Press booths into that space?

I will say that from an exhibitor POV, it was nice that the majority of medium-to-large publishers were clustered together making it easier to browse the stuff I was most-interested in. But honestly, it’s been like that since year one, and I feel like that’s more of a hold-over from previous shows than a conscious decision for 2010.

Which brings us to the marketing: Wow. Listed as Press for the event, I was put on the list fairly early and received at least one update a week from NYCC itself, and a hundred+ PR emails, almost exclusively from film and video game producers. I don’t know if the comics pubs just didn’t want to pony-up the dough to buy access to the press list, but the majority of comics promotion happened in the body of the NYCC emails, and again, felt paid-for or part of an in-kind promotion… and even then, they were exceptionally rare. No, both inwardly to subscribers and outwardly to the public, this was marketed as a POP CULTURE event, a freak parade by and for media-friendly Geeks, and a place to come and get your geek on. Come meet Stan Lee! Come see a J-Pop Band! Video Games! B-Movie Actors Film Guests! (There was comics content in almost all of the official NYCC emails I received, but it was always after other info, and other media.)

The marketing for the show, hell the whole website if you look at it, has a Carnival Barker vibe that’s… well, it’s successful as fuck. Seriously, it’s fucking amazing how many people showed up, talked about the show before it happened. It was happening. But this is starting to get into broken-record territory here–Reed STILL isn’t good at running consumer shows.

(Kind of telling that it took 20 paragraphs to get to the thesis…)

So Reed Exhibitions have integrated themselves with PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo, a video-game show that started as a grassroots effort that topped like 70k attendees this year. They’re wholesale-running PAX East, in Boston, in early 2011. PAX has always been a well-run show, nearly seamless and exceptionally enjoyable as an exhibtor, and as an attendee.

Reed has done everything in their power to figure out why PAX runs so well, and attempted to duplicate it to the best of their ability. For example, at PAX, the volunteers are called “Enforcers” and they will bend-over-backwards to help you. This year (and I believe this is the first year), NYCC branded all of their volunteers as “Heroes” and their yellow volunteer shirts had “Hero!” on the back. The staff shirts were red… and I don’t think they had anything on them.

The problem was, every volunteer I encountered was unempowered. They had the barest of instruction, and didn’t even feel confident in that.  There weren’t enough maps, and no one from one section knew anything about any other section, so no one could answer where anything was that wasn’t right in front of them. Any harder question was met with “ask my supervisor.” These weren’t random volunteers I asked either, these were people at the check-in desk. And this wasn’t just the first day, it was all weekend.

You can call your volunteer a ‘hero’ to thank them for helping out; I think that’s swell. But if you don’t give them any information, if you don’t empower them to basic questions, if you don’t even give them basic orientation, then you’ve done a poor job.

Which leaves you to rely on the convention centre security. I’ll say one thing about the Javitz Centre Security: They don’t give a FUCK. This was the antithesis of San Diego Comic Con in at least one way: there was almost no security, doing almost nothing, and by Sunday they’d given up entirely… which when you’ve got an overstuffed convention centre full of folks who’ve been invited in to stare at/be the freak show, creates more of those overcrowding problems I was talking about. A security “guard” at the south hall entrance couldn’t be bothered to tell people not to stop directly in the center of the narrow entrance way to talk. Literally looked over at them blocking the way, then looked away. I don’t like being the guy who shouts at comic book conventions, but “THERE ARE BETTER PLACES TO STAND” may have been uttered at one point. Loudly.

If one is going to be undiscerning about who one invites into their home, then it behooves one to make sure that one is prepared for what follows. I’d submit that NYCC was not, from a staff, volunteer, or security POV.

In Closing: I really felt like the show had a slapdash feel to it. Because Reed moved NYCC from February to October, they had more than 20 months between 2009 and 2010 to prepare the show, nearly two full years, and it felt considerably more poorly-organized than the 2009 show. I’m aware that as an event organizer (though on nowhere near this scale) I’m way more sensitive to organizational problems than the general public, and as such I try hard to pull back a little on criticism… and I did, honestly… (The programming, the integration of New York Anime Festival, the last-minuteness of their info going public). It’s tough because NYCC isn’t the show I’d run, but I can get over that to judge it in the context of the shows it’s decided it wants to be: SDCC and PAX. And honestly? It comes up short. Or at least this year it did.

So there are my thoughts on NYCC 2010. I had an amazing time, I got a bunch work done, and met some great people, but in the end I don’t think that’s going to be enough for me, for next year.

- Christopher
I’ll caption some of the photos later if I have time.

To that end, I’ve been very fortunate to be asked to speak in a number of venues over the coming months, and so I put together a little “Where’s Chris?” box on the right there, which lists all of the panels, seminars, and presentations I’ll be participating in in the coming months. Also if I’m going out of town for more than a few days I’ll try to list that cool, in case anyone wants to meet up while I’m travelling. Feel free to contact me and say hello, I’m generally very amenable to being bought a drink :) Here’s a quick outline of those upcoming engagements:

Oct 7-11 New York
Oct 7: ICv2 Digital Comics Conference (Press) – I’ll be covering ICv2′s Digital Comics Conference as ‘press’, which should be pretty interesting.
Oct 8-10: New York Comic-Con (Press) – Likewise, I’ll also be covering the whole New York Comic-Con as a member of the fourth estate, and I’m hoping to do some real blogging and coverage this year akin to some of my better coverage from years past.

I’ll also be participating in a panel discussion and giving a lecture at the show.

Saturday Oct 9:  Comic Events that Really Work Panel, 5pm-6pm, Room 1A17 (Speaker) - I’m going to be giving a lecture on how and why to run comics-related events, from micro to macro, book signings to Scott Pilgrim Parties to The Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and everything in between. I’m tailoring it to booksellers

Saturday Oct 9: Gay for You? Yaoi and Yuri Manga and GLBTQ Readers Panel, 7:30pm-8:30pm, Panel Room 2 (1E12) (Panelist) – A panel that will be not-at-all controversial! I’ll be joining a range of very cool ladies and gents from all aspects of the comics industry to talk about how yaoi and yuri intersect with actual Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Trans/Queer concerns.

Oct 25-Nov 8: Tokyo
I’m heading back to Tokyo for a buying trip for The Beguiling and, fingers crossed, for a touch of TCAF-related business. If you’re in the area and want to go for a drink, drop me a line.

Nov 14: Toronto: Gamercamp
I’ve been invited to lead a discussion on narrative and the intersection between comics and video games. Details tba, but will be announced soonish at http://www.gamercamp.ca/.

2011
Feb 23: Toronto: Freedom To Read Week
I’ll be a guest speaker for Toronto Public Library’s Freedom To Read Week. My Speech will be entitled “Censoring Manga For Fun And Profit”.

May 7-8: Toronto Comic Arts Festival (Festival Director)
Oh My God you guys. http://torontocomics.com/

- Christopher

Chris with Megaphone. Photo by Paul Hillier, http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadragebunny/

I swear, I was much happier than this last night.

Seriously, that was a pretty ridiculous night. We feel like there were over 2,000 people at the event, we did counts on the line and there were over 800 people lined up for Mal for the midnight signing (that went until about 3:45am). About that many in the “I just want my book” line, and people milling out, seeing bands, playing video games, listening to music, drinking, having a good time.

In short, it was the most successful event I’ve ever run. Thanks to everyone who helped out. Thanks to our sponsors. Thanks to Oni for helping us set it up. Thanks for coming out. Thanks for not calling the cops. Oh, and thanks to Mr. O’Malley, who basically killed himself in the service of comics… that’s all I really ask of anyone :)

- Christopher

May 24th: Zan Christiensen posts a great article about possible censorship concerns against gay-centric graphic novels at Apple’s App Store, for the iPad and iPhone.
http://prismcomics.org/display.php?id=1858

June 13th: The New York Times covers the case of ULYSSES SEEN, a graphic novel adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses that had non-sexual nudity edited out after demands by the appstore people. Rage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/technology/14ulysses.html

June 14th, 1:40am: I post a link to Zan’s article at Prism, add a little bit of commentary and additional thinking, call for comment. I feel bad for being behind the times…

June 14th, 10:40am: Tech blog Gizmodo picks up on the story of ULYSSES SEEN and THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST censorship.
http://gizmodo.com/5562802/the-latest-examples-of-apples-stupid-editorial-censorship

June 14th, 12:30pm: Awesome Gay Blog JoeMyGod publishes a story on the same issue, based on a reader tip.
http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/06/apple-censors-gay-graphic-novels-but.html

June 14th, 4pm: Gizmodo updates that Apple has apparently reversed its decision and has asked the creators of both ULYSSES SEEN and THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST to resubmit the unedited works for approval.

While it shouldn’t have taken a public, multi-site shaming to get Apple’s act together, I’m quite pleased that both sets of creators will get their work to be presented in the format they’d originally intended, and hopefully get a nice little sales boost from all of the attention. I’m glad that whatever small part I played in bringing the story to people’s attention helped resolve the situation, and kudos again to Zan for writing a great article and highlighting an obvious injustice. I hope the Yaoi Press people aren’t similarly left behind…

Which brings us to another issue, as mentioned by my friend Andrew Wheeler this morning:

@Wheeler: Given Apple’s censorship, shouldn’t intelligent liberals adamantly reject it as a publishing platform? Where’d our ethics go? I refer in part to the censorship of comic adaptations of Wilde http://tinyurl.com/37j3q3b and Joyce http://nyti.ms/9HzgFE

Matthew Seiden manning The Buenaventura Press table at TCAF 2009. Photo by Deb Aoki, manga.about.com.

Sad news today, as Alvin Buenaventura officially announced the end of his publishing company Buenaventura Press at the (excellent) group blog Blog Flume, to which he contributes.

“I deeply regret having to take these actions, but the press experienced a devastating financial blow that made it impossible to continue.”

While I do actually have a good handle on what that ‘blow’ was, it’s not my place to say if Alvin doesn’t want to talk about it just yet. The fact that he closed down Buenaventura Press in January and just told the public now implies the level of privacy he’d like, and that’s totally within his rights.

I really liked a lot of Buenaventura’s output–they’re the only North American publisher to have released work by the wonderful Tom Gauld for example, they were the amazing Vanessa Davis‘ first publishers, they took over the publishing duties of the outstanding Kramers Ergot and surprising Comic Art magazine, not to mention all of the other fabulous prints, comics, and books that they released over their short lifetime. They were a regular exhibitor at TCAF and they always put on a fantastic-looking display. They put out good work by good cartoonists, and it’s a shame that there’s now one less publisher doing that. Cheers Alvin, you did great work.

Which brings me to my next point: There are still a lot of awesome publishers around that could probably use a few of your hard-earned dollars in exchange for wonderful comic books.

Buenaventura Press at TCAF 2007. Photo by Jamie Coville.

I don’t want to turn this into a polemic or anything, I’m not trying to guilt or badger you into giving up your money, but I know more than anything how easy it is to get swept along in the day-to-day-discussion of comics, the bullshit Blackest-Night-Siege-Heroic-Age-Brightest-Day nonsense is fun because you can be a part of the conversation online about how terrible it all is, but when it comes to spending money on good books that don’t get as much discussion–but are going to hold up on your shelves and in your comic boxes a helluva lot better down the road–it really is worth your time and effort to check out some of the smaller and boutique publishers out there, because they’re often doing amazing stuff.

And I’m not setting this up as a mainstream versus indie debate–that’s fucking stupid. That’s over. This is about buying comics you like versus buying comics you don’t. And there are a lot of great books out there getting left out of the discussion that are great, that are worth your time. I do my best to promote them here on the blog, to sell them in the store, to give them a platform and an audience at TCAF, but sometimes it isn’t enough and I have to make a direct appeal like this.

So here’s a list of publishers I like, and a book or two I recommend from them; Please support them with a purchase if you can:

AdHouse Books – http://adhousebooks.com/
Recommended: Afrodisiac, by Jim Rugg. The Venice Chronicles, by Enrico Casarosa

Bodega Distribution – http://www.bodegadistribution.com/
The Mourning Star Volume 1 & 2, by Kazimir Strzepek

Conundrum Press – http://conundrumpress.com/
Drop-In, by Dave Lapp.  Ruts & Guilles: Nine Days in Saint Petersburg, by Phillippe Girard.

Drawn & Quarterly – http://drawnandquarterly.com/
Market Day, by James Sturm. Vellevision, by Maurice Vellekoop. Red Colored Elegy, by Seiichi Hayashi. Get a Life by Dupuy & Berberian.

Fanfare / Ponent-Mon – http://ponentmon.com/
A Distant Neighborhood Volumes 1 & 2, by Jiro Taniguchi

Fantagraphics Books – http://fantagraphics.com/
Almost Silent, by Jason.  Artichoke Tales, by Megan Kelso. Ganges #1-3 by Kevin Huizenga.

Koyama Press – http://koyamapress.com/
Lose #1 & #2, by Michael DeForge. A Very Kraftwerk Sumer, by Chris Hutsul.

La Pasteque – http://lapasteque.com/
la Fugue, by Pascal Blanchet.  Jimmy et le Bigfoot, by Pascal Girard.

New Reliable Press – http://newreliable.com/
Horribleville Volume 1, by KC Green.

Oni Press - http://onipress.com/
Scott Pilgrim Vols 1-6, by Bryan Lee O’Malley.

Picturebox Inc. – http://www.pictureboxinc.com/
New Enigineering & Travel, by Yuichi Yokoyama.

Pop Sandbox – http://popsandbox.com/
Kenk, by Richard Poplak.

SLG Publishing – http://slgpublishing.com/
Street Angel, by Jim Rugg and Brian Marruca. NIL, by James Turner. DORK Vols 1 & 2, by Evan Dorkin. SQUEE!, by Jhonen Vasquez.

Sparkplug Comic Books – http://sparkplugcomicbooks.com/
Bookhunter, by Jason Shiga. Jin & Jam #1, by Hellen Jo.

Top Shelf Comix – http://topshelfcomix.com/
Alec: The Years Have Pants, by Eddie Campbell. Superfuckers, by James Kochalka. Moving Pictures, by Kathryn & Stuart Immonen.

Topatoco – http://topatoco.com/
Never Learn Anything From History, by Kate Beaton. Adventures of Dr. McNinja, by Chris Hastings.

Tug Boat Press – http://tugboatpress.com
Papercutter Anthologies, by various.

U.S.S. Catastrophe – http://www.usscatastrophe.com/
Pretty much everything they stock is awesome.

…and that’s the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of single-title self publishers doing great work like Carla Speed McNeil and Finder, Jeff Smith and Rasl, Eric Powell’s Chimichanga… hell, tons of creators trying to scrape out a living publishing under a larger umbrella too. Not to mention the many fine retailers like The Beguiling trying to stock and sell these books too.

There are people doing good work, and while it’s tempting to get yourself down when a great publisher disappears, scuff your shoes on the ground and say “shit”, it’s much more productive to remember that there are still folks out publishing great work… and we don’t want them going anywhere, you know?

- Chris

An international coalition of Japanese and American-based manga publishers have joined together to combat what they call the “rampant and growing problem” of scanlations, the practice of posting scanned and translated editions of Japanese comics online without permission of the copyright holders. The group is threatening legal action against 30 scanlation sites.

The effort brings together the 36 member Japanese Digital Comic Association—which includes such major Japanese houses as Kodansha, Shogakukan and Shueisha—as well as manga publisher Square Enix, the Tuttle-Mori Agency and U.S.-based manga publishers Vertical Inc, Viz Media, Tokyopop and Yen Press, the manga/graphic novel imprint of the Hachette Book Group.

A spokesperson for the coalition said the effort shows that Japanese publishers—who license the majority of manga sold in the U.S.—are taking an aggressive interest in combating manga piracy outside of Japan as well as inside the country.

- From the article at Publishers Weekly

Well that’s pretty good news, I’d say…! I’ll probably have thoughts on this later.

- Chris

So, here’s the deal:

CMX wasn’t, at its inception, a particularly well-run company. There are a lot of excuses out there, but bluntly DC didn’t know a thing about the manga market, and the person they hired to start the imprint wasn’t good at his job. DC offered a deep-discount offer to retailers to stock some of the initial titles, MADARA in particular, an older-Seinen action adventure title at the height of the shoujo boom. (Their sole shoujo title was from the 1970s.) I can’t stress enough, their initial licenses were very strange and generally weak with no cohesion as a line.

Sales tanked, comics retailers who were encouraged to buy BIG were left with unsold stock, and comics retailers have long and ‘specific’ memories and if they’re ever burned by anything they never forget and hold a grudge indefinitely. (Except for superheroes of course; Marvel and DC are putting out lit cigarettes on the foreheads of comics retailers every month, and they keep coming back for more. But say something nasty about Carol Kalish in an obituary and I WILL NEVER BUY YOUR FUCKING BOOKS FOREVER I HATE YOU. Comics are kinda lame sometimes.)

So with retailers burnt, the publisher upped the ante and censored one of their second wave of titles, when the _only_ thing it had going for it was the dirty bits. Manga fans hold STUPID grudges too, and they only need the thinest whisper of an excuse to steal their shit forever. “CMX censored Tenjho Tenge! That’s why I’ll download all the books they publish and never give them any money ever!” Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. You’re awful, flat out awful.

But that’s besides the point; fans were burned too.

So no retailer support, little fan support, reported difficulties getting press coverage/convention coverage, and the books were barely ever in bookstores. All of it added up to…? What? Surprise? It wasn’t a matter of if CMX was going to get closed but when, and bad news at Viz provides the perfect cover doesn’t it? “See! Economic downturn! We can’t publish manga if Viz can’t!” Except of course Viz are publishing manga, just tightening their belts. Feh and bah.

This all smells very much like someone got some early July DC solicitations, noticed there were no CMX books, and started asking questions. This seems exceptionally poorly handled, from a company who’s doing a great job at poorly handling this imprint.

So to summarize: It was a line that was poorly conceived, poorly run for the first half of its life and then barely run at all for the last half. Then it was unceremoniously killed. The end.

I’m not saying the whole thing isn’t utterly depressing, it is, but only because it’s just a monumental waste of time and resources and talent and opportunity, not because I’m particularly sad to see it go. Maybe that’s mercenary of me–a lot of other people liked the line and I should probably shut up–but yeah. DC evidenced quite clearly that they have no idea how to run a manga line so if they weren’t going to _try_ then it’s best they stopped wasting my time clogging up my shelves.

- Chris

Deb Aoki spent the night asking difficult questions on Twitter, about the difference between what Simmons did and what thousands of anime-convention artist alley kids do every year, when they sell their own illustrations and stories based on the work of famous manga creators like Tite Kubo. The short answer is that anime fandom sat up and said “NO! We do what we do out of love and have very strict rules about that sort of thing!” and blah blah blah, which basically ammounted to “It’s us doing it so it’s okay, but Nick Simmons is them, so he’s a pariah we’re all going to tear our garments over.”

Got news for you, champs.

When you sell illustrations, or short stories, featuring your favourite characters, you’re entering into exactly the same dirty world of “commerce” that poor Nick Simmons did. You may be, in your head, doing it in ‘tribute’ to the manga or the creator, but out in the real world? You’re ripping him off, just like Nick Simmons did. You’re more honest about your sources, but you’re less creative. You may even have a much higher degree of craft, but as soon as you violate someone’s copyright or IP in that way, making money based on (legally and artistically) derivative works? You’re all just a batch of Nick Simmons, building your careers on the backs of others creators.

Are there lots (lots) of people who do it? Yes. Is their a “community” of like minded people all telling each other that what they do is okay? Fuck yeah! Does it make a lick of difference…?

Here’s the thing: I’ve got infinitely more respect for obvious thief Nick Simmons than I do for the legions of artist-alley dwellers selling mass-produced copies of their fanart for characters. Nick Simmons is (badly) taking his influences and turning them into something (horribly derivative but at least nominally) “new”. It’s not original, it may not even be good, but every artist or writer is comprised mainly of the sum of their influences and experiences. But at least Simmons on his first shot out of the gate managed to synthesize all that shit into something other than “Here is a terribly drawn portrait of two BLEACH characters making out, in tribute to an author who clearly never wanted this to happen or he’d have done it himself. I am charging $10 for this colour photocopy.”

Paying “tribute” to an author like Kubo by selling work based on his creations is about the same as “building his popularity” by distributing illegal scans and fansubs of his work, I personally put the two in exactly the same category: complete fucking fiction.

What I’m saying is Nick Simmons’ behaviour is embarrassing and the work is getting the smackdown it deserves. But North American anime “fandom” for their legion of sins have no reason to be so comfortable in their condemnation, particularly because the behaviour they condone–and celebrate–is worse.

- Chris
P.S.: I love fan creations, I am happy that people legitimately pay tribute to artists they love on DeviantArt and in the myriad of Fanfic communities. Sell that work and you cross a line.

Edit Sat Feb27: Normally, I wouldn’t bother approving some of the stuff in the comments section, because there’s a combination of wrong-headedness and pomposity from a bunch of alias’d anime fans that’s off-putting at best, but I decided this time out to let the comments ride. Mostly because I think that the more ridiculous comments speak for themselves, but I also kind of knew that this would be a contentious one going in. As such, I don’t particularly recommend reading the comments here, but instead would recommend that the most compelling rebuttal to my ideas comes from Simon Jones at Icarus Comics, http://www.icaruscomics.com/wp_web/?p=4319, and you should check those out if you’re interested in more on the subject.

For my part, I do understand that plagiarism is bad news, but then I didn’t think that need to be stated. Instead my position was (and still is) that the culture of complacency and all of the mealy-mouthed defence for selling unauthorized work based on a creator’s IP that permeates anime fandom? Far, far worse than any individual instance of plagiarism, no matter how famous the plagiarist is. Seriously, the general attitude of North American Anime & Manga Fandom with its fansubs, it’s scanlations, it’s complete disregard for intellectual property, ethics, or fairness in the face of what they want (everything) and what they want to pay for it (nothing) is so much more utterly damaging to Tite Kubo, to manga and anime, and to Art and Artists hoping to make a living from their Art, than Nick Simmons could ever hope to be. Get your own house in order before crucifying this guy.

Thanks for reading!

- Christopher

“I worked for them as a letterer at an embarrassingly low page rate. I took it to get some more superhero style stuff under my belt, hoping that I could at least use them as a springboard to get better work down the line.

For the first two books, things went ok. However, on the next four, I had to send invoices up to six times with constant reminders in order to get paid. It was crazy how often someone could “lose” invoices or have them “caught by the spam filter”. After having waited about 6 months to get paid, I walked and stopped doing any work for them. They did eventually pay up, but it took a lot of effort to get them to do so.

During the above situation, someone who’d worked on one of the books that I worked on contacted me to see if I’d been paid. He’d taken a back-end deal and was told that the book hadn’t made any money. I wasn’t surprised, to be honest — It didn’t seem like it was going to be a big seller. The person didn’t know much about how distribution worked and thought that it was a lie that Diamond was only giving about 40% of cover price, so I kind of dismissed his claims at first. Then he sent me a spreadsheet of expenses and income that he’d been sent from Bluewater and asked me to look over to see if it made sense. I was shocked to find that the cost of lettering was listed at TWICE what I was paid.

Maybe there’s a logical explanation as to why the lettering cost was listed at twice what I was paid, but I can’t think of what it would be. What it looks like, to me, is number fudging.

- Ed Brisson, comics creator and small-press publisher

So to reitterate: Most creatives working with Bluewater only get paid royalties once a book is profitable. But the accounting to determine whether or not a book is profitable is done by the publisher, and has allegedly been rigged in the publisher’s favour at least once. So to those last, few, desperate people defending the business practices of this company, it’s not just that you’re working for free to ‘get your name out there’ which in this age of social media and webcomics is frankly ridiculous, but this publisher may actually be deliberately cheating you out of money that you would be owed. I would recommend, again, to any creator looking to ‘break into’ comics, to find other routes than through the gutter.

In a completely unrelated matter, in no way tied to the previous statement (particularly in a way that could get folks like Mr. Brisson in trouble vis a vis Bluewater’s constant legal threats), after consulting with my employer we’ve decided at The Beguiling to no longer carry Bluewater’s product. If a customer would like to pre-order Bluewater’s material with payment, we’ll honour that request, because we’re a full-service comic store. But frankly the idea of supporting this publisher with shelf copies (or making money ourselves off of these books) has become incredibly unappealing to us for a variety of reasons.

For more on Bluewater Comics, check out Simon Jones, Tom Spurgeon, Johanna Draper Carlson (2), and Heidi MacDonald.

- Christopher, “every bit helps,” said the old woman as she pissed into the sea.

Specifically

It would be nice if someone sent

a copy of

so he could stop giving that quote in interviews, cuz that shit ain’t true.

- Christopher

–

A month or two back, reader Mike Kitchen wrote to get my thoughts on the following announcement by Print-on-demand outfit ComiXpress:

It is with great pride that I make this post. As a lifetime fan and reader of indie comics, Dave Sim’s Cerebus always had a special place for me. The depth of the story, the wry wit and social commentary, the brilliant art of the book … this was the reason I read comics. As an aspiring cartoonist, I admired Dave’s championing of Creator’s Rights and his groundbreaking work in Self-Publishing. This guy’s day didn’t end when he put down his pencil after knocking out a page; he effortlessly changed hats from creator to businessman, showing a generation of cartoonists how it could be done if you had the brains and the guts, and in many ways made the independent comic book explosion of the 80s possible.

That inspiration is a big part of what drove me to create a company in 2004 that changed the way indie comics were made. And I couldn’t be more excited that Dave Sim has brought his work to ComiXpress.

Starting today, with the premier of Cerebus Archive #4, you will always be able to order every back issue of Cerebus Archive, Dave’s black & white walk down memory lane (completely devoid of rose-colored-glasses). No back issues ever go out of stock at ComiXpress, and Comic Shop Retailers are a welcome addition to this new Direct Market with a book from one of the most respected names in comics who has proven time and again how seriously he treats deadlines and release dates.

So please, join me in welcoming Dave Sim, Aardvark-Vanaheim, and of course Cerebus himself to ComiXpress. And lets all look forward to a brighter future for indie comics together.

Logan DeAngelis

Reader Mike mentioned, correctly, that I’d been pretty critical of print on demand services like ComiXpress and Lulu in the past, as a vehicle for solicitation of commercial projects. I still hold that point of view, quite honestly, but my thinking on it has broadened a little.

First off, I’d like to note that for terminology’s sake, I use “print on demand”, “pod”, and “digital printing” pretty interchangeably. I’m generally referring to digital printing like high-end laserjets or inkjets, versus offset printing which generally involves physical contact between ‘plates’ (usually rubber) and the paper, and offset is a much higher quality of printing. There are terms like ‘digital offset’ out there, but so far as I can tell it’s still inkjet printers, albeit with slightly higher quality.

As a sweeping statement, I will say that the quality and price of offset (‘professional’) printing has not yet been matched (let alone beaten) by any digital print or print on demand services I’ve seen so far. A couple of recent projects that I’ve been made aware of have been the closest I’ve seen to offset printing from this sort of set-up, but held side-by-side with offset work the difference is very noticeable, with P.O.D. suffering considerably in comparison.  When it comes to POD the resolution in the printing isn’t as high, leading to pixelation, the blacks often have a sheen that comes from laser printer ink, the greyscales look patchy, dark, and amateurish,  and the plain-white-bond paper stock doesn’t feel as nice in the hand or seem like a “real” book. As an artist who probably worked really hard on a story, I don’t understand the impulse to sabotage that hard work just to get it “in print”, regardless of how it looks when it gets there… I understand that it’s vital for works of limited or niche appeal, for books where the message or story is more important than the repro quality, but in terms of art it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. So, yeah, strides have been made, but it isn’t there yet. I’m not convinced it ever will be.

Secondly, there’s the cost factor. I just finished working with a friend who moved their project from digital-printing to offset. POD offered them the ability to print books as needed, in small batches for smaller amounts of money. The-trade off was that their 64 page black and white book was costing them $5 a copy to print, and they’d printed over 300 copies that way. I priced out an offset print-run for them, and for the same book with better paper, a better cover, an actual spine (POD outfits hate printing on spines, it requires too much quality control), at 1000 copies the cost per book dropped to $1.50. At 2000 copies the cost per book dropped to $1.10. The difference is between $3 and $4 a book, but the money’s gotta be paid up front. But they’d already spent over $1200 printing 300 copies of their book! For $300 more they could’ve printed 3 times as many, AND made more on every book they sold. Selling a book for $10 that cost you $5 to make is ridiculous, but hey, it isn’t my money. But selling a book for $10 that cost you a buck  to print? I’d much rather be in that business.

Granted, not everyone has $2000 to spend. Not everyone is going to hand-sell their book. Not everyone wants to ship out copies of their work, which many online P.O.D. services will do (for an added fee). Not everyone wants to solicit through a distributor (like Diamond or whomever), which P.O.D. pricing either makes impossible or foolish. Some projects are deliberately short-run, copyright-skirting endeavours that need to stay under certain radars. Not everyone should print 2000 copies of their work. Or 1000. Hell, some projects shouldn’t be printed at all and advising someone to go-offset or go-home would just be mean. There are a bunch of other caveats there, but long-story-short, offset isn’t right for every project but if you intend to make a serious commitment to the continued commercial viability of your project, the choice, IMO, is clear. Sort of.

Back to the Cerebus Archive announcement.

A quick check of the ComiXpress website shows that they’ve subsequently added Dave Sim’s other recent offering Glamourpuss to their offerings. I actually found their original post/announcement incredibly confusing, as it strongly implies that ComiXpress will be printing/offering Sim’s work from now on. Their Glamourpuss announcement uses a very important phrase not present in the Archive announcement: back issues. ComiXpress is making back issues of Glamourpuss available, seemingly once they’ve gone out of print from their initial offset printing. A quick check at Diamond shows that Glamourpuss #1-7 are listed as out of print, but 8, 9, and 10 are still in stock. A quick check of ComiXpress shows that they’re offering #1-7 but not #8-10, so yeah, looks like once the first print is gone, it’ll be kept in print ‘forever’ in digital POD form… I’m pretty curious to see whether or not ComiXpress’s print job is up to the task of reprinting Glamourpuss, as, let’s face it, the book is an excuse for Dave Sim to draw fantastically detailed portraits of attractive women in varying ink styles, an incredibly art-focussed book.  I kinda want to order a copy just to do a side-by-side comparison and see how it holds up…!

Meanwhile, Cerebus Archive doesn’t match up quite the same (publication-wise), and with a very interesting difference. ComiXpress is distributing Cerebus Archive #4, a book that Diamond hasn’t distributed at all, and doesn’t seem to intend to… meaning Cerebus Archive #4 is exclusively available as a digital POD item, something that not-very-much fuss has been made about. It looks like that book has moved POD only, which strikes me as probably a smart move considering it’s a collection of ephemera and early, rougher early work by Sim. Issue #4′s contents describe it as reprinting a wedding invitation, so, you know. But it seems very likely indeed that Cerebus Archive #4 failed to meet Diamond’s order thresholds, wasn’t (offset) printed, and is digital-only. That’s a bit of a sea-change for a book from Sim. Cerebus Archive #4 has been available at Comixpress since early September, and no future issues have been added since, so I’d rightfully cast some doubt on the future of the project… Maybe someone who does this sort of thing regularly can ping the ComiXpress guys for info? Maybe they’ll show up in the comments, who knows.

But all of that aside, the important thing to take away from this is that POD is now being used for comics as a way to keep backlist available, without having to print thousands and thousands of comics at a time that may take years to sell through. That’s about the best use of POD I can think of, actually, following up a high-quality print run with digital copies for latecomers. Anyone particularly concerned with quality or ‘real book feel’ can track down one of the original prints, and anyone else can place a convenient order on a website… bypassing comics retailers entirely. Actually, that part doesn’t bother me either, because (at least in the case of Glamourpuss) we had our kick-at-the-can, ordered our copies, and sold them too. While a project from Dave Sim is something that we’d be likely to keep in stock indefinitely in whatever form it takes, that certainly isn’t true of every project and knowing that there are creators out there that can have that work available for the long haul? Not too shabby.

So… yeah. I’m still not sold on digital printing, and you’ve only gotta flip open a digitally printed book to a page with a toned/greyscale image on it to see why, but I’m glad the technology has started to be applied in really useful, important ways. Here’s hoping that the trend continues and someday we’ll be able to order individual reproduction issues of all KINDS of comics to fill out our collections.

- Christopher

TONIGHT! and Saturday Morning at 10am.

Evangelion 1.0, the first of four feature-length remakes of the Neon Genesis Evangelion tv series/movies, is screening tonight at 7pm across Canada, at more-or-less every Cineplex Odeon or Empire Theatre. There’s another screening Saturday morning at 10am as well.

As you might have figured, I’m a bit of an Evangelion nerd, and so I am going to this tonight. And maybe Saturday too.

More info at: http://www.cineplex.com/events and http://www.empiretheatres.com/evangelion.

See you there!

- Christopher

On the Runway: An Illustrated Fashion Editorial
Weekend Post, Saturday September 12
Illustration by Maurice Vellekoop, Text by Nathalie Atkinson

“I hope there’s a red carpet at check-in,” says Marla, feeling the Sixties retro-futurism vibe of her Narciso Rodriguez ensemble (made all the more over-the-top with a Jimmy Choo bag).

Model of the moment Katya is starry-eyed, fresh off the plane from Eastern Europe and worries she doesn’t have a thing to wear: luckily John Galliano went to town in the Balkans with folkloric embroidery and traditional costume headdresses. “Dahling, anybody who tells you that less is more is simply old, like me,” purrs her booker Joan, in Jil Sander.

It’s always happy hour in the First Class Lounge. Sheila and Karen aren’t frequent fliers but their Marc Jacobs (L) and Christian Dior outfits (R) were all the points they needed to breeze past those adorable security men. (That, and the promise of mile high club benefits.) “If anybody gets suspicious,” whispers Sandrine, “just repeat after me: ‘Oh, how I miss the Concorde.”

The same charm doesn’t work on Customs, alas, as this ill-fated trio soon found out. Search and seizure agents were immune to the persuasive sartorial powers of Alexander McQueen (L), Miu Miu (M) and Comme des Garçons (R) and immediately confiscated the spoils of several fashion weeks’ worth of front row swag. Isn’t air travel glamorous?

—
END

The line contains 4 different products, a series of balancing and cleansing oils that will run between $77 and $89 CDN, and be available exclusively at Holt Renfrew in Canada (Bloor Street, Yorkdale, Vancouver). Anno has contributed art and design for the packaging of the product, and generated a loose narrative around five archetypical Japanese women, each relating to a different ‘flavour’ of product. Also available is a make-up brush kit with Tokyo Kamon Girl designs emblazoned on the case, and a custom make-up box, also sporting Anno’s designs.

Incorporating traditional Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print styles and Japanese iconography, laid overtop of ultra-contemporary packaging, these are some downright lovely pieces of design. They integrate the traditional elements of Kamon design including circles and nature, with each flower or plant on Anno’s badges representing different aspects of the women she’s created… Kamon in particular were typically reserved for upper-class families, and the application of these designs uses lots of shiny gold foil and ink to give the products a luxurious, high-end feel. A lot of thought and effort has gone into this campaign, and shu uemera has spared no expense.  (Click for larger.)

This in and of itself is lovely, and would make for a lovely post here at Comics212. But here’s the most awesome part: The press kit also came with a gorgeous booklet which espouses the philosophy of the line and the various “girls” on one side, and a biography and gallery of Moyoco Anno’s manga and illustratuin work on the other! And a CD-ROM full of images from Moyoco Anno’s vast bibliography! And permission to post them (until at least October 31st, 2009)! So if all of the images disappear at some point in the future, you’ll know why.

Get ready for some lovely art. Let’s start with the book, first.

The Tokyo Kamon Girls 40-page flip-book could only be the product of an international upscale cosmetics company with money to spend… if you take my meaning. It’s a high-end production, with gold-foil inset on the cardstock cover depicting the Kamon  Girl designs in something approaching their historical mode: shiny and austentatious. The book features glossy full-colour production with liberal use of a fifth-colour gold ink to add that extra oomph.

Scattered throughout are biographies of each of the five Tokyo Kamon Girls: “pure and innocent” Sakurako, “energetic and strong-willed” Tamaki; Tsuruha (“who sparkles as she drifts through the streets of Tokyo”);  “reserved and elegant” Matsuno; “coquettish” Katsura. In addition to the Kamon featuring the girls, Anno also created a full-size illustration of Sakurako as an ukiyo-e print, which is gorrrrrgeous:

Lantern at night - Sakurako, Ukiyo-e print by Moyoco Anno ©2009

The first half of the book is then rounded out with a description of the make-up brushes and make-up box, a page featuring quotes from Anno on her inspirations for creating the series (“I felt afresh that shu uemura is a global brand which is aimed at the world and treasures Japanese aesthetics. That is why, when designing the bottles, I felt I wanted to design something with a hint of modern Japanese taste.”). Oh, and a walk through the five real-life Tokyo neighborhoods that the five fictional ladies live in, places that you will never live because you are poor (for the record: Ueno Park, Den-En-Chofu, Ginza, Azabu-Juban, Shirokane). It is amazing.

Manga-ka Moyoco Anno.

The other half of the book (and really it’s a flip-book, maybe this is side-a and the cosmetics-focussed side is side-b) is an introduction to Moyoco Anno, artist. It contains a biography, partial bibliography, and dozens of illustrations. Because the bio wasn’t presented to me in a digital form, I feel awkward about copy-pasting it in here, but the notable bits from her biography are that she’s been making manga for 20 years, she’s an accomplished ukiyo-e woodblock printer in addition to being a manga-ka, she’s had a bunch of hit series, and her website is http://www.annomoyoco.com.

One of the most interesting bits about Moyoco Anno that isn’t in the printed bio? It doesn’t mention that Moyoco Anno’s manga has appeared from more publishers in English than any other manga-ka! It’s true. Her North American debut was in the pages of the Tokyopop-published Happy Mania (11 volumes), but her next series was the satirical bishonen role-reversal series Flowers & Bees from Viz (7 volumes). Her current, and most-popular English-language series is Sugar Sugar Rune, an all-ages shojo series from Del Rey (8 volumes, ongoing) about magical young witches who gain their powers from breaking boys hearts (HEH). Somewhere in there, Anno contributed a story to the French/Japanese co-production JAPON, known in North America as Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators from Fanfare/Ponent-Mon (1 volume). Actually, the bibliography mentions all of these stories except Flowers & Bees, but despite being an English-language booklet produced for an English audience, it doesn’t mention which… if any… of her manga works have been translated into English! If it weren’t for the fact that my customer demographic and the demographic for these products were so far apart, I’d fear customers coming in to ask me for manga like Hatakari Man or Sakuraman. But I have a feeling I’ll be able to sleep easy on this one.

What this book does do though is provide lots of gorgeous illustrations and excerpts from her catalogue, which I am free to run below. Yay! Oh, and: all images Copyright ©2009 Moyoco Anno, all rights reserved. Don’t copy or distribute these images. Got it?

Chandelier, original work for Prints21 2005 fall edition. Prints21©Moyoco Anno.

Jelly Beans (interior art spread). Jelly Beans©Moyoco Anno / Kodansha.

Le Chant Des Grillons (interior page), ©Moyoco Anno/s (from Japan As Viewed By 17 Creators)

Sakurakan, ©Moyoco Anno/Kodansha

Sugar Sugar Rune (colour illustration), ©Moyoco Anno / Kodansha

Tundra Blue Ice, 1988 by Moyoco Anno, SHUEISHA Inc.

Stella, original work for Prints21 2005 fall edition. Prints21©Moyoco Anno.

Lovely, isn’t it? That “Tundra Blue Ice” one actually reminds me a little bit of Taiyo Matsumoto’s work, and it’s from very early in her career. Heck, it might’ve been her first series actually… the timing works out right. Nice.

Here’s two more pieces, but these are particularly cool. These are wordless comic strips from Moyoco Anno’s newspaper strip, called Ochibisan. It runs in Japan’s Asahi Shinbun, and is illustrated in the style of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. It’s a celebration of the seasons, and each strip runs in brilliant full colour.

Ochibisan © Moyoco Anno

Ochibisan © Moyoco Anno

Seeing all of these pieces together, it really shows the range that Anno posesses. Moving effortlessly from manga to fashion illustration to ukiyo-e woodblock prints to newspaper strips to product packaging and design. She has a phenomenal career, and I find myself really inspired by her work.

In closing, I wanted to talk about a few little biographical tidbits that I didn’t get to mention early on. First off, sadly Moyoco Anno took a break from manga last year for health reasons, stopping the serialization of her incredibly popular Hatakari Man manga mid-stream (which may account for why it has not yet been licensed for release in North America). It is currently unknown when she’ll return to manga (though she is continuing her newspaper strip), though given the prestige of the Tokyo Kamon Girls project I can’t imagine why she would.

Moyoco Anno is also the wife of Neon Genesis Evangelion director and co-creator and Gainax founder Hideki Anno. They wed in 2002, over 5 years after The End of Evangelion.

–

For more on Moyoco Anno and Tokyo Kamon Girls, check out these resources:

Wikipedia Biography – Moyoco Anno at AnimeNewsNetwork – Moyoco Anno Official Website – shu uemera at The National Post – shu uemera Tokyo Kamon Girls Official Website

- Christopher
Thanks to Nathalie for the heads-up!

]]> http://comics212.net/2009/08/19/moyoco-anno-x-shu-uemura-manga-make-up-debuts/feed/ 5 http://comics212.net/2009/08/18/are-the-new-people-post-otaku-welcome-to-the-mega-culture/ http://comics212.net/2009/08/18/are-the-new-people-post-otaku-welcome-to-the-mega-culture/#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:19:03 +0000 Chris http://comics212.net/?p=3097 This past weekend a new Japanese pop-cultural centre opened in San Francisco, and it sounds pretty awesome. It’s called New People and it’s… well it’s kind of a Japan-style mall. It’s got a gift shop with manga and artbooks and designer toys and things, 4 different goth/loli-informed clothing stores including a North American outpost for hyper-popular label Baby The Stars Shine Bright, a movie theatre sponsored by Viz, a cafe (or two), and an art gallery. It sounds like a pretty amazing building actually.

To celebrate the opening of New People, they held a great big cultural festival called the “J-Pop Summit”, with bands and clothes and artists and presentations from Yoshitaka Amano (final fantasy), Yuichi Yokoyama (New Engineering), and the director of the live action 20th Century Boys movie, which I guess Viz announced they have the rights to now? At least they had an actor dressed up like “Friend” from the books, which is kind of amazing too.

Check out these event descriptions from [About.com], [Same Hat!], and [Anime Vice].

All in all, it sounds like a truly amazing event, and a step forward for the promotion of Japanese pop culture in North America. It also seemed really weird to me as well, here’s why:

I think I mentioned that this fall I was lucky enough to see a presentation on Otaku by Professor Kaichiro Morikawa, an expert on Otaku, Japanese culture, and the export of Japanese culture outside of Japan. One of the most interesting points in his lecture (and the whole thing was phenomenal) was that Otaku spaces are generally _closed_ spaces, hidden from the public eye, and that non-Otaku spaces are all about being clear and visible and open to the public. The manga, software, doujin, and toy stores in Japan have their windows blacked out, and popular clothing and mainstream culture stores have big glass windows inviting eyes inwards. Otaku are introverts, ashamed of their purchases, non-otaku are extroverts flashing their shopping bags with massive brand-name labels on them (this is both only part of his larger point, and a simplification, but still). Check this out:

Animate Flagship, Manga/Anime/Character Goods Store, Ikebukuro.

Softmap Software store, Akihabara

Lamtarra, Porn Store, Akihabara

Now, conversely, check out the frontage on these fashionable flagship stores in Fashion-capital Harajuku.

Christian Dior Flagship, Transparent Building

Ralph Lauren, 25ft high windows

Louis Vuitton, giant glass windows with Takashi Murakami art done up in lights. Gorgeous.

Can you see the difference?

Actually as a bit of an aside: Perhaps the most interesting thing here? Japanese Otaku have largely rejected much of LV ‘partner’ artist Takashi Murakami’s work, apparently. He appeals to the mainstream, to youth culture, and especially to other artists. But the hardcore nerds simply aren’t into his work or his ideals, so far as I can tell. There’s nothing moe about his work… Louis Vuitton’s great big transparent open-concept retail space (with multiple scultptures visible from the street…!) is directly in opposition to contemporary otaku retail and public spaces.

So I trust this point has been well illustrated?

Here’s what the NEW PEOPLE building looks like.

New People Building Exterior. Photo by Ryan Sands, http://samehat.blogspot.com

It doesn’t look like an Otaku space at all, not even a little. I mean, it’s GORGEOUS, it looks like cutting-edge Japanese fashion retail design. It reminds me a lot of the Harajuku H&M flagship actually, lemmie see if I can find a picture of it.

H&M Flagship, Harajuku

The scale of these two buildings is really, really different btw. The New People building is probably about as tall as the top lit part of that H&M building (called ‘the ice cube building’ btw) in the middle. But you see what I mean about that right, where each floor is open to the street, for 30+ feet of transparent frontage? That was the thing that struck me when looking at the reports on the opening of New People–it doesn’t look like it’s a space for nerds… despite the fact that it is clearly intended to be a space for nerdish pursuits.

The first-floor of the New People building features New People: The Store, a sort of gift-shop of Japanese culture. Artbooks, manga, toys, shirts, paper goods, designer items, etc. The folks at Anime Vice did a great walk-through of the space, and apparently they allow embedding so spend 30 seconds or so watching this:

Here’s a still photo, in case it doesn’t embed correctly or you don’t like clicking things:

New People- The Store. Photo by Animevice.com

Again, it’s got a big open floor plan and it’s lovely and well-designed, but it’s laid out like a boutique clothing store, not something ‘otaku’. Check this out, here’s what a hardcore otaku shop looks like:

Animate, Ikebukuro

Village Vanguard, a pop culture chain store. Shown: Odaiba location.

“So where the hell is he going with this?” you’re asking yourself. And to be honest, I’m not 100% sure. The whole thing is just leading to more questions for me, about intent, about the future of Japanese culture (and therefore manga…) in North America, about the future of retail. But I think what it all comes down to is the future, and the industry passing from a planning/regrouping phase into actively seeking “What’s Next?”.

I’m specifically curious what this means for Viz, whose CEO and parent-company are the primary investors/visionarries involved in this undertaking. Let’s face it, they’re so huge now that when you’re talking about the North American manga industry, you’re talking about Viz (publishers of Naruto, Bleach, and Pokemon, for those not in the know). For years I’ve been discussing whether or not “What’s Next?” in manga is going to be an aging demographic embracing more mature works… or if it’s just going to be 40 year old Naruto fans (mirroring the superhero comics industry). While they have continued to funnel new product into the all-consuming shonen/shojo machine, Viz seems to have clearly staked out the mature next steps, the seinen manga, the light novels, the more mature shoujo manga, the sci-fi fantasy novels. But they’re also importing larger parts of both Japanese youth culture and otaku culture. We’re getting more art books, we’re getting more Japanese movies, we’re getting more character goods. We’re getting online manga, for free, for audiences that could be entirely new to comics (or at the very least a part of the burgeoning literary/new mainstream graphic novel clique). Viz seems to be betting on a wider, wilder, more diverse manga industry (as part of a larger J-culture industry), and part of that is creating a cultural context for the material here in North America… that more than hardcore nerds are aware of. New People is clearly a massive leap in that direction.

But: NEW PEOPLE are deliberately eschewing the “otakuness” of otaku culture in an effort to present otaku culture to the mass market.

Viz, Shogakukan, all involved over there, they’re trying to create a mainstream cultural awareness of many different facets of Japanese culture, which (if successful) will make it much easier for them to import the thousands of more complicated, unique, challenging manga that they have access to through their Japanese parent companies. It’s a canny move from where I’m seeing, if it plays out right. To be honest, as a fan of complicated, unique, challenging manga I win no matter what.

It also looks like Viz just might be trying to move their fortunes out of the iron grip of the increasingly fickle thieves (“but I’m just sampling!”) that make up anime and manga fandom to… you know, ‘normal’ people. I just wonder when, or if, the hardcore nerds, the American Otaku, are going to revolt when their fandom is opened up to the general public… It already happens all the time on smaller scales, the fandom all watches pokemon, it gets too big, they hate pokemon and people who still like it are “Poketards”. Ditto Naruto, and it’s die-hard fans who are called “Narutards” by the otaku elite (you can tell they’re elite because they refer to anime with North American releases by their Japanese names).

I wonder how long it’ll be before, much like Nintendo hardcore fans (called “core gamers” in the lingo) before them, the American Otaku cry that the manga industry has abandoned them for the general public, where companies can make a fuckload of money for a tenth the effort of satisfying their often insane and frequently contradictory desires…?

Or has that editorial already been written?

Anyway, maybe it won’t go tits-up after all, no core-fans vs. casual-readers in Thunderdome.

Uniqlo is a popular Japanese clothing chain, it’s like the Japanese equivilent of The Gap (actually Uniqlo’s been eyeing buying The Gap for years now… anyway). Uniqlo has been doing a series of radical partnerships for the last few years, putting manga characters and art, and anime, and video games, onto t-shirts. Inexpensive t-shirts too, that ‘normal’ people are expected to buy and wear. They call the whole thing “Mega Culture”.

Floor graphics, Uniqlo T-Shirt Store, Harajuku

MEGA CULTURE. Parappa + Uniqlo = greater than the sum of their parts. The blending of introvert and extrovert culture.

Uniqlo’s got the big glass-fronted stores & they’ve got otaku culture all wrapped-up in them, in their lovely boutique-style store layouts. And they’re making money hand-over-fist. When I was visiting Japan, the recently released slate of Shonen Sunday Anniversary shirts had made a debut, and the Harajuku Uniqlo was actually hosting a gallery exhibition and mangaka signing, VIP invite only. I did not get in (LAME) but I did get to observe the normals, the average hip man-and-woman off the street, prowling the same t-shirt racks as obvious otaku, both finding common ground in a bitch’n Gundam Anniversary T or distressed Urusei Yatsura LUM women’s longsleeve. MEGA CULTURE.

So maybe that’s what we’re heading towards… a more seamless blend of nostalgia, youth, and introvert culture with the mass market. Maybe there’ll be friction between the established fans and those trying to spread/exploit that fandom. James Cameron’s NEON GENESIS EVANGELION probably won’t be worse than this summer’s G.I. Joe movie (how could it be?). Maybe not, and video game t-shirts goth-loli affectations will fade. But with the opening of a three-floor, culturally oriented shopping centre by a Japanese-owned American publisher with 15 years of experience in importing Japanese culture, one thing is for certain: the game has definitely changed.

- Chris

]]> http://comics212.net/2009/08/18/are-the-new-people-post-otaku-welcome-to-the-mega-culture/feed/ 16 http://comics212.net/2009/06/15/manga-art-in-japan/ http://comics212.net/2009/06/15/manga-art-in-japan/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 06:39:13 +0000 Chris http://comics212.net/?p=2746

One of the things I really enjoyed about my last trip to Japan was, in the Tezuka Museum, getting to see original art (manuscript) pages by Osamu Tezuka. I feel like I have a new perspective on his work, seeing the paste-downs, white paint, pencil marks, and changes that each page went through before going to print. I feel like I’ve learned something about his process, and maybe I understand his work a little better. Maybe I’m full of shit too, but it’s still a nice feeling. (Image from Tezuka Museum to left, click for larger.

I also got to see originals at the Kyoto International Manga Museum in Kyoto Japan, although surprisingly very few Japanese original pages as the installations that were up while I was there were primarily from other countries. Still, I do like me some original art, and it was pretty great. Unfortunately the Museum’s photo policy was incredibly strict, and so it wasn’t possible to get any photos for the blog. Them’s the breaks…

Perhaps the biggest “score” in terms of diversity of material was Nakano Broadway Mall, which had lots of “auctions” going on for original artwork, with many manga pages and anime cels on display. I actually didn’t see much “finished” work when it came to the manga–lots of sketches and autographed books–but it’s still a bit of a treasure-trove of process work. (Image from Nakano Broadway up-top).

For my upcoming trip (one week! eeee!) I do plan on, if possible, hitting the Tezuka Museum and the Kyoto Manga Museum again, but I’m wondering if there’s anywhere else I can go in Japan (we’re travelling A LOT this time) that I’d have access to Japanese original art? Whether temporary shows/exhibits, or permanent ones. 

If anyone has any suggestions or recommendations, particularly if there’s a website attached so I can parse it out and find the place, I’d really appreciate it! Thanks!

- Christopher

Oh, delicious assortment of Japanese alcoholic beverages.

So I am going back to Japan, with my darling and talented husband. As you might imagine I am quite excited about this, I’ve been wanting to go back to Japan since two days after my previous (and first-ever) trip ended. There’s something to be said for spending a night sleeping in your own bed, but any longer than that, I’d rather be in Japan. AND SOON I WILL BE!

We’re arriving in Tokyo on June 23rd, and staying for 3 weeks. 3 weeks! Just think about how much nerditry we’re going to get up to! We’ve done the preliminary planning for the trip and now it’s just down to fine-tuning the details. We’re going to do more traditional stuff on this trip, I think, for basically a full week. Nikko, Sapporro, Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Shirahama, 7 days non-stop. Whoo! But that leaves two full weeks of hanging out in Tokyo too, which is awesome. I could be happy just wandering around Tokyo neighborhoods for days and days, and I’m looking for excuses to do so. Feel free to make recommendations about what I should see in the comments section!

Of course, the biggest nerd sight-to-see is the life-sized Gundam robot that they’ve built in the middle of Tokyo Bay. If you remember my last trip to the magical island of Odaiba, you’ll remember that it already features a scale-model Statue of Liberty, a Ferris Wheel, and a beach (seriously, don’t go in the water). Well it looks like that in recognition of some anniversary or something, they’re building a 60 foot tall Gundam that’s gonna move and shoot lasers. It opens while we’re there. It should be bitch’n. Here’s a picture ganked from DannyChoo.com:

Photo of life-sized Gundam on Odaiba, taken by Danny Choo.

Fried Rice Vending Machine

So, yeah, I am going to have a seriously awesome time.

And of course I’m going to take pictures! Though honestly sorting and resizing and uploading a thousand photos last time was brutal, so I’m going to look into some sort of Flickr feed based thing that will show up in the sidebar, and I’ll post highlights here at the blog. And commentary.

Or maybe I’ll just slog through it again, who knows? I was checking the dates and I only got 3 updates done while I was in Japan last time, and I’d like to be updating at least every other day this time… I’ll see what I can do.

Actually, I was just going through my Japan photos, and I was reminded that I never actually posted any of the shrine/temple/castle photos from my trip. Like, you got a little bit from Himeji, but we took hundreds of photos that never made it online. Geez, Kiyomizu Dera alone is breathtakingly beautiful. Shit, alright, one more photo:

Building at Kiyomizu Dera Shrine

Huh, maybe I really should get those up on Flickr too…!

Anyway, JAPAN. JAPAN. Ask me if I’m happy?

Just kidding, you know I’m happy.

- Chris

America, these are your rights and freedoms being eroded. Something that makes you feel squeamish but is entirely legal in other first-world countries might send this guy to jail for 15 years, with a $500,000 fine. Something that you reading this could be guilty of* by google image-searching the wrong Japanese manga-ka’s name with the “safesearch” turned off. 

“Mr. Handley now faces the loss of his freedom and his property, all for owning a handful of comic books. It’s chilling. ” – Charles Brownstein, Executive Director, CBLDF

“Personally, I wish the CBLDF had been running the case, and not Mr Handley’s lawyers… it’s a bad outcome all around: bad for him, bad for comics and bad for the First Amendment.” – Neil Gaiman

- Christopher
*Actually, only partially guilty for posession, not the mail-related charges. Point stands.

Anyway, if you want to see what went down in 2008, the list is below. Thanks again to all of the great artists, writers, authors, and organizations we were fortunate enough to work with last year… and this year. 2009 is already off to a pretty solid start, if I do say so!

–

Author Events at The Beguiling, 2008

Cecil Castellucci (Janes In Love), The Beguiling, January 30th
Scott Hepburn (Star Wars: VECTOR), The Beguiling, January 30th

Kean Soo (Jellaby Volume 1), Keep Toronto Reading, February 5th
Kazu Kibuishi (Amulet Volume 1), Keep Toronto Reading, February 5th
In Association with Toronto Public Library 

Kean Soo (Jellaby Volume 1), The Beguiling, February 6th
Kazu Kibuishi (Amulet Volume 1), The Beguiling, February 6th

Michel Rabagilati (Paul Goes Fishing), Lillian H. Smith Library, March 15th

R.G. Taylor (Growing Up With Comics), Industry Night, March 26th
Ron Kasman (Growing Up With Comics), Industry Night, March 26th
Mark Innes (Comic Eye), Industry Night, March 26th

Jillian Tamaki Art Show, The Beguiling, April 14th-May 30th

Free Comic Book Day For Kids! @ Palmerston Library, May 3rd
Featuring: Michael Cho (Max Finder Mysteries), Steven Manale (You Crack Me Up!), Brian McLachlan (Owl Magazine), and Jeremy Tankard (Grumpy Bird).
Presented in association with Toronto Public Library, Scholastic Books, and Owlkids. Image shown below, featuring Jeremy Tankard.

Free Comic Book Day at The Beguiling, May 3rd
Featuring J. Korim (Penciler, Atomic Robo FCBD Edition), Jessie Lam (Colorist, Neozoic), Tyrone McCarthy (Creator, Corduroy High), Alana McCarthy (Illustrator), Tara Talan (Galaxion), Willow Dawson (Violet Miranda), Nick Mandaag (Artist and self-publisher), Chip Zdarsky (Monster Cops).

Stuart Immonen, The Beguiling, May 28th

Luminato Arts Festival, June 8th
Featuring Spain Rodriguez (Che: A Graphic Biography), Dan Goldman (Shooting War), and Bernice Eisenstein (I Was A Child Of Holocaust Survivors). 
Presented in association with Luminato. 

Blake Bell (Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko), Lillian H. Smith Library, June 18th

Jason (Low Moon, Pocket Full of Rain), The Beguiling, June 10th 

Ray Fawkes (Apocalipstix), Revival Bar, August 6th
Cameron Stewart (Apocalipstix), Revival Bar, August 6th

The Doug Wright Awards, August 10th
Official Bookseller

Russel Lissau (The Batman Strikes!), The Beguiling, August 29th

Matthew Forsythe (Ojingogo), The Beguiling, September 27th
Pat Shechuk (Pohadky), The Beguiling, September 27th
Marek Colek (Pohadky), The Beguiling, September 27th

The Word On The Street, Graphic Novel Tent Official Sponsor, September 28th
Featuring: D.J. Steinberg, Steve Manale, Brian McLachlan, Jim Zubkavich, Matt Moylan, Jeremy Tankard, Matt Hammill, Steve Murray, Mariko Tamaki, Ray Fawkes, Cameron Stewart, Jim Munroe, Ramon Perez, Ray Fenwick, Susan Hughes, Willow Dawson, Pat Shewchuck, Marek Colek, Matt Forsythe, Andy Bellanger, Joey Comeau, Emily Horne, Matt Forsythe, Ryan North, Kate Beaton, Ramon Perez.

Street Fighter Tribute Launch, The Beguiling, September 28th
Featuring nearly two-dozen different comics creators including Cameron Stewart, Bobby Chiu, Kei Acedera, Scott Hepburn, Alex Milne, Arthur Dela Cruz, Eric Kim, Alvin Lee, Omar Dogan, Joe Ng, Christine Choi, Eric Vedder, Joe Vriens, Matt Moylan, Jim Zubkavich, Saejin Oh, and many more.

Lynda Barry (What It Is!), IFOA/Writing The Unthinkable, October 23rd-26th
Chip Kidd (Bat-Manga), IFOA, October 25th-26th

Shaun Tan (The Arrival), The Beguiling, October 28th

Chris Onstad (Achewood, The Great Outdoor Fight), The Beguiling, November 4th

Igort (Baobab, Ignatz Line), The Beguiling, November 15th
David B. (Epileptic, Nocturnal Emissions), The Beguiling, November 15th

Maurice Vellekoop (Pin-Ups), Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, November 25th

Dave Lapp (Drop-In), The Beguiling, December 3rd

Kramers Ergot World Tour, The Beguiling, December 11th
Featuring Sammy Harkham, Seth, Shary Boyle, Souther Salazar, Kevin Huizenga, John Pham

Faith Erin Hicks (The War At Ellsmere), The Beguiling, December 17th

–

So, yeah. Come to Toronto. We are doing awesome things here, we’d love for you to be a part of it.

- Chris

 Tlönista clears things up for those of you who don’t quite get it.  Click through to see the girl version as well.

But yeah, go ahead and be as critical as you want, or as critical as you need to.  But I’ve got no problems calling people on empty snark… just like no one should have a problem calling me on the same.

- Chris

“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. – Amazon.com”

Which is annoying nanny-state garbage that disinclines me to use their site, but fine. However, it seems that some patrons of Amazon have noticed differences in the way this policy is applied, and that it tends to classify many books with gay and lesbian themes that aren’t necessarily explicit as “adult”, while keeping many heterosexual explicit works in the public eye…including a graphic novel:

We would like to hear the rationalisation for allowing sales ratings for explicit books with a heterosexual focus such as:

–Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women)
–Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love” (explicit heterosexual romance);
–Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance);
–Bertrice Smal’s Skye o’Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances
–and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel)

Yet the following books, which have a gay or lesbian focus, have been classed as “adult books” and stripped of their sales ratings:

–Radclyffe Hill’s classic novel about lesbians in Victorian times, The Well of Loneliness, and which contains not one sentence of sexual description;
–Mark R Probst’s YA novel The Filly about a young man in the wild West discovering that he’s gay (gay romance, no sex);
–Charlie Cochrane’s Lessons in Love (gay romance with no sex);
–The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience, edited by Louis-George Tin (non-fiction, history and social issues);
–and Homophobia: A History by Bryan Fone (non-fiction, focus on history and the forms prejudice against homosexuality has taken over the years).

Please tell us, Amazon, why the explicit books with a heterosexual focus are allowed to keep their sales ratings while the non-explicit romances, the histories and the biographies that deal with LGBTQ issues are not. - Petition against Amazon’s policy

I like Lost Girls as much as the next guy, but how is that not an “adult” work when a non-fiction history of Homophobia is? Maybe it’d classify if adult if someone told Amazon about all the hot lady-on-lady or man-on-man action?

This is pretty gross. I realize the world is filled opportunity for outrage these days, but if you could muster some against a policy which will very, very likely be changed with enough attention, I’d appreciate it. Head over to:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy

and sign up.

EDIT: If you’re looking for more on this story, Jezebel has a great write-up, more examples of books stripped of their standing, and what it all means. Check it out at: http://jezebel.com/5209088/why-is-amazon-removing-the-sales-rankings-from-gay-lesbian-books

- Christopher

“Last week, Marvel’s 2007 adaptation of the Stephen King fantasy epic appeared, as if by magic, atop the hardcover list, unseating Watchmen. Although I couldn’t find an obvious reason for the book’s performance, I was willing to accept that the upcoming release of The Dark Tower: Treachery hardcover or another miniseries might’ve renewed interest in the original. (Or did I completely miss a new edition or reissue?)

“But this week The Gunslinger Born is nowhere to be seen. Watchmen again rests comfortably upon its hardcover throne, followed by a trio of Batman-related books.

“It’s as if last week never happened.” – Kevin Melrose, Robot 6 @ CBR

Sorry, I didn’t realize that no one had addressed this.

It’s pretty clear that the NYT Graphic Novel Bestseller lists are equally weighing all of Diamond’s direct-market sell-in with all of the other sales channels’ sell-through. What this means is that every book shipped by Diamond to a comic book store counts exactly the same on their list as every book actually sold by a bookscan-reporting store. It means that, on the week that comic-store-favourite graphic novels get released, their positions on the bestseller list will be abornomally high… but they will most likely never be heard from again. Unless their reorder velocity in a given week is incredibly high… maybe if that item was put on a sale or something?

So how did we end up with Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born on the list? That’s tricky. Marvel is a very litigious company, and has all sorts of warnings about reproducing their private personal information in public. Blah blah blah. So, let’s talk about me instead, because I doubt even Marvel would be able to argue that retailers aren’t allowed to talk about their own businesses. So: There was a time period last month where I ordered Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born and received a higher-than-average discount on that book, and for every copy I ordered, I got another copy of the book for free. I did this, it happened, and I am talking about my actions as a retailer (litigious!). So the week that all of those discounted copies and free copies of Dark Tower that I ordered shipped to me, the book ALSO appeared on The New York Times Graphic Novel Bestseller list. Do you see the correlation there?

I don’t think Marvel tried to game the system with this maneuver; Diamond Comics also reported the first Dark Tower collection as being the top-seller for the month, likely because of this promotion. Apparently according to Diamond, something that sells at a reduced price—even if that reduced price is zero—is still a sale, and when they report data to the NYT? A sale is a sale.

Basically, in the larger bookselling community, the “end customer” is the reader, the consumer, because bookstores can return unsold product to the publisher (or distributor), and so a sale is really only final once it leaves the store. But in the Direct Market of comic book stores, the “end customer” is the retailer–the comic book store owner–because the comic book store owner can’t return the books; the final sale is when the books arrive at the store. Worse than that, comic book store owners are expected to front-load their orders–order heavily up front with no immediate promise of further availability–to secure a better discount from Diamond as a supplier, which further weights the Diamond’s numbers on the day-of-release.

So two largely incongruous sales systems are being merged–pretty badly it looks like–to generate a list that has books with little long-term sales spiking on release and never appearing again, and heavily prone to being thrown entirely out of whack by promotions, sales, discounting, and… hell, just giving stuff away for free! It’s one of the many, many problems of the apples-to-oranges sales systems that we have in comics. And yeah, it’s why The New York Times Graphic Novel Bestseller List is Broken.

- Christopher

OUTSTANDING COMIC BOOK
The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames (Vertigo/DC Comics)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Drew Goddard, Jeph Loeb and Joss Whedon (Dark Horse Comics)
Final Crisis: Revelations by Greg Rucka (DC Comics)
Secret Six by Gail Simone (DC Comics)
Young Avengers Presents by Ed Brubaker, Brian Reed, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Cornell, Kevin Grevioux and Matt Fraction (Marvel Comics)

The awards are handed out to media and media-makers who provide compelling, honest, and visible portrayals of GLBT people.

I’ve often felt that the intended aims of the media awards were awkward, giving a pat on the back to straight people who are good to gays rather than recognizing the achievements of… you know… actual gay people who also inspire and create great work and are visible and honest and etc.  But since I haven’t read 4 of the 5 books on my list up there I’ll hold my tongue until I get through them… if I ever get through them.

(Maybe Scott Pilgrim will finally get nominated next year when the movie comes out, eh?)

- Chris

What pushed me over the edge? Well I’m about a week behind on my feed reading, but I just came across a post at the Blog, talking about Naruto and Bleach anime at iTunes in Canada. Which is a non-story, and just sort of lame, but fine. What pushes the whole thing into all-caps LAME is that they illustrated the article about Naruto anime… with Fan Art. Like they have no idea what Naruto anime looks like. Better still? Fan Art by COREY LEWIS (Sharknife). Not exactly an unknown creator, you know? And they didn’t credit him, or link his site, they just used his art commercially without asking him. And they didn’t correct the story when folks wrote in in the comments section saying “Hey, what’s up with this?”

Just… just amateur hour. I don’t need to be reading this site.

If you need to see for yourself, it’s a December 17th entry. I’m not linking them.

Merry Christmas.

- Christopher
P.S. Check out Corey Lewis’ stuff online at http://www.reyyy.com/

“Ever since Archie’s first appearance in 1941, Archie Comics has prided itself with keeping up with the fads and fashions of the times.  That includes technology.  Photocopiers, fax machines, microwaves, video players, compact music players, the internet. you name it. Archie Comics has been there through every innovation, exploring each with hilarious humor as the classic cast of characters both utilize and wrestle with modern technology.  This March, several stories highlight the latest gadgets in goofy fashion, as only Archie Comics can!”

The part that they forgot to mention is that they are consistently 10 years behind in doing so. For example, I present the rest of the press release:

“ARCHIE #595: “Home Insecurity”: After robbers break into his safe, Mr. Lodge upgrades his security system to protect his property. but who will protect him from the ever-pervasive new system?!”

I hate to be all “Simpsons Did It”, but just in terms of “keeping up with the fads” The Simpsons did wacky-home-security-antics with Pierce Brosnan 2 years ago. Yikes.

Other issues that month will have (not joking) Archie addicted to text messaging, Betty & Veronica joining “The Geek Squad” (like Best Buy! Only not-litigious!), and Reggie having some sort of problem with camera phones. I hear Archie might even get Vista for Christmas… next year.

Watch out Ellis, Archie’s nipping at your body-modified, cybernetically-enhanced heels.

- Chris

What do The RZA, Jay Z, Busta Rhymes, and ICE MUTHAFUCKIN T have in common? They’re all over Kagan McLeod’s completely, completely awesome HISTORY OF RAP poster, and Kagan’s been getting pics with all of them and the poster over at his Facebook page.

ICE T with Kagan McLeod’s History of Rap print. Photo by X-man from Disconnexions.com

RZA with Kagan’s History of Rap. Photo by X-man from Disconnexions.

There are another 20+ pics over at Kagan’s site…

I know I’ve blogged about this print before, but? Local boy makes very good, you know? We’ve sold a ton of these at the store and a ton more through the website (they’re only 20 bucks), I’m super happy for Kagan getting to live the dream and meet all these incredibly talented artists.

- Chris
Top Photo of Kagan McLeod at the Source magazine offices, by X-Man of Disconnexions.com.