For those of you who haven’t been following along at home, Takeshi Miyazawa is an American comics artist (he drew Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane) who went to Japan last year to try to break in to manga. Obviously, he’s already very good, but making the switch from Western comics to Japanese manga is proving harder than he expected. Today he posts about going to Kodansha, Japan’s largest publisher, and getting a fairly sharp critique from an editor there:
One of the major points was that it didn’t have enough “manga-isms” to it. By that, he meant, more light-hearted touches like those wacky faces and more humourous touches that many people associate with manga backhome. I studiously avoided any of that stuff and it seems it came around to bite me in the ass. Also, not enough movement in the images. If you check out my more physical scenes or action sequences for SMLMJ or BFX you’ll notice that I mainly work with suspended shots rather than blurry and trailing arms or legs. He mentioned it’s okay to use once in a while but when it’s the same note throughout it loses it’s impact and becomes dull.
There’s more, and it’s interesting not only as a contrast between the two types of comics but also because of Miyazawa’s totally professional reaction.
At the Manga Maniac Cafe, Julie goes trolling for manga in the September Diamond Previews.
Comicsnob posts this week’s manga watch list.
ICv2 talks to DC president Paul Levitz. I’ll save you some time and link directly to part three, where he talks about their manga imprint, CMX, and their recent investment in Flex Comics.
The Asahi Shimbun looks at the history of Viz, with a profile of head honcho Seiji Horibuchi, who wasn’t even a big manga fan until he was 33. (Via ComiPress.)
Also at ComiPress: a profile of the short-lived website animeOnline, a rumor that Vertical has licensed Tezuka’s Dororo, and a link to a story about a 12-year-old mangaka, whose little interactive story, A Day of the Melon Bread, is cute as heck albeit a bit hard to maneuver through.
Otaku Champloo is one year old! Actually, a bit more, as blogger Khursten lost track of time. She celebrates with a post about the Tagalog translation of Doraemon.
Ed posts the second part of his Big List of Japanese manga releases; this one covers mid-size publications.
Yaoi Suki has the press release about the new yaoi magazine as well as a funny anecdote about an unfortunate romanization of a Japanese name.
Reviews: Julie checks out vol. 7 of Kamui at the Manga Maniac Cafe. Lori Henderson reviews vol. 13 of BT’X at Manga Life. At Soliloquy in Blue, Michelle reviews vols. 13 and 14 of Hana-Kimi. Patricia Beard reviews the adult title Pleasure Dome at Anime on DVD. Bill Sherman reviews vol. 1 of Translucent at Blogcritics.
Thanks for linking to the animeOnline article! I actually proofread it last week (thanks again for posting the call for proofreaders at ComiPress!) and wondered when it would be up.
We can only hope that animeOnline does come back, bigger and better!
I left a comment on Tak’s site and hopefully he’ll see it… I think he should try to publish a doujin in COMIKET to hon his skills. Being a circle helps his negotiation as a professional anyway. Just hope he’s otaku enough to do a doujin on a hot property like Fate, Haruhi, and Lucky Star. Since his English is excellent he should totally do a Pixel Maritan doujin, and it will sell like hot-cakes. I’m sure he can think of more than a few profanities for that little cute US Marine. Maritan is taboo for almost every circile cus none of them are English proficient enough to tackle it.
Wow. I don’t what the standard is in Japan for manga submissions, but for submitting prose fiction around here, to get that kind of close, personal, and very specific feedback is a very good thing and good sign indeed. Usually you just a form rejection letter with nothing else at all! Though of course Tak is a professional already, so he has several legs up compared to those of us in the slush pile. :)
Did Miyazawa take the constructive criticism to heart and come back to Kodansha with something more likee what they needed to break in a new title? Or did he just leave it there?