New comics are out today, and the MangaCast crew makes their selections.
Comics: Not just for boys any more. The Guardian notices, and they give manga credit for opening the medium up to female readers and creators.
In this week’s Flipped column, David Welsh contrasts The Manga Bible and Manga Sutra.
Charles Tan discusses why fans prefer fansubs and scanlations to licensed anime and manga. (Snobber and purism loom large.)
Meanwhile, Same Hat! Same Hat!! hosts an extremely unlicensed (and NSFW) manga, Drunkard Condo Syndrome, scanlated by Anonymous K.
ComiPress has the winners of the 53rd Shogakukan Awards and the nominees for the 2008 Manga Taisho (Manga Grand Prize). MangaCast has more on the Shogakukan awards.
Submit to Del Rey! No, I don’t mean buy all their books—they’re accepting submissions of graphic novel proposals and portfolios from would-be manga artists.
Reviews: Briana Lawrence reviews Glass Sky at Anime on DVD. Julie checks out vol. 1 of Aria and vol. 2 of Andromeda Stories at the Manga Maniac Cafe. Ed Sizemore has a thorough critique of The Manga Bible at Comics Worth Reading.
Oh man, I haven’t heard the ‘The Smurfette Principle’ in a long time. It’s as interesting as the ‘Kincaid Effect’, when we start with a cool female character—but then she’s dumbed down by her involvement with the ‘manly star’ of the book.
Charles article makes the assorted points pretty good- though I’d add that a lot of fans of fansubs I’ve known who call themselves “hardcore” aren’t often up to date on R1 dvd’s [it’s fairly common for fans to have no idea that a title’s licensed- the number of fan translators who don’t drop projects play a role in this, but it seems that companies themselves really should be extending their internet promotions net wider….].
Interesting news about Del Rey! The electronic submission is a curious thing- it shows they’re open to having a lot of submissions right now [most companies don’t opt for them due to the sludge piles that often result… adding the task of sending it via mail seems to weed some of the pack out…]