SDCC wrapups

At MangaCast, Ed posts audio of the Jim Henson Company Labyrinth and Dark Crystal panel.

ANN has a list of new licenses with links to their encyclopedia articles, which will have to do for now as the publishers don’t seem to have a lot of info up yet.

Wired went to the con but got distracted by the cosplayers. At least they took pictures.

Pata wraps up SDCC and fact-checks PWCW. He issues a caution about carelessly using the term “lolicon.”

Speaking of PWCW, they have two articles up that mention manga. This marketing story fills in some of the gaps, as manga sites’ coverage of the con focused on the manga panels, not the broader events. Diamond VP Kuo-Yu Liang tells PW what we all know, that manga is huge in bookstores, and what we might not have guessed, that yaoi is selling well in the southern chain Books-A-Million. And this:

He has praise for small manga publishers like Go!Comi and Seven Seas Entertainment. “They both have very strong marketing with online preview pages and message boards. They do all the stuff for their books that much bigger companies don’t do.”

Indeed. Liang also mentions Alison Bechdel’s FunHome as an example of a book that benefited from publicity in the non-comics world, such as the New York Times and NPR. I wanted to read this book ever since I heard NPR interview Bechdel (see! It works!), but I haven’t been able to find it in Borders or Barnes & Noble, although I haunt both those stores weekly. I could trek out of my way to some comic store I’ve never been to before on the off chance that they would have it, but—nah, I’ll just buy more manga instead. It’s a shame, though.

On the other hand, manga and manwha wrapup doesn’t have much that regular readers of MangaCast won’t already know. With limited time and space to cover an entire genre, they didn’t do much more than name names, although they did get a quote from Yoshihiro Tatsumi.