MMF launches, the girls of shonen, and the scanner of the future

The June Manhwa Moveable Feast has begun, and Melinda Beasi starts us off with an introduction to the Color trilogy (The Color of Earth, The Color of Water, The Color of Heaven), which is the topic of this month’s MMF, while Daniella Orihuela-Gruber and Lori Henderson check in with the first reviews.

Melinda also rounds up some recent reviews of manhwa in her latest Manhwa Monday post.

In case you’re afraid you missed something, Lori Henderson rounds up the past week’s manga news at Manga Xanadu and Erica Friedman posts the latest edition of Yuri Network News at Okazu.

Kate Dacey looks at this week’s new releases.

At Manga Desu, Andrew continues his series on the girls of shonen manga with an analysis of Winry from Fullmetal Alchemist.

Helen McCarthy looks at another manga creator whose works are unknown in English, although she is very influential in Japan: Nanaeko Sasaya, a member of the Magnificent 49ers group.

Deb Aoki has the 411 on Tokyopop’s America’s Greatestui Otaku tour, which will be launching soon.

Tech talk: The IEEE Spectrum, not a publication we usually link to around here, has a story about a super-scanner that can scan in an entire book in about a minute; you just hold the book under the device and flip the pages. This would be a huge leap ahead of the old-school methods of cutting a book up and scanning in the pages one by one, and the application is obvious—too obvious:

In fact, Watanabe told me he was particularly interested in scanning manga comics. Imagine, he said, if all of Japan’s vast manga archives, at libraries, homes, and elsewhere, could be rapidly scanned and shared among manga fans around the world. That’d be nice. Alas, when he contacted one publisher, they didn’t like his idea and forbade him from using their books for testing the scanning device. Watanabe currently uses a mock book he made himself.

Reviews: Kate Dacey posts short takes on Afterschool Charisma, Bamboo Blade, and Higurashi When They Cry at The Manga Critic. The Manga Recon team presents their own short reviews of recent releases in the latest edition of Manga Minis. Carlo Santos takes a close look at some new manga in his latest Right Turn Only!! column at Anime News Network.

Michelle Smith on Adolf 5: 1945 and All That Remains (Soliloquy in Blue)
Kristin on vol. 1 of Afterschool Charisma (Comic Attack)
Connie on vol. 5 of Baby & Me (Slightly Biased Manga)
Richard Bruton on The Box Man (Forbidden Planet)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 3 of Children of the Sea (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Michelle Smith on vols. 1 and 2 of Claymore (Soliloquy in Blue)
Tangognat on vol. 1 of Flower in a Storm (Tangognat)
Connie on vol. 10 of The Gentlemen’s Alliance+ (Slightly Biased Manga)
Leroy Douresseaux on vol. 7 of Gestalt (The Comic Book Bin)
Sesho on vol. 4 of Happy Mania (Sesho’s Anime and Manga Reviews)
Sam Kusek on vol. 1 of Kingyo Used Books (Manga Recon)
Charles Webb on vol. 2 of Laon (Manga Life)
Shannon Fay on vol. 1 of Millennium Prime Minister (Kuriousity)
Sean T. Collins on Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka (Attentiondeficitdisorderly)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 10 of Vampire Knight (A Case Suitable for Treatment)

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Comments

  1. Up in Toronto, there’s a huge initiative (including a grant with millions of dollars) to use some kind of super scanner and get all of the University of Toronto’s huge academic library entirely digital. I have a friend who spent a few months scanning books for the archives for $10 an hour. It’s an excellent, EXCELLENT idea, and publishers fighting it is more proof that they’re just unprepared to go digital. The technology is here, it’s just the laws and the businesses that have to catch up. And they WILL have to catch up, just like every freaking business in the world has had to catch up to new technology. Book publishers are not special—they can’t whine and get special treatment by civilization. THEY HAVE TO UPDATE THEMSELVES.

    I didn’t really want to get into this whole “publishers cracking down on scans” debate, it’s just…I’m so, so unimpressed so far. DMP has an interesting idea. Netcomics has been doing it right for years. The other publishers who stream anime and post scans legally have the right idea, too. Don’t fight the technology—it’s a losing battle, and new technology opens up NEW paths for business. Work WITH it, people! Yelling at MangaFox isn’t a long-term solution. Cripes, why are the companies so slow with this? iTunes worked things out almost a decade ago.