Nigorimasen! Blog

This morning ANN published an editorial by Justin Sevakis, the founder of ANN who now works for Imaginasian TV, in which he described the sorry state the industry is currently in financially, how it got to that state of affairs, and the problems preventing any significant change from happening. Apparently, the numbers are “terrifying” and the business model is clearly failing. His doom-and-gloom piece, I think, made many good points about how difficult the situation is now for licenses to break even due to years non-interference with fansub distribution.
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The poll about Newtype USA and pricing has been growing old in the sidebar so I felt a new question was well overdue. I wanted to see the method of behavior in which people typically watch anime series so the question is “Which of the following best describes your anime watching behavior?” The options are watching week-to-week, marathoning or multi-batching the series on fansubs, buying the DVDs as they come out, waiting for the box set, or just watching it on TV.
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Last night, I was browsing through the top song charts of various countries’ iTunes Stores and I was surprised to find “Sousei no Aquarion” by Akino, the first opening theme to the anime of the same name, on the Japanese chart. I then thought to myself, “Hey, wasn’t that one of Funimation’s Kickoff ‘07 licenses?” I checked and found I was right but then I began to wondering why I hadn’t heard anything about an upcoming release. The landing page for Aquarion says “Coming Fall 2007″, which seems to be a projection that be missed since it’s almost winter and there’s still no definite word. Meanwhile the other six titles seem to be doing fine.
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I’m currently selling some of my anime DVD’s because I need some money for next month’s rent and also I want to free some shelf space. (Can’t believe I got myself in this situation in the first place…) Anyway, I already sold some to people in my anime club during the past few weeks but there are still a number of them remaining so I decided to just put them up for auction. The first group of auctions ends around 1:30am-2am PST 11/26, the other around 2:30pm-3pm PST that same day, all but one have Buy It Now options, and I’ll be shipping them by Media Mail. Listings below the fold!
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Before this week, the downloadable episodes that ADV Films was selling through its website were priced at $4.99 each, much higher than anime on iTunes albeit ADV’s stuff was at a much higher bitrate as well. Now the company has announced that it has begun offering downloads of “over 500 episodes” from 32 series for $1.99. Sounds good, right? Well, maybe not if you look at what you’re getting for your two bucks.
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Wild Arms TV (short for Twilight Venom) is an anime based on the first two installments of the future Western series of video games and aired in 1998. I haven’t played any of those games so I was not familiar with the world nor any characters before I watched the five episodes on the first disc and expecting that it would be decent. It met those expectations.
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It’s been a while (about nine months) since I’ve composed a This Week in Akiba post, probably because I check out each entry that week and from Oct 29th to Nov 4th, there were about forty-seven. I picked out nine that I thought were interesting enough to share with you.

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Remember a couple weeks ago when I posted about the decline in manga sales in Japan? Well, this month’s issue of Wired Magazine has a feature story about Japan’s manga industry as well as a 10-page manga-style history of Japanese comics in the United States. The main article begins at a dojinshi market called Comic Ichi, shifts to providing the reader a sense of the art format’s influence within Japan, and returns to the topic of dojinshi artists while suggesting that the pool of enthusiastic artists could hold hope for solving the industry’s issue of homogeneity.

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