Nigorimasen! Blog

The news that Inuyasha (the manga) will at last conclude when its 558th chapter is published in next week’s Shonen Sunday should be a welcome relief for fans of the series. They will hopefully get a definite conclusion unlike the TV series, whose ending made Anime Insider’s list of 10 worst anime endings last October. (Scan after the jump.)

This announcement also means that Viz Media will have at least two more years of business from the franchise - the 34th volume is due to come out July 8th. If the current pace of one volume every three months continues, Volume 56 would come out in January 2014 (assuming they don’t speed its release, like they did with Naruto last year). That would be five years after the projected January 2009 release of volume 56 in Japan. With such a long wait ahead for US fans, I hope scanlations don’t hurt sales of the printed versions too much.
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Chris Beveridge posted a complaint Monday about the lackluster marketing and solicitation efforts of ADV Films and FUNimation to the broader non-hardcore audience. I personally haven’t had as bad a problem with on-box descriptions but I’ve had more of an issue with minimalistic ads, such as the above from the June issue of PiQ that I got in the mail late last week.

At first, I was like “what the hell is Shattered Angels?” and the one-line copy - “Why Choose?” - wasn’t helping me understand what the hell they were trying to advertise. It took a quick search engine query to divine that Shattered Angels is actually Kyoshiro to Towa no Sora under another name. (I later noticed that the image credit mentioned the production committee in the lower left corner but tiny, grey text on a white background is not very readable to the average eye.)
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I got the pulp copy of RightStuf’s Spring 2008 catalog in the mail today and found an odd coincidence: two different manga with homophonic names: Gacha Gacha and Gatcha Gacha. The former is a shonen title dealing with a girl’s multiple personalities with an ecchi bent (the story arc shown above, “Next Revolution”, involves a boy who swaps gender whenever he sneezes due to a VR game malfunction!) while the latter is a shoujo romantic comedy with a love square and hints of shoujo-ai. Thankfully the Wikipedia pages for both series offer links to the other (shonen to shoujo and vice-versa) in case you were off by a letter. Still hard to discern between the two if you only hear the titles, though.

From top to bottom: Japanese, German, English

When I was in Germany last August, I bought the first volume of Honey and Clover and wrote about how Tokyopop GmbH was releasing titles noticably ahead of US licensors. Now that Viz’s English version has hit shelves, I bought one of those and looked for differences and similarities between the German and American adaptations. What follows is a comparison of many features between the two in attempt to determine which is the better visual adaptation.
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ICv2 reported in its Guide #51: Anime/Manga that sales of anime DVDs in North America fell more than 20% in 2007 and that the estimated market size in retail dollars is $275-300 million. That drop of a fifth might seem shocking at first but once you also take into consideration a corresponding 21% drop in anime releases, the number doesn’t seem to be too much cause for alarm. The amount of releases decreased in 2006 as well to the tune of 19% so I believe the market is still consolidating through more calculated and fewer licenses. The guide writers are nevertheless optimistic about the future of anime in America based on signs we’ve heard before including a “growing awareness” among US audiences, the eagerness of US companies to shorten the gap between Japanese airings and DVD release, and those companies’ willingness to try new methods of digital distribution and lower-cost packaging.

On the manga front, it appears that 2007 was another strong year but its growth rate is beginning to taper. The profileration of new titles is still the major problem facing publishers and retailers, something that I think might become an issue for some publishers in the near future. The manga section at the Borders here in Davis almost takes up two full aisles and forced the fantasy books into another set of shelves. I personally think that the US manga market might become a bit oversaturated in the near future when I look at the projection in the ICv2 article of 33 volumes of manga being released a week but it’s just a small thought right now.

[via ANN]

There was a story on ANN a couple days ago about a mother who was shocked to the Shoujo Beat manga “Absolute Boyfriend” in the children’s section where her 11-year-old was browsing at a Books-A-Million in Lexington, SC. There was a link to the actual news story from the CBS affliate WLTX so I decided to grab the video report and upload it. Books-A-Million Vice President Jeff Skipper said that the store would relocate the manga section to another area of the store after they looked at the “proximity” of the two departments. (Absolute Boyfriend is rated Older Teen on its page on Viz’s website.)
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The September and December 2007 issues of Shonen Ace, respectively.

Last week I ordered two issues of Shonen Ace from Akadot Retail mainly for the pack-in extras (got the tip for December from Furu Anime Panikku) and got them in the mail Wednesday. The “appendix” for September’s issue was a Haruhi battery-operated fan while December had a medium size Evangelion T-shirt meant to celebrate the 13th anniversary of Shonen Ace. More pictures after the jump.

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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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I was walking around with my parents at Apple Hill today, looking at bunches of apples, pumpkins, and various crafts when I saw the headline “Manga comics losing longtime hold on Japan” in a copy of yesterday’s USA Today that was in a trash bin. So I made a mental note of it, checked out the article when I got home, and apparently there is a big problem of sorts. Sales fell the fifth consecutive year in 2006 and manga magazine sales are far from their 1995 peak of 1.34 billion with a figure of 745 million last year, about a 44% drop. The reporter noted that that high year was when Weekly Shonen Jump stopped carrying Dragon Ball. There were four likely causes given that primarily involve the habits of young Japanese people.
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In an AP article about “Thunder Road”, the first comic to be released exclusively for US cell phones, there was a bit about Tokyopop and their offerings through GoComics:

Mobile comics have been a cellular mainstay for years in manga-crazy Japan, where some titles already begin life on cell phones before going to print.

Stu Levy, chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based TokyoPop, one of the leading U.S. publishers of manga, said the domestic market is still way behind Japan. But he said he could see comics being released in the U.S. on mobile phones before coming out in print regularly in the next few years.

Levy, whose company provides most of GoComics’ manga titles, said his company already is experimenting with adding animation and other cinematic touches to manga stories and tying in manga-themed games, ring tones, wallpaper and other content.

“I think that we’re all still in the experimental stage,” Levy said. “But I think with video and with technology that will allow the experience on the cell phone to become more engaging and more involved, we’ll be able to touch more customers in a number of areas.”

I tried out the service on my Verizon phone and the first chapter of DramaCon looked pretty nice with a couple instances of cropping and focusing on speech bubbles. However, I don’t think I would do it regularly because I like to have the whole thing in my hands and be able to admire two-page spreads or flip through the pages. Another excuse is a reluctance to paying a monthly subscription of $4.49 and using airtime to access something that I can’t view on anything else. It’s similar to my stance on ringtones and wallpapers - I’d rather make my own for free and have a lot of options instead of paying for a limited selection.