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Manga Explains NASA Mission
YetAnotherName writes "Anime fans working with NASA? Yes. Tokyopop has the scoop on planetary scientists who made manga to explain a NASA mission, complete with spandex-clad, big-eyed lead character and robotic dogs. You can also download the manga in color or black/white PDF files. (Disclaimer: my spouse is one of the authors.)" If you sit through the talk about dogs, it's actually pretty interesting.
\^_^;/
here
should withstand a decent slashdotting..
wait. so it's an american drawn thing about an american mission, why is it called a manga and not a comic? we have the word comic in our lexicon you know. any explanation or is calling it manga like calling it X-TREME! CINDI or something?
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
I haven't something this bad since D.C. comics infinite crisis. I hope their engineering skills are better than their manga skills.
I wonder if the Japan fad is fading or increasing in size... Being an international studies major, I unwisely selected Japan as my focus. A country, despite being the "second largest economy" that hasn't seen growth in over a decade, but has an abnormous amount of people focusing an equal amount attention on. I don't know, I think I am suffering from trend syndrome, and seeing a large influx of people taking a bystandard's interest in something I feel I love. I wish I would have studied Korean or Chinese culture two years ago.
What next, is NASA going to get Woody Woodpecker to explain their concept of going to the moon?!
Oh... wait...
Odd. It seems you have to read this manga from left to right (and top to bottom) .. not right to left as in most mangas.
.. and it's in English, not Japanese :P
-- dbg
This is some sort of nerd dream, and I can't seem to wake up. I love it.
have we repeated slashdot cliches and mixed and matched so much that now we hallucinate nasa making space manga?
in the style of the movie cliche wino who sees godzilla and then stares at his bottle in disbelief and then throws it, running hysterically,
i now purge slashdot from my bookmarks and rss and close the wind#@~@!" - NO CARRIER
If you don't find this manga to your liking, you might take a look at PlanetEs.
A more serious and utterly fantastic manga about life in outerspace in the pre-warp universe.
One of the best mangas, and best sci-fi for that matter, that I've read in a very long time.
It's what Enterprise *should* have been.
Oh, and we need some quality Japanese art in here... mouths inexpecably small while closed... unbelievably HUGE when open! And she needs green hair, and robot boots. And her head needs to be shaped like a bean.
(credit to Strong Bad here)
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
I like space girls as much as the next guy, but to call this manga is really a stretch. Where's the zoom-in action lines? Where's the SD vignettes? Where are the nose-bubbles and sigh-puffs and tear-drops, etc.?
The character design is hardly different from any Dark Horse comic containing teen-chicks, so that can't be what makes this manga. (Granted that Dark Horse employs some artists with some Japanese inspirations, but skinny chicks with big-eyes hardly defines a manga.)
Seems alsmost like buzzword compliance...
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
(>^(\O_O)/
but the tentacle scene was a bit gratuitous.
"Manga Explains Nasa Mission"
So in other words we've built a giant battle cruiser with an ultra powerful partical beam cannon as its primary weapon that can be used as a last resort and can also launch transformable combat mecha which can only be piloted by nubile 16 year old girls clad in tight environmental suits that leave nothing to the imagination against a vast armada of souless automatons at 20:1 odds bent on wiping out the last vestiges of humanity from the universe?
God, why didn't we fund this sooner!?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
But seriously. What do space dogs and NASA have in common? What scares me more is what will happen when people start doing fanfics of this.
Well, you see, a secret pact between Nerv and the State Alchemists used a special alloy called spacedogium to help create a weapon using ancient space energy to fight off Shonen Bat. Eventually it went spacebound, and the process created Space dogs. And now Johan Leibert is the head of the android dog catching squad, and will slowly take over the multiverse. Throw in a tenticle monster from the schema world and we're set.
aaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaha, jesus-motherfucking-christ you're funny
The word in the U.S. is "comics", or "comic strip". Calling comics "manga" in the U.S. is posturing. Using a foreign language name is a marketing tool that I do not like. Even worse, this is often done in a way that pays no respect to the language being exploited. As an example, I recently was at a menswear section of a Trendy Department Store that had most of the signs in Italian, except that the Marketing Guys apparently decided that we Stupid Americans hadn't heard of the pronoun "il", so the signs were Italian with "le" substituted for "il". Why don't they just cut the B.S. and use the prevailing language?
There is no reason this wasn't called "NASA scientists write comic strip to explain mission".
Anybody else noticed Roberto's (the orange-mohawk-havin'-NASA-technician... radical!) has a pretty sweet-looking laptop?
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
There used to be a -great- science newspaper comic during the 1960s and 1970s called "Frontiers of Science", authored by two Australian Scientists, that did a much better job at introducing and explaining all Science-related topics (...without any patronising or dumbed-down gimmicks like this 'manga' has). There's a few scans about the web (see http://www.meteoritearticles.com/pdfdownloadscomic s.html). The republished collections of the comics were among my favourite books when I was a kid...
something like this is being done by TokyoTopless
Although it doesn't go into much detail it does give a gerneral scientific explaination behind their mission.Unfortunatly if this information was in any other form a vast majority of people would've disregarded it. Here's to more manga aided learning! anyone want to make a manga series about advanced quantum theory? ^.^
\(^o^)/
reason: made in america by americans.
manga is the japanese word for comic, so by definition its a manga when its made by japanese people, as well as manwha if its made by koreans.
putting that aside, its not even drawn manga-style.
putting that aside, its not even funny or entertaining.
Is there nudity because there's no good Manga without nudity.
Hentai would be even cooler. A hentai NASA project could rock the geek world.
Page 15, bottom-left image should say "ion" instead of "neutral", right?
should i care?
rax
Just like Japanese comics are also comics. Made by Japanese.
We all know where this is going.
hahaha! that made me blow coffee through my nose...
the galactic layline?
When I was a young boy, I took karate lessons from a company called "Shotokan Karate which operated through our local YMCA. It was mostly young kids in dojos being taught by older men.
I was doing a little research on Japanese words as they related to animation, history of anime, etc. and found this
Shotacon () (also Shota ) is a Japanese and anime term for a sexual complex where an adult is attracted to an underage boy.
WTF! Couldn't they have picked a slightly better name for their organization?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
^____^ (#-__-) etc.
[oh noes my post was aborted (x_x) won't someone please think of the children!]
Where is the fucking torrent?
Deus est fatalis
Your spouse is one of the authors? Cronyism!
That is the right buzzword for politics these days, isn't it?
Are you sure the the mission's android isn't instead an acronym for
C ronyism
I n
N ews of
D ubious
I ntegrity
?
Kidding, kidding! Okay, 85% kidding. But aren't the "smart kids" they want to reach with this project the ones who will see right through an obvious plot to make learning fun? A whole lot of kids I know would rather "call B.S." than actually learn when faced with being "tricked" into learning. Why would they expect this project to just...work? What's the childhood psychology behind it? I'd like to believe it has a chance of success, but for now it only seems like it was done because of its cool-factor.
That was really kind of fun and cool, space doggies and all. I mean, I don't have any special interest in C/NOFS, but at least now I know about it.
Why can't there be about 100 times more science education like this out there? That would make me happy.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
(Disclaimer: My spouse is one of the dogs.)
If you look at the actual site carrying the comic it doesn't actually call it "manga" anywhere - it's uniformly referred to as a "comic". Yet the press release on TokyoPOP's site has "manga" for every second word - and the same for all the not-actually-manga-at-all releases they're pimping on the same page.
Who needs accuracy when you've got a neat term you can abuse to your own ends? It isn't going to change anytime soon, either - just look at "hacker".
After browsing through, I spotted some names that were familiar. Yet another fine literary work with a New Mexico Tech grad co-author. After Dan McKay's award earlier this year, it's pretty clear the school is on a roll.
Put Dan's work into this format... now that would be cool.
"Falstaff, you have entered the troposphere to the north. The pungent stench of water vapor emanates from the wet cloud walls."
"Where are the Cheetos?"
"I cast a spell! I'm casting Carbon Dioxide Heat Trapping."
"You can't cast that, there's nothing to attack!"
"I'm attacking the cloud cover!"
The final page contains a notice that 'no protons or electrons were harmed in the making of this comic'. Which is UTTER BLATANT LIES!
We must join with our Electron brethren and free them from the slavery they have been under since Edison figured out that light bulb thing! I will now free all the electrons in my hous-- (Read error: 104 (Connection reset by peer))
The submitter has a spouse!
The Slashdot standards aren't what they used to be. *shakes head*
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
It has a cute anime girl in it. You cannot tell me that doesn't help. :)
..."Western Manga" or, for short, simply "Wanga".
What arguments could anyone possibly have against that?!
* A Mad Tea Party
* Among the Chosen
* Boschen & Nesuko
* Bulletproof
* Crackling Silence
* Indavo
* Level
* Midnight Gurl
* Mondo Mecho
* Monica Furious * Reman Mythology
* Seraphic Blue
* Terinu
Padding text to allow this to post.
I have isolated the city-experience within me and have examined it closely. The idea of a city fascinates me. The formation of a biological community without a functioning, supportive social community leads to havoc. Whole worlds have become single biological communities without an interrelated social structure and this has always led to ruin. It becomes dramatically instructive under overcrowded conditions. The ghetto is lethal. Psychic stresses of overcrowding create pressures which will erupt. The city is an attempt to manage these forces. The social forms by which cities make the attempt are worth study. Remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity. Despotism and slavery hover at the edges. Many injuries occur and, thus, the need for laws. The law develops its own power structure, creating more wounds and new injustices. Such trauma can be healed by cooperation, not by confrontation. The summons to cooperate identifies the healer.
Leto Atreides, The Stolen Journals
I think some congratulations should be in order.
Sure it's not up to par with what I expect from an "entertainment" product I've paid for, but it's definitely the type of thing that makes Science more accessible to kids.
And of course the dogs part was important. I'm guessing half of you just skipped over most of the text about the dogs and their charges.
while the idea of the dogs might be simplistic, once again it's accessible to kids.
I'm just glad there are people out there who want to make teaching fun and not in the kids are dumb as rocks way that we seem to be going in the education system.
- sKy
You have to give this comic a little credit. If I were a kid, regardless of the dogs, I'd still find this very entertaining because of the cool art and you have to admit, it's a great way to get kids interested in science. I'm still laughing at their example of interferance where the guy is using his GPS system in his car and it says "You are 200 miles into the Atlantic Ocean, Turn Left." It's great for what it is people, so just let them take off every zig because there is no time, make your peace.
"Shotokan...Shotacon"
"Lex" is only one letter different from "sex"! That's even less than the three letters that you had to change! Couldn't they have chosen a better name for their software package?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
On page 15 of the comic, the atom pictured in the lower left corner, under the influence of magnetic and electric fields, should have been an "Ion" not "Neutral".
I once had a signature.
See, when I was a kid, learning was made fun with hip, black rappers in colorful early 1990s clothing dancing on backgrounds animated to look like the covers of the equally-colorful notebooks we carried around (triangles and paint splotches and shapes that look like confetti -- oh my!), singing us about why copying that floppy will amount to the ... END OF THE COMPUTER AGE... mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
Nangas nAngas nangaS nangAs
Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
It's also one of the only pieces of space sci-fi that recognizes that a loose screw flying around in orbit can totally fuck up your spaceship. Which is why the heroes are debris collectors.
That "manga" is absolutely boring.
Sorry about that.
Blue.
"And for some reason, I got blue hair. You gotta have blue hair. Then there's my mouth. Real tiny when it's closed; ridiculously huge when it's open. And then you basically just put me in space and let me fly around in cool poses!"
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail57.html
Is it "manga" or not? From a purist standpoint it's not "manga" since it's not drawn or written by anyone who is Japanese. OTOH we did deliberately ask Erik Lervold (our artist from MCAD whom I met at MCAD's Schoolgirls and Mobilesuit anime/manga workshops) to make the artwork manga-like and he came up with something that's halfway between US style and Japanese style. So you can call it "manga," you can call it a "comic book," or you can call it a "graphical introduction for middle school students to the CINDI mission" (which is what we call it in our reports to NASA).
As for the various complaints about why we didn't just give the straight science, remember the target audience is typical sixth through ninth graders. If we just did straight science we'd lose 98% of them on the first page. There is already enough boring and bad science education material out there. Yes, the story is silly, but the idea is to get the reader interested and let the science sneak up on them instead of hitting them over the head with it straight off. "The Magic Schoolbus" (books and TV series) was our ideal role model of how to do that right and make it work.
BTW, we're not the first science comic book. There are all the wonderful comics by Larry Gonick. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-fo rm/ref=s_sf_b_as/103-8242802-9062263 Then there was a comic book done by Zander Cannon (and Kevin Cannon) called "Space Weather" put out by NOAA back in 2001. http://www.kevincannon.org/published/ And there are two manga (real manga in Japanese!) about the aurora and the Earth's magnetic field put out by the Solar-Terrestrial Environmental Laboratory at Nagoya University. NOAA helped create English translations of them here: http://www.stelab.nagoya-u.ac.jp/ste-www1/doce/out reach.html#anc_booklets STEL has a lot more science manga in Japanese here: http://www.stelab.nagoya-u.ac.jp/ste-www1/doc/outr each_j.html All of these were the inspirations for us to do our own comic book. Also there was a great NPR story last spring about using comic books in science education at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4581832 One of the books mentioned there was "Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards" which is a comic book/graphic novel about the bitter fight between the nineteenth century paleontologists Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh. I just picked up a copy last week at my local comic book store and it's great! Two of the artists are none other than Zander and Kevin Cannon from above.
For SynapseLapse (644398) who suggested watching "PlanetES": Yeah!! I second that. One of the two NASA space junk experts interviewed in the US release (Dr. Mark Matney) is a grad school buddy of mine and didn't tell Bandai he'd already seen some fansubs of the series before they approached him to do the interviews. (I wonder how that happened....) BTW, NOAA has commissioned Zander and Kevin Cannon to do a sequel to their "Space Weather" comic about "Space Junk." http://www.bigtimeattic.com/blog/2005_09_01_archiv e.html
For Peterus7 (607982) who wrote: "Well, you see, a secret pact between Nerv and the State Alchemists used a special alloy called spacedogium to help create a weapon using ancient space energy to fight off Shonen Bat. Eventually it went spacebound, and the process created Space dogs. And now Johan Leibert
This brings a whole new meaning to the relationship between Gouki/Akuma and Ryu.
(I didn't get a chance to respond ealier)
...skinny chicks with big-eyes hardly defines a manga.
7 47886. Sadly, I think the "cool kids" (for younger definitions of kid) aren't watching fansubs, but Beyblade, Yu-gi-oh and One Piece. Sadly, I think the well translated, well-localized (i.e., humor and often puns preserved) Pokemon has already passed its apogee. If by kids you meant teens then yes. :-) The new generation of anime fans sure have it easy... back in my day... (turn on the old man voice) we had to drive for hours to swap tapes at underground cons in the back of comic shops just to watch 3rd-generation fansubbed dups of Nausicaa.
me:
you: That doesn't define manga at all. It defines the mass market manga we see translated. Theres a lot of different styles where the eyes arn't huge and such, but unless a fanbase picks up they never get released.
I guess we're agreeing. Thanks for taking the time to let me know you agree. Possibly relevant, but not directed at you personally: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164683&cid=13
FWIW, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a manga-serial published in the last 20 years that doesn't include zoom-lines, ever. The cinematic/story-board style in manga has been nearly universal since the 80s, I'd consider this a pretty good hallmark for the "style" (if we can agree there is such a thing; If we can't agree there is a certain manga style then you needn't respond since we fundementally disagree).
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
way to small tits for a manga!
no white underwear and mini-skirts ?!
WTF is this?
First, as a co-creator of the "Cindi in Space" comic book, thanks for taking the time to read it. We loved getting slashdotted and appreciate your interest and feedback.
For those worried about the "manga" designation, we don't mind whatever you want to call it. We call it a comic book. To NASA we call it a "graphical introduction for middle school students to the CINDI mission". Tokyopop (a manga company) calls it a manga, and so does my husband. As long as kids like it and learn something, that's what matters.
Okay, the space dogs are silly, but that's the point. We're not surprised that many of you think we should have gone straight to the science...after all slashdot is news for NERDS. We're hoping to reach the rather larger fraction of 12 to 15 year old kids who tend to think of science as boring. (Can you image how hard the ionosphere is to explain to these kids?) We're also interested in getting and keeping kids, especially girls, interested in science. Girls tend to start losing interest in "nerdy" things by 6th grade. Want the real nerdy scoop? We have a whole curriculum guide that will be posted online complete with boring (to typical middle school kids) information sheets and we hope to have real CINDI data for kids to analyze, too.
Finally, an extra big thank you to those who caught the typo on page 15. We will work to get it fixed ASAP. It may take a few weeks, though, given what we paid our student artist. It's hard even for us to believe that we did this whole comic book for less than the cost of one of us going to the fall American Geophysical Union meeting!