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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.
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?
pwned. dude i can see your server on fire from here.
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.
This is because most manga's are created in Japan. Not America. "English manga's" (which I'll just call manga's even though they might not deserve that name) should be left to right, as they're audience are people in English speaking countries, which have the left to right feature in their written language.
The only time a manga created outside of Japan should read right to left is when they've been translated from Japanese, or they're being marketed towards an audience whose language is written right to left (in which case it should be written in that language, and not English).
If you do create a "manga" do not bring over the Japanese custom of having the panels read right to left. This is a bad imitation and amateurish, and only raises a barrier to your potential audience. NASA did the right thing with it's comic being left to right.
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.
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.
In the early forties, the federal government sponsored a lot of artists to produce really nice art to convince people that it was *really important* to kill lots of Germans.
I'd say that it's at least as useful to convince people that science is fun.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Perhaps it's just me, but aren't all the popular manga and anime - Ranma, Inu-Yasha, Lum, Tenchi, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Dirty Pair (yeah, I know the manga is drawn by Adam Warren, but it's still as manga as can get), Caravan Kidd, Outlanders, Drakuun, Sailor Moon, Dominion Tank Police, Slayers, Excel Saga - about superheros (okay, Akira and Excel Saga are about supervillains, but still) ?
All of these have one thing in common: they have a finite length. All of them have an overarching plot (and usually several smaller plot arches going on at any given time too), and once that has been finished, the series is finished.
On the other hand, big American publishers, namely Marvel and DC, create heroes and villains and then keep them around forever. That is understandable - a good character is hard to come by, and once they have been properly introduced, you can reuse them easily without having to come up with new motives. Doctor Doom wants to kill Reed Richards, but not really, since that would make his life purposeless. So Doom will come up with a plot to kill Richards, then at the last moment goof it up somehow, and Richards escapes. In the end, nothing has changed, and the writers can reuse the same characters and basic plot structures again and again infinitum. Unfortunately, there is only so many ways and times Doom can almost kill Richards before Doom the writers run out of fresh ideas for diablolical plots and readers start going "yay, another Doom-Richards-fight." So the writers try to compensate by adding soap opera to the mix. But soap opera only works if the reader cares about the characters involved, so the writers take the easy way and try to invoke sympathy in the readers by making the characters suffer. However, to get a reaction, they need to up the dose time and again, and the end result is all the characters going through horrible personal traumas and losses all the time, to the point of it becoming utterly ridicilous.
In other words, the problem with the established American superhero comics is not any inherent problem in the concept of superhero itself, but laziness and greed of the publishers. They want to keep milking the cash cows of Superman, X-men, and other decades-old series, but the cows are long dead so the milk kinda stinks.
If you want to see good American superhero series, I recommend Sojourn and the Powerpuff Girls - of the latter, the episode "Moral Decay" is one of my favourite superhero stories ever.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.