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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?
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.
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.
something like this is being done by TokyoTopless
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.
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.
Actually, the Japanese have a word for American Comics: AmeComi. I'm not sure what their word for comics in America drawn in the manga style would be but I would suspect it would also be AmeComi instead of Manga.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
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.
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!
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.
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.
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