Slashdot Mirror
American Newspapers to Begin Carrying Manga
jonerik writes to tell us The Associated press is running an article stating that several American newspapers are going to start carrying manga with their normal arsenal of comics. The papers feel that this will help boost their readership amongst a younger audience. The two strips that made the cut are Van Von Hunter, and Peach Fuzz which are both created by American writer/illustrators and are being distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Now, it if was hentai...
Where does the line between manga and comic art exist then, if not by country of origin?
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Manga has nothing on Ziggy
If it ain't Japanese it ain't manga. They should have picked up Azumanga Daioh.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Aaaah - manga to the rescue! If nothing else this shows how corrupt and clueless the American media landscape has become. After the obvious abandonment of objective reporting we experienced in the last three years, mixed with fabricated reports, a myopic coverage of world affairs, etc. it is manga that will get me to buy the paper now? Give me a break! If I want manga I either buy a printed copy dedicated to that genre, or buy a DVD, or if I'm really broke resort to eMule and co.
I frankly wonder what PR company issued that one - must be the one that constantly claims that 'suits are back!' - LOL
How about filling their newspapers with informative and well written articles that don't contain glaring factual errors? It seems like almost every article on a subject I know something about has blatant factual errors in it.
How about publishing the news as it happens? It seems like most of the articles in the New York Times cover things I knew about a week earlier.
How about not using anonymous sources, or at the very least outing the sources if they are proved to have been lying?
How about not pretending there is such a thing as unbiased reporting? Saying "one is lead to believe" instead of "I believe" is just another form of lying.
You know, this might be one of the smartest things anyone in the media has done recently. Even if it turns out to be an enormous flop (and I think it might have a chance of succeeding,) at least it's a new direction. They are at least trying to get out of their rut.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Though I was pissed at the time, as time as passed, I have more and more begun to think that Bill Watterston (Calvin and Hobbes) did the right thing, in quitting as soon as he felt like it had become work, not fun. As a result, they are all good.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
In the 1980s and 1990s Belo bought newspapers across the country.
To quash competition in two-newspaper towns, they paid rediculous amounts for exclusive rights to features like comics and Dear Abby and Ann Landers.
People quit buying the competition and now we have a lot fewer two-newspaper cities.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
C'mon, you didn't even read the summary. Both the manga are created by Americans.
Love Hina? FAKE? I think you want Angel Sanctuary.
:)
The local anime convention was once held at a traditional Catholic school. The completely insane organizers decided to show Angel Sanctuary. I had the opportunity of watching it in a big screen between a giant statue of Mother Mary and another of a saint. The school never allowed another anime convention on its grounds. I think it was worth it
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
There are 3 or 4 things that I read in the paper (in order), the comics, the editorial page, the police reports, and maybe, maybe, the front page. Comics /do/ sell the paper and thankfully my paper publisher listened to the complaints of many and cut the likes of Cathy (UGH!) out and put Dilbert (finally!) in. Were there no comics, I'd probably not ever read their newspaper.
Americans take what is brilliant, run it through a lamifying filter and end up with Fitz US style, Nikita US style. End result: lame, politically correct bullshit.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Considering Harry Potter's success, i'd say yes. Altho I doubt the kids will read the Finances section.
My parents used to buy the newspapers that had the comic strips that I liked. For my father there wasn't much difference between newspaper A or newspaper B, but I _HAD_ to see the comic strips. So he always bought newspaper A for me.
See, newspapers aren't aimed at kids. They're aimed at the PARENTS. The comic strips are just a marketing device, and manga inclusion is just a strategy to keep that market (people don't buy newspapers as often as 10 years ago). Since comic strips like Peanuts don't attract the young people right now, manga in newspapers was bound to happen, sooner or later.
Newspaper? Aren't newspapers dead already? I thought that with inventions of Slashdot, Fark, and The Daily Show that everyone born after 1970 gets all the daily information they can use. Even old-school broadcast television is moving to the web. As of yesterday, you can now download NBC nightly news on the web.
For those of you still reading newspapers, STOP KILLING THE TREES already. We need the wood to rebuild Florida, Texas, and Lousiana before next hurricane season.
Perhaps you could do us all a favor and say... back your assertion up!
The reason you may be modded flame bait is that are making a rather enormous generalization that, so far as I can tell, does not in any way represent reality.
So maybe you could do the honest thing here and either admit you're just blowing smoke out your ass, "Feminist Mom", or come up with some actual data.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
(hmmmpph if the above line doesnt display then it would seem slashdot needs some i18n work.....)
You cant HANDLE the Japanese editions?
With weekly Jump magazine weighing in at @ 500 pages the comic section would be bigger than the paper.....
Well, it's hard to say where do you draw the line at what is manga what isn't. Manga is really just the japanese (and chinese) word for comics and isn't really confined to one style or another. But there are a certain type of styles that american artists, (including these two mentioned in this article) to a certain degree, haven't adopted/understand. I know a lot of those deviant art people will like to call themselves manga artists and will argue to the end of time that they are, but whether their comic is good or not is another matter altogether. To put things into perspective. I was reading ranma 1/2 while I was reading Batman:Knight's End and in my eyes, they're both just comics. The difference is really in the story line and how the artists perceives the world (i.e. how the shots are set up and the panels). But what a lot of younger readers have found is that the story lines of mangas (comics from japan) are, a lot of times, a lot more intriquiging, engaging and more emotional than say your x-men or spiderman where you find out, yet again, that the spiderman you thought was spiderman was yet another clone. And because, at that time, there was no comics outside japan that had that style (ragnarok comes to mind. Yes, the manga that Ragnarok Online was based on was korean. *gasp*), they've come to associate the manga style with the more engaging and better stories. Of course, this being America, a lot of people have tried to encroach on that space by putting out shotty story lines with manga-like art, hoping that people will read their stuff and associate their comic to the style that associates with good story lines. (Kevin Bacon, anyone?) So, in the end, it's all about the storyline, not the style. That's why I've stayed away from the American authors. Usually the authors that try to associate themselves with the style... that's all they have going for them. And for those artists that say Japanese artist can't draw... you should see the ground work and side work that a lot of these artists do. The infamous Hojo Tsukasa (surname, first name) who did Cat's Eye, City Hunter, F. Compo and Angel Heart, has a really great book out filled with his life drawings. I only wish I could draw that well. Oh yeah, my title. If they wanted a 4 panel manga, they should have just licensed azumanga daiou.
please... let me sleep... a little more... yay, no longer annonmyous coward.
Okay, so first of all, my head would have to be a little bean. With real, real big eyes. Get rid of my thumbs, make me all shiny {clean noise that sounds like a harp, or bells, or both} ...my boots would be a whole lot cooler. Like robot boots. {robotic 'shooo' noise} 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!
I don't know about you but I've read quite a few manga... Though I've never read this "Peach Fuzz" or "Von Von Whatever" I have to say that manga is hardly anything that is for kids. I would say that the normal comics you see in newspapers today actually appeal more to "kids" than manga ever would. In Asia mangas may be read by 10-14 year old kids alongside the older readers, but that is only because Asians are more... For lack of a better word... "Mature," and are exposed to more "mature" content (not as in pornography, but as in complex and hard-for-kids-to-understand) at a younger age. If anything, adding manga to the Sunday Funnies will likely draw more adults.
Tokyopop is one of the companies that started the whole manga boom. They weren't the first, but they definitely contributed to the market. They started out being called Mixx, and originally published the Sailor Moon manga in english. They started releasing other Shoujo manga (manga for girls) and did well initially.
Eventually, they saturated the market with a lot of titles and started seeing diminishing returns on their profits. Naturally, they looked at other markets to expand into. One of the things they did was to run a regular "Rising Stars of Manga" contest where they encouraged artists to submit material to them in the manga style, with the winner being offered a publishing deal.
I've been told that terms of the contract heavily favor the company, and that they own the rights to all the material that gets published. They've been calling this product OEL manga, or "original english language manga" and are trying to differentiate it from the so-called "ameri-manga" that is published in the comics industry.
There's really no difference between OEL manga and Amerimanga, and it's basically a marketing tactic. Make no mistake, this is OEL manga, not the stuff published in Japan. But like manga, it's very free in it's layout of the various panels. Moving to the standard 4-panel (or 4-koma in Japan, which is published vertically as opposed to horizontally) format will be difficult. It'll be interesting to see how they accomplish this.
Even though they refer to it as manga, Japanese people make a distinction between the stuff published domestically and abroad. American Comics are usually referred to as AmeComi, and OEL manga probably falls under that umbrella. So while it's nice for the marketing folks to say that manga is being published in newspapers now, it really shouldn't be considered manga.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
So the question really is, is Manga about a comic coming from Japan, or is it about the particular style of comic?
And the answer is, it's a comic coming from Japan.
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