Kodansha sends C&D | Last pictures taken by Usui found

David Welsh, in his review of CMX’s Swan, considers an angle to the DC Entertainment story that no one else has yet tackled… what all the commotion could mean for the manga imprint.  I never saw it this way, but neglect could turn out to be a good thing!

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Comics Worth Reading has a review of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and provides a summary of the major, sometimes dense themes the author covers, and draws parallels with nerds comic fans of the American variety.

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Missed it… according to AstroNerdBoy’s blog, Japanese mega-publisher Kodansha made its US presence known to the scanlation scene by sending a cease-and-desist letter to a group posting zero-day, raw scans of their manga.  (Caught via MangaBlog)

In an interview I had a while ago that touched on the subject of scanlations, I said something to the effect of “don’t do anything that would attract the attention of the Japanese publishers.”  It seems posting raw scans before the Japanese street date is one of those things.

As much as scanlators may try to be mindful of their moral obligations to the fandom (or, simply limit their own legal exposure), the nature of the internet is such that nothing they can do, short of stopping a scanlation mid-series, can exert any real control over the end result.  Scanlations will continue to be traded long after a book is licensed; they’ll find their way onto unscrupulous pay sites; translations will conflict with the official releases.  Unfortunately, Japanese companies will want to deal with this at the source.  As they become more invested in the U.S., and in turn become more familiar with the scene and the realities of the market, expect legal actions to escalate, in quantity if not ferocity.

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The Asahi recounts the previously discussed CEDAW meeting at the UN, at which Japan was chastised for not meeting its commitments to creating sexual equality.  If one needs any more proof that the UN is specifically targeting ero manga, anime, and games (holding Japan up to standards some of its largest members do not meet), this is it.

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Also at the Asahi… a few additional details have emerged on mangaka Yoshito Usui’s untimely death, including the contents of his digital camera which suggest his plummet was purely accidental: the last image in the camera was a top-down view of the cliff from which he fell.

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Jog looks at Manga, one of the earliest efforts to bring Japanese manga artists (in an anthology of original stories created specifically for Western audiences, no less) to the American public.  In hindsight, the project’s overt catering to Western tastes was a total misfire, given the fact so few could even recall this first-of-its-kind book.  But there’s no reason to believe that a straight port of Japanese manga would have done better anyway.  I’m a firm believer that the public’s embrace of the “Japanese style” and the manga boom enjoyed by Tokyopop and Viz could not have happened any sooner… it was the complete dominance of Japanese console video games during the 80s and 90s that really introduced – and accustomed – masses of kids to the Eastern cartoon aesthetic.  Outside of the very first anime and manga publishers, Nintendo and Sega did more to lay the foundations of the fandom than anyone else.