Group items tagged

Abstract background effects:

Symbols:

Sweat drops, usually drawn largely on the head region, commonly indicate bewilderment, nervousness, social discomfort, or mental weariness. On a sidenote, actual physical perspiration in manga is signified by even distribution of sweat drops over the body. A round swelling, sometimes drawn to the size of baseballs, is a visual exaggeration of swelling from injury. A nosebleed indicates sexual excitation following exposure to stimulating imagery or situation. It is based on a Japanese old wives' tale[1] Throbbing veins, usually depicted as a cruciform in the upper head region, indicate anger or irritation. Hatchings on the cheek represent blushing, usually used when embarrassed by romantic feelings, while oval "blush dots" on the cheeks represent rosy cheeks.

line over form

Impressionistic backgrounds

sequences in which the panel shows details of the setting rather than the characters.

right to left,

small noses, tiny mouths, and flat faces.

the transparent feeling of pupils and the glares, or small reflections in the corners of the eyes are often exaggerated,

eyes of characters who have died are the colour of the iris, but darker.

hair partially covering the face, the eyes that would otherwise be covered are often outlined to make them visible,

The following is a non-exhaustive and incomplete list of artistic conventions used in mainstream manga and their place of origin. A white cross-shaped bandage symbol denotes pain. A large sweat drop on the side of the face denotes a broad spectrum of emotions, usually embarrassment or exasperation. A scribble on the cheek can show injury; it is also used in black-and-white media to denote red cheeks, i.e. blushing. A red cheek denotes embarrassment or blushing. A throbbing vein, sometimes comically simplified to a "+" shaped outline on the head (or occasionally other body parts, especially fists), represents anger or irritation. A balloon dangling from one nostril (a "snot bubble") indicates sleep. Electricity shoots out on the eyes of two characters when they are fighting. Nosebleeds, usually caused by shocking sights - especially those with a sexual undertone. There are many eye symbols such as love-hearts, crosses, flames, stars, and spirals. A character suddenly falling onto the floor, usually with one or more extremities twisted above him or herself, is a typically humorous reaction to something ironic happening. The pupils disappearing from the eyes, and the iris gaining a glass-like glare smoothness denotes loss of conscious control because of possession (ghost, demon, zombie, magic, etc). The eyes becoming huge and perfectly round with tiny pupils and no iris and going beyond the reach of the face, plus the mouth becoming like a stretched semicircle, the point of which extends past the chin, symbolises extreme excitement. All facial features shrinking, the nose disappearing, the character lifting off the floor and the limbs being multiplied as if moving very fast symbolizes panic; if the same but with larger facial features it symbolises comic rage. Tear drops everywhere indicate intense joy or sadness. An ellipsis appearing over a character's head indicates a silence, implying that something is going unsaid. Eye shapes and sizes are often symbolically used to represent the character. For instance, bigger eyes will usually symbolize beauty, innocence, or purity, while smaller, more narrow eyes typically represent coldness and/or evil. More often than not, character colorizations tend to represent the character in some way. A more subdued character will be colored with lighter tones, while a flamboyant character will be done in bright tones. Similarly, villains are often colored in darker tones, while colder character will be given neutral tones (black, white, grey, etc.). An odd white shape (more often than not, something close to a mushroom) that appears during an exhale represents a sigh of awkward relief or depression. Completely blackened eyes (shadowed) indicates a vengeful or deep anger. It could also indicate that someone's being sort of a wise-guy, grinning. Characters push their index fingers together when admitting a secret or telling the truth to another. A character's eyes are shadowed regardless of the lighting in the room when they become angry, upset, something is wrong with them, or they are emotionally hurt. The anime character's eyes turn into two thick half-circles, conveying a cute, delighted look. Face expressions change depending on their mood, and can look from apple shaped to a more subtle carrot shape. Parallel vertical lines with dark shading over the head or under the eye may represent mortification or horror. If the lines are wavy, it may represent disgust. A wavy ghost coming out of the mouth is often a comical representation of depression or mortification. Cherry blossoms indicate a sweet or beautiful moment. This is a reference to Mono no Aware. A flower blossom falling off its stem may indicate death or, more commonly, sex. A fang peeking from the corner of the mouth indicates mischief or feistiness. (Unless, of course, the character has fangs normally). A cat mouth (like a number "3" rotated 90° clockwise) replacing the character's normal mouth, and usually accompanied by larger eyes may also represent mischief or feistiness. Unbound hair may represent freedom, while hair that is tied back may represent some form of either literal, figurative or emotional enslavement of some kind.

Graphic systems (or rather, human minds that produce graphic systems...) are fluid and changing

Multilingualism in visual language!

Children are choosing the "manga style" en masse to draw in — a consistent style which is beyond the scope of a single author and belongs instead to a community. Underlying message: Children learn to draw by imitating others

To this extant, it wholly removes them from the social context in which they usually appear. They did have some actual books on display, though they were kept under glass – meaning people couldn't flip through them at all. Of all print-culture visual languages, manga in Japan seem quite the paradigm example of using a Language over Art context. Seeing them pulled from that context and put into a dominantly Art setting was an interesting clash of these underlying cultural forces.

San-Francisco based anime-sharing site Crunchyroll is another newcomer to the fair. It hosted a symposium Wednesday on the future of Internet broadcasting.

The first Japanese-Chinese joint TV cartoon, based on the Chinese historical novel "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms," will be broadcast across China.

that’s not to say that doujinshi isn’t profitable…a few artists never “go pro” because they make quite a healthy living on their doujinshi,

The much better road for the American manga industry and fans to take is not to import doujinshi, but to import the doujinshi ideal and ethics, and foster a domestic doujinshi community of our own.  This road is beset by its own share of hurdles, though, and they have very deep roots.

in America properties are created and owned by the corporation.

While fanzines and fanfiction have been around in the U.S., we have nothing even close to the doujinshi scene in Japan, because of American corporate mentality which values “perpetual properties” instead of new creations, and these properties are guarded visciously.

They simply have no reason to support budding artists in such a way, when their raison detre are still characters created decades ago.  Fan comics are not seen as extending the life of a property, but as competition. 

The truth is a significant portion of Japanese doujinshi are erotic works, many based on children’s shows.  It isn’t hard to imagine the kind of moral outrage most doujinshi would illicit. 

American manga companies need to take a hard look at doujinshi in Japan and understand its benefits, and readers and artists should take a stand because this is an opportunity for the status of the creator to take precedence over the corporation.

Fans and critics complain that manga — which emerged in the years after World War II as an edgy, uniquely Japanese art form — has become as homogenized and risk-averse as the limpest Hollywood blockbuster.

The place is pulsing with possibility, full of inspired creators, ravenous fans, and wads of yen changing hands. It represents a dynamic force

future business model of music, movies, and media of every kind.

Nearly every aspect of cultural production — which is now Japan's most influential export — is rooted in manga.

Comics occupy the center, feeding the rest of the media system.

About 90 percent of the material for sale — how to put this — borrows liberally from existing works.

Japanese copyright law is just as restrictive as its American cousin, if not more so.

known as "circles" even if they have only one member

by day's end, some 300,000 books sold in cash transactions totaling more than $1 million

"This is something that satisfies the fans," Ichikawa said. "The publishers understand that this does not diminish the sales of the original product but may increase them.

As recently as a decade ago, he told me, creators of popular commercial works sometimes cracked down on their dojinshi counterparts at Super Comic City. "But these days," he said, "you don't really hear about that many publishers stopping them."

"unspoken, implicit agreement."

"The dojinshi are creating a market base, and that market base is naturally drawn to the original work," he said. Then, gesturing to the convention floor, he added, "This is where we're finding the next generation of authors.

They tacitly agree not to go too far — to produce work only in limited editions and to avoid selling so many copies that they risk cannibalizing the market for original works.

It's also a business model

He opened Mandarake 27 years ago, well before the dojinshi markets began growing more popular — in part to provide another sales channel for the work coming out of them. At first, publishers were none too pleased with his new venture. "You think I didn't hear from them?" he tells me in a company conference room. But in the past five years, he says, as the scale and reach of the markets has expanded, the publishers' attitude "has changed 180 degrees." It's all a matter of business, he says.

triangle. "You have the authors up there at this tiny little tip at the top. And at the bottom," he says, drawing a line just above the widening base of the triangle, "you have the readers. The dojin artists are the ones connecting them in the middle."

The dojinshi devotees are manga's fiercest fans.

provides publishers with extremely cheap market research

the manga industrial complex is ignoring a law designed to protect its own commercial interests.

Intellectual property laws were crafted for a read-only culture.

the copyright winds in the US have been blowing in the opposite direction — toward longer and stricter protections. It is hard to imagine Hollywood, Nashville, and New York agreeing to scale back legal protection in order to release the creative impulses of super-empowered fans, when the gains from doing so are for now only theoretical.

mutually assured destruction. What that accommodation lacks in legal clarity, it makes up for in commercial pragmatism.

some artists make a living off producing dojinshi.

In the west, fans of anime, the term for Japanese animation, behave much like fans of Star Wars and Star Trek: they “remix” the characters and ideas from the stories they watch.

Trekkies or Star Wars fans do the same activities as otaku, but one practice sets anime fans apart from other avid fans: fansubs.

Manga also has its own form of fansubs called scanlations

Fansubs and scanlations don’t quite match the “traditional” forms of remix that Lessig and others mention. They do not create a “new” work in the same sense as dojinshi, fan films, or AMVs because their aim is to remain faithful to the original work.

Fansubs as a cultural product sit at an interesting boundary—between the dojinshi-like fan culture that authors such as Lessig want to encourage and the massive online file trading so vilified by the recording and motion picture industries.

examines the anime industry’s unique relationship with fansubbers in the context of the suggestion that it represents a new policy model for online copyright.

Section 7 concludes by stating that it is too soon to claim the anime industry as a victory for alternative business models incorporating what most would think of as widespread copyright infringement.

Otaku create fansubs because they love anime—in fact, most love all things Japanese.

Fansubs predate BitTorrent, broadband, the dotcom boom and bust, and even the World Wide Web.

Fansubbers distributed or traded the finished videocassette tapes to others, but because of the time and cost involved of mailing out a physical medium, distribution was limited.

At one time fansubs were virtually the only way that fans could watch (and understand) anime.

But as with the music industry, the benefits of digital technology and the internet brought problems.46 Fansubbers started to take advantage of faster computers that allowed them to subtitle anime without the need for expensive, specialized equipment.47 This made it easier for more people to fansub because of the lower cost barriers to becoming a fansubber. The internet also meant that fans could meet from around the world, thus making it more likely that fansub groups would form. Today, groups now make digital video files instead of videocassettes.

Fansubbed videocassettes offered a poor quality picture and sound that encouraged fans to buy the licensed product when it came out and also limited the number of copies that could be made from a single original cassette (or from 2nd and 3rd generation cassettes).49 Digisubs offer a quality comparable to official (DVD) releases and the ability to make limitless copies.

Fansubbers then “release” their fansubs to fans. Distribution happens through all of the regular internet channels, including p2p services (Kazaa, eMule, etc), BitTorrent, IRC, and newsgroups.

Lessig essentially asks the question, “Do our laws stifle creativity and sharing to the point where it harms society?”78 Some point to fansubs and anime as part of the answer to this question—when a company allows some illegal activity it actually benefits.

Unfortunately for fansubbers, copyright law does not condone their activities.80 International copyright treaties such as the Berne Convention, state that its signatories (such as the United States and Japan) should grant authors the exclusive right to translation.

copyright law construes translations as “derivative works”.82 Derivative works are any work “based upon one or more preexisting works.

The Japanese legal system may also, as a practical matter, discourage litigation towards fansub groups within Japan,

Within Japan, fansubs could potentially be within the law because the Japanese take a more relaxed attitude towards some aspects of copyright law and include private use and non-profit exceptions into their law.

For infringements outside of Japan, it is no small wonder that Japanese companies do not bother with the expense of enforcing a right against a group whose infringement affects a distant market with a different legal system.

In his article regarding selective copyright enforcement and fansubs, Kirkpatrick argues for a fair use defense under U.S. law for fansub activities based on the cross-cultural value of translations, the non-commercial nature of fansub groups, and the potential market enhancement for the original work.

The fact remains that fansubs may create a preferable product for otaku—thus decreasing any market enhancement arguments.

One wonders what could be easier than a few clicks of the mouse and a few hours (or less) wait for a file to download, for free. Many video files deliver comparable picture quality and fandubs do exist.

Regardless of any potential defense, the law sufficiently tilts towards copyright holders so that they can easily use the threat of suit as enforcement.

The sheer cost of defending a copyright suit makes for a powerful incentive for fansubbers to settle, especially since fansubbers make no money from their activities and are unlikely to have any assets.