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Real manga saints, straight from the Vatican!

This advertises the publication of a study psychanalyzing the characters of several animes, which have been released in Europe for the last 30 years. This book is only in French for the moment.

This is a brief introduction to amvs, these forms of fanart based on the combination of the person's favorite animes, animes' scenes and musics. It is a perfect manifestation of the desire to appropriate bits and pieces of contents and recombine them into something new and personal.

This is an additional ironic twist of fate. American pop music star copying Japanese mangas....when for decades, Japanese have been accused of copying everything that was coming from the West and being unable to create anything of their own. However, besides this anecdotic issue, this story points out another that is a lot more preoccupying, that is piracy and copyrights violation. From what I can see on the livejournal entry that offers a frame-by-frame comparison of Simmon's manga and Bleach, it does look like he has been heavily copying not only the graphic style but also the character design and whole scenes from Bleach. However, this doesn't really tell us how much Simmon actually took from Bleach, especially at the narrative level. Did he also heavily take from its story or did he simply inserted scenes that he found cool and inspiring within a fictional universe of his own? This isn't really clear from any of the comments. But then again, when one looks at the extraordinary resemblance between graphic design and characters from one manga to the other, it might also be difficult to accue him of plagiarism. After all, even though there is some diversity of representations in manga, it is kind of limited by some aesthetic codes. In the end, manga heroes within the same genres do tend to look extraordinarily alike to the point that it isn't rare to confuse them, if they are taken out of their original context.

In 2010 the Australian Government proposes to go ahead with a mandatory ISP-level internet filtering scheme which, if passed into law, could have a massive impact on anime, manga and slash fans. Why manga and slash fans? Because the main target of the law is to prevent the circulation of 'child abuse sexual imagery' - BUT in Australia 'child abuse sexual imagery' covers even FICTIONAL representations and includes 'under age' characters in anime, manga and slash. If the law is passed, any fan site that contains or links to this material could be added to a government 'blacklist' and access denied in Australia.

This is an important news for both fans and scholars of fanfictions and dojinshi.

Several interesting issues are laid out here: that of access to more mangas, but also the issue of country-by-country copyrights, the potential censorship exerted by Apple on adult contents, the issue of format lock, etc.

Not really new, but might be useful to have on one's bookshelves!