Let's Manga

The French fashion company Louis Vuitton and Japanese modern artist Takashi Murakami have produced Superflat First Love, an anime short to mark the revamp of Louis Vuitton's Multicolor Spring Palette line of leather accessories.

The Asahi Shimbun paper has announced the winners for the 13th Annual Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prizes this weekend. For the first time, two manga titles shared the Grand Prize: Fumi Yoshinaga's Ōoku: The Inner Chamber, and Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life. Ōoku had been nominated three years in a row before winning this year. Hikaru Nakamura won the Short Work Prize for Saint Young Men, her comedy manga about Buddha and Jesus sharing a Tokyo low-rent apartment. Suehiro Maruo won the "New Artist Prize" for Panorama Tōkitan.

On the authenticity question—a translation is always going to be a translation from another language, and as we are talking about sequential art, it's not like we shouldn't expect there might be changes in the visual translation as well as the textual. There's always a divide between what fans desire and what will bring a product to a wider audience.  Hitting the balance enough to satisfy both parties is nigh impossible.

Blackjack ni yoroshiku author Satou Shuuhou has been writing a lot about the manga industry recently.

An increasingly popular outlet for manga enthusiasts is doujinshi, meaning both fan-produced manga and the “circles” that create them. They flout copyright law and rearticulate the characters they love, and their numbers are many—the largest public get-together in Japan is not a World Cup or Olympic gathering, but rather a doujinshi market called Comike.

Legally, fans can produce whatever they want insofar as it’s not blatantly for profit or obscene.

Researcher Gunnar Hempel, 27, a Sophia University MA who wrote his thesis on the phenomenon, estimates there are 8,000 Japanese living off doujinshi, but stresses the number could be greater thanks to digital publishing. A “professional doujinshi” artist scrapes by on some 12,000 yen a month, but can gross 32,000 yen from large sales events.

     (1): Though this is in some part the fault of the manga being drawn in pencil, the characters aren’t drawn in distinct “heavy lines.” The standard theory when creating manga states that one should draw characters with thick, defined lines (heavy lines), and the background with a thin pen such as a mapping pen, causing the characters to stand out from the backgrounds. Drawing the characters and backgrounds with the same quality of line, (often even leaving no space between the two) the characters often seem to get buried in the background.      2: The individual panels are too “complete” as illustrations. This is only true for each singular frame (panel), and there isn’t enough of an attempt to connect one frame to the next, or to guide the reader in following the flow of the manga.

The new series will debut online for U.S. readers on April 22 at TheRumicWorld.com, a new North American web site devoted to news about Takahashi, while the series will launch at the same time for Japanese readers in Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine. Each week a new chapter will be released at the same time for both U.S. and Japanese fans.