Let's Manga

the many ways that anime crosses over from the "virtual" to the "real." The most obvious example is cosplay and the many forms of licensed merchandise, such as toys and models, that in effect bring anime through the screen and into people's hands. When fans take anime and manga characters, and use them to create their own fanzine manga (dôjinshi), a similar kind of translation effect is underway, that is, taking imagined characters, re-imagining through our own minds, and the creating something new in the world.

Anime creators always struggle with challenge of bringing the "real" into the "virtual" space of animation.

Anime fans have long debated whether Anime is best understood as a genre (or perhaps a set of related genres), as an aesthetic style, as a mode of production, or as a transmedia phenomenon.

held twice a year in August and December at the Tokyo Big Sight in Tokyo, Japan, and attracts over 450,000 participants over its three day run.

Comiket is an all genre event, meaning literally anything goes

Comiket is also known colloquially as the birthplace of cosplay and thousands of visitors come dressed as their favorite anime, manga and game characters as well.

While most Japanese people celebrate New Year's Day at home, more and more otaku are defying their introverted homebound stereotype by celebrating the holiday together — at a symbolic otaku mecca and a literal holy shrine with an anime tie-in.

By contrast, many otaku go against the traffic and visit Tokyo during the last three days of the old year because of Comic Market

Traditionally, many Japanese people visit a local shrine during the first three days of the year to ask for good health and prosperity during the new year. An estimated 130,000 people went instead to Washinomiya, the Tokyo area's oldest shrine which was further immortalized (in a manner of speaking) by the Lucky Star anime series. Washinomiya's attendance during the first three days of the year is estimated to have grown almost 50% percent — 40,000 more people — this year because of this series which premiered last April.

Europe has caught the bug, too. In the United Kingdom, the Catholic Church is using manga to recruit new priests. One British publisher, in an effort to hippify a national franchise, has begun issuing manga versions of Shakespeare's plays, including a Romeo and Juliet that reimagines the Montagues and Capulets as rival yakuza families in Tokyo.

Manga sales in the US have tripled in the past four years.

Circulation of the country's weekly comic magazines, the essential entry point for any manga series, has fallen by about half over the last decade.

However, her words convey a profound truth--a yearning for relationships with interchangeable roles that are free from fixed ideas about gender.

Over the first years of the new millennium these trends continued, with a robust market emerging that combined improved distribution with wider interest to generate revenue for some circles that could no longer be termed “amateur” in any meaningful sense.

The doujinshi market grew steadily via promulgation through the internet and pop culture media. This resulted in the viability of the doujin as a means of part time and increasingly full time employment. “Kojin circles” emerged, consisting of a sole creator (kojin) who handled all aspects of production and received all the benefits of income from publications. Larger circles formed semi-professional units to produce doujin software that would compete with professional releases. Otaku goods shops expanded their scope as doujin vendors, acting as proxy sellers for hundreds of circles both via brick and mortar outlets and via online mail order. Online-only doujin shops such as DLsite emerged, selling digital copies of doujinshi via download. Advances in printing technology and cheap, high quality labor (mostly Chinese) allowed for the proliferation of doujin items to media beyond the traditional books (and less tradtional CD-Rs), including towels, pillowcases, fans, cups, trinkets, and figures.

new class of semi-pro and professional creators

Japanese doujinshika---at least at this sort of amateur level---are often very leery of publicity. This might be a reaction to the arrests of several doujinshika in apparently random, token copyright enforcement cases in recent years (such as the infamous Pokemon doujinshika incident), or it might simply be a sign of how negatively "fringe" behavior is viewed in Japanese society

Snape is gorgeous---or at least that's what the djka at this show seemed to believe.

it's how Snape is depicted emotionally that's most telling on a cross-cultural level.

First, doujinshi are not commercial products, and this is one of the most important distinctions that allows its very existence. 

Many doujinshi conventions (Comiket included) require doujin circles to provide print run information, and enforces a cap.  Quite simply, there aren’t enough books to export en mass. 

This is also why doujinshi has continued to grow while other media like manga, anime, and music have suffered with the advent of peer to peer trading on the internet…the doujinshi market is a collector’s market, where the physical book itself is highly valued

The club reads manga, pronounced (MON-ga), which are Japanese graphic books with a variety of themes.

That was the case when she dabbled in Fan Manga, which is a fan-drawn comic using existing characters but with newly created storylines. She had entered her work into a National Fan Manga contest that required her to use a manga called "Black Sun Silver Moon." Soon after she entered, she heard from the contest sponsors, TheOtaku.com and the go!comi publishers, that she was one of 15 finalists. Guests at the New York Anime Festival voted on their choices -- and at the ending ceremonies, she discovered her work had won."My fan manga will be published in the back of the actual manga 'Black Sun Silver Moon,' which is every manga fan's dream: to be published in a real one," she says. "I haven't gotten word which issue it will be published in but go!comi said they'd let me know."

Most agree that Japanese maids are not direct imports from Europe but that they have come to embody 'moe' elements to become an original concept.  This concept may not comply with the kind of maids that the Japan Maid Association is preaching for. Indeed, it is the diversity of maids that makes it interesting. The variety and types of maid is probably exactly what is needed to cater to the diverse clientele. Despite these activities in the maid industry, the peak of the maid boom has been long over. Two or three years ago there were once about 70 maid cafes in Akiba. Prospects for the maid cafe industry are bleak as many in the scene predict maid establishments to decrease to a third of their number by next year. One only wonders how that would change the energy and liveliness of Akiba.