manga
Comics A.M. | Digital comics market triples to $25 million
DC Comics app
Digital comics | ICv2 estimates the total value of the digital comics market in 2011 as $25 million, triple the 2010 figure, and boldly predicts that digital will account for 10 percent of the entire comics market in 2012. Digital sales grew faster in the second half of the year, which ICv2 attributes to three factors: DC’s decision to release its New 52 comics digitally the same day as print, the industry-wide trend toward same-day print and digital releases, and the proliferation of different platforms on which to read digital comics. As for digital taking away from print, the publishing executives ICv2 has spoken to over the past few months don’t seem to think that is happening. [ICv2]
Retailing | Retailer and journalist Matt Price takes the temperature at the ComicsPRO Annual Members Meeting, which kicks off today in Dallas, noting that members remain interested in DC’s publishing plans, and report “very strong sales” for Image’s Fatale and Thief of Thieves. [Nerdage]
- February 9, 2012 @ 07:15 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | Is Amazon planning its own brick-and-mortar chain?
Amazon
Retailing | Rumors have begun to swirl that online retail giant Amazon plans to open a brick-and-mortar store in Seattle within the next few months to help gauge the profitability of a chain. The store reportedly won’t just sell e-readers and tablets, but also books from Amazon’s newly launched publishing division. [Good E-Reader, Gawker]
Publishing | Japanese publisher Shueisha Inc. released the 65th volume of Eiichiro Oda’s pirate manga One Piece last week with a first printing of 4 million copies, tying the record set in November by the previous volume. [The Mainichi Daily News]
Retailing | Howard Ackler writes about the final days of Dragon Lady Comics, the Toronto retailer that closed last week after 33 years in business. [National Post]
- February 7, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | Neil Gaiman comments on end of Spawn dispute
Spawn #26
Legal | Neil Gaiman comments briefly on the settlement agreement that ends his decade-long legal dispute with Todd McFarlane over Medieval Spawn, Angela and Cogliostro, and a handful of derivative characters: “The main thing is, I feel like an awful lot of good things have come out of it. … I think the various decisions, particularly the [Judge] Posner decision, were huge in terms of what the nature of dual copyright in comics is. What is copyrightable in comics is now something that there is a definite legal precedent for. There were a lot of things that were … misty in copyright [law] that are now much clearer. And it’s of benefit to the creator.”
While the details of the settlement are confidential, it’s known that Gaiman and McFarlane now share ownership of Spawn #9 and #26, as well as the first three issues of an Angela spin-off series. [Comic Riffs]
- January 31, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | Guy Delisle, Jim Woodring win Angoulême honors
Jerusalem
Awards | The gold medal for Best Graphic Album at the Angoulême International Comics Festival went to Guy Delisle for Jerusalem, and the jury awarded a Special Prize to Jim Woodring for his Congress of the Animals. Veteran French creator Jean-Claude Denis was awarded the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême, so he will preside over next year’s festival, as Art Spiegelman did this year. Two manga won awards as well: Kaoru Mori’s A Bride’s Story won the Intergenerational Award, and Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s autobiographical A Drifting Life received the World Outlook Award. The Heritage Award went to Glenat’s edition of Carl Barks’ Donald Duck. [Paris Match]
Conventions | New Orleans Comic Con, held over the weekend, receives plenty of coverage, with spotlights on Stan Lee’s panel, aspiring creators and cosplayers. [Reuters, The Times-Picayune]
- January 30, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Shelf Porn Saturday | A collection mom forgot to throw out
Hello and welcome to Shelf Porn, where fans show us their collections. Today’s submission comes from Victor Liew in Edmonton, Alberta Canada.
If you’d like to see your collection right here on Robot 6, just send me a write-up and some jpgs, and we’ll make it happen!
Now let’s hear from Victor.
- January 28, 2012 @ 09:00 AM by JK Parkin
YALSA announces 2012 Great Graphic Novels for Teens
Thor: The Mighty Avenger, Vol. 1
The American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association has unveiled its annual list of Great Graphic Novels for Teens. The 56 titles come from 24 publishers, led by First Second Books with nine and Marvel/Icon with seven.
Chosen by the Great Graphic Novels for Teens Committee from among 78 official nominations, the books are recommended for readers age 12 to 18 as meeting “the criteria of both good quality literature and appealing reading for teens.” In addition, the committee singled out 10 titles “that exemplify the quality and range of graphic novels appropriate for teen audiences”:
- Zahra’s Paradise, by Amir and Khalil (First Second)
- Scarlet, by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev (Marvel/Icon)
- Anya’s Ghost, by Vera Brosgal (First Second)
- The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, by Brooke Gladstone, Josh Neufeld and others (W.W. Norton and Company)
- Thor: The Mighty Avenger, Vols. 1 and 2, by Roger Langridge, Chris Samnee and others (Marvel)
- Infinite Kung Fu, by Kagan McLeod (Top Shelf Productions)
- A Bride’s Story, Vol. 1, by Kaoru Mori (Yen Press)
- Axe Cop, Vol. 1, by Malachai Nicolle and Ethan Nicolle (Dark Horse)
- Daybreak, by Brian Ralph (Drawn and Quarterly)
- Wandering Son, Vol. 1, by Takako Shimuro (Fantagraphics Books)
The complete list of the 2012 Great Graphic Novels for Teens can be found at the YALSA website.
- January 25, 2012 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | How to save the struggling manga industry
Lucky Star
Publishing | Longtime industry hand Jason Thompson has written a thoughtful essay on why the manga industry is in trouble, going beyond the American scene to point out structural problems in the Japanese market: An aging readership, the decline of print and the reluctance of Japanese publishers to embrace digital publishing in any coherent way. “Perhaps wary of creating an iTunes-like behemoth which could drive prices down,” Thompson writes, “publishers haven’t united in any reasonable way to create a consistent digital newsstand/bookstore format for their titles.” This, of course, has just made life easier for the scanlators. He also points to a shift toward the individual creator — it’s the big publishers who are hurting, while self-published and indy manga are on the rise. All this may sound familiar to American comics fans, but Thompson’s prescriptions for the future — more gag manga, simpler art, more color, and motion comics — don’t seem like convincing ways to rescue the industry. An iTunes-like behemoth is probably the way to go. [io9]
Awards | The Horror Writers Association has released the preliminary ballot for the 2011 Bram Stoker Awards, which includes a graphic novel category. [Horror Writers Association]
- January 24, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | FBI shuts down Megaupload file-sharing site
Megaupload
Legal | The U.S. Justice Department and the FBI on Thursday shut down the popular file-sharing site Megaupload, seized $50 million in assets and charged its founder and six others with running an international enterprise based on Internet piracy that’s cost copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. The FBI has begun extradition proceedings in New Zealand to bring company founder Kim Schmitz, aka Kim DotCom, to the United States. He and three other associates are being held without bail until Monday, when they’ll receive a new hearing. Three others remain at large. They face a maximum of 20 years in prison.
News of the shutdown was met with retaliation by the hacker collective Anonymous, which attacked the websites of the Justice Department and the Motion Picture Association of America.
- January 20, 2012 @ 07:15 AM by JK Parkin
Comics A.M. | Artist Brett Ewins injured in struggle with police
The Art of Brett Ewins
Creators | Former Judge Dredd artist Brett Ewins suffered serious head injuries Saturday after he allegedly stabbed a police officer who responded to complaints about a man shouting throughout the night. Police say when they arrived the 56-year-old Ewins attacked them with a knife. One of the officers received minor wounds during the struggle, but Ewins was hospitalized, where he remains in serious condition. The newspaper report asserts the artist, best known for his work on Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper for 2000AD, has a history of mental-health problems. [Ealing Gazette]
- January 18, 2012 @ 06:55 AM by Kevin Melrose
Digital returns to Kickstarter with new Tezuka title
On the heels of its last Kickstarter campaign, which will fund a reprint of Osamu Tezuka’s Swallowing the Earth, Digital Manga inaugurated a new Kickstarter drive last week, this one dedicated to producing a print edition of another Tezuka manga Barbara.
Whether the book will actually be published is no longer in question — the campaign reached its goal last week. The question is whether this is how comics publishers should be doing business.
On the one hand, you can argue that Barbara is a book that would be difficult to publish in English by the traditional means. It is one of Tezuka’s more outré books, with adult content that will make it hard to place in the usual channels. Here’s the blurb:
Wandering the packed tunnels of Shinjuku Station, famous author Yosuke Mikura makes a strange discovery: a seemingly homeless drunk woman who can quote French poetry. Her name is Barbara. He takes her home for a bath and a drink, and before long Barbara has made herself into Mikura’s shadow, saving him from egotistical delusions and jealous enemies. But just as Mikura is no saint, Barbara is no benevolent guardian angel, and Mikura grows obsessed with discovering her secrets, tangling with thugs, sadists, magical curses and mythical beings – all the while wondering whether he himself is still sane.
At Manga Widget, Alex Hoffman argues that this is essentially the readers commissioning a book, as a patron might commission a painting from an artist. “Commissions are what works for microniche consumer materials,” Hoffman argues, adding,
- January 17, 2012 @ 01:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
Six by 12 | 12 comics to look forward to in 2012
Are You My Mother?
With 2012 still fresh and new, it seems like as good a time as any to look at various publishing companies’ plans for the year ahead and pick out what looks good, or at least interesting. Because the year looks to be filled with so many delights, I decided to double down and offer not just six but 12 comics I’m really looking forward to reading. Obviously this list is reflective of my own, indie-slanted interests, so feel free in the comments section to tell me what a dope I am for forgetting about Book X by Artist Y.
- January 13, 2012 @ 12:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Media Blasters cuts staff, goes freelance
Just a week after Bandai Entertainment announced it would stop releasing new material — and laid off three of its five employees — another anime and manga publisher looks like it is hitting the shoals. Media Blasters announced yesterday it’s laying off 60 percent of its staff, although there is no plan to cut the catalog.
Media Blasters is chiefly an anime publisher, although it does have a small line of manga, under both its own name and in its adult line Kitty Media. This 2007 Publishers Weekly article mentions the company had a catalog of about 20 yaoi titles and was planning a shift from shonen to yaoi. Three years later, it canceled most of those titles. Blogger Lissa Pattillo commented back then that quality had slipped quite a bit:
- January 11, 2012 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Greed and giant robots brought down Bandai
The big news in anime and manga circles last week was the announcement that Bandai Entertainment will stop releasing new anime and manga. The current catalog will stay in print, and the company will focus on licensing its products to other companies, but three of its five employees have been laid off.
Like manga, the anime industry in the U.S. has been troubled for a long time, and it’s tempting to blame this on piracy. Indeed, that’s exactly what Charles Maib of Kotaku did. Maib admits he doesn’t follow the anime and manga scene much any more, but that doesn’t stop him from delivering some strong opinions. What Maib does know is what it was like to be an old-time otaku, when you made your own fansubs with love and VHS tapes and chewing gum and chicken wire (which may have been technically illegal but wasn’t harming the industry at all), and also how much work it is to make your own content. Maib himself is a content creator, and he has a long paragraph where he explains all the steps you have to go through to make an animated cartoon.
And nobody seems to care. “Consumers have become selfish monsters who are strangling an industry that is already on its knees,” he says, and he points the finger squarely at fansubbers and other pirates, and those who avail themselves of their services:
We created the beast, and we continue to feed it. We’ve reached the point that it’s not uncommon for major websites to publish links to pirated content. Pirating has gone mainstream, and unless we as consumers have the fortitude to reverse our actions, allow the market to work as it should, and develop the patience to wait for new products to become available in our region, or even not become available, the face of the internet and digital media will change. It’s inevitable.
- January 9, 2012 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Six by 6 | The six most criminally ignored books of 2011
Salvatore Vol. 2
It’s time once again for our annual look at six books that were, for whatever reason, unjustly ignored by the public and critical cognoscenti at large. With all the titles that are published lately, it’s no real surprise that some books fall through the cracks, though in certain cases it seems grossly unwarranted.
After the jump are six books that, while they may not have made my “best of 2011″ list, I think got nowhere near the amount of attention they deserved. There are lots more that I could include if I had the time. I’m sure there are books you read this year that you don’t think got enough praise either. Be sure to let me know what they are in the comments section.
- January 6, 2012 @ 01:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Watch amazing time-lapse video of crowd control at Comiket
Crowd control at comic conventions can be generally, if not creatively, described as “organized chaos” — emphasis more often that not on the latter — as thousands of fans determined to lay their hands on that special sketch, autograph or issue are poured into narrow entry points like so many grains of sand in an hourglass.
If you’ve attended Comic-Con International or New York Comic Con, or even read the tweets, blog entries and forum posts from those who have, what a delicate, frustrating and, yes, frequently sweaty and smelly dance that crowd flow can be, with one untied shoe, inconsiderate mid-aisle conversation or loud protest over access botching the choreography and sending everything into a horrible, grumbling snarl.
But at Tokyo’s Comiket, the world’s largest self-published comics fair, organizers have transformed crowd control into an artform.
- January 6, 2012 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose