I got this link from the Anime/Manga scholars group I'm in. I'm not sure if it's been posted before. Mods, if you guys know if someone's already shown it, feel free to delete this post. Check it out if you're interested!

The South Bank Show tackles Manga Mania.

The first issue of Mechademia, a new academic journal devoted to anime and manga, can now be ordered from the University of Minnesota Press.

The Mechademia site, where you can find their call for papers for the 3rd issue (deadline January 5, 2007), if you're so inclined.

Via Irresponsible Pictures: the Manga Museum opens next week in Kyoto.

If you don't read the manga blogs, right now you're missing a go-round on story structure and books vs. serials sparked by a post by Johanna Draper Carlson at Comics Worth Reading and Christopher Butcher's review of tentopet's Fool's Gold.

Chronologically (so far):

1. Johanna Draper Carlson's essay about reviewing serialized chapters, in response to someone challenging her reading of Mail Order Ninja.
2. Christopher Butcher's review of Fool's Gold.
3. Queenie Chan is asked by Newsarama to write a bit on the state of OEL/global manga, and responds to the above two by detailing the story structure she followed in The Dreaming.
4. Butcher responds, challenging Chan's perception of the three-act structure she used.
5. Heidi Macdonald at The Beat jumps in also.

This is rather exciting: TIME.com interviewed shoujo mangaka Natsuki Takaya, about her career as a mangaka, her popular series my darling beloved Fruits Basket and its approaching finale WAH, and manga's popularity and creation outside Japan. There are no spoilers for Fruits Basket in the interview.

(Link snagged from umadoshi, cross-posted to my own journal.)

Tokyopop.com has just gone live with their new website, and I thought I'd mention that chrisarrant has a weekly column in the section on People, and I have one in the Manga section.

chrisarrant has his intro posted, and my first two columns are up: an intro and a roundup of terms that I'm likely to use in future columns. There's also an interview with Harold Sakuishi, the mangaka for Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad.

The easiest way to find the columns is to load the page, wait for a bit until you recover from das blinkenlighten, and then explore the menu in the white section on the left.

Bento Physics heads into their Feminism in Shoujo series with a look at NANA.

Via Anime News Network: Manichi news is running a new feature, 'Manglish'. It looks like they're publishing one page per day of shoujo manga with English translation provided as you mouse over each speech bubble or sound effect. It's definitely an interesting way of presenting the material, though I suspect I'd be more entranced by it if I were actually studying Japanese.

Tina Anderson has some words about the difference between yaoi and slash. (The term Aimai seems really useful.)

This looks like it might be interesting: keep an eye on Bento Physics, who has declared an intention to write about feminism in shoujo manga. (Via MangaBlog)

Via Love Manga: a new French monthly manga anthology called Shogun.

coffeeandink visits this exhibit on shojo manga at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Via MangaBlog: a video look at CLAMP's studio and working style. (In Japanese, but still interesting if you don't understand it.)

Hi all,

I'm working on a manga titled Hollow Fields for Seven Seas Entertainment which is due out early next year. Just out of interest, they've been posting interviews with their new creators for the past few weeks, and mine went up about a day ago. We're basically asked to discuss how we 'got into' manga, what our influences are and how we work. You can check out all the interviews just by going to the aforementioned link; my interview is on this page. I hope I sound coherent; I remember answering most of these when I had a severe head cold!

-Mad

X-posted.

Something that people might find interesting: Scott over at Polite Dissent is a medical professional and usually provides medical reviews of comics and episodes of House. He's just announced that he's going to be reading Naoki Urusawa's Monster and providing medical notes on it.

Hello all,

I just did an interview with Rivkah, creator of Steady Beat. In it she discusses many things; Her pen name, her background, influences, tools of the trade, art assistance in OEL books, competition and much more.

You can read it here:
http://www.collectortimes.com/Clubhouse.html

Three articles about the manga industry from the Publishers Weekly online newsletter PW Comics Week:

Manga at the Con, about the manga presence at the New York ComicCon.

Librarians Talk about Sex in Manga, also reporting from the NYCC.

And the standard "Gosh, so what is the future of manga?" panel from the NYCC, Manga: Essential or Disposable?

I debated for awhile as to whether or not I should post this here… but while it doesn’t pertain to manga specifically, it DOES deal with analysis of sequential art, (A topic in which this community seems to be interested.)

But anyway. I wanted to let you know that I’ve written a book called TIMING that is serializing in 3 parts on Newsarama.com starting today. It’s essentially about the design and manipulation of the mechanism of time present in sequential art.



When you really strip everything down, comics employ a lot of really sophisticated information design, and I wanted to create a book in which I could make that clear to fine artists, designers, and comic artists alike.

Here’s the link:
http://www.newsarama.com/general/Timing/Timing1.htm

Hope you check it out! :)
x-posted lots of places.

I wish this was a little more informative overall, but when considering all the factors that makes a comic successful, distribution is often ignored. And it shouldn't be. A book can be beautiful and profound and have mass appeal, but if it gets stuck in a warehouse somewhere (or there aren't even enough copies in print to require warehousing), it is all for naught. I was very much aware of the search for a new distributor while it was going on, but I was a little surprised to see it show up in the news. :-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/13/business/media/13manga.html

Discuss. And note the horrific Peach Girl box set in the photo! Yaaaaay! Love that book so much, but seriously...Yuck.

They don't go into this really, but as a side note, there's a remarkably fine line between having enough copies to meet with demand, and not putting so many out there that they overwhelm shelf space and just get sent back. We had this come up in the past week, and while it's great when a book sells so much right out of the gate that we run out of inventory, that means that there are people who may have wanted the book and will now have to wait for a reprint (and then for the reprint to actually hit store shelves).