Follow-up to The Real Reason to Go to Japan Media Arts Festival: It’s Art, So It’s Not Embarrassing:
Strike Witches DVDs now have a sticker on the box advertising the fact that they were nominated. How dare they cover up the commander’s face with this trash sticker!!!
Nichijou, arawi keiichi. Kadokawa/Shonen Ace/Comptiq. Vol 4 published 1/26/2009.
I’ve been following this one on the blog for a while, and while I really liked volumes 1 and 3, 2 wasn’t that hot and 4 isn’t as exceptional as 1/3, I have to say. keiichi still has absolute top notch gag manga chops (layout/framing/timing, etc), but a lot of the best material/neta were continuations of earlier gags like the Soccer Go club and the daifuku mascot mask. I also have to warn the sensitive that there is a “what’s the deal with the crazy size names at Starbucks” chapter in here, though keiichi’s ability to draw incredible character reactions paired with his sense of timing and tempo still made me laugh at a topic that is basically comic suicide in the states at this point. Longer stories really seem to be his forte, seeing as I don’t know if I’ve laughed at one of the professor/Nano 4koma strips yet. Still in my personal list of favorite gag manga, but maybe that’s because most of the rest of the list is Bonobono.
Mozuya-san Gyakujou Suru, Shinofusa Rokurou. Kodansha/Afternoon. Vol 2 published 1/23/2009.
Volume 2 of this was pretty impressive for me since Shinofusa manages to take a pretty silly concept (tsundere as clinical disease) and actually make something other than cheap gags out of it. Volume 2 keeps the drama going strong as Kabashima tells Mozuya that he’s a masochist, which completely throws a wrench into Mozuya’s psychology of “I’m sick and hurt people when they’re nice to me -> people are still nice to me after i hurt them only because they know something’s wrong with me -> they’re looking down on me, thus i hate them more.” Of course, Mozuya also discovers someone she wants to feel bad for of her own, basically making a lot of the character interaction a look at the dynamics of the whole moe/amae thing. (has anyone talked about moe in relation to the concept of amae? I’d do it but I’m never writing a non-graded paper that has to do with psychoanalysis.) Of course there’s still some fanservice and even a weird reader stand-in Sexy Otaku Nurse character, but overall it’s shaping up to be a very interesting drama, kind of along the same thematic lines as NHK. Time to wait another 5 months for volume 3 :(
Moetan, illust. POP. Sansai Books. Vol 1 published 6/1/2006.
This was given to me as a birthday present from a fellow internet illuminatus who I met last semester, so I haven’t actually had the opportunity to read volumes 1 or 2, or watch the anime, so I’m not exactly an expert on lolicon English manuals. That said, this is a hilarious lolicon English manual. A little over half of the book is ostensibly an attempt to teach English to Japanese nerds through sentences and examples that they use in their daily lives! Thus, the example sentences are mostly nerd jokes (You said you don’t like crowds. But somehow you casually endure the crowd in Comiket. / She doesn’t recognize the existence of girls who dislike homosexuals.) and there are also some conversation examples, one that’s nothing but tsundere lines, and another that’s a conversation between an American and Japanese otaku in Japan. ( That’s the coolest thing ever! The maids out front of the station waiting to greet you! Let’s go into one of those places! Hey Sam, look at this picture of the dolphin! Is this also one of the “Moe”? Wow, Akihabara is really a cool place!), and so on. In between language examples is a story about Nijihara(虹原, o hoh hoh hoh) Inku’s attempts to bring her friend back from his secluded otaku world by shattering all of his silly nerd dreams and illusions by doing things such as showing him what the person who plays the cute female character in the dream-world MMO he’s addicted to really looks like, or calling the police on him for the books he’s selling at his dream-world Comiket shutter booth. (There’s a certain sense of hypocrisy in that one when you realize that POP illustrated this thing, but never mind that). Of course, the sentences all appear to be J->E translations, so I imagine that this would actually be more helpful as any sort of learning tool to an English speaker at an intermediate level of Japanese language experience than to a Japanese person trying to learn natural-sounding English. Either way, don’t take it so serious.
Obaachan ga Shitai Kusai Yo, Shintaro Kago. Kubo Shoten. Published 2/1/2009.
Cover (semi-nws)
I probably shouldn’t admit to buying Shintaro Kago comics since I am not writing for a blog called Same Hat!, nor do I read Vice, but I like living on the dangerous side. The volume is a collection of shorts by Kago, most of which were surprisingly non-pornographic. That is to say, there’s no real focus on sex, but, as in all good Kago stories, on pooping. To be honest, I was not aware that one could make so many poop jokes, some of which were laugh-out-loud funny. Of course, that probably says more about me than about this book, but I mean, these are really top-tier poop jokes that also reference old zombie movies, and classic rakugo skits while being painfully satirical of modern events. Beyond the Life is Poop and Die nihilism that’s fairly standard in Kago stories, there’s stories like one near the back of the volume, Mirai Eigyou-ki: Kinyuu Kaisha-Hen (Future Business Report: The Finance Industry) about investing in promising young criminals, who currently show signs of future criminal activity, which you can cash in on when they make it huge on the news media after committing terrible crimes! To be specific for this chapter, after running people over in a truck in Akiba and stabbing them! oh, wait. too soon, dude. :(
Itsumo no Hanashi, Akino Kondoh. Seirinkogeisha. Published 9/25/2008.
I really should do a longer article on this since there’s a lot of blog buzz about the upcoming Ax anthology, which I believe Kondoh is doing the cover art for, but I really need to get to doing my homework, sorry! I first became interested in Kondoh after getting hooked on Nicovideo classic Densha Kamo Shirenai a while back (look at how low that sm number is!), but didn’t give Kondoh’s other works a whole lot more thought until this magically appeared in front of my face when I was looking around at Taco Che over the holidays. Itsumo no Hanashi is a collection of shorts from about the last decade by Kondoh, which range from somewhat light-hearted slice of life-ish stories about getting letters from old classmates (Itsumo no Hanashi) to seemingly drug-induced dream stories about talking to your legs and furniture (Kotatsu no Mawari de). Kondoh’s style is whimsical yet mysterious, but at the same time her art can get intensely unsettling and destabilizing. In terms of storytelling and overall effect, Kondoh reminds me a lot of Nekojiru at her best, using a very accessible style to get at some normally unaccessible feelings. Looking forward very much to getting her other collection as well as the English version of Ax (more info here, also here) once I get it through my head that buying one 1300y volume of absolutely beautiful manga is better than buying 13 volumes of fist of the north star at Book-Off. Well okay, maybe they’re about tied, but I ought to keep a good balance.
this is not what i wanted at all kadokawa!!!!!!!!!!!!!
guess they’re too busy putting the final touches on Haruhi s2!
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Star of David, aka Violence Gekiga David no Hoshi, Beautiful Girl Hunter
Tetsuya was the product of his mother being raped by a burglar, and after years of abuse form his mother’s husband he becomes a serial killer/rapist.
Did they think it wasn’t good enough without offending a random group of foreigners?
And I guess this is the third entry in the series of Violence Jack and Violence Hero Riki-Oh.
edit: This is terrible but somehow really entertaining if you fast-forward through all the boring parts. Since they talked about both LSD and マスコミ I guess it’s the most realistic anime I’ve seen in years, even though he owns a house with a spiral slide that goes into the ocean, which he uses to kill people with.
So apparently a few people on that 2ch site are kind of angry at doujin circle Hachimitsu Kuma-san over a recent job posting on the circle’s site as well as on their mixi.
In essence, they are looking for someone to do odd jobs for them, basically filling in whatever need they have at the moment. A few more details:
*Must live within an hour of Omiya city in Chiba prefecture.
*Must be able to be on call even after midnight on days off.
*Will work for free. (this part is only mentioned on the mixi posting.)
Sounds like a dream job, right?
Well, apparently those nay-sayers at 2ch don’t think so. What a bunch of negative nancies! They’ve even gone so far as to post a lot of copy/pastes making some pretty harsh allegations about Hachikuma-san’s business practices, but you can find those on your own, or I’m sure some other blogger will post them as The Absolute Truth, cause 2ch kopipe is never wrong. Anyway, any of you folks out there thinking of applying?!
(via katoyu–)
(This link is old, but it’s new to me!!)
Now, I know a lot of folks aren’t the biggest fans around of Seven Seas Entertainment, after all that KnJ unpleasantness and whatnot, but between trying to break into the US market with a whole bunch of light novels, trying to bring stuff done by Closet Child over here, and on top of that sending me a free copy of Shinigami no Ballad just so that it could be subjected to the verbal diarrhea better known as “me reviewing things”, they’ve got a place in my heart.
With that in mind, after reading this thread on their forums, I want to go to their offices and give them all (especially this Adam Arnold feller) a great big hug. Or maybe a big pat on the back or something, that seems less creepy but unfortunately more patronizing. I mean sure, 2channelers might burn multiple volumes of your manga, but any sort of entitlement complex that “nagi is a slut” betrays pales in comparison to the average American message board poster if this thread is any indication. After that thread I feel like I need to go spend all my holiday Amazon gift certs on light novels, yeesh.
I’m about to go to my last class for the next 3-4 weeks so I promise I’ll do reviews and other things that aren’t stupid nerd news some time soon, but until then:
Zepy had a good post about Comiket circles doing Touhou stuff over the years back in August, and the folks who made that have updated for this year: 1356 circles doing Touhou, up from 885. Good lord.
The other thing that came up last night that I was too busy watching Rosario + Vampire on tv to post about was that some folks on 2ch apparently got the new Mahou Shoujo Ai game a few days early (1, 2, 3), and well, if they’re telling the truth, the game didn’t really get a look-over before going gold, or something. As was pointed out to me by irc last night, this would normally not be a problem, since who the hell looks at anything but tentacles and the various parts that said tentacles interact with, but the problem is that in some scenes, the tentacles are missing. More than the tentacles, actually, it’s that some scenes are missing any art at all, and even the paper dolls might be missing in some scenes.
This is compounded by the fact that the game is a third of the size of the previous installments (500mb on a dvd?!) They’ve also caught some flack for apparently using CG from previous games on their website and on the game box as promo art for the new game. Of course, this could all be a very elaborate, awesome troll (one of “epic” proportions, as i hear the kids say these days), or maybe they got the Doom 3 devs to make this new installment, but otherwise… Matsuri da!!
first and foremost, hats off to the anime team for the spoo reference.
Second, weblab.ota has a great flowchart describing what in the world is going on with this whole mess, if you can manage to read the Japanese. I’d love to read it for you, but I have a 10 page paper due in 48 hours.
Finally, the current rumor circulating around the internet around Takenashi’s health is that she fell down a bunch of stairs due to anemia, if this mystery barebones blog site by some light novelist who may or may not be referencing Takenashi when she talks about “U-nyan” is correct. Kind of a stretch, I guess?
With all the crazy news and c75 stuff and anime/manga announcements (Ore no Imouto ga Konnani Kawaii etc etc manga adaptation!) popping up today I keep thinking “man I should make a post” but then realize that I should spend more time studying for this test I’m taking tomorrow that I’m going to fail.
But then this showed up on my Katoyuu feed:
Idolm@ster, LIVE 4 U! ON PUBLIC TV!
THIS IS WHY I PAY YOU THE BIG BUCKS, NHK
update:
