Manga - Animefangirl!

Manga viewer woes – Trying to find a free manga reader plugin

What happens if you have manga and want to host it online? What are your option? Well for my part, at first I tried hosting them on free filesharing sites, but the links go dead so quickly. Then I started uploading them to online manga readers, but it’s a pain going round from site to site and coping with all their rules and regulations and forms to fill. So now that I have a proper website I thought, why not add an online reader to the site? [Note: I’ve taken it down now. This an old, no longer relevant post] Little did I know that was the beginning of my woes.

First I tried a simple WordPress plugin called Kommiku. I wanted something free and simple, and Kommiku fit the bill. You enter details about your manga, upload the chapter as a zip and presto, everything online. As far as I can see it doesn’t compress the images any further either. Not that my manga was ultra-HQ or anything, but the compression on sites like Mangafox can be quite dreadful sometimes.

The problem with Kommiku? It looks horrible. It makes absolutely no attempt to adopt the user’s existing WordPress theme, and the default theme is hideous to look at. Someone who is good at PHP might be able to adapt the default theme quite easily, but if I was any good at PHP I would be writing my own viewer, right? I wholesale copied the stylesheet for my website over Kommiku’s stylesheet and ended up with the abomination you see on the right. At least it works, I guess?

Still I couldn’t past beyond the terrible look, so I tried some other plugins as well. My next foray was the Manga+Press plugin. This does seem to be integrate itself with my theme because it creates a page for every new comic. Unfortunately it seems made for people who want to publish single-page webcomics and images, not whole manga chapters. I couldn’t find the option to upload zips and I didn’t have the patience to upload page after page one after the other, so I ditched that.

There was also the WP Manga Project Manager, but first, that seems woefully outdated. It lets you offer downloads via IRC (heh) and Megaupload (heh. heh. heh.) for one thing. Secondly it’s just a manager and not a reader on its own. You’ll still have to upload your manga elsewhere and provide the link to the program. In which case it makes more sense to use the other program in the first place.

Lastly I considered a few paid plugins, but not seriously because this is just a hobby site. jtManga on Code Canyon seemed interesting and only costs $12, but I read on some forums that the developers don’t provide any meaningful support and that it’s buggy and it’s outdated. Genbu Manga Viewer from Bukku costs $9, but not from the original developer, which doesn’t offer it any more. This means I can forget about any kind of support if anything goes wrong and can forget about any future updates. No point then. The third and final one I considered was WP Manga from Xhanch, but at $200 a pop, it’s not a viable purchase for your average hobby site. Maybe if you’re MangaFox and making $20,000 a day (just a guess!) in ad revenue, spending a fraction of your gains on a plugin makes sense, but not for someone like me. Also the support is pretty poor, I hear.

My last resort will be the FoolSlide program. Problem is, that seems confusing to use. I’ll have to go into my cPanel and fiddle around with MySQL and PHP and stuff like that, which I was trying to avoid. For now you’ll have to put up with the ugly Kommiku viewer. Enjoy!

My thoughts on: Rurouni Kenshin

Rurouni Kenshin wasn’t the first manga I ever read, but it was the first one I ever read online. That was back when Viz had only just gotten started and hadn’t gotten round to licensing most of the juggernauts it later got. I caught a few episodes of the Samurai X anime on TV one day, got hooked, went hunting and got hooked like nothing else before.

What I liked about it: The cast. Most of it, anyway. The music – I loved the ending themes so much I became a fan of The Yellow Monkey and T.M. Revolution almost instantly. As a matter of fact I physically own almost all the albums The Yellow Monkey ever released, and I have the pics to prove it. I think I liked the story, but I don’t remember what it was about any more. The tragedy early on where the minister was assassinated and Aoshi’s troops were massacred really moved me at the time, being used as I was to happy-go-lucky series like Ranma 1/2 (more on that one day). At the same time it wasn’t a series about killing for killing’s sake, and I was just as satisfied when the series became less and less bloody with the passing of time.

What I wasn’t so crazy about: Kaoru. There’s a part later in the manga where she supposedly dies, only not really. I’m probably the only RK fan in existence who cheered out loud when that happened, but I really, really didn’t like Kaoru. And not in a fangirl “gyaaa, get offa my man!” kind of way because I wasn’t that crazy about Kenshin either. He’s a cool guy, but I was more a fan of the supporting cast like Saito and Sano. The final Enishi arc wasn’t anywhere near as good at the Kyoto arc, but it wasn’t terrible either. The series would have been too short if it was just Kyoto so for lack of a better ending arc the Enishi arc had to do.

Series quality in general: The action was slightly hard to follow at first, but it got better pretty quickly. I bought the Vizbig editions later and thought the translations were a little too heavy on the Japanese terms. The story wasn’t too memorable in the long term but the cast definitely was. The manga is a little better than the anime, IMO, but both are okay. Is it worth reading? Well it’s one of the bestselling mangas of all time, so I think they’re on to something there. In other words, hell yeah! Especially if you like action manga. If you’ve somehow managed to get by without watching it so far, get on it now!

The 20 best-selling manga of all time (May 2014)

I just read the list of the current bestselling manga on AnimeNewsNetwork and was surprised to note I’d read almost all of them so far. The ones I haven’t read I’ve watched the anime of, which is almost the same thing. It’s given me 20 days worth of posts too, where I will jot down quick notes and opinions I have of each one. The ones I haven’t seen, well, maybe I’ll put them on my rapidly-growing To Read/Watch list.

Actually, studying the actual numbers shows it’s not really bestselling, it’s manga with the most copies printed. It’s like the difference between copies shipped and copies sold in the videogame market, so there might be quite a discrepancy in actual sold numbers. But probably not enough to knock any of these out of the top 20, so here goes.

Rank – Bestselling manga title – Copies printed – My thoughts, if any

1. One Piece – 300 million
2. Golgo 13 – 200 million – Haven’t read it. It’s always seemed ultra-violent to me.
3. Black Jack – 176 million – Haven’t read it. I tend to shy away from medical series, but I’ll try it.
4. Dragon Ball – 157 million
5. Kochikame – 155.3 million – Haven’t read it.
6. Detective Conan – 140 million – Seen episodes of the anime. Good, but a bit formulaic, no?
7. Naruto – 135 million
8. Oishinbo – 130 million – Haven’t read it. I never knew Oishinbo was so popular.
9. Slam Dunk – 119 million
10. Doraemon – 100 million – Seen an episode. It’s cute.
10. Astro Boy – 100 million – Saw the recent movie, does that count?
10. Touch – 100 million
10. Fist of the North Star – 100 million
14. Kindaichi Case Files – 90 million – Haven’t read it.
15. Sazae-san – 86 million – Seen an episode. I like the characters.
16. Captain Tsubasa – 80 million
17. Hajime no Ippo – 75.5 million
18. Bleach – 74.6 million
19. Sangokushi – 70 million – Haven’t read it. I tend to find Romance of the Three Kingdom series too hard to follow, but I might try.
19. Rurouni Kenshin – 70 million

[from AnimeNewsNetwork]

IIRC this only counts manga printed in Japan, not copies overseas. Maybe the numbers will be a little different once you add in all those printed in China, US, UK, France, Spain, etc. Then again apparently 5,000 copies sold counts as bestselling manga in the US, so it’s probably negligible. I’ll try to find worldwide numbers next time.

Gamushara manga review

Another terrible manga from the terrible duo of Juhzo Yamasaki (writer) and Mitsuru Adachi (artist). Adachi has produced several all-time classics since he struck out on his own, but his early artist-only series SUCK.

I only finished Gamushara (がむしゃら) a few days ago, but I’ve already forgotten all the character names. It is completely unremarkable and not really worth a read, not even by someone like me who is currently grabbing any and all baseball manga I can get my hands on. By the way, all manga reviews on this blog will contain free, unmarked spoilers so, yeah. I probably should have said that earlier.

Anyway, the main guy on the cover there is a transfer student at a high school. He gets into an altercation with the guys on the regular baseball team and decides to form a softball team so he can go to the national softball tournament. As with many baseball series (e.g. Princess Nine, Taisho Yakyu Musume), a ridiculous amount of time is spent early on gathering members, even more time is wasted on some stupid rivalry and then the main character’s team loses the final match of the series but learns valuable lessons from it.

It’s a standard pattern, but in the case of Gamushara it rankles quite a bit because the main character is way off base. He is 100% in the wrong and probably has some serious personality problems. He picked the fight with the baseball team for no good reason and formed his own team largely to get back at them. Throughout the series he goes out of his way to antagonize and annoy them, yet somehow he’s treated as a hero for his pettiness. It’s very hard to swallow, which is why I took to skipping large chunks of volume 2. At least it was short, that’s all I have to say. I can’t think of a single redeeming feature of Gamushara, because even the baseball sections were boring, poorly-written and predictable. Another manga for hardcore Adachi fans only, I guess.

Little Boy manga review

Little Boy is a miserable excuse for a manga. Its only redeeming feature is that it’s about baseball. And I suppose there might be points of interest for Mitsuru Adachi fans, since he drew the art for this series. Since this manga came out in 1974, early in Adachi’s career, it might be interesting to people seeking to trace the evolution of his art, before he settled on the same few character archetypes and evidently decided, why fix what ain’t broke? The story is by Mamoru Sasaki, who I’d never heard of before and hope to never hear of again.

I’ll skip lengthy explanations of the story and characters because it really doesn’t deserve it. I’ll just say it gets worse and worse as the series progresses and it’s a good thing Little Boy only lasted one volume. Gou, the main character only gets more and more difficult, rude, selfish and impossible to root for. In many series this is balanced out by letting you root for the rival instead, but all the “rivals” in this series show up for only a few pages a chapter to lose unceremoniously to Gou’s overwhelming skill and power. The one match he does lose isn’t satisfying either, because he isn’t that torn up over it. He’s just like, welp, gotta work harder. Typical shonen hero.

His ‘girlfriend’ Michi isn’t worth writing home about either. Gou threw one bloody ball (literally) which landed near her, and that makes her go all “I’ll follow you forever!” Michi even kicks up a stink when Gou agrees to marry another girl so the other girl can teach him a secret pitch (because that’s the kind of guy Gou is. He sucks.) The question of what she sees in him is never, ever answered. Unless it has to do with their mutual fetish for public peeing (yes, you read that right). Every Jack has his Jill, as the saying goes.

For the reasons I’ve mentioned above, Little Boy has zero merit as a romance or character-based manga. More importantly, because of the monotony of the matches, the nastiness of Gou and the colorlessness of the opposing batters, it has zero merit as a sports manga as well. The art is actually decent for a manga that old, and the action is always simple and easy to follow, but that’s as far as it goes for the positive side of this manga.