Category: Manga

Farewell Tokyopop!

I heard yesterday that Tokyopop was closing its doors for good. No word on what will happen to most of its licenses, but the majority of its cash cows were taken away by Kodansha a while ago anyway. Pretty much all they had that people cared about was Hetalia, Alice in the Country of Hearts, Future Diary and maybe Aria. None of these are series I’ve ever cared much for, anyway. The only Tokyopop manga I have in my collection is a few volumes of Sgt. Frog, which I always thought they did a smashing job with. So in that respect I’ll be a little sad to see them go.

These are the signs of the times, though. The great anime/manga boom of the early 2000s is long over, now it’s sink or swim. Viz has canceled future releases of series like Gintama and Katekyo Hitman Reborn that weren’t selling too well, and I think they’re on the right track with that. It’s time to slim down and pare away the chaff.

The surviving companies have to approach manga from a business perspective instead of a fan one: what sells? Get that, license it and sell it. If Tokyopop had done that instead of licensing hundreds of unprofitable series, wasting time developing Original English Manga that few people cared about and recently, insulting the fans with that horrible America’s Greatest Otaku series, maybe they’d have had a better chance of surviving. Maybe.

Of course, the fans might cry foul if only stuff like Naruto and Bleach gets licensed. Those people can count on Vertical to release niche titles that sell, I suppose. Or they can suck it up and realize that ‘artistic merit’ means nothing if it leads to bankruptcy. Face it, manga costs a lot to produce, license, translate, typeset, market and sell. If you go through all that trouble only to sell 200 copies of that manga, you might as well not bother at all.

Quite frankly, I don’t think the average anime/manga fan who has gotten used to watching or reading his/her favorite manga for free is going to change his/her behavior any time soon. They might say “OMG, I love series X, it should be licensed!” but when it is, they just come up with some flimsy excuse (I don’t have money, I don’t like the translation, I don’t like the cover, I don’t like the company, It’s too expensive, It’s not coming out fast enough) to ignore it and keep reading their illegal scans.

So instead of trying to get those lost fans back, it’s up to manga companies to study who DOES buy manga, what they do buy and how they make their buying decisions, and then sell manga to them. I think they’re beginning to do that.

I also think they should go after the surviving aggregate sites. They did well taking down Mangahelpers and OneManga, but they didn’t go far enough and others have sprung up to take their place, most notably MangaFox. They might not succeed in taking them all down, but they have to make a public and well-publicized effort to show the world that reading manga for free is not the way it’s supposed to go. I swear, there are fans now who think manga naturally comes in free, low-quality, online packages and that anyone who tries to charge for it is ripping them off. Even if you can’t stop them pirating, they should at least know that what they’re doing is wrong. (Plus it pisses me off to hear them thanking the aggregators like they did anything except upload scans downloaded from somewhere, but that’s another matter for another time.)

So, farewell Tokyopop. All things must come to an end someday, and yours was a long time coming.

Hayate no Gotoku manga review

Hayate no Gotoku! a.k.a. Hayate the Combat Butler is an anime based on a manga series by Kenjirou Hata about a debt-ridden butler and the rich young girl who saves him. The story is pretty straightforward: Ayasaki Hayate’s parents rack up a debt of 159 million yen to the yakuza and take off, leaving Hayate to handle it. After a failed attempt to kidnap Sanzenin Nagi (the rich girl) for money, he ends up working for her as her butler and owing his debt to her instead.

I started out by watching an episode sometime in November and really liked it, but didn’t have time to really dig in until earlier this year. I spent a couple of weeks blasting through both seasons of the anime and then read the manga from chapter 148 onwards. I’d like to go back and read it from volume 1, but I’ll save it for another time.

I tend to prefer character-driven manga to story-driven manga anyway, unless the story is really good. HnG has a number of interesting and likeable characters (Hayate, Maria, Nagi, Tama, Hinagiku, Isumi) and not so interesting and not so likeable characters (Sakuya, Wataru, Saki, Klaus), but even the less interesting ones still make for a few good laughs.

I enjoyed the constant spoofs of and references to other anime and manga as well. I actually got a lot of them, which shows I’ve been watching too much anime… That said, I thought the quality of episodes in Season One was really iffy. Some were good, some were not so good. Later on I discovered that most of the ones I thought were bad were actually filler, which just goes to show that Hata’s unique touch isn’t so easily imitated.

Anyway, after putting the anime behind me, I’ve finally caught up to the current manga chapter, chapter 309. That was a whirlwind ride, especially the Mykonos arc where Hayate ran into his old flame Athena. I like Athena a lot. This is may sound like blasphemy to Hinagiku fans (of which I was one until Athena showed up), but I think Athena fits Hayate better in a lot of ways. She understands that he has feelings, that he’s often in pain, that sometimes that smile is just a mask. Hinagiku still doesn’t really know Hayate, deep down inside. To be honest I think the main frontrunners for Hayate’s affection right now are Maria and Athena, with Hina in third place. Athena x Hayate forever!

That being the case, I’m rather pissed off at this whole Alice arc, wiping out Athena’s memory and turning her into a kid again for 3 months. That puts a halt on any romantic development for the next 200 chapters or so. Boo! Hiss! Hata’s also added another girl called Luca/Ruka to the mix, we’ll have to see what she can bring to the party. It might be time to drop this for a while and see how things work out.

Aqua Planet Chronicle Blue

What appears to be a series of short stories by Masaru Oishi. The cover is nice, but Aqua Planet Chronicle Blue (碧 水惑星年代記) is really boring. I made it through half of the first story about the guy who wants to bonk his older stepsister while his younger stepsister wants to bonk him before giving up. I hate that kind of story, especially when it’s told in a slow, whiny, self-conscious way. Also the pen-and-ink art style may be popular these days, but I don’t think it fit the mood this time (i.e. I don’t like it) Next!

Akkake no Itoko – Hagio Moto manga review

Grhh…Banana Fish put me off manga for a while, in a way only truly annoying series can do. After a while I went through my collection of one-volume mangas for something new to try and settled on Akkake no Itoko by Hagio Moto. She’s pretty famous in Japan as one of the pioneers of thoughtful shoujo manga like AA’, but she’s not so well known in the west.

Unfortunately this collection of short stories is not one of her best. Maybe, just maybe, all this material was fresh when she published it back in 1970-whatever, but now they’re all silly, stale and shallow. The title one-shot is pretty good though, about a girl who moves to the countryside with her seemingly-Caucasian cousin Noelle (lots of Caucasian-types in this collection) and has to learn that there’s a lot behind her cousin’s happy-go-lucky facade.

The rest of the collection is lame. IIRC there’s this one called “Marmalade-chan” about a girl who looks like a boy, who gets involved with a fashion school and turns out to have been “pretty all along.” The next one is called “Mia” and it’s about a girl with a boy’s name who is put in a boy’s dormitory by accident and has to keep up the facade. It was so stupid I couldn’t read it but hey, maybe she was the first do to that hidden-girl-among-boys shtick, who knows. …And I stopped reading after that, even though the fourth story showed comedic promise I just couldn’t take the simplistic storylines and pat resolutions any more.

Aspiring mangakas might find the last story about mangaka struggling to come up with drafts interesting, but it seemed a little too longwinded to me so I just browsed through it. Still, I haven’t given up on Hagio Moto yet, someday I’ll find out just what it is that makes her special. It’s not Akakke no Itoko, for sure.

Banana Fish vol. 1-3 manga review

You ever had a manga you knew was good…but the main character was such a <bleep> that you couldn’t enjoy it? I like a good conspiracy theory/ragtag gang-on-the-run manga as much as anyone else, but when the protagonist is about as sympathetic as Jack the Ripper, it just ruins everything.

So this <rather unpleasant guy> named Ash had an older brother who took some bad drugs in ‘Nam and ended up shooting his whole unit. Older bro ends up as a vegetable who can only say “Banana Fish” and Ash winds up as a minor gang boss in New York. Eventually he finds a clue to the whole Banana Fish deal, but there are plenty of people – namely mafia boss Papa Dino, who will do anything to keep him from finding the truth. Etc, etc.

Banana Fish has got angst and violence – physical and sexual (how many times must Ash be raped before the mangaka is satisfied), it’s got action, mystery, suspense, tragedy and more. And everything moves along at a good pace, not too fast, not too slow. By the end of volume 3 Ash has already lost his best friend, his brother, his gang, he’s been to jail and back, he’s got a new Japanese best friend (I love how Japanese always self-insert no matter how improbable the location) and he’s gone home to trace his brother’s past.

…And that’s how far I think I’m ever going to get because I can’t STAND Ash. He’s the most incredibly stuck-up prat, ever! He’s supposed to be so smart, but most of the trouble he gets into is because he just won’t listen when people tell him not to do something. “No, Ash! It’s a trap!” means “It’s a trap!” you numbskull, don’t go dashing out there all half-cocked and act surprised when you get arrested and sent to jail. And then yeah, he shows flashes of brilliance in jail, but he wouldn’t even have BEEN in jail if he wasn’t such a nitwit in the first place. What a moron! “Oh, but he was raped as a kid, you’re supposed to feel sorry for him!” Yeah…NO. In fact the mangaka, Akimi Yoshida, clearly realizes that Ash’s level of —holery exceeds the pity point, so she keeps revising the age of his first rape earlier and earlier, wait he was 10, no wait he was 7, no wait… Give it a rest lady, your main character is a twit.

Thank goodness for Google and Wikipedia where I can read up on everything that happened without raising my blood pressure. Adios, Banana Fish!