American Newspapers to Begin Carrying Manga 304
jonerik writes to tell us The Associated press is running an article stating that several American newspapers are going to start carrying manga with their normal arsenal of comics. The papers feel that this will help boost their readership amongst a younger audience. The two strips that made the cut are Van Von Hunter, and Peach Fuzz which are both created by American writer/illustrators and are being distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Not news (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not news (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sorry. I thought the headline said "Manga" was being added to the newspapers.
Illustrated stories by Americans are called "comics."
And no, it doesn't matter if they are not joke-based. Ever hear of "Prince Valliant", "Sally Forth" or "Spider Man"? This is just more of the same.
Re:Not news (Score:2)
No. If an American makes a comic with chicks with eyes the size of saucers and mouths the size of lake Michigan, then it is "manga"!
Re:Not news (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not news (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not news (Score:2)
Even by this rather dodgy definition (wtf do you call comics from Japan then???), the two strips mentioned in the article hardly seem to qualify -- other than a few details of the way eyes are drawn, they look/feel much more like traditional american comics than real manga.
[And in the grand tradition of most newspaper comics, they also appear to suck.]
Re:Not news (Score:2)
Re:Not news (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Like it or not Manga now refers (Score:3, Insightful)
And the answer is, it's a comic coming from Japan.
Re:Not news (Score:2)
How do we know this is manga? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:5, Funny)
It's obviously more than just the big eyes. If that were the only qualification, we'd have seen Dragonball Orphan Annie Z! a long time ago.
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
Annie? She was Thong, the dog was Bananahammock, and Miss Ashtma was known as Aunt Grannypanties.
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:3, Informative)
The Japanis comic art style is distinctly different from traditional (pre-Japanese-influence) American-style comic art.
I prefer American comic art, myself. I can't recall ever seeing any manga that looks like something I'd want framed and hanging on my wall, but there's tons of American comic art that'd look great up there. Anything by Alex Ross, for example.
The "Manga-ized" American comics are awful. It's like they took the worst elements from both and stuck them together. Ugly as hell.
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:4, Insightful)
The "big eyes" look that people seem to associate with Manga (even though it's not always used) is something that Osamu Tezuka stole from Disney's "Snow White."
When I see must American attempts to make things "look Japanese" (such as the Teen Titan series currently on cable), it looks more like a parody of the oddest quirks of japanese anime than anything else.
Right here (Score:2)
Hi. I'm John Q. Public. Japanese style, manga, anime, japanimation, or whatever everyone wants to call it this week, to me, is big eyes, small mouth and no nose. There are other aspect that make it that style, but visually, that is what it is to me, John Q. Public.
------
Now, I'm not a "real" or "hardcore" anime fan. I've seen some series here and there, and it's ok, but not really my interest. But as someone who was on the outside and who gave it a real chanc
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
In Manga, I guess you'd basically look for the same things minus the voice acting. (Unless you do your own voice acting.)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhh... Just by grabbing three hugely popular series... "Cowboy Bebop", "Sailor Moon" and "FLCL" don't even look like they were all drawn by the same species, let alone the same artist.
I don't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion, unless you somehow think that seeing "Pokemon" and "Yu-Gi-Oh" has exposed you to the full range of Japanese anime styles.
and the terrible voice acting
Setting asi
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
I'm not sure if this link will withstand the slashdotting, but I'd suggest that stuff like this [ssw.net] holds up with just about anything from Alex Ross.
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
It's like they took the worst elements from both and stuck them together. Ugly as hell.
No, if you want "ugly as hell", look at the style used in DC and Marvel comic books.
Someone went on a contagious, permanent acid trip years ago and ruined what was once a fine American institution.
They might as well turn all of the superheroes into manga. It couldn't make them any worse.
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was thinking the same thing when I read that last sentence in the submission. "Manga" is not a style, it specifically refers to Japanese graphic storytelling. Otherwise there'd be no reason to even use that word. We use that word to refer to their comics/graphic novels because they use that word to refer to the same material. (It is the same with "anime".)
Anything that is created outside of Japan is not manga, at least not if you're using that word to differentiate something from a standard comic (i.e. you are speaking English and not Japanese). It may be "manga-inspired", but it is not manga.
People do get into arguments about this sort of thing, and yes, there can be questions of degree... a lot of anime, for example, is written and designed in Japan but drawn in Korea. Is it really anime? Probably. Same is true of some manga. But if you're talking about comics written by Americans, drawn by Americans, in America, that's just a comic. That's got nothing to do with manga, however its visual style may look.
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:5, Interesting)
But I was under the impression that one large distinction was the set of graphic conventions used. (For instance: lightbulb-over-head versus laserbeam into head for idea, smoking head versus bulging veins for anger, etc.)
I suspect when an american comic syndicate executive says "manga" he undersands it to mean a comic that uses the stylistic and graphic-linguistic convention set of manga, rather than whatever the "real" definition is.
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
Its a graphical novel, not a comic you insensitive clod!
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
Not until it's collected and published as a book or installments it's not. As long as it's on the "comics" page of a newspaper it's a "comic" - regardless of its humor value. (See Alley Oop, among many others, for a strip-serialized adventure story.)
And last I heard the term was "graphic novel", not "graphICAL
How about we settle on "sequential art" for now, eh?
B-)
Not really (Score:2)
Take wedding rings in Japan as an example. Japanese women did not get diamond rings for a marriage until after a large diamond organization marketed it to Japanese women, post WWII.
Now, Manga has been targeted at young kids in America for some time, and the newspapers are just leveraging that marketing in hope of increasing readership base. It is well know that is you get kids to buy someth
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
(One instance I can think of right now is the nose bleed as shorthand for someone being sexually aroused. Is your average American likely to know that?)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet if Japan was to release films claiming to be "Hollywood Films", music that was "New Orleans Jazz" or selling "Texas BBQ Steak Mix" there would be little question of them cynically ripping off an American idea just to make a quick buck...
Manga is Japanese, in the same was as Champagne is French, you can make it the same way, it might even taste the same... but no matter what you do its not the real thing.
Pepsi ain't Coke folks...
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
If Japan was selling Hollywood films, New Orleans jazz, or Texas BBQ steak mix, then that would be questionable, as you say. But if they sold Japanese variations on film, jazz, and BBQ steak mix, that would be more intriguing. Manga is a type of product, not something that
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
This assertion doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Why don't we use a French term for French comics? Why don't we use a Japanese term for Japanese movies?
Yes, in the English lexicon "manga" refers to a style. This style's associa
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:2)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How do we know this is manga? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also to add to what does the word 'manga' mean? Sure it means 'comic' from Japan. But it also carries with it an intrinsic style. Art styles have no borders and influence those who read it. So if American artists start to pick up tendencies and even plain out copy the styles... well thats just natural. Now the argument is whether or not american made 'manga' is indeed manga. Well sometimes you can't tell the difference other than language. So surely it must be manga. Is non-english hip hop not hip hop? Again describe an american made manga as a 'comic' and many will scratch their heads.
'It doesn't look like a comic.'
>'Oh. But It has an American author/illustrator.'
'Yeah but it looks like manga!'
Maybe the word 'manga' has changed in its meaning.
A great place to get scanlated manga is lurk [thelurker.net]. Stop by sometime.
pfffft .... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:pfffft .... (Score:2)
Re:pfffft .... (Score:2)
Re:pfffft .... (Score:2)
While Americans might actually learn something about a foreign culture through exposure to manga, the Japanese would learn nothing at all from exposure to Zippy.
Blasphemy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Blasphemy (Score:3, Insightful)
If it ain't American it ain't rock-and-roll?
Re:Blasphemy (Score:2)
If it ain't American it ain't rock-and-roll?
Americans already have a word for stylized picture-panel drawings. That word is comics. I see no need to borrow a word to replace what we already have. I see using "manga" on an American comic is simply a lame marketing attempt to latch onto something that's "hip" or "cool", despite being neither, all while diluting a loan word that fans have used to mean "japanese comics" as a short hand to identify what they like, same with "anime". Technically, in Japanese
Re:Blasphemy (Score:2)
Americans already had a name for what Buddy Holly and the Crickets were doing: country music.
"I see no need to borrow a word to replace what we already have."
You don't believe that the artistic style is different and distinct enough to set it apart from all the other genres? What other than manga uses such exaggerated facial features on human characters to convey emotion?
"I see using "manga" on an American comic is simply a lame marketing
Re:Blasphemy (Score:2)
Fixed that typo.
Re:Blasphemy (Score:2)
First off, we have no national language. Secondly, the language in question is English. Us anglophones have the nasty habit of mugging other languages for their words. Like "anglophone."
"in america, multiple drawings used to convey an event or narrative are called 'comics'."
Assuming there is one and only one proper name for that category of art (again, English), you
Re:Blasphemy (Score:2)
No, the lie was "the comics industry in this country has been stunted and is mostly for kids." Before Congress got involved, American comics and cartoons were never intended for kids, and all Congress did was drive things underground or force artists to rely on double entendre. And even today, in the "funnies pages" proper, even the strips that are intended to be funny, most kids
Re:Blasphemy (Score:2)
Re:Blasphemy (Score:2)
lol, that would have been a coup. Mind-numbing, inane, and utterly mindless, yet something that keeps you going back for more and more (and wanting more!).
It certainly would have been a great fit for the American daily comic format.
Re: Uh... (Score:2)
Re:Blasphemy (Score:2)
Not a follower of Prince Valiant, are we?
How about accurate reporting? (Score:5, Insightful)
I frankly wonder what PR company issued that one - must be the one that constantly claims that 'suits are back!' - LOL
Re:How about accurate reporting? (Score:2)
about damn time (Score:2)
commic strips haven't changed much in genre since I was a kid (i'm 30). With the exception of boon docks every comic is double digit years old. Only being retired when the artists have passed on.
Re:about damn time (Score:3, Insightful)
To Boost Readership? (Score:2)
While this is a cool thing, since I'll take a look at any new comic in the paper, I don't see it making any noticable impact on readers
A lot of people subscribe for the features (Score:2, Interesting)
To quash competition in two-newspaper towns, they paid rediculous amounts for exclusive rights to features like comics and Dear Abby and Ann Landers.
People quit buying the competition and now we have a lot fewer two-newspaper cities.
Re:To Boost Readership? (Score:2)
Dilbert, the horoscopes, and the NYT crossword are vastly more important to newspaper circulation than actual news coverage.
People who subscribe to newspapers don't care if it's a perfect source of accurate information regarding world events. They just want something to thumb through over their Special K before going to work, or read on the shitter once they get to work.
Re:To Boost Readership? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:To Boost Readership? (Score:2)
Re:To Boost Readership? (Score:2)
But the reverse isn't necessarily true. Having manga/anime in newspapers might introduce more to a general market allowing it to become more popular as an indepenant medium. Also, while comics aren't generally the whole reason for reading a newspaper, I do know some where people would buy a paper to catch the new few cells if they're following a particular plotline...
Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
How about publishing the news as it happens? It seems like most of the articles in the New York Times cover things I knew about a week earlier.
How about not using anonymous sources, or at the very least outing the sources if they are proved to have been lying?
How about not pretending there is such a thing as unbiased reporting? Saying "one is lead to believe" instead of "I believe" is just another form of lying.
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
How about carrying all major sides to every divisive issue (rather than carrying only one to the left of Joe Stalin and mentioning others, if at all, only to deride them)?
How about giving an unbiased view of probabilities, rather than focusing on a few rare occurrences and ignoring commoner ones - without even mentioning in the reportage of the rarer events that they're the exception rather than the rule? (For instance: Covering every offensive firearm use or firearm accident as a nation
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
You lose.
Come back if you're ever willing to actually discuss media bias. Until then you might as well not bother posting such jibberish.
The slashdot readership - or at least the subset I
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Saying "one is lead to believe" instead of "I believe" is just another form of lying.
I don't know about you, but in several of my high school English classes, using a personal pronoun for anything nonfiction, short of an autobiography, was considered poor style. In one of my college science classes, using a personal pronoun in a lab journal entry resulted in losing 10% of your grade on that lab. I'm guessing that saying "I believe" violates some stylistic rule of journalism.
Of course, I'm replying to a
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
Many of the things I see here I have seen elsewhere days or even weeks ago. Some WAG articles on theinquirer and other sites are often surprisingly accurate and months ahead of official party lines.
What's a "Newspaper"? (Score:2, Funny)
Where can I download it? 'nuff said.
You need to check it out (Score:2)
Also, if someone hacks it and changes the information, it's usually really easy to tell!
Wait, it gets better: NO DRM! once you get one, you can share it with anybody else, and it is completly legal!
You can also reply to discuss about article, but the moderater is really stern and you have to get there approv
Trendsetter (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody's said it yet... (Score:2)
I've read Van Von Hunter... (Score:2)
In comparison with american anime-like cartoons like Martin Mystery or Totally Spies (ack! Choke! Cough), VVH is much more anime-like, relatively speaking. And having seen garbage like digimon (eew) or DBZ (ugh), I say VVH has much more quality than them.
So no
Re:I've read Van Von Hunter... (Score:2)
Western != American
Wtf? It will be americanized lame nothingness (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wtf? It will be americanized lame nothingness (Score:2)
The newspaper? (Score:5, Funny)
For those of you still reading newspapers, STOP KILLING THE TREES already. We need the wood to rebuild Florida, Texas, and Lousiana before next hurricane season.
Re:The newspaper? (Score:3, Informative)
which is still a tiny number of trees compared to 200 yearsa go. Also, natural forests have a different eco system then a bunch of tree carefull planted in a line.
If the paper companies didn't need those trees, then those areas could be used to grow the correct kind of timber for houses.
Of course, once reality sets in, one quickly relizes that the current situation is the best for are current culture.
Van Von Hunter?! (Score:2)
if only it was azumanga daiou (Score:3, Insightful)
CutePet makin' it big (Score:2)
Obligatory Homestar Runner Reference (Score:3, Funny)
I though I'd seen the last of him... (Score:2)
Tokyopop, Shoujo, Contracts, 4-koma, and AmeComi (Score:3, Informative)
Tokyopop [animenext.org] is one of the companies that started the whole manga boom. They weren't the first, but they definitely contributed to the market. They started out being called Mixx, and originally published the Sailor Moon manga in english. They started releasing other Shoujo manga (manga for girls) and did well initially.
Eventually, they saturated the market with a lot of titles and started seeing diminishing returns on their profits. Naturally, they looked at other markets to expand into. One of the things they did was to run a regular "Rising Stars of Manga" contest where they encouraged artists to submit material to them in the manga style, with the winner being offered a publishing deal.
I've been told that terms of the contract heavily favor the company, and that they own the rights to all the material that gets published. They've been calling this product OEL manga, or "original english language manga" and are trying to differentiate it from the so-called "ameri-manga" that is published in the comics industry.
There's really no difference between OEL manga and Amerimanga, and it's basically a marketing tactic. Make no mistake, this is OEL manga, not the stuff published in Japan. But like manga, it's very free in it's layout of the various panels. Moving to the standard 4-panel (or 4-koma in Japan, which is published vertically as opposed to horizontally) format will be difficult. It'll be interesting to see how they accomplish this.
Even though they refer to it as manga, Japanese people make a distinction between the stuff published domestically and abroad. American Comics are usually referred to as AmeComi, and OEL manga probably falls under that umbrella. So while it's nice for the marketing folks to say that manga is being published in newspapers now, it really shouldn't be considered manga.
Re:I only read comics made in the USA (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Heh (Score:4, Interesting)
The local anime convention was once held at a traditional Catholic school. The completely insane organizers decided to show Angel Sanctuary. I had the opportunity of watching it in a big screen between a giant statue of Mother Mary and another of a saint. The school never allowed another anime convention on its grounds. I think it was worth it
Nice Example (Score:2)
Re:Will it work? (Score:4, Interesting)
My parents used to buy the newspapers that had the comic strips that I liked. For my father there wasn't much difference between newspaper A or newspaper B, but I _HAD_ to see the comic strips. So he always bought newspaper A for me.
See, newspapers aren't aimed at kids. They're aimed at the PARENTS. The comic strips are just a marketing device, and manga inclusion is just a strategy to keep that market (people don't buy newspapers as often as 10 years ago). Since comic strips like Peanuts don't attract the young people right now, manga in newspapers was bound to happen, sooner or later.
Re:have to point it out (Score:2)
Re:I guess (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason you may be modded flame bait is that are making a rather enormous generalization that, so far as I can tell, does not in any way represent reality.
So maybe you could do the honest thing here and either admit you're just blowing smoke out your ass, "Feminist Mom", or come up with some actual data.
Re:I guess (Score:2)
US is the king of sexual abstinence. [yahoo.com]
Re:When are we getting complete japanese editions? (Score:3, Interesting)
(hmmmpph if the above line doesnt display then it would seem slashdot needs some i18n work.....)
You cant HANDLE the Japanese editions?
With weekly Jump magazine weighing in at @ 500 pages the comic section would be bigger than the paper.....
Re:When are we getting complete japanese editions? (Score:2)
Would that be a bad thing? Sign me up!
Re:Van von Hunter? (Score:2)
Re:Further semantic analysis and analogy to Champa (Score:2)
Correct... and not just anywhere in France; it has to actually be made in the Champagne area (duh!)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/foodwine/20
Re:Sinfest the webcomic (Score:2)
Re:UTF-8 is a bitch (Score:2)
Transliteration is a huge hassle. One could say that using diacriticals is 'appropriate' as the revised Hepburn style has used for years. In that case it wouldn't be animeeshon (kana transcription aka Kunrei-shiki) it would be animêshon (using the the substitution of circumflexes for macrons prevalent on, for example, IMDB, as a crutch against non unicode sites). The old Hepburn style just ignored long vowel
Corporate Pre-Processing (Score:2)
America has taken it in, made their own lesser versions, and crapped them out the other side
The whole reason you think this about us is because the Corporte poobahs can't do anything without their thrice-damned focus groups. Focus groups (or f^%&-up groups) just result in bland, lame, products that just bite. Anything that's sufficiently bland as to cause exactly 0 controversy in any given group of people simply CANNOT be worth having.
When the marketing wonks wake up and realize this, we'll all b