Weekend Required Reading
So I’m playing around with some new editorial ideas, one of which is what I’m calling “required reading.” If it sounds familiar, I sort of previewed it in my roundup a couple of days ago– I haven’t decided if it’s going to be a regular round-up feature or its own once a week deal.
But see, there are a lot of great blogs out there that touch on matters near and dear to the anime/manga fan’s heart, and I don’t always get to write about them because it’s not especially news-y. So I wanted to create a way for me to do that without doing an individual post for each thing I find. Sometimes there are a half-dozen in a day, and other times there’s nothing.
So, here’s the first edition of the “weekend required reading,” which as I said is tentatively its own feature but possibly something I’ll include periodically in a daily roundup– let me know your thoughts!
The Myth of Supporting the Industry, from Sporadic Sequential. It’s a look at the idea that the industry is trying to guilt its consumers into supporting it. As I said in my comment on the post: I don’t support the idea that fans should support the industry for the industry’s sake, it needs to produce a product people want. But I do think fans should be willing to spend money on the products they enjoy– even if it’s buying the legit version long after they’ve downloaded and watched it. (Or hey, if you want to bypass supporting the US companies but still want to support the Japanese creators, you could always import the DVD from Japan. $_$)
Manga Killed the Comic Book Artist from art school comicking teacher Ryan Cody, who bemoans that most of his students want to create manga– more inspired by Rumiko Takahashi or Masashi Kishimoto than Scott McCloud or Jack Kirby. An interesting debate ensues in the comments, where some people agree and others say that Cody should try to appreciate that American comics don’t appeal as much to the market that his students are a part of these days.
How to Survive as a Small Yaoi Publisher part one and part two. Western yaoi creator Alex Woolfson talks to hentai (not yaoi) publisher about what pleasures and pitfalls a small yaoi publisher in the US might have to deal with– particularly apropos as Iris Print closes up shop, Seven Seas’ yaoi line ceases before it begins, and Drama Queen remains quiet and troubled.
And, just because I love linking to myself: Shall I Compare Thee To a Summer’s Anime. If any of you missed my summer 2008 anime preview when it fell off the front page, there it is in all its glory.