The Anime Almanac

Warm weather, VIZ, podcasting, Scott Pilgrim, and going home!

And so we reach the final day of the New York Comic Con. Normally the Sunday of a convention is the time to chill and relax after a hectic Saturday, and it was most certainly looking that way with only one industry panel scheduled for today.

But there is one factor that can completely disprove this common convention characteristic, and he goes by the name Joss Whedon. Because of his panel today, the Javits center was packed wee early on a Sunday morning. This left many of us bloggers stunned as we try to push through the crowds to get to Viz’s presentation.

NYCC projects an attendance of 77,000 people this weekend, which is really freaking amazing. I will be posting my top highlights from the convention later this week, but for now, please enjoy reading about the last day of the convention through the tweets of those who were there.

On site today:

Deb Aoki from About.com: Manga	Scott from The Anime Almanac	Anime3000 from Anime3000
Narutaki from Reverse Thieves	Vampt Vo from Ani-Gamers	Bryan Lee O’Malley from radiomaru
Ed Chavez from MangaCast	Dave from Subatomic Brainfreeze	tania from Yen Press
animevice from Anime Vice	Hisui from Reverse Thieves	Brigid from MangaBlog

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Sold out, Jason Thompson OEL, Bandai goes digital, Yotsuba&! vol. 6, FUNimation’s popularity, and Ani-bloggers go out for a huge dinner.

What do you get when you stick tens of thousands of geeks into a single building?

Tens of thousands of iPhones killing my  AT&T internet connection, that’s what!

Good thing I had a whole crew of bloggers ready to twitter away every piece of news to come out of the five industry panels today. A lot of big news happened today, and I’m sure I’ll go into more detail about it in the weeks ahead.

On site today:

Deb Aoki from About.com: Manga	Scott from The Anime Almanac	Anime3000 from Anime3000
Trisha Lynn from Movie Make-out.com	MangaCast	Angry Rabbit from Kitsune Kiki
Narutaki from Reverse Thieves	Vampt Vo from Ani-Gamers	tania from Yen Press
Bryan Lee O’Malley from radiomaru	Dave from Subatomic Brainfreeze	animevice from Anime Vice
Erica Friedman from Okazu	Gia from a geek by any other name	Michael Pinto from Anime.com
NY_Comic_Con	Hisui from Reverse Thieves

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Teen girls with manga, dealers room, Tentacle Grape, Vertical, and Yatta, Yatta, Yatterman!

Yes, my readers, on the first day of Comic Con, I was graped. I didn’t want it at first. I kept on begging, “No! Please don’t! Stop!” But I eventually gave in and opened myself to the purple monster. Before I knew it, his tangy liquid filled my body.

… and I kinda liked it. I even went back for seconds.

Not a lot of industry stuff going on today. They’re saving that all for tomorrow. Check out Anime Almanac the Live on Saturday for all the crazy going on as it happens.

On site today:

Scott from The Anime Almanac	MangaCast	Narutaki from Reverse Thieves
Dave from Subatomic Brainfreeze	Anime3000 from Anime3000	Deb Aoki from About.com: Manga
tania from Yen Press	Vampt Vo from Ani-Gamers	animevice from Anime Vice
Bryan Lee O’Malley from radiomaru	Chuck from Chuck’s Anime Shrine	Michael Pinto from Anime.com
funimation	Hisui from Reverse Thieves	yenpress from Yen Press
CMX from CMX MANGA	Robofish

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Travel, checking in, ICv2 conference, dinners, and Gia sticking tentacles in her mouth.

So here’s the brand new feature I’ve been working on for a few weeks here at the Anime Almanac. With so many people I follow on Twitter attending the New York Comic Con with me this year, I figure it would be interesting to see the event play out through different perspectives. So here is a chronological recap of today in a very unique convention report.

To check out all the action at it’s happening this weekend, go to Anime Almanac the Live.

On site today:

Scott from The Anime Almanac	Deb Aoki from About.com: Manga	Narutaki from Reverse Thieves
MangaCast	Dave from Subatomic Brainfreeze	Hisui from Reverse Thieves
tania from Yen Press	Gia from a geek by any other name	animevice from Anime Vice
funimation	yenpress from Yen Press	Robofish

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Today starts the trial of Christopher Handley for the content of his pornographic manga collection. Under the PROTECT Act of 2003, the fictional depictions of children having sex and bestiality in his collection could put him away for 20 years in prison.

This is not the first time that PROTECT has put an otaku on trial. After that man was convicted on those charges three years ago, I wrote out the following editorial piece on the problems with making works of fiction illegal. I feel that the piece is still applicable to Mr. Handley’s situation.

Originally posted on December 4, 2005.

Update: The trial has been postponed until next month.

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Hey everyone,

So as I’m preparing for a new year’s worth of convention coverage, I’m going to be taking a break from writing for a few weeks in order to program some new features for this site and fix up a few bugs.

As you know, I am the only person working on Anime Almanac and my free time is a little limited. There have been a few things I’ve wanted to develop for the site using PHP, but I’ve been putting it off for a few months now to focus on writing.

But with the New York Comic Con lurking just around the corner, it’s time for me to get these features out the door so that I can use them for the convention.

What are these new features? Well, all I can say is that it will be closely tied to my Twitter account and the people who have signed up at Anime Almanac the Live. If you are on Twitter and you are planning on attending the NYCC, I strongly encourage you to go to this page and add your Twitter feed to my site.

The blog will return the first week in February for a (very) complete live coverage of NYCC. In the meantime, keep on checking out all the nonstop action over at Live.

I don’t normally do this, but I figure that with this being the first week that Crunchyroll went legit and started streaming new episodes of Naruto, I had to put out a final plea to my audience.

I had received an email last week concerning my Greg Ayres and the Fight Against Fansubs post from a reader I’ll refer to as Brian. Because he was nice in his letter, I sent him back a long email about my views and thoughts on the issue.

After reading over my response, I realized that there are some points I wrote about that really all my readers should know, not just Brian. Because I have stopped downloading fansubs and written many pieces on the negative consequences of it, I often hear people saying that I either hate technology, hate anime fans, or that I must be in the pocket of the industry.

So this week, I’d like to repost Brian’s email and my response to clear the air and let everyone know exactly where I stand on the fansub issue, why I do what I do, and what exactly I’m asking of my readers.

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Last week, I reviewed the past year in terms of anime releases, manga release, and the best and worst companies in the industry. However, there was still one more thing that gained a lot of traction and notice in 2008 –

The Anime Almanac and its ever lovable blogger! (^_^)

I started this blog a few years ago while in college, but the stress and time I needed to devote to school work left the site on a constant hiatus. I’d pop up during a school break to make a post, but for the most part, this site failed to get anywhere do to my lack of consistency.

When I attended the New York Anime Festival a year ago, several different events occurred that I felt needed to be told to the world. I had four posts already in mind, but I didn’t just want to pop in to post those few things and then disappear again. If I was going to be returning to blogging, this time I was going to commit myself to something big.

So I bought the animealmanac.com domain name, I redesigned the site to have a more contemporary feel (which I later redesigned to have a more moé feel), and I set a goal for myself – I would post at least one article every week.

These changes paid off quickly and tremendously. I started off the year as just another opinionated jerk with a blog, but I ended it as an opinionated jerk with a press badge, access to exclusive interviews and information, a professional reputation, and a growing readership who look forward to seeing what I’ll write next.

This week, I’d like to go over my top ten posts over that past year and why they made the Anime Almanac the site it is today.

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You know, even though I mostly focus this blog on stories about the anime industry and the American fan culture behind it, I am still an avid collector of manga and anime DVDs. So that means that along with keeping tabs on the latest news and traveling to many conventions this past year, I’ve been watching and reading many new series.

For the next two weeks, I would like to take a break from my normal postings and do a little bit of a review of 2008. Looking over my collection, I’ve pulled together my top picks for new anime and manga releases in the past year. Hover your mouse over most of the titles for cover art and shopping information via Amazon.

And because I just can’t keep my editorial opinions to myself, I have also included a list of the best and worst companies and organizations of 2008, as well as my predictions for the anime and manga industry in the new year. Let’s see just how accurate my predictions actually are when I look back at this a year from now. 😉

And just to be clear, I’m only listing series that began their availability in America in 2008. Series that had been available prior to 2008 or that are not legally available in the US are not counted.
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If you have been following my blog for the past year, then you are familiar with my controversial narrative of the US anime market and how it reached its breaking point a few months ago.  The giants of the industry formed their mighty empire after Toonami and Adult Swim brought in a new American audience around the turn of the century. The fans needing something more than just Dragonball Z and Cowboy Bebop to handle their anime craving began to head out to their local Best Buy and spend their hard earned cash on new DVDs.

With this expanding new market demanding more series, the American distributors bought into any new series that Japan was producing at the time and began adapting them for the US audience. But during this time, broadband internet connection became available to more households through out the country. With this new development, it was no longer TV that provided the gateway to new American otaku, it was illegal downloading and streaming video websites.

The audience brought in from the internet were not going out to Best Buy to buy anime DVDs. Why would they if they could just download it all for free? And as older fans discovered the ease and availability of fansubbing, they also stopped buying DVDs. This meant that all those series that the giants have been working on following that big rush were now just sitting on the store shelves going unsold.

The anime DVD market was dead, and it died at the hands of the internet fansub monster. Although fandom continued to grow through the years, profits began to shrink and wither away into nothingness. We saw the first causalities of this when the giant Geneon fell around a year ago, and again when ADV fell to pieces only a few months after that.

So instead of trying to squeeze water out of this dried up sponge, I have written many essays on how the Japanese needed to adapt into the digital space created by illegal file sharing. And as the economy and general outlook of the industry became far more gloomy as the months passed, it has become obvious that they had better do it soon. Otherwise, we were going to see many more causalities in the near future.

However, despite what appears to be all too painfully obvious to the Americans, the Japanese seem to be completely oblivious to the fansub monster. I faced this fact head on with an interview I had at Otakon last summer.

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