The Anime Almanac

It’s been a long time since I last read shojo manga. As a fan of the more moé and shonen series, I very rarely pick up shojo titles in my eight years of collecting manga. But some time ago, I had a girlfriend who was also into manga, and she (literally) forced me to take in series like Hot Gimmick, Marmalade Boy, and Fushigi Yuugi. Fortunately, the girl had good tastes in manga, so despite following outside the target demographic of these titles, I found myself enjoying them a lot.

But again, that was many years ago, and I haven’t picked up a truly shojo title since then. So when CMX sent me a copy of Mai Nishikata’s Venus Capriccio to review for this site, I was worried that I might be a little rusty in being able to evaluate such a title.

Much to my surprise, however, Capriccio was an enjoyable read.

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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’m live at the Doubletree Hotel in Somerset NJ for the third annual MangaNEXT convention this weekend.

MangaNEXT is the spin-off of the AnimeNEXT convention I reported on back in June. As the name implies, it focuses mostly on manga-themed events and panels. This year’s guests include yuri comic artist Rica Takashima, OEL manga artist Misako Rocks!, and one of my personal favorites, manga translator Mari Morimoto.

I will be posting small updates and cameraphone photos all weekend long on Twitter. Be sure to follow my Twitter account or check out Anime Almanac the Live to catch my live con coverage directly from the convention floor.

I was getting dinner at my local Subway restaurant the other day when I was overhearing the people in front of me. It was a mother and her 8-year-old son. The boy was acting like little boys do, a little hyperactive, loud, and very annoying to the people around him. So the mother came up with the best way to calm him down:

“You better behave,” she warned him, “or you’re not going to be able to watch Avatar tonight. You want to watch Avatar, don’t you?”

“Uh huh,” the boy said, and he did quiet down and behave himself after that. I was a little tempted to tell the boy, “I also want to watch Avatar tonight,” but I’ve learned from my days of selling DBZ toys at Toys R Us that this kind of  cross-generational fanboy talk never goes so well with the mother…

But I was actually taken aback a little bit when I overheard this conversation. I have been a huge fan of the series for a couple of years, and I’ve seen it become so widely accepted among my peers. I’ve talked about it with my anime club back in college. I’ve seen it cosplayed many times at anime convention. I’ve been to convention panels where fanboys would go nuts over the action sequences and fangirls would coo over various coupling… including some yaoi pairings!

In my mind, Avatar has become just as much as part of the American otaku culture as any other mainstream anime show from Japan. So now that the show has finally ended its run on TV, I’m left to wonder just how does this series manage to become such a huge part of the otaku community yet still appeal to your average American boy?

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Within the past couple of months, I have became a total fanboy for the new manga publisher Yen Press. With their manga anthology Yen Plus coming out in a couple of weeks and the release of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya coming out next year, I really see a great future ahead for these guys. But my first taste from this publisher actually came at the suggestion of Del Rey’s Dallas Middaugh. During a Q&A panel last year, someone asked Mr. Middaugh about his favorite manga series not released by Del Rey. His answer was Yen Press’s With the Light – Raising an Autistic Child by Keiko Tobe, and he was quite adamant about how much he enjoyed it.

With this suggestion, I picked up the first volume of the series shortly afterwards. Yen Press combines two volumes of the Japanese edition for each American release, making each volume much larger than your average manga. But you only pay $15 for what’s pretty much two entire books, and trust me, it is worth every penny of it…

Mr. Middaugh’s suggestion was dead on because With the Light would become the best comic I have read in years… and that’s saying a lot considering just how much manga I’ve read during that time.

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Darkness falls over the poor lands of the American anime market. What was once a prosperous and thriving area was now facing mass famine due to the abandonment and neglect of its people. Now the land’s most terrible foe, the evil giant Fansub monster, has grown so big that even the mighty warriors of the industry struggle to survive.

“It’s too much, I can’t go any farther,” calls out the Geneon Ranger as his giant robot becomes the first to crumble to the ground.

“I’ve lost all my support,” screams the leader, ADV Ranger. “I can’t continue on like this. Fall back! Fall back!”

But through all this chaos and destruction, one underdog steps forward to rally the others together. “I might not have enough to defeat this monster,” says the lone FUNi Ranger, “but my robot still has enough juice to fight! Let us combine our powers to take down this beast!”

“Right!” confirms the others, and they join their battle machines together to create the FUNizoid – savior of the market and fighter of the Fansub monster!

And unfortunately for everyone, this massive mech is the last hope left for the struggling industry.

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Note: Because I’ve been spending so much time responding to my essay from last week, I haven’t been able to finish a new post for this week. So instead of just posting nothing, I would like you all to enjoy one of my personal favorites from the Anime Almanac archives. Originally posted on September 9, 2005.

At first I was going to post a review of the live-action TV show entitled Train Man (“Densha Otoko”), but then I realized that doing so would not give this story enough justice. This simple story about a nerd turning towards the Internet for romance advice has become a phenomenon that is currently rocking the Japanese and American otaku culture. It is a representation of the geek and nerd lifestyle and where our hidden passions truly lie. I will take a look at the history of the Train Man, the kind of impact it has made in Japan, and just what makes it is so significant.

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In a darkly lit room at the AnimeNEXT convention on Saturday, English dub voice actor Greg Ayres enters to applause from a full room of otaku. “No, it’s not my final panel for this convention,” he announces to the audience, “but it’s the only one I think is important.” The topic he is going to be discussing is fansubbing and illegal downloading of anime in America.

When he asks the audience whether or not they download fansubs illegally, a majority of them raise their hand to say yes. He assures them that it’s okay to admit to doing so, but he just wants to hear their reasons. One-by-one, fans talk about why they do it, giving reasons like “I can’t afford to buy”, “the show in unlicensed over here”, or “I don’t want the show to be spoiled by all my friends who have already watched it.” Greg listens to each one, jots it on a list, and addresses each point for as long as time will allow him. But the audience is so eager to talk the most of the points will not get covered in the two hour limit.

The only stipulation he has when it comes to audience participation is that everyone treats each other with respect and hold back any unnecessary bashing and name calling. It’s a taboo subject to be speaking about so publicly like this, and it causes some very emotional and spiteful reactions from both sides when it’s being argued about. As expected, the actor is dissected, taunted, and harshly mocked by his critics on the internet in the days that follow this panel. But for the next two hours, this audience of otaku listens to the actor’s message and feel safe enough to speak out openly about their own views and doubts on the subject. And when it’s all over, most of them leave the room vowing never to download illegally again.

I got to have a interview with Ayres prior to the panel to discuss his views on illegal downloading, the people who take part in it, and the people who are damaged by it. In attending these panels and talking to the participants, I learned just why his message has such a huge impact on the community all together, in both positive and negative ways.

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While I’m still in the process of writing up my piece on voice actor Greg Ayres, I figure I’ll just share my very personal experience with the AnimeNEXT convention last weekend. I had mentioned towards the end of a previous post that I was going to be getting press badges for all the major northeast conventions this summer. AnimeNEXT was the first, and man, was it an awesome experience.

Actually, the whole thing started with me noticing a “Fan Subbing” panel in the conventions schedule being hosted by Ayres. Wait, a voice actor talking about fanssubbing? This sounded like something I would write about, and it would probably make for a good story on my site. Since the schedule didn’t list any more details on the panel, I emailed my press contact asking for more information. I said that I was considering possibly holding an interview with the voice actor if he was really there to talk about the controversial subject.

Within a couple of hours, Trisha Sebastian, AnimeNEXT’s Director of Publicity, emailed me back:

“I’ve forwarded the details of your request to our guest liaison who will ask Greg if he would like to do the interview.”

o_O! Whoa, a private interview already?!? No, no, no! I was just curious about the panel. I didn’t want to commit to anything just yet.

But Trisha responded to my doubts and reassured me that the panel was just as I thought it was going to be. She sent me a complete summary of the panel from a past convention, a link to Ayres’s MySpace blog, and a link to a post I made in my blog several years ago which she said represented the over all tone of the panel. I was very impressed. Not only did she know everything I was looking for, she even did her homework about my little site and cited something I wrote a while ago. So I agreed to have the interview.

Clearly something was going to be very different about going to an anime convention this time around…

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Okay, so my last two reviews of light novels have turned out to be a couple of big disappointments for this anime blogger. Because of that, I had decided to leave the novel reviews for the New York Times and stick with just comics and cartoons. But I became interested in Del Rey’s Maid Machinegun light novel after hearing a sample of the book being read at the “Lolita and Maid Fashion Day” event in New York City two weeks ago. The first chapter, an introductory lesson into the proper maid café etiquette, was convincing enough for me to give this book a try. It’s a good thing I did, because this novel turned out to be one of the best reads I’ve had in recent memory. It proved to me that one can come close to the manga and anime experience even through written prose.

Maid Machinegun is the diary of Aaliyah Kominami, an eighteen-year-old girl working at a maid cosplay café in Akihabara. Through out the book, she writes about the interesting characters who work at and patronize the café, her run-in with a very harsh otaku critic, her experience at Japan’s largest comic convention, and a love/hate relationship between her and a male co-worker. She has made it her personal goal to become the world’s best maid, and attempts to do so with each and every “master” and “mistress” she serves along the way.

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