The Anime Almanac

There’s been one company in the manga industry that has come under a lot of scrutiny from the media and otakushere lately, and that would be the mighty Tokyopop. The company first received some flack when it was revealed that the terms of the contract to their potential Original English Language (OEL) manga artists granted the company full “moral rights” to the artist’s works. The contract was immediately blasted by Fred Gallagher and Bryan Lee O’Malley, two highly successful OEL creators not on Tokyopop label, which generated an outcry from the community. Just when the buzz was starting to go down, the company then announced that it would be going through some major reconstructions, including layoffs and production cutbacks. It’s amazing how the once mighty publisher has just simply crumbled over the past few weeks.

For those of you new to the manga scene, let me give you a bit of a history lesson:

Tokyopop made the US manga industry.

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Last week, I witnessed a truly disgusting display of the entertainment industry’s war against the bittorrent peer-to-peer method of file sharing. American Internet-based TV company Revision3 was shut down over the Memorial Day weekend due to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to its server. The cause of the attack was the company Artistdirect and their MediaDefender service. The service, which is paid for by the movie and music industry, searches for “bittorrent tracker” sites, fills the site with fake files, and then administers the DDoS attack if the bittorret site attempts to block MediaDefender from doing its thing, which is what happened to Revision3.

MediaDefender, along with most of the entertainment industry, assumes that bittorrent can only be used for the purposes of illegal file sharing and piracy. Revision3, on the other hand, used the peer-to-peer technology as a completely legitimate and legal method of distributing their TV shows over the internet, only to be punished for doing so by the entertainment industry it is a part of.

What sickened me the most about this story was looking at the front page of the MediaDefender website and seeing our favorite medium of entertainment being very specifically targeted in their war against bittorrent.

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The Wachowski brothers’ 1999 film The Matrix was a turning point in movie special effects. The movie was inspired by the brothers’ love of anime and comics. In emulating such works as Ghost in the Shell, they produced some of the most jaw-dropping visuals ever seen at the time. The heroes of the story defied all realistic notions of physics by leaping into the air, destroying concrete sidewalks and building by hand, and slowing down time itself to dodge speeding bullets.

Not only were the brothers able to make the cartoonish antics of anime and comics into a feature film, but they were actually successful in making it look incredible instead of just looking completely stupid. The film had enough of that Hollywood shine to it to make the outlandish seem possible.

No matter how easy Hollywood makes it look, that is not something that can be done so easily.

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There will be no regular post this week because I’ve been hard at work at creating a new feature for the site – Anime Almanac the Live!

No, I’m not putting on a concert… or starting a dorama adaptation… AA the Live is a Twitter aggregate for the anime blogging community. Users can visit the site to see what the Otakusphere is thinking about right now. It’s like a smaller version of Anime Nano, or an Anime Nano Nano, if you will.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a micro-blogging tool. The concept is simple – just post a small message that’s no more then 140 characters and it will show up on all your friend’s “Twitter feeds.” You can send updates via the website, cell phone text messages, AIM window, or any of the countless websites and applications built around the service. Its addictive simplicity has made Twitter one of the hottest new websites out there right now.

Why Should the Otakusphere use Twitter and AA the Live?

Because it’s makes it easy to get your word out onto the internets!

There are times that you might need to say something, but don’t want to write an entire post on it. It doesn’t take more than 140 characters to say, “This week’s ToLOVEる freaking rocks!” every week, does it? Twitter allows you to say the little things without having to clutter your blog and RSS feeds with it, and AA the Live allows you to see everyone’s Twitter feed in one place.

Another major benefit of Twitter is that it’s live and constantly updating. When there’s an event going on, like an anime convention, you know exactly what’s going on the moment that it happens. I used Twitter to send in live updates and photos from the NYCC last month via my iPhone. When Gia couldn’t get wifi in the panel rooms at ACEN last weekend, she sent in updates to her Twitter account with cell phone text messages.

It’s my goal to have every anime blogger going to Otakon this year to have a Twitter account and to post their thoughts, reactions, and photos live from the convention floor. Thanks to Twitter and AA the Live, you won’t have to carry around a laptop to do live con coverage.

How do I sign up for AA the Live?

First, sign up for Twitter. If you want to upload pictures to your feed, sign up for an account at TwitPic. Then go to this page to submit your twitter user name, customize your feed appearance on AA the Live, and you’re all set. Just Twitter away and it will show up on the page. (^_^)

So hopefully Twitter and AA the Live will be just as addictive to you as it has been to myself in the past week. I’m already planning on adding some new features over the next few weeks, but first we need more feeds and more people updating. Twitter has always had a huge Japanese-speaking otaku community, so let’s get the English-speaking otaku community onto there as well.

Okay, so I’ve talked a lot about Lucky Star over the past few weeks, but that’s because it is a highly anticipated title that has acquired a huge fanbase in America via the fansub community. That community, my dear readers, includes mostly every one of you out there. Rest assured that if I was continuously blogging like this in the months leading up to the US release of Haruhi Suzumiya, I would have given that series plenty coverage as well (instead of only writing one post on it). However, I promise to you all that this will be the last time I ever focus on Lucky Star on this site, so please just bear with me one more week.

It is not a surprise that my rant last week struck some nerves with a couple of readers. Owen over at Cruel Angel Theses wrote the most in-depth dissection I have seen of any of my posts. I don’t think my English teacher even took so much time to criticize my writing! But the point that Owen and many others got wrong with the post was that I do not actually hate the show. In fact, I became a major fanboy for the Tsukasa character and the Lucky Channel segments, which I did mention in the post. But the show was overall very dull and I have very rarely seen anyone really enjoy the show whenever I have seen it screened or shown to friends. Lucky Star, as a show, is neither bad nor all that good. It’s just mediocre.

The point I was trying to make with last week’s post was that despite Lucky Star’s mediocrity, it has gained an insanely huge cult following based only the promise of it was the second coming of Haruhi Suzumiya. I showed this connection happening in Japan with the magazine Comp H and in America with Bandai’s teaser trailer. There was even further news of it last week when ANN reported on an Akiba shop giving away Haruhi / Lucky Star mash-up telephone cards. It is this kind of artificially created hype machine that I was pissed off about, and if you don’t see the connect then you must be living under a rock.

The day after the post went up, I received my package from Amazon, and it did completely change my view and outlook on the series. So this week, I’d like to take a look at the impressive Lucky Star box set that Bandai Entertainment released in the US last week.

Which – and I’m sure this is completely coincidental – is almost exactly like Bandai’s release of that other show a year ago… (>_>)

Some hot “Lucky Star on Haruhi” action

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Okay, so I might have said some controversial things on this blog before. I’ve lashed out against the fansub community, criticized major anime news organizations, and advocated the right to lolicon. But I don’t think I have ever said anything so blasphemous against the otaku community as what I have to get off my chest this week.

Are you ready? Here we go…

(Takes in a deep breath)

Lucky Star is not the second coming of Christ.

It’s not even a particularly good show.

(Ducks for cover)

Okay, still with me? Good.

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It’s been only four months since the Anime Almanac had it’s relaunch at the beginning of the year, but the result has been phenomenal. The blog has had more readers in the last couple of months than it ever did when I was Blogsome. So in order to ensure the site continues to grow, I figured it was time for a facelift.

The “Old” Look

One of the biggest problems with the site’s old design was that I was using an image of Yuki from “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” in my header. See, I’m not all that artistic, so I couldn’t possibly create original artwork for the site. So I did the easy thing… find a nice image off of the internet, and copy-paste it onto my site.

But obviously stealing images like that doesn’t look all the professional, and since I’m going to be officially “press” this summer, I better start acting like one. I can’t hand out a business card with a copyrighted Yuki image on it, can I?

Not to mention that those bastards over at ANN also started using the image in their weekly manga review section… So there goes my hopes of making the image my branding.

So I asked the help of my friend Datura to create a completely original image for the site. Dat understands how to push the right buttons to get to the otaku heart, and often exploits them for her own profit. Whenever she needs me to do something for her, she calls me “senpai” and starts talking in the most moé way possible. She’d get me every time with that. So if there was a person I can rely on to appeal to an otaku audience, it would be her. I commissioned her for the new project.

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I hated the Lucky Star theme song at first. It was anticipated to be, like everything about Lucky Star, the second coming of Haruhi and it’s very popular ending theme song. But it turned out to be nothing like Haruhi at all. After the first episode of the show aired in Japan and someone had posted the opening on Youtube, I was left scratching my head over this strange creature…

click to play in new window

The theme starts off with a spoken-word introduction (aimai san senchi…) and then goes into an entire verse of spoken-word lyrics (Nanka daru, nanka deru, aishiteru…). While this is not quite rapping, it still has enough of the rhythm to it that you can’t quite call it free-verse either. The song then breaks into semi-singable verse (Bon-bon, ooendan..) which builds into a full-blown j-pop chorus (Motte ike, saigo ni waracchau no wa atashi no hazu…). And just before the song is over, it calls back to the spoken-word introduction.

This semi-rap aspect of the song was just too unusual for me, so I thought it was an epic failure of a theme song. But after listening to it a couple of times, I started to like it. Not only did I start to like it, I was loving it. It’s odd style of the spoken word verses made them very memorable. I found myself saying things like “Let’s get, cherry pie” to myself all the time. I became a total fanboy for this theme song!

Originality is rare in the anime business, and the Lucky Star theme shows that taking creative risks can pay off in the long run. But that kind of success can come with a price…

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Instead of appending this to my ANN editorial last week, I figure this deserves an entire post by itself. I’ve been getting a bunch of good emails regarding this topic. Apparently I’m not the only one dissatisfied with this new direction for ANN.

I was very worried about criticizing the ANN because who am I to judge journalism when all I do is program computers? However, Cameron of In Search of Number Nine actually has a background in journalism, and he’s not happy either:

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This was my first year at the New York Comic Con. I went to the event expecting it to be similar to the New York Anime Festival last December. After all, it was in the same venue and it was being run by the same group of people. So I was in for a huge surprise when I discovered that this convention was actually over six times the size of the Anime Fest. It was pretty overwhelming.

The dealer’s room was massive and crowded. I only bought two books and then had to get the hell out of there. I didn’t find much solace in the panel section either, as a triple shot of Avatar, Venture Bros, and Robot Chicken panels turned the hall into a madhouse. But I did get to see some awesome events, like a live performance from geek superstar Jonathan Coulton (followed by his autograph) and the fantastic TM Revolution concert at the end of the day. Even if TMR does look like a girl, the bright lights, heavy guitars, and bouncing electronica made for a great show.

But as an anime fan, what was the biggest shocker for me on Saturday was the panel from newcomer manga publisher Yen Press. While the anime industry is pretty easy to keep tabs on, the manga industry has grown so big and flexible over the years that I just cannot keep up with all the changing. Because of this, my mind breaks the manga industry into only four categories: Tokyopop, Del Rey, VIZ, and none of the above. I cannot tell you the difference between a Seven Seas release and a Comics One title, only that they are not done by any of the big three.

So that is why Yen Press has flown under my radar up until last Saturday. I had no interest in the company, and I was originally just going to skip over the panel to go to some Star Wars thing. But after sitting through VIZ and Del Rey that morning, I decided to just stay at my seat, finish uploading my pictures to Twitter, and listen to what this group had to say. The other press around me noted that this was the “none of the above” publisher that was going to put out the Haruhi comic and novel. At the very least, I would be able to crack the joke, “Hannah Montana meets Heroes? Really?”

Man, was I wrong.

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