An article about WotC IP Duel Masters, whose original manga featured kids playing Magic the Gathering rather than the titular card game. Full disclosure: the magazine in question is published by Wizards of the Coast, and the shilling does bleed through the text quite a bit.
A short article outlining Tokyo Godfathers’ Oscar hopes, which didn’t pan out.
Trigun director Satoshi Nishimura and producer Masao Maruyama talk about getting permission to kill off characters and what they viewed as the over-capacity state of the anime industry.
A short blurb that talks about the JSDF funding various anime.
Years before they had a fire sale on most of their anime titles, Best Buy was the first store to gain exclusive rights to an anime release.
A very, very short Kazuo Koike interview (made more so by the fact that the interview is only half the sidebar).
The late, great Satoshi Kon talks about choosing animation over live action, his works, and Osamu Tezuka’s effect on him.
Director Shinji Aramaki and producer Sumiji Miyake talk about CG in the Appleseed movie and Shirow’s involvement in the project.
This article might not have been a boatload of fun to read, but it does contain a bunch of rough salary figures for various anime-related professions:
Dub voice actors: A minimum 64.25$ per hour for Screen Actors Guild people (remember, an mc’s va typically works about 12 hours per episode) $25 for non-unionzed actors. So that’s 64.25*12*12=~$9250 per main character role per show. Or $3600 if a show is being cheap. For reference, the current per-episode cost of a dub is given by Justin Sevakis as around $7000-8500 per episode.
Pure speculation here, but the fact that vas are paid by the hour might mean a series with less dialogue (thinking about Texhnolyze here) is more likely to get a dub because the number of hours involved might be fewer.
ADR Directors: Yearly salary ranging from a rookie’s $25k to a veteran’s $100k.
Japanese Animators: Roughly $17k/year, though I don’t know whether that’s starting or average.
Translators: $20k-30k/year salary, $20-50 per page freelance.
Plus, there’s a sidebar towards the end with some technical specs on Voices of a Distant Star.
A minor revelation from this short article about Random House’s Del Rey imprint; apparently the reason they were so quick to partner with Kodansha was that they had just finished researching how to put out a line of graphic novels for a separate project which ended up being too expensive. That’s a pretty big what-if for me; Genshiken (via a discount bookstore) was one of my big formative manga in high school, and it’s pretty heavily influenced my philosophy on fandom.
Animetics 