Manga Chapter of the Week: Touch Chapter 212 (Let’s Be Childhood Friends)

This’ll be the last time I put Touch on here, if only because I’m done with it and it was awesome and any further thoughts will be coming in a full review up sometime next week. But before I lock the stadium up, I just want to geek out about one more thing. As before, major spoilers for a 20+ year old manga are coming up.

The title of this chapter alludes to the fact that it concludes a subplot between leading lady Minami and one of her admirers. This process includes a very touching scene of Nishimura, a sympathetic gag character, going full swirly on a couple of asshole guys who mocked his childhood friend. Which is all well and good, but that has next-to-nothing to do with why this chapter’s on here. It’s on here for one face, one which perfectly demonstrates the fiercely expressive power of Adachi Mitsuru’s character designs.

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Manga Chapter of the Week: Touch Chapter 64 (The Pitcher, Kuroki-kun)

I’m going to belabor this point, but Touch is an amazing, timeless classic manga. It’s also wildly unpopular in the states, something I kind of knew, but became much, much more obvious in my marathon sessions this week. Something I did not expect happened, and I had in no way been spoiled on it. The impressive thing isn’t so much that it happened, but how Adachi Mitsuru gives the audience the inside scoop. Suffice the man is a genius who’s madder than he lets on.

Warning: This article spoils a somewhat important twist in a manga that’s 20+ years old, but one that’s virtually unknown to western audiences. If you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t read this and do read the manga.

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Animetics Podcast: Kickstarting Anime and Speculation

In the long-delayed second episode, we talk about Kickstarter. More specifically, we start by discussing anime and manga it’s funded already, and use what numbers we have (mainly myanimelist statistics) to wildly speculate on what else might be a viable candidate for a Time of Eve-style international BD release.

Show LinkĀ / Listen Online

Show Length: 59:40

(Timestamps for each segment in parentheses)

Kick Heart (1:01)

http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/animation/most-funded?ref=more#p1

http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2013/05/27/video-latest-kick-heart-anime-trailer

Time of Eve (4:07)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/693293489/time-of-eve-the-movie-on-blu-ray/posts

Kickstarting Manga (6:20)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kansaiclub/limited-edition-translation-of-osamu-tezukas-the-c

Other anime realistically kickstartable (7:29)

-Refer to list after break for data

The “Almost Certainly Would Get Funded” Group (9:02)

The “Maybe But Maybe Not” Group (21:48)

The “Probably Not Actually Happening” Group (44:00)

Anime Sols and the viability of other sites to crowdfund anime (52:14)

http://animesols.com/series?search%5Bmeta_sort%5D=popularity.desc

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