Manga artist Kumeta Kouji gives a rather hilarious interview where he talks about terrible editors, his relationship with his partner in Joshiraku’s creation, and a bunch of trivial nonsense.
Original Article: http://natalie.mu/comic/pp/joshiraku
As of last Friday, I was only about 40% done with my little vanity translation project. Now it’s at about 80-something and progressing rapidly. I would be legitimately shocked at this point if it weren’t up by, at the latest, the end of next weekend. This project involved about 20,000 characters worth of Japanese and will probably cash out in the neighborhood of 6000-7000 words if my fuzzy math is right. In the course of working on it, I’ve been able to streamline the hell out of my process and I’m itching to try it out on something smaller-scale.
Since my current “short anime/manga articles I want to take a stab at” list is about 50 deep, I thought I’d toss this one to the crowd. Here’s a list of 10 articles, with links, that I’d be super-hype to translate after finishing my current thing. I’ve googled all of them to check and I don’t believe any has been done yet, so they should all be fresh. And a there’s a poll so you can vote, of course. I’ll definitely translate whichever article gets the most votes, and anything that gets votes I’ll think about doing. Poll will stay open until I finish my current project, and then I’ll get cracking on the leader.
Update 2 (July 15, 2014): New, more accurate data is here.
Update (Jul 1, 2014): This post doesn’t measure releases in 2-week totals, which turns out to be a huge deal in many, many cases. I’m currently working on an updated version of both this and the 2011 data. Just be aware of that before citing the data from here regarding any one show.
By all rights, a 30-series sample like the one I had for 2011 was enough to get most of the relevant information regarding how anime boosted manga sales. However, during that analysis, I bumped into an incidental correlation, myanimelist ranking versus gain in manga sales, that was far too juicy to ignore. If that correlation is real, it points to a very tangible link between the Japanese mainstream community (who have enough disposable income for manga but not for anime) and the English-speaking online community (who generally pay a comparable pittance, if anything, for the anime they watch). But I couldn’t be sure from just the 2011 data, since that was the sample that gave rise to the theory. So I did what any good researcher would do, and pulled another year worth of data to see how things would match up. The results can be found on this spreadsheet, and are sorted in order of descending myanimelist rank below.
The ending for this series was very much its twelfth episode. It opened with a recap and ended with a loop to the beginning, showing a main character who made no real progress as a person. It wasn’t a conclusion that was difficult to predict, but it does again highlight the biggest weakness of a show that expects one character to carry the entire show on her back with only a bunch of situational humor as a sidekick. As it is, it’s a fun show, but by no means the best comedy of the year (or even the season).
Based on what I’ve seen of reactions to Free on the internet, it seems like a large quantity of people are ruling it out with one glance at the promo material rather than 20 minutes of episode time. It’s becoming increasingly obvious how much of a shame that is, because this show is complete in ways it didn’t even have to be to be an enjoyable ride.
When P.A. works gets ambitious and does cool crap like this show, it’d be a disservice to the material to just have one reviewer. We’re breaking down the not-at-all-token arsty show of the new season, Uchoten Kazoku, buddy cop style!
I got an email the other day (my first one, so thanks, anonymous reader Y!) asking why I’m blogging this show over Attack on Titan, which also airs on Saturday. There are two main reasons, which I want to briefly address that before moving into the meat of the episode.
First, good comedies are no less difficult to produce than good dramas. If you handed Astro Fighter Sunred, Panty and Stocking, or another comedy that relies on its particular sense of style (workplace-themed deadpan and rampant excess, respectively) to a replacement-level handler like Chiaki Kon or Yuu Kou, you’d almost certainly get something darn near forgettable. A comedy has to have real personality to work, which is something that’s not at all easy to do; just because they seem* to come along more often than dramas doesn’t mean a good laugh is worth any less than a good teardrop. Muromi-san specifically happens to be a *very* well-executed comedy, as it’s effectively mixing the high-energy of Angel Beats with the tongue-in-cheek sarcasm and subtly clever camera play of Joshiraku, and has a ceiling as a low-tier 10/10 on my ranking scale.
Second, while I like Titan quite a bit, it has a plot I’m very familiar with as a reader of the manga. It means that a) there’s less I can legitimately speculate on, b) I don’t want to spoil anything by accident, and c) I’d only be able to comment on the execution, which I find slow and less interesting than the wham-bam lightning rod pacing of the manga. It’s distinctly my third-favorite Saturday show at this point. Which is, if anything, a mark of how fun Saturdays this spring have been.
Animetics 