These are the weekly manga sales charts for the first four months in 2016, via myanimelist news, continued from the 2015 post. If you want more recent data, there’s plenty of places where charts are available (eg. ann, the mal news forum I get them from).
Format:
news post url
week of data
Place. [Weekly Sales] [Total Sales] [Series+volume #]
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.
One of the better manga I’ve really gotten into this year is Okachimachi Hato’s Horii-shimai no Gogatsu (Eng: The Horii Sisters in May). I discovered its first chapter in a copy of the now-defunct Manga Erotics F I picked up for Awashima Hyakkei a year ago, got interested, bought the first collected volume a few months ago, and fell in love. Among other things, it prominently features a gender role-flipping adult relationship with great emotional complexity that’s right down the middle of my strike zone. So I got interested and tried to dig up some stuff on it. I found out on Okachimachi’s twitter feed that she had done an interview for women’s magazine An-An with some thoughts on gender, and I decided to translate it.
There’s plenty of literature out there pointing out the importance of examining the role gender plays in Japan, but I think it’s worth noting that a survey in the same magazine asks “Can a man and a woman have a stable friendship?” and gets a very wide spread of responses.
It’s really not much, but read it if you want. You can follow the interviewer on twitter here.
Continue reading
Just the subtitle file for the episode of Urasawa Naoki’s Manben featuring Manga Taisho recipient Higashimura Akiko. They comment on footage the crew took of Higashimura’s studio, mainly captured on the deadline day for her newer series, Yukibana no Tora. It also discusses Higashimura’s other work, particularly Kakukaku Shikajika.
In 2009, Hokkaido University’s Imai Nobuharu wrote a detailed paper discussing the ins and outs of anime tourism and how it might be tied in with traditional cultural events. It’s a good paper, near as I can tell, and it goes in some interesting directions, breaking out statistics, comparing and contrasting the Washinomiya shrine and Disneyland, and exploring the terminology which has developed around anime tourism.
The whole paper is extremely long and translating all of it would take a good chunk of time, but my eyes were drawn to a particular footnote on page 14, which discusses 1990s examples of pre-modern anime-driven tourism and the etymology of the term 聖地巡礼 (Seichi Jyunrei, or Holy Land Pilgrimage in English) which has come to refer to otaku tourism.
Source Paper: http://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/handle/2115/35681
Kouta Hirano got some exciting news this past week when the staff for the anime adaptation of his current manga, Drifters, was rolled out. Reading about that news reminded me of a list Hirano earned his place on with that series, and about someone else on that list we won’t be hearing as much about from now on.
Typically, even the manga that command the greatest degree of fame and attention take a while to actually get to that point. Takako Shimura spent years writing 18+ manga under multiple pen names before creating the internationally recognized Wandering Son. Shingeki no Kyojin didn’t even make the charts when its first volume came out. Even undisputed king of manga sales One Piece took over a decade in print to surpass Dragon Ball’s 156 million copy total and become #1, and in the last 6 years it’s added about 220 million to that total. A big part of success for most of the authors who have achieved recognition is due to diligence and working a lot over a long period.
Manga that do amass gigantic sales totals from the launch date of their first volume tend to fall into one of three categories. First, there are the licensed spinoffs, adaptations of Sword Art Online and Mahouka and such riding the wave of another author’s popularity, often as part of a larger media blitz. Second, you have the extensions of existing popular manga series that decided to change their titles, your Major 2nds and Baki Gaidens. Lastly, you have the bona-fide originals, series which ride a name and a compelling start to immediate large-scale success.
It’s this third category, the hardest one to break into, that most interests me. In practice, it breaks down into a list of authors with strong pre-established reputations doing other popular series and Jump newcomers, and it’s fun to look at in that “tough achievement to notch” kind of way.
Manga author Kusanagi Mizuho and voice actress Saitou Chiwa talk about Akatsuki no Yona in an interview conducted (by Kishino Eka) around the time the anime first aired. It’s mainly a dialogue on the mutual respect they share, and how they influence one another in their approach to the series. This includes both serious stuff and some extremely cute conversation about the hugs they’ve shared.
There’s also a neat tidbit in there from Kusanagi regarding how the anime project took a long time to materialize, to the extent that she was more relieved than excited when it was officially set. This doesn’t necessarily mean the anime was an exceptionally troubled production from the get-go, but it’s interesting taken in context with the show’s switching distributors and soliciting uber-late as a result of VAP’s leaving the production committee during the broadcast, a rare occurrence. It’s also worth noting that the show’s first opening theme was an instrumental track, uncommon in the modern age where music publishers very aggressively use anime OP/EDs as a space to market their artists.
Kusanagi also mentions a pilot film which had been in production prior to the TV anime. I personally suspect that that footage may have found its way into the TV anime, as a brief battle scene covered in the first 40 seconds of episode 1 and the last 2 minutes of episode 2.
Original Article: http://natalie.mu/comic/pp/yona
Note while reading that I opted not to translate the bottom two-thirds of page 1, as it contained only one-line character bios and some flavor text.
These are the weekly manga sales charts for the first four months in 2015, via myanimelist news, continued from the 2014 post. I’ll be doing one of these updates every 4 months; if you want more recent data, there’s plenty of places where charts are available (eg. ann, the mal news forum I get them from).
Animetics sits down to talk about anime before going into our latest manga obsession, Kiss Him, Not Me!
Animetics 
