A short interview with Vampire Hunter D’s artist Saiko Takaki. He talks about getting sort-of-scouted by the author of the original novels, Hideyuki Kikuchi, and his respect for Yoshitaka Amano.
A short article on manga-based musical productions.
Today we here at Animetics begin a new (and hopefully regular) podcast consisting of us hanging out and discussing manga. First up is Kaikisen, a single volume story by Satoshi Kon before he became the legendary director he is known as today. Did his talent extend beyond anime? Find out here!
“How many pages long is the average light novel?”
A friend of mine flat-out stumped me with this question a few days ago, and I’m willing to bet even odds it stumped you too. Neat, right? People familiar with anime likely have at least some vague inkling about what light novels are. But anime-focused writers who offer sweeping takes on light novels often don’t have the answers to those sorts of basic trivia questions, and I’ve forced a few acquaintances to google over this in the past week.
Granted, this particular question is sort of misleading; wordcounts are more accurate quantifiers of length than pagecounts, since the latter depend on size and typeface. Still, it underscores how little people can know about something which plays such a big role in the anime industry. Too, the question is also ridiculously basic to answer; I only had to spend about an hour on amazon compiling a list of links to the first volumes of novels adapted into anime in 2013 (excluding sequels), and taking down their given pagecounts. And while I was at it, I did the same for manga. The data, source links included, can be found here, and is summarized below. Note that Uchouten Kazoku, a single-volume novel, was counted as a novel along with the other multi-volume series.
Yen Press co-founder Kurt Hassler talks about the weak market for Seinen/Josei titles in the US.
BL manga writer Satoru Kannagi talks about her favorite authors and getting feedback from male readers.
An article which notes some of the plagarism accusations flying around the manga industry, a topic which still comes up today.
Some claims are probably more justified than others; I mean, of course Takehiko Inoue modeled Slam Dunk from his knowledge of the NBA, but is it really violating intellectual property to use photographs as reference material?
One thing I can’t say enough is that data should be interpreted with a healthy amount of caution and second-guessing. This is especially true for manga charts, when a combination of ridiculously high weekly thresholds and the desire to have fast data on the effects of currently-airing anime can lead to some very incomplete and erroneous interpretations of the facts.
I’ve already done a few case studies on how Oricon and publisher claims can differ for series where the publisher boasted of some particular print total (usually in an insert on a volume of the series or a magazine). Those cases are enlightening, but not necessarily general, since there’s a heavy element of volunteer bias involved in which series get their totals reported. Recently, though, I found a fairly large list of distributor claims of print volume totals (via Shuppan Shiyou, see post #99 here), which contains latest-volume printing data for over 100 series published in 2013. It still isn’t totally general, but is at least a tad more representative of manga at large. In order to get a better idea of how much Oricon underestimates the “average” series, I took the weekly-charts total for a volume and compared it with the given print total for the same volume. The results of this comparison (which can be found here) highlight some large and inconsistent discrepancies between the Oricon figures and the official publisher totals.
Just a quick heads up that my chart archives for both manga and light novels have been updated through the month of August.
A short article on then-newcomer to the US manga market, Yen Press.
Animetics 