Comics Books Reviews: manga

Showing posts with label manga. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Cryptozoic brings back Warcraft manga

| Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources – Covering Comic Book News and Entertainment

--> Comic Book Resources Comic Book Resources

News All News News Archives Comic Books TV/Film Video Games Web Comics Previews Press Releases Columns All Columns Cup O' Joe Flogging A Dead Horse One Fan's Opinion Permanent Damage Pipeline Pipeline Podcast ReTales The Buy Pile Tilting at Windmills When Words Collide Reviews All Reviews DC Comics Marvel Comics Image Comics Dark Horse Comics Blogs All CBR Blogs Comics Should Be Good Robot 6 Spinoff Online CBR Live! Video All Video CBR TV Movie Trailers/Clips TV Trailers/Clips Video Game Trailers Comic Book Trailers Community CBR Forums Homepage DC Comics Forums Marvel Comics Forums Independent Comics Forum CBR Specific Forums Miscellaneous Forums Hosted Forums Resources Comic Hubs Comic Shop Locator Comics Twitter Directory Events Calendar Links Database RSS Feeds/Social Network Polls About Report A Bug Contact Us Media Kit/Advertising Privacy Policy Site Credits Robot 6 Cryptozoic brings back Warcraft mangaWarcraft manga" data-count="horizontal">Tweet

All over the Internet, folks (myself included) have been speculating about the fate of Tokyopop’s licenses once the publisher closes up shop next week. Fans have been listing their favorites, but I don’t think anyone would have guessed that the first license rescue would be a global manga. But it’s true: Cryptozoic Entertainment has acquired the digital rights to Tokyopop’s World of Warcraft and Starcraft manga, created under a deal with WoW parent company Blizzard, and today released them on the Cryptozoic iPad app. The app is free, and the first volume of Warcraft: Legends will be free through June 2; other than that, the manga is $5.99 a volume.

If you have never heard of Cryptozoic, don’t feel bad — the company was only founded in March 2010 — but now might be a good time to start paying attention. It makes comics, trading cards, and games, and its line includes the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game and The Walking Dead board game. The iPad app, provided by iVerse, also includes IDW’s Locke and Key comics, but the Warcraft and Starcraft manga are a big get, because fans can’t seem to get enough of those franchises.

(Hat tip: Steve Horton, via Twitter)

May 27, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Brigid AlversonTagged: Cryptozoic, digital comics, iverse, manga, Starcraft, Tokyopop, World of Warcraft

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Japan report: Earthquake aftermath forcing manga online

The March 11 earthquake and the tsunami and nuclear disaster that followed have had all sorts of repercussions for Japan, and while manga and anime are not as serious as the humanitarian problems, it’s interesting to see the industry adjusting quickly to maintain continuity for its customers.

Ayano Yamane, creator of the Finder series, blogged and Tweeted recently that the earthquake caused serious enough damage to several paper mills to put them out of commission, resulting in a paper shortage. Meanwhile, NHK World reports that the Japanese Printing Ink Makers Association has asked newspaper publishers to reduce their output, in terms of both number of pages and number of colors, because damage to several chemical plants has left them short of key ingredients.

Combine that with disruptions to the transportation network due to the disaster, and you have a potentially dire scenario for the manga industry. Manga publishers are responding by putting all or part of their weekly magazines online, for free. Shogakukan will post two issues of Weekly Shonen Sunday online, and Kodansha is putting up a number of different titles. Shueisha put up the manga sections of Weekly Shonen Jump last week, but in a Windows-only format; they have now repeated them on another website that allows non-Windows users to read them. (Shueisha and Shogakukan are the parent companies of the American publisher Viz.)

So far, all the issues that have been posted have been from the past two weeks, so it makes sense to make them available—the work has been done and paid for, and the sales are lost anyway, so putting them online keeps readers from falling away. The question that remains is whether the system can repair itself and print publication can resume in the near future, and if not, whether the publishers will continue their online program or abandon it for another strategy.

March 30, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid AlversonTagged: Japan earthquake, manga

One CommentJoe HMarch 30, 2011 at 11:21 am

Huh. Interesting to see where this goes.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

A fresh look at manga in the French comics scene

Posted on November 29, 2010 - 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson

Astérix: No longer fresh and new

The French love to complain that anything that isn’t French is ruining their culture, so the manga boom (it’s huge over there, and for pretty much the same reasons it was a hit over here) occasioned much tut-tutting when it was still fresh. Uderzo, the illustrator of the venerable Astérix, even made a comic in which his characters were attacked by foreign creatures called “Nagma,” a fairly transparent acronym. But complain as he might, as this 2006 article attests, the kids were gobbling up InuYasha, while “Visitors clustered around the Asterix booth nearby were mostly men over 40.”

Last week, France Today took a fresh look at the French-language comics scene (many well known BDs are actually by Belgian and Swiss creators) and presented a different take on the influence of manga. Most of the biggest sellers—Tintin, Astérix, Blake and Mortimer—are over 50 years old, and their sales have been slipping for some time.

The lesson, says Xavier Guilbert, editor-in-chief of the comics website du9.org, seems to be clear: their age is beginning to show. “It’s reasonable to think that the stalwarts of the comic books market might not resonate as much with the younger generation today,” as he puts it.

What the success of manga over the last decade has done, says Guilbert, is not so much push out traditional BD as distract French publishers from the falling sales they were seeing in their existing stables anyway. “They went after manga and forgot to develop their own catalogs,” he argues. That’s a problem now, because with most of the successful Japanese titles now translated into French, manga sales have started to slow.

The France Today article does miss another point, made in the earlier piece, that manga are more inviting for girls. BDs tend to be guy comics, with mostly male characters doing things that guys like to read about, and that’s fine, but it leaves half the potential audience with few choices. If there is a BD renaissance, it would be nice to see more female creators and characters take center stage.

Tagged: Asterix · BDs · France · manga
Share This!