A Japanese man wants to marry an unnamed comic book character, and have it all nice and legal.

Seriously…

That’s a good idea, because I bet those superhero leagues have great insurance and if you’re legally married you can get on the plan!

If this law is passed, I can move to Japan and marry Batou from Ghost in the Shell. Except it would be an unhappy marriage because he is still jonesing for the Major. And we couldn’t have kids, probably. And inviting the Tachikoma over for Thanksgiving….eh. Forget it. I’ll stay with the current husband; at least he has eyes.

Man, if you believe the headlines these days, it looks like Japanese comics are the new video games. Prosecutors making the case against a pair of Italian students indicted in the murder of 21-year old Meredith Kercher made sideline allegations that the killers may have drawn inspiration from the manga Blood: The Last Vampire.

While there’s no shortage of sexual or violent content in Blood: The Last Vampire, I’ll have to maintain once again that it takes a pretty twisted nut to sexually assault and knife another human being, and that these folk will be happy to take inspiration from just about anything.

Sky News goes the extra mile and dredges up links to a slew of other murders with supposed ties to Japanese comics.

Manga has been directly linked to a death in Belgium, in which a note found next to the victim’s mutilated body referred to a Japanese comic called Death Note.

The animation genre was also connected with the murder of Tokyo-based British teacher Lindsay Hawker, after piles of pornographic comics were found at the suspect’s flat.

With graphic violence and explicit sexual content depicted in many of the Japanese comics, manga is perhaps a sitting target when an explanation is sought for a violent crime.

However, the cause and effect link between violence and manga made by some commentators frustrates and angers fans of the comics.

They point out that within manga there are numerous subtypes and that many are highly respected forms of art.

And while being a something of a cult interest in Europe, manga reading in Japan is a mainstream hobby - the Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso is said to find time to read 10 manga comics a week in between carrying out official duties.

Deb Aoki, who writes About.com’s manga blog, recently chatted with Elfquest creator Wendy Pini about her online yaoi adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. Plague victims and man-love - yummy!

Here’s a brief excerpt:

Q: How long have you been thinking about doing this story?

Wendy Pini: I first floated out the idea about three years ago, at an anime convention in Chicago. I was in artists’ alley with a bunch of other young, female doujinshi artists.

They knew that I was a professional artist, but they didn’t know about Elfquest so much. I asked them what they thought of an “R-rated” or X-rated” yaoi version of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, and they all squealed! With just that description, they knew that they’d be getting gothic romance and dark, sexy erotica.

I’ve never been adverse to doing adaptations of other people’s stories. I did a graphic novel based on the Beauty and the Beast TV series some years back, and really enjoyed that. Borrowing an idea and expanding on it is one of my favorite things to do.

So their reaction led me to think that this will work, as long as I can get Masque in front of that audience. I had a lot of work to do for my deal with DC Comics, but when that relationship ended, I was able to start on Masque.

Q: Has it been challenging to write for a new generation who has different tastes, interests and life experiences than yours?

Wendy Pini: With Masque, I don’t see myself as writing for a younger generation so much. I don’t think about that. I’m happy when I hear that women in their fifties are reading it too, because that’s my generation.

But if someone in their twenties sees it, well, it’s for them too. It’s for young women who are looking for something more than the typical high school yaoi manga story. It has more character development, more reasons why the characters get into their relationship.

Sometimes I wonder if the media (Yellow Menace included) does too much to prop up negative stereotypes of otaku behaviour…and then I read this.

A Japanese woman addicted to comics turned to the internet to look for someone to kill her parents after they asked her to clear out her cartoon-filled room, reports said today.
The 36-year-old woman, who was unemployed and lived at home, filled up three rooms with several thousand comic books and videotapes she had collected with an allowance her grandmother sent her, news reports said.

She reportedly became angry after her parents told her to throw away some of her comic books to make space for her sister who was planning to move in.

“I was told to throw away what was precious to me since I was a child. I felt frustrated and angry and wished that my parents would disappear,” she told police, as quoted by Jiji Press and the Sankei Shimbun.

In all fairness, most otaku are (relatively) well-adjusted human beings. This child-woman is clearly fucked up. Sure, I did my share of squabbling with my parents - when I was 17 (and dosed up on loads of 80’s hardcore punk). Don’t think I ever wanted them dead, though.

The Guardian’s Book Blogs columnist Ned Beauman recently commented on the death of Minx, DC’s attempt to woo Western teenage girls away from the manga racks. Beauman raises some interesting points.

But that specific audience is Japanese, not American; and the odd result is that just as British kids of my generation grew up watching so much Saved By the Bell and Sweet Valley High that we talk about “jocks” and “proms” even though these barely exist within our direct experience, tomorrow’s Americans will be looking around for the otaku and bishonen that are supposed to populate every school. It’s nice to see cultural colonialism happening in reverse, and of course teenagers love to plunge into an esoteric world that makes no sense to their parents, but at the same time it does seem a bit ridiculous that an American 16-year-old can’t pick up a comic that more closely reflects her own life. So there was room out there for Minx; and if it failed, it may just have been that – boring issues of marketing and distribution aside – the quality wasn’t actually very high.

Yes, well - Minx failed because it sucked. Pretty simple assessment, I suppose.

I should point out that the U.S. has a perfectly legitimate alternative to manga - we call them comic books (or for the more intellectually demanding crowd, graphic novels). When we in the U.S. describe manga, more often that not what we’re talking about is the idiom of Japanese comics, the way they tell stories in comic format. We in the U.S. have our own idioms, and while there is a gulf between the U.S. and Japan with regards to how we express ourselves, it’s important to understand the distinction between the form and the content.

If I remember correctly, Scott McCloud likened this to confusing a pitcher of liquid for the liquid. One contains the liquid, one is the liquid. I know it probably sounds like I’m splitting hairs here, but I think it’s important to make the distinction. American comics will always be American comics, even if we take some cues from the Japanese. Just as Italian comics are Italian comics, and French comics are French comics. It’s all just words and pictures, people.

Speaking as a life-long comics reader, I should point out that I’ve more or less abandoned the activity since both Marvel and DC seem intent on bludgeoning us with multi-title ‘events’ that require one to invest inordinate amounts of time and money to follow properly. This is exactly the kind of thing that drives people like me to download said books off the internet rather than blow all my spare cash on superhero rags.

And before anyone gets uppity - yes, I do know independent comics exist. And yes, I do occasionally read them.

Golly gee willikers!

A rash of underage suicides has moved a Shanghai bookstore to ban the comic believed to be the source of inspiration. ‘The Rabbit Who Wanted to Kill Itself‘ (shouldn’t that be ‘The Rabbit Which Wanted to Kill Itself‘, since ‘itself’ implies non-personhood? Sorry…) reportedly prompted a slew of teen suicides, as well as a sales surge in psychological self-help and suicide-prevention tomes.

“The comic used to be popular among young readers,” said Zhu Bin, public relations officer at the book city.

In the story, the rabbit comes up with various ways of killing itself, including pouring sulfuric acid to its head, jumping off a building and sticking its head into a revolving door.

Zhu also said that since last Wednesday, the sales of books on teenage psychological guidance have soared, as parents are becoming more concerned about the mental health of their children.

“In the past, reference and exercise books were parents’ favorites. However, last weekend, the first weekend after the new semester started, there was a sales rush on psychology-related books,” he said. “Some even sold out.”

According to the New York Times, American comic company Marvel is teaming up with Japanese animation studio Madhouse (creators of Ninja Scroll and Highlander: The Search for Vengeance) to create 4 anime series featuring Marvel superheroes. The characters will be anime-ized in Madhouse’s unique style. The only character specifically mentioned in the article is Iron Man. Who do you guys think the other 3 will be?

Link!

More news on the yaoi craze threatening to swallow your children whole - this time, from the San Francisco Chronicle (’Brokeback comics craze‘):

“Yaoi allows for a kind of enjoyment - visual stimulation without the self-examination,” says Tina Anderson, a writer whose yaoi is published in the United States and Germany. “It allows you to distance yourself from the fantasy.” What Anderson touches on is the way heterosexual sex in entertainment caters to the male point of view. A common complaint among high school manga and yaoi readers is that male-female sex shows the woman and little of the man. Yaoi, on the other hand, shows the man, and as one 15-year-old remarked, “It shows everything.”

But the popularity of yaoi and the demand for pornographic man-on-man love has brought the industry to a crisis. Publishers polybag and label their books (some even put boilerplates inside their flaps, stating that all characters depicted within are 19 or older), but no amount of shrink-wrap can protect them from the content itself - or the resistance of the large chain bookstores to carrying it.

“Everything in print is available and orderable for our customers,” says Jim Killen, graphic novels buyer at Barnes & Noble. B&N carries mature fare like Preacher and From Hell but doesn’t stock everything its Web site does. But there is a certain line that the retail chain refuses to cross.

My question (and it was posed to me as well by our fellow blogger AnaKhouri) is - where’s the Yuri-love? Surely girl-on-girl action is compelling in its’ own right, yes? And yet I don’t see a comparable explosion in yuri manga.

Reading this Daily Yomiuri piece (’Through Otaku Eyes / Lawsuit exposes mangaka-editor relations‘), I’m reminded of the creator-rights squabbles that erupted in the 80’s and 90’s, leading to more formal declarations of responsibilities between comics creators and their publishers.

Mangaka (manga artist) Mokoto Raiku alleges that Shogakukan, Inc. is offering him sub-standard compensation for artwork the publisher seems to have misplaced. While Shgakukan offered him 500,00 yen for the missing pages, Raiku wants 3.3 million, a figure he arrives at based on going prices at various auction sites.

With a discrepancy that large, I wonder if the real value lies somewhere between. Speaking as someone who has done freelance work, I can understand the impulse to put a high price on your product, but 3.3 million (even in yen) seems damn steep.

At any rate, I suspect the lawsuit will be a good thing in the end.

I don’t know if I can rightfuly call this cereal-box tchochke (found in a box of Cheerios this Saturday) ‘tasteless‘ or not. I know General Mills wants me to think ‘Joker’, but I can’t help but think ‘Heath Ledger’. Maybe I’m just morbidly fixated. Either way, I turned it over to my daughter who gave it a test-lick and promptly chucked it under the sofa…so I guess at least one of us found it tasteless.