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One of the finest anime made in recent years, Emma: A Victorian Romance is also a testament to the care RightStuf/Nozomi Entertainment takes with their releases. While season one is available only as a box set, it doesn’t much matter. I’m pretty sure no one can watch Emma without wanting to follow this powerful love story to its conclusion.

The series opens in a middle-class household in Victorian London. Emma is a maid for Mrs. Stowner, a retired governess. The pair have been together many years- Mrs. Stowner hired Emma when she was just a child, and has educated her to a level most lower classes of that time could never hope to attain. Mrs. Stowner’s care has created a model young lady: intelligent and observant, unfailingly polite and quiet, and sharply conscious of her place in society.

And then William Jones shows up.

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Once again a mainstream news source has written an article about a trend imported from Japan. This time it’s the “Elegant Gothic Lolita” fashion trend, the paper is the  New York Times.

The Article

The article is interesting enough, and the girls whose pictures accompany it are cute. But for some reason they don’t look ‘Lolita-y’ enough for me. I think it is because I saw a couple of EGLs in Harajuku when I visited Japan, and they were Lolita-y to the extreme. Like creepily adorable china dolls, drowning in ruffles.

So ladies, when it comes to EGL fashion, remember…MORE RUFFLES! And more ribbons. And bonnets. And banana curls. And more ruffles. That’s the way to go!

I have no words to describe this. Okay - one word.

smeg·ma /ˈsmɛgmə/ Pronunciation Key - [smeg-muh]
–noun
a thick, cheeselike, sebaceous secretion that collects beneath the foreskin or around the clitoris.

Yeah, that sums it up.

A former Matsushita Electric employee turned manga-ka will rename the company featured in his comic to follow in the footsteps of his former employer, which recently changed it’s name to Panasonic Corp.

Kosaku Shima, hero of the popular comic serial “Shacho Shima Kosaku” (President Kosaku Shima), by Kenshi Hirokane, will be renaming his firm, Hatsushiba Goyo Holdings, it emerged on Tuesday.

The new corporate name will be announced in the Oct. 2 edition of weekly comic magazine “Morning,” to be published by Kodansha Ltd. on Thursday.

President Shima, an icon among Japanese businessmen, had earlier pointed out that his company’s branding is weak in the world market.

“We must establish a brand that can be competitive around the world,” said Shima during a board meeting, in the Aug. 14 edition of “Morning.”

I have stated my opnion on this site (several times) that America needs more yuri manga up in here. I’m glad to see that the LGBT magazine The Advocate agrees with me:

Read This Article!

It’s a very interesting, in-depth article about yuri in Japan and its slow journey to America. It also explains better than I ever could the attractions of yuri to a female audience!

As a straight female who likes love stories of all kinds, I say: more girl-on-girl action , please publishers!

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.

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In the author’s comments section at the end of volume one, mangaka Makoto Tateno claims she didn’t know if Steal Moon would fit in the boys’ love genre, since it is a science fiction manga. She should have no worries on that account. Steal Moon is as much a science fiction story as Brokeback Mountain is a Western; slapping a ten-gallon hat on Jake Gyllenhaal didn’t make that film a cowboy movie, and sticking a couple supercomputers in Steal Moon doesn’t make it science fiction.

Nozomi is a young punk who makes his living by fighting people in narrow alleyways (I’m not totally sure how he makes money by doing this…does he take bets? Or maybe he just steals his opponents’ wallets after he knocks them unconscious.). He’s undefeated in the street-fighting world, so when a new challenger approaches with a rather sinister proposal, Nozomi doesn’t think twice about accepting. So when tall, dark and handsome Coyote beats the crap out of him, Nozomi finds himself having to do whatever Coyote says.

Usually in a yaoi this would lead to some rape scenes, but Coyote actually has something different in mind. He sells Nozomi to a company called Digital Angels. DA has an interesting business plan: they ‘buy’ people from other people, lock them in little rooms, and focus a webcam on them 24/7. Every time some perv on the Internet clicks on their particular webcam, the prisoners earns 200 yen; when they pay back their purchase price (usually in the millions) they are free to go. So they’re less slaves than, say, indentured servants.

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So a few years ago I saw a film called Uzumaki. It was a Japanese horror film, one of the creepier, more bizarre movies I’d ever seen. The movie was about a town obsessed with spirals; that odd, repeating pattern that occurs often in nature and human art. The movie featured a variety of weirdness, including a boy who turned into a snail, spiral-patterned cremation smoke and a girl whose hair curled and took on a life of its own. I slept with my head under the covers that night.

I picked up the original Uzumaki manga by Junji Ito because I liked the movie and was curious to see how it differed from the original three-volume story. It differs quite a bit. The plot is mostly the same, though cut quite a bit shorter in the film. The main difference is that the manga is far, far, far more disturbing than the movie.

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VIZ has unleashed Rei Hiroe’s original Black Lagoon manga in the U.S. Excuse me while I do the Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy dance…

VIZ MEDIA DEBUTS BLACK LAGOON MANGA SERIES

A PT Boat Packed with Mercenary Couriers Lands on North American Shores

San Francisco, CA, SEPTEMBER 16, 2008 — VIZ Media, LLC, one of the entertainment industry’s most innovative and comprehensive publishing, animation and licensing companies, has announced the exciting North American debut of BLACK LAGOON, a manga (graphic novel) series by Rei Hiroe about a misfit group of mercenaries and their adventures on the high seas of Southeast Asia. BLACK LAGOON is available now from the VIZ Media imprint and is rated “M” for Mature audiences. It carries an MSRP of $12.99 U.S./$15.00 CAN.

Readers will lock ‘n’ load with Dutch the Boss, Benny the Mechanic, Revy Two Hand, and Rock as they seek adventure and fortune aboard their World War II-era torpedo boat, the Black Lagoon. In the treacherous underworld of the Russian Mafia, Chinese triads, Colombian drug cartels, crazed assassins, and ruthless mercenaries, it’s hard to know who to trust. But if you’ve got a delivery to make, and you don’t mind a little property damage along the way, you can count on the crew of the Black Lagoon! The action kicks off from the very first page as Rokuro Okajima, an average Japanese salaryman, is taken hostage by the crew during a mission to transport a computer disk with insider information that could bring down a major industrial conglomerate. But when Rokuro is sold out by his employer, he decides to join the Black Lagoon crew, who nickname him Rock and throw him headfirst into a deadly world of outlaw heroes, brutal villains, and blazing gunfights. Where he ends up is anyone’s guess, but one thing is for certain – he’s in for a wild ride!

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MSNBC’s Sexploration column discusses the mainstreaming of otaku fetishism, of all things - although they neatly overstep the twin-headed viper that is yaoi / yuri (unlike us, who unceasingly stare into the abyss so that we may spare you the horrors within…).

Guess that would’ve really scared the curious onlookers peeking in from the safety of their cubicle farms.

When anime conventions started in the U.S. back in the mid-1990s, the main demographic was mostly Asian college-age male students, says 32-year-old otaku expert Lawrence Eng. “Now, at least 50 percent are female,” he says. “Fandom itself is more diverse than ever.”

Within the adult realm of otaku culture, cuteness is fetishized (hence the Hello Kitty sex toys) and gender is often bent or dissolves altogether. Women are penetrated by octopi and young women in short school-girl skirts save the world. Men, on the other hand, are often passive worshipers of small figurines depicting sexy characters.