eigoMANGA's Rumble Pak shakes things up

Rock music may have only a slight connection to manga, but it was there as eigoMANGA commemorated the mainstream release of Rumble Pak #1 through national media retail outlets. Lemme know if any of you guys spot it somewhere, because I sure don't remember seeing it at Tower yesterday.

The Go of Hikaru

Well, James is doing a much better job than I am, since he's looking at the gender-disguised Hana-Kimi Vol. 1. There's also a Hikaru No Go Vol. 1 review at ANN with a delightful tongue-in-cheek commentary on how Shonen Jump is getting soft.

Meanwhile, I still haven't gotten around to reading Demo or Blue Monday. But I'm sure no one is clamoring to hear my expert viewpoint on those comics anyway, so I'll just put it off another day. :P

Blue Wednesday

It's a good time to be in Korea, as fans of visual storytelling celebrate the nationally recognized Cartoon Day.

CWR has new reviews for the pivotal Rurouni Kenshin Vol. 7 and the amusing but confusing Here is Greenwood Vol. 1. (Can't find it at your bookstore? That's because the street date is November 9.)

And ... I was going to say something about the new Blue Monday and Demo today ... but I should probably read them first.

Going to the mattresses

From the looks of this survey, it appears that Viz might be planning a shoujo anthology similar to their Shonen Jump magazine.

Wolf's Box

Borders and Waldenbooks have cut a special deal with Viz to release a Wolf's Rain manga box set, consisting of Vol. 1, a collectible card, and -- well -- a piece of cardboard with some nice drawings on it. ("From the creators of Cowboy Bebop and Escaflowne!" they remind us.)

Interesting discussion on yaoi/boy's-love/shounen-ai, or, Why do girls love Japanese comics about boys bonking?

-during the adolescent age, girls find boys disgusting. In yaoi or any shoujo, males are portrayed as flawless pretty boys--in other words, perfect.
-they associate with the bishounen more simply because Japanese women aren't nearly as busty as women are normally portrayed in manga. They almost have more in common with an effiminate hairless male than a big breasted, curvy woman.
-homosexual men don't compete for another woman's affections and just compete for men. This would be ideal for a woman to have no competition for a guy unobtainable to any woman.
-girls relate more to the guys because it's easier to picture them as women than actual hairy men.

and lots of other stuff.

Fresh reviews on AoD: Rurouni Kenshin Vol. 7, Full Metal Panic Vol. 5, and Couple Vol. 2.

And it looks like one of Disney's many tentacles is entering the manga game: "Hyperion Books, the American publishing arm of the Disney entertainment empire, has won a bidding war with Henry Holt and will publish manga created by Misako Takashima, who grew up in Japan but currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. ... Takashima's first manga, which is tentatively entitled Ride On!, is at least a year away."

What is new mainstream?

Seven Seas Entertainment has officially launched their site, putting up a preview of their NYC-meets-Japan title Blade for Barter and, more interestingly, having an article by Tokyopop editor Jake Forbes on "What is Manga?"

Yes, manga is USUALLY faster paced than US comics*. Yes, manga layouts don't adhere to grids to the degree that Western layouts do. But for each point there are countless exceptions-and countless Western comics which have the same qualities. And can manga be boiled down into a formula? "If you have X, Y, and Z you're manga, but if the amount of Q is greater than P, then it's not..." Definitions like these are a little too cut and dry for my taste. It's like reading a dictionary entry for Impressionist painting--Sure you can catalog the qualities, but it doesn't really get across what makes it art!

*By which I think he means "faster to read." Pacing is entirely a matter of the artist's style.

Top 25 messageboard discussions of all time!

The city of Kyoto plans to open a manga museum. "Over 230,000 manga, dating from the early Meiji era to the present, will be stored in the museum. The majority of the material was donated by two collectors in the Kanto region."

Newtype USA magazine is crazy enough to think it can name the Top 25 Anime of All Time, which will undoubtedly set off a thousand angry forum threads. Good thing this blog ain't "Otaku Rampage" or we'd be drowning in forumsnark for weeks ...

AoD has a review of Madara Vol. 1, an epic fantasy that's spearheading the launch of DC's new CMX line.

There's no mistaking what time of year it is at Junko Mizuno's site. (Thanks, Shawn!)

Chapter 39 of Death Note goes up, and our two favorite boy geniuses continue trying to out-guess each other ...

Today on the intimidating manga stack!

They're reading Imadoki! Vols. 1 and 2 over at Precocious Curmudgeon, where Yu Watase lets go of the magical elements and comes down to earth, and The Wallflower Vol. 1 at Reading Along. And not to plug myself or anything, but the review for Tactics Vol. 1 is up at ANN.