Whither Manga?

As I've explained before, most anime was something else first. Sometimes a light novel series, sometimes the plot from a first person computer role-playing game (like a dating sim game). Most commonly, however, the source material for anime is a successful manga.

We use the loanword because a manga is not precisely newspaper comics (though it's usually originally serially published in a magazine with other manga in a weekly or monthly format) , nor book comics, nor graphic novel (though it usually has a strong plot arc with defined beginning and end, and usually has better art than US comics). There is, however, a simple linear-panel variant still popular in Japan called the four-panel comic (yonkoma) which is frequently published in general interest publications and is very similar in sensibility to a US newspaper comic strip. Jumpy sketch-comedy animes like Azumanga Daioh, Hidamari Sketch, and Doujin work are derived from yonkoma.

In any event, historically there has been a steady and large demand for a lot of different manga. Couple the big demand with the low production cost (newsprint, black ink, and staple binding is a cheap combination), and the result is dozens of weekly and monthly manga magazines catering to every possible niche of the manga market.

At least that's how things used to be.

Manga circulation in Japan is dropping. It's way down from the boom years of the mid-1990s, and it has lately been dropping at a steady (and not especially gentle) rate. I can't regard this as a good thing, because a lot of the manga (and manga-derived anime) I like are from marginal stories in marginal magazines. If Shounen Jump (the biggest single circulating manga magazine) is falling in circulation, I have to be somewhat concerned - I want mangakas (authors) to make money and keep making manga!

So why is this happening and what are some of the likely results? Here I tie into a post I made on mangaforums when Sphinx asked about the recent spate of erogame-based anime.

Frankly, I think the v-novel based series are a symptom of a somewhat worrying trend. The reasoning goes like this:

1. Japan is busy having a population collapse. As a proportion, it has one of the oldest average ages in the world.

2. this means that there are, proportionately fewer young adults, fewer high school kids, and even fewer still elementary school kids than at any previous time in living memory.

3. guess who the biggest consumers of manga and anime have historically been? Yup. Kids. Adults frequently read manga as well, but not so religiously - they also tend to gravitate toward the slick monthly manga aimed at adults and away from the pulp weeklies where most manga are published.

4. add in the Nintendo factor - "books are old school, my console is cool."

5. result: manga consumption is dropping rapidly.

6. result: the anime market is getting increasingly bimodal: one group is A. the traditional kids and young adults, the other group is B. the otakus who obsess over manga/anime, but have somewhat different perceptions of goodness than the average population.

7. result of 5: manga are going to get somewhat rarer, and new mangakas are going to have a harder time getting published. Most mangakas will likely also make less money.

8. result of 6. b: More and more otaku-centered manga/anime out there: Lucky Star, Genshiken, Doujin Work, Welcome to the NHK, as well as more 'moe-moe' extreme character designs (Misaki Chronicles, the generic kawaii loli character, etc.).

9. result of 4: since kids aren't reading manga, but are playing dating sim games, guess what you make anime around if you want to target a young audience. Yup, eroge anime isn't going anywhere any time soon.

I wonder where this leaves complex stories like Ai-Ren, Gunslinger Girl, or Hataraki Man. As the non-manga-reading kids age up, they're not going to be interested in seinen or josei manga, either...

We may all be hanging out at manwhaforums in a few years...

The last remark is a comment that Korea has a steadily growing but not-very-mature graphic story telling medium called 'manwha,' which is basically the Korean version of manga.

There has been a lot of computer game-based anime lately. This season, for instance, we have Clannad (from the Key game of the same name), Ef-A Tale of Memories, (derived from Ef- A Fairy Tale of the Two by Minori), Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Kai, School Days, and Myself, Yourself among those I could easily spot.

It's true that there are plenty of good manga-based anime coming out as well, but the scripted computer games (I refuse to call them visual novels, as some of their creators do) definitely seem to be here to stay.

Is this bad?

Right now, yes, it is bad. All the sim games follow pretty straightforward plots, and, because the total text content of one of these is small relative to a good anime or manga, there's not a lot of room for subtlety of character or convoluted plot twists. I have yet to see a character in an erogame-based anime as complex as, say, Enzou from Hotman, Aaeru from Simoun, or even Kozue from Mahoraba, and I don't think it's likely that I will anytime soon. The formats are conventional and the plots are either straightforward schoolboy love stories or murder mysteries.

We can hope that the sim game consumers mature into desiring more complex plots, but the format doesn't encourage that sort of growth. I have 20-something coworkers who spend large amounts of their free time playing MMORPGs. They don't seem to grow bored with the sameness of trying to beat a rigged system with a small decision set, and they never seem to become interested in reading the Tolkien novels that form the basis of the thin milieu in which they play.

The one upside to this is that there does seem to be a minority trend in focusing more effort toward complex seinen and josei stories in manga. A manga like Honey and Clover would never have been published 20 years ago, and would never have been made into a successful anime even ten years ago.

That said, it's starting to seem to me that the Japanese love of shiny flashing things may mean the loss of a lot of diversity in the manga and anime market.

I really hope I'm wrong.

Suzumiya Haruhi Uncut

About now, you're wondering if old Senile is really trying to live up to his nick(name). It's true that when the Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu (The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi) anime showed up in the 2006 spring season it was an immediate hit, and it developed a huge following among both Japanese and international viewers. Haruhi was everywhere, and the anime was so ubiquitous that it actually pushed other deserving anime offerings of that season (Simoun, for instance) out of the limelight.

But it's also true that 2006 was last year. So it looks like I'm in that horribly 'uncool' place of talking about old pop culture that is still fresh in memory. And if I were writing a Japanese blog, that appearance would be correct.

But I'm a gaijin writing for English-language readers (Hi to both of you). Which means that you'd be wise to keep on reading.

As you probably know if you've been reading my blog, or have just been paying attention for a while, most anime series are made from successful manga (Japanese comics/graphic novels). Since there is a Suzumiya Haruhi manga, it's a reasonable assumption that the anime derives from the manga. It's also an incorrect assumption -- the manga appeared after the anime.

But, unlike Simoun, Haruhi's aggressive genki personality did not spring straight from anime scriptwriters, either. The Suzumiya Haruhi anime derives from a very successful series of light novels written by Tanigawa Nagaru. Tanigawa-sensee is a lawyer by training, so you'd be right in expecting him to be a fluid and skillful author of Japanese prose.

He has written nine volumes starring the members of the SOS Brigade, and the tenth is anxiously awaited by his many fans. He has also written twelve other books, according to his wikipedia entry. I think it's a safe assumption that lawyering isn't paying his bills these days. Fine by me - lawyers aren't generally known for contributing to the richness of human society. But I digress.

The novels have all the essential characteristics that Kyoto Animation tried so hard to preserve in the anime. They also have some things that just don't translate well to animation. Kyon is the first-person narrator, and his internal monologue often blends seamlessly with the dialog. KyoAni tried to preserve the feel of this, but they couldn't put a lot of it in without hurting the anime. The books are a lot of fun, and I highly recommend them to you if you would like to find out what the fuss was really about. If you enjoy Kyon's laconic/sarcastic asides in the anime you'll certainly enjoy him in the books much more. He's a keen observer and is master of the understated smart aside.

At left: the cover to vol 4: The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi Yes, that's who you think it is.

Making the inevitable comparison between anime and novel, I'd have to say that it's almost a tie, but I prefer the books. Why? Well, you do miss some of the working of Kyon's mind in the anime, which is a loss. Likewise, some things just describe better than they show. Contrarily, some things (like the band concert in the cultural festival) show better than they describe.

The tie breaker for me is the tweaking Kyoto Animation did to the Lone Island Syndrome short story. I'm not a purist, but the story's major purpose was to show a side of Kyon's character (and abilities) that had not previously been seen. This character development is of vital importance, because the future of Kyon's world will hang on his reasoning abilities in volume four (Which, along with vol. seven is my favorite of all the books). Kyo Ani took all that out and replaced it with little sister and Phoenix Wright gags that just flat didn't work for me, and apparently not for this guy either - I found him when I googled to find the name of the US localization of Gyakuten Saiban. He came at the episode from the other direction - having seen the anime before reading the book, and he agrees with me. Seems like a smart guy - I'll be checking out his blog in the future.

There's no official effort to translate any of Tanigawa-sensee's books into English. Luckily, there is a crew of hard-working volunteer translators at Baka-Tsuki.net who slavishly translate the novels into English as they're released. Their work is generally very good, and is free for the reading on their website. Here's a helpful chart on their website that shows the chronology of anime episodes, novels, and stories.

Milady prefers the printed page. Accordingly, I spent a fair amount of time reformatting the Baka-Tsuki translations into MS Word format, tipping in the intertextual pictures, doing color covers, and writing up notes (containing helpful answers to questions like "What is a benjo-korogi?") on each chapter for her consumption. All of my work is also available free for the download at senile-seinen.4shared.com Look for the Haruhi folder. Hint: find a printer that does duplex, or print a short sample and practice your manual duplexing skills...

At right: the cover to vol 8: The Indignation of Suzumiya Haruhi

Wondering why there hasn't been more Haruhi anime since it was initially so popular? I suspect that the delay is at least partly due to Kyoto Animation being a small studio. They do exactly one project at a time, and their bread and butter has been anime adaptations of Key's visual novel games, including the 2006 Kanon remake and the currently-airing Clannad. I don't think it's an accident that they were the studio to take on the Haruhi books - most other studios could not have handled translating such a text-intensive storyline into a watchable show. The buzz is that the second season of Haruhi will appear in Winter/Spring, 2008.

We novel readers have been annoyed by the slow appearance of volume 10 of the novel series (they're quite short - each one is what I'd call a novella). Volume nine (The Dissociation of Suzumiya Haruhi) was released last summer. Volume 10 is the second half of the story started in volume nine, so we're very much stuck on a cliffhanger. I suspect that it's a simple money-grubbing move on Kodansha's (his publisher) part - they want the release of vol. 10 to coincide with the airing of season two of the anime. I've also read a rumor here or there that Tanigawa-sensee was taking some time off.

In any event, there are ten volumes already translated out there waiting for you to read them. Enjoy.

Hotman and Other Bedtime Reading.

Milady and I finally finished Fruits Basket. I feel like I should have a t-shirt that says something like "I survived Fruits Basket." I shouldn't complain - as shoujo goes, Furuba is definitely top-tier. That said, it'll be a while, probably quite a while, before I get around to starting on another shoujo angst-fest like (say) Kare Kano simply because shoujo is, after all, the chick-flick of manga and anime and I'm definitely not a chick, and particularly not a middle/high-school-aged chick.

Of course, finishing Fruits Basket leads to the inevitable question: What shall we read next? The only reason I was reading Furuba (again) in the first place was because I needed something for Evening Manga Reading with Milady. We'd read Video Girl Ai, Chobits, Midori no Hibi, and several other manga over the years, and after getting through all 136 chapters of Fruits Basket, it was time to pick something again.

I looked through things on my laptop (we were still in temporary digs at the time), and considered manga on my hard drive that interest me. I tend to like medium-to-long complete manga for this application. We get through 1-3 chapters in a typical night, so it's not hard to finish up a short manga in less than two weeks. Likewise, it's nice to have the story end when you're reading it with someone else, instead of having to go back and remind everybody what whas happening in this story three months ago when the last chapter came out.

Unfortunately, these two requirements remove many good manga from the list: Mahoraba, Karin (currently stalled in scanslation), Mirai Nikki, Doujin Work, and a host of one-shots all are too short, non-terminal, or both.

I didn't want another boarding-house romance (because we'd finished up Love Hina before starting Furuba), and so my list came down to a few entertaining choices. At the top of the list was Ai-Ren, both because it's so good, and because it's unlike anything she's seen before in manga.

She promptly shot that one down because she didn't want something sad/depressing. Now I don't ultimately regard Ai-Ren as depressing, but it's definitely not the feel-good manga of any year, either.

So I was left scrambling. I considered Ah! My Goddess, but we had a magical girlfriend story before in both Video Girl Ai and Chobits, and I wasn't looking forward to the degradation of story qualty I've heard about after the first 100 chapters, which would leave me the choice of just stopping (which we almost did with Love Hina a couple of times), or suffering through an unknown number of bad, reductive, franchise-milking manga chapters a-la Berman and Piller-era Star Trek.

And then, scrolling through the hard drive, I stumbled across an old friend: Hotman.

Hotman was perfect: It isn't mostly about kids, it's not depressing, and there are at least ten volumes translated. Will we get to the end of the story? No. It's not fully translated. In fact, it may never be fully translated, and the scanslation that has been done so far is...well, quick and dirty is probably not a bad description. To be fair, Null are doing an HQ re-scanslate of it, but they're only on volume 1 of that project. So, if you want to read it in the near future, you are going to be looking at the quick-and-dirty version.

Which is OK - it's still thoroughly worth reading. One note: the translators have elected to romaji some common Japanese words instead of translating them. This is, frankly, a good thing most of the time. Not only is it difficult/impossible to come up for a conversational equivalent to "Aniiki" for instance, it would also remove some cultural flavor to do so. The untranslated words are usually things like "tadaima," "sensee," "gochisousama," etc, so are good survival words to learn if you have an interest in Japanese anyway.

So what is Hotman, what is it about, and why should you care? Good questions.

Meet Takaya Enzou

He's an art teacher in a middle school. Yes, I know - I never had an art teacher that looked like that either. At left is one of the advertising-knockoff chapter opening pages Kitagawa sensee uses. Enzo is also a former gang leader. Sounds like GTO, doesn't it? Well, yeah, but, ahem, Hotman, and GTO came out at practically the same time, as did Salaryman Kintaro and Gokusen. Obviously 1994 was a good year for heroic characters in authority roles. There are also some crucial differences between the two: GTO is shounen, Hotman is seinen, Enzo really is passionate about art (actually, he's passionate about a lot of things).

He quit being a gang-banger because he was presented with a baby girl (Nanami) on his doorstep five years ago who is supposedly the result of his misspent youth. He decided that being a responsible father was his penance for being such a such a menace to society in his younger days. Caring for sickly Nanami is the focus of his existence, and her well-being is never far from his thoughts. At right: Enzo and Nanami take a much-deserved vacation.

But there's more to Enzo than teaching art and being super-dad. He's the eldest son of a deceased TV and film star mother who had a number of kids with a succession of husbands. Enzo has gathered all four of his half-siblings togther in what was his mother's house in Tokyo. He's at once the man of the house, father figure, eldest sibling, and primary breadwinner for the assembled family. His siblings (who are between 23 and 14 years old) are sometimes annoyed by his blowhard/overbearing ways, but seem always to understand that he really does love them and wants the best for them and that Enzo's effusive grand gestures are the only way he can express his feelings.

Each of Enzo's siblings has his own stuff to deal with. Shima (eldest sister, 23) is so busy being a responsible mother figure to Nanami and her siblings that she may never actually be a mother for lack of a man. Hinata (16) is an amusingly typical high-school girl. Athletic Haiji and bookish Ryu (twins, 14) are an indivisible pair of opposites who often seem more mature than Hinata, and at other times are reckless in their youth. They all miss their mother, and hold her memory sacred even as they recognize that she really wasn't all that good at being a mother. At left, Enzo talks about the importance of family meals to his siblings and daughter. L-R: Shima, Nanami, Enzo (standing), Hinata, Haiji (standing), and Ryunosuke. At right: Enzo teaches art like he does everything else - with passion.

There are friends and acquaintances associated with everybody as well, some of whom are minor characters, and some of whom are pivotal to the primary plot.

After looking at these sample pages, you've probably observed something else about Hotman: its art is topnotch. Kitagawa-sensee draws faces well and distinctively and his anatomy is generally quite good. Backgrounds are distinctive and page design is straightforward. We've had exactly two pages in eight volumes that required a second look to figure out who was talking to whom. Given the vagueness of English pronouns compared to the specificity of Japanese pronouns, that's pretty good page layout. Given that the manga originally ran 1994-1997, it really isn't dated at all, except by technological objects and the lack of much two-page composition. Even the action scenes are well-drawn.

Kitagawa-sensee has essentially given us the variety of a harem manga without actually having a harem. Frankly, it works better than most harem romance mangas. It has a certain Leave it to Beaver/Father Knows Best quality about it even as it plays with topics like anorexia, poverty, and the slacker lifestyle. It's an amusing juxtaposition, especially when Enzo's street-thug past comes back to haunt him, as it does periodically.

I'd read through vol 8 by myself a couple of years ago and generally enjoyed it. Now we're reading it together, and it's just as popular with Milady as I'd hoped it would be.

Hotman was apparently quite popular back in the day. Popular enough that it, like Salaryman Kintaro, GTO, and Gokusen, was made into a live-action drama series in 2003. I have yet to see any of it, but it was quite popular at the time. I believe it has been fansubbed and should be available somewhere out there...

Not quite slice-of-life comedy (there is a definite, if rather relaxed plot arc), not quite episodic drama, not quite seinen romance, Hotman does a great job of just being entertaining in the best seinen manga tradition. No villains are defeated, no worlds are saved, no panties are exposed in female pratfalls. Instead, it succeeds the old-fashioned way - by telling a story worth reading. Enjoy.

Anime versus Manga

Yeah, everybody has their opinion on this one, and I'm no exception. What surprises me, though is that some people are so dogmatic about it.

Often the story first appears as a manga, and is then translated into an anime. Sometimes the anime comes first. Sometimes the source material is a light novel, or even some piece of heavy literature (Les Miserables comes to mind as a recent example). Maybe I'm more open-minded than other people about this because of taking a few classes in literary criticism in my college days. One thing that postmodernism was good for was opening peoples' eyes about what constitutes literature worthy of study. It's a core tenet of postmodernism that all texts (text here defined as anything that tells a story, including film, tv shows, etc) are created equal as objects of study. Like most things, they went too far with it, and so there's some utter crap now being seriously reviewed by academics. This is not entirely a bad thing - at least they're less likely to miss good stuff now.

If I haven't convinced you on this point, I'll remind you that Shakespeare's plays were populist universal entertainment performed (usually) in an open-air theatre on the wrong side of the river (that's like saying "the wrong side of the tracks," because there weren't tracks yet) in London. In a very real sense, plays like Love's Labors Lost are the direct ancestors of manga like Fruits Basket or Maison Ikkoku. Likewise most of the novels from the golden age of the prose novel were not regarded as serious literature in their day, either. Serious literature was epic poetry - stuff like The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, or The Idylls of the King (to choose a later example). - prose novels were trashy reading for the masses. It may seem strange to regard something like Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice or Les Miserables as popular fiction, but that is what they were when initially published.

So with that said, the first thing you must do is imitate the academics (after all, they think about this kind of thing for a living) and accept that manga and anime are both forms of literature (pop lit, to be sure, but lit nonetheless) and that one is not inherently superior to another.

Now the next big step: allow for detatchment - the offspring need not be an exact copy of the parent. Frankly, I wish the Japanese did a little better with this one. Example: Stephen King wrote an OK supernatural horror book called The Shining. Stanley Kubrick made a very good psychological horror movie called The Shining, which was loosely based on the King novel.

If you're a hardcore Stephen King fan, you probably don't like the movie very much, because it's not especially faithful to the King story. It's a pretty easy case to make, though, that as a movie, the movie is a better piece of literature than the book is - the plotting is tighter, the characters are more vivid, and, frankly, King has always needed a cruel editor with a sharp knife where his novels are concerned - his best work is his short stories and novellas.

And so it goes with anything - the Karin anime has to be judged on its own merits as a show. Maybe it doesn't tell the same story that the manga does (in this case it definitely doesn't). That doesn't matter. What matters is how well it tells whatever story its attempting, and if the story is worth telling in the first place. And no, I don't particularly like the way the Karin anime is plotted for all that I'm quite fond of the manga.

That said, I think it's fair to say that if the manga came first, it's often better than the anime, simply because adding more cooks to the kitchen seldom improves the product. Or, to put it another way, the mangaka had a concept in mind when writing the manga. The anime producer (who often thinks of himself as an artist forced to deal with somebody else's art) seldom has the same concept in mind when plotting the anime. Two different (sometimes conflicting) views of who the characters are and what the story should be about. There also often seems to be a repurposing of content - Seinen manga are bowdlerized into all-ages anime entertainment (Chobits). Shounen manga sometimes get a fanservice and adult themes infusion in the anime to give them appeal to older viewers (Midori no Hibi).

On the other hand, there are a few situations (similar to the Stephen King example above) where the manga is too long, baroque and complex and the anime producer successfully distills it down into its essentials and makes it into a better story as a result. These are, however, in the minority.

The stories that seem to reliably survive the manga-anime translation the best seem to be character-driven talky mangas - Hataraki Man, Honey and Clover, Bokura ga Ita, Kamichu!, Mushi-shi, etc. Frequently, the action-intensive manga seem to get too frantic when translated to anime. Taken too far, however, you end up with talky anime, which isn't load of fun. Consider how hard Kyoto Anime had to work to make the Suzumiya Haruhi stories (which are fairly cerebral and very talky light novels) work as anime. Sometimes, the story is so obviously visual that it's hard to figure out how it could have been popular as a manga, but it is a shoo-in as a good anime. Binchou-tan is a recent example.

July 2007 - What's on my mind now

Ho dear reader - I bet you thought this was another one of those 'four posts and it's over' blogs, didn't you? Well, since my blog subtitle includes 'life,' I thought I'd clue you in on a little of mine.

Old geezers like me have things like jobs and responsibilities. Usually I can reschedule this sort of thing around more important stuff like anime watching, manga reading, board posts, and blog entries, but sometimes life rears its ugly head and I have to pay attention to it.

In this case, Milady and I had decided that some basic things needed to change. The anime/manga chestnut about following your dreams and being true to yourself certainly figured in the reasoning, as did a recognition that we weren't very happy with the way some things were going, and that it was going to require some dramatic changes to alter this.

So, about a year ago, I started seriously considering moving from Western Pennsylvania, where the weather is cold and grey much of the year, people are old (the average age is among the oldest in the USA) and rude (Not as rude as further East, but not polite, either), taxes are high and ignorance and machine politics are bliss to someplace nicer.

Heightening this desire was the knowledge that the large multinational consumer electronics conglomerate that employed me was 1) going through some hard times financially, making my job less stable than it once had been, 2) making some really stupid business decisions that suggested that the hard times weren't going to get better soon, and 3) had failed to give me a raise for three years in spite of a steady increase in responsibilities and good performance reviews from all quarters. If a certain Welsh-born CEO wants to know what his company's problems are, and why they lost an employee like me, I'll be happy to give him a detailed list...

It was time for a change. I was ready for promotion, more money, and new challenges at work, and ready to live someplace less generally depressing with people who had more intellectual hobbies than morning radio shows and bar fights.

So I started looking seriously just after the new year, focusing my attentions on a particular town in a particular state on the eastern seaboard. Why that particular town? We had friends in the area, the countryside is beautiful, and the politics, while not wondrously pristine, at least sometimes benefit the many, instead of the empowered few.

Opportunity finally knocked...well, actually I kept beating on the door and opportunity finally answered after about four months. However, once the door was opened, I was invited in for the longest, chattiest job interview I've ever had. And a sequel a few weeks later. After some silly circumlocutory negotiations, I agreed to start work there in the beginning of July...which gave me about a month to give notice, pack, find some place to live, move several hundred KM, start work, and set up house.

It didn't all get done in the proper order. House still isn't moved. I'm staying with friends commuting an hour to work at the new job. Milady and e-chan are still at the old house packing things. I have no idea where they'll be living when they get here. But it's happening.

So what's going on with the interesting stuff? I've been downloading a pile to tide us over until we're settled with high speed in the new location. I also put in an order with rightstuf.com when they had their geneon midnight-madness sale. They're slow to ship, so I may have to change the address...

I'm staying with friends in the new town, and have somewhat different media tastes than they. Accordingly, I'm reading a a fair amount of manga (Maison Ikkoku and Mirai Nikki lately). I've got a list of other things recommended by friends over at mangaforums.org to download and read as well.

Maison Ikkoku is an interesting item. For one thing, it identifies the origin of the hot-widow-landlady trope in Chobits. Yup, the centerpiece of Maison Ikkoku is an off-again-on-again semi-harem romance between a mediocre college student (who is both more attractive than and not as big a loser as Keitaro in Love Hina) , and the hot landlady widow, who married straight out of high school and was widowed in less than a year of marriage. Result: landlady and college guy are pretty close to the same age. The supporting cast is the usual wacky assortment of characters who exist primarily to get in the way of the obvious-as-bricks-down-a-well romance.

The female lead (Kyoko) runs hot and cold - not in a tsundere way, really, but just in an insecure way, similar to Nagisa in Yume de Aetara. To her and Nagisa's credit, both have good reasons for their behavior - they're not arbitrarily tsundere like Naru in Love Hina.

The art is likewise interesting. Since we know that the author is the queen of manga - Takahashi Rumiko, and that this was a huge hit that pretty much established both the harem romance and the rooming house romance as genre staples in manga in the same way that Ranma 1/2 (by the same author) did, and since it's old (1980), it's logical to expect that the art is both dated and probably pretty good by the standard of the day. Right on both counts. It lacks the detailed perfection of Crying Freeman, but the facial work is actually a little better, and the character designs, while simple, are both expressive and identifiable (well, except for the male lead and his principal competition). One can also see how it borrows from the successful serial US comics of the 1960s and '70s. The art has a certain Archie and Veronica flavor, or possibly some Mary Worth about it. This is the first time I've ever looked at a manga and said - "yeah, I can see how the American dailies influenced the art here."

The only other Takahashi I've read in any detail was a one-shot (Vacation-in-law) and the Mermaid series (which I, and apparently the Japanese like a lot). The mermaid series, though, is one of her occasional special projects - it'd probably be a doujin if she weren't the queen of manga. She obviously puts a lot more art into it than into the potboiler stuff like this and Ranma.

This one is so interesting because it obviously has a lot of kids. Yume de Aetara borrows some character traits. Love Hina borrows setting, setup, and some character tropes. Virgin Na Kankei borrows the relationship dynamics of the characters and rips off some supporting characters (the chiisai cutie with a crush on male lead) wholesale. Even Mahoraba, dear as I hold it, has the same setting and a bereaved landlady.

None of this is a bash on any of the newer material, but it does point out just how influential Maison Ikkoku is.

Mirai Nikki (I carefully translate the title from the kanji as something like 'Future Diary' or 'Diary in the Future Tense') is a rather different kettle of fish. Shounen action-thriller. It's a slightly pedestrian storyline involving a modern-day schoolboy shounen who has to save the world (and his own life) and lots of badness and baddies trying to off him, along with the magical girl story trope of a special goodie given him by a super-powerful individual that gives him some special ability. The interesting spins are:

1. He's not the only guy with a special goodie
2. Everybody else I've seen who is special-goodie-equipped is mentally warped to some degree or other
3. The most warped one of all is his dere-dere classmate who has a really sick dere-dere stalker fixation on him.

I've only read through the first volume - but it's a pretty good ride so far. I'm curious to see how the mangaka hopes to keep it fresh in future volumes.

Anime-wise, I'm down to what the slow laptop I'm using can cope with. Mostly stuff like Azumanga Daioh...

Beginning Mangaka Syndrome

If you've been reading manga for a while, you've probably noticed that many manga that aren't doujinshi or one-shots probably have a significant variation in art quality over their run. This is particularly true with a mangaka's first big hit - IE, the first manga that not only goes into tankoubon printings, but goes past four volumes and becomes an anchor story for its magazine.

Now some of this is intuitively obvious - a beginning mangaka is new at doing his job for his soba and tofu, and probably isn't as skilled an artist as he will be after a year or two of drawing a manga for a weekly. But there's more to it than that - the curve of improvement seems to reliably start about vol 2 and settles into pleasant and usually much better art (and often storyline) by vol 4 or so.

So I took a look into the process, and economics, of being a mangaka. Let's just say that after looking into it, it's obvious that people don't go into drawing manga for the money...

It works like this: Would-be mangaka draws up a proposal (with character list) and sample chapter or two for a manga to be published in one of the many weekly or (rarer) monthly manga magazines. The proposal will be targeted both to the nominal readership of the magazine, and often also toward any editorial biases the mangaka might have heard of/been told of/observed about that particular magazine.

Here's an example of what proposal pages can look like. The mangaka is Kojima Akira, who later went on to draw the successful (and fun) shounen comedy/romance Mahoraba.

Chichiwomoge at mangaforums posted about this, and I snarfed the image from where he found it.

So our aspiring mangaka (who is either in college, or, more likely, has a mundane day job of some kind) makes his pitch to the editors at a magazine and...they buy it (as didn't happen with Seiken Shoujo). Happy mangaka charges home and hits the drawing board. And draws. And draws some more, probably while trading in his full-time day job for a part-time job of some kind and drawing every other minute he can spare.

For all of this labor he is paid the princely sum of ¥3000-5000 per page for a weekly magazine, and maybe ¥10,000 per page in a monthly. A typical chapter is 20-25 pages. As of this writing, there are ¥124/$US. A little quick math has our beginning weekly mangaka making under $500/week, and he's probably living near his publishers in Tokyo, which is the most expensive place to live in the world. The monthly author is doing no better. So yes, you can make a living as a young mangaka writing for a manga magazine, if you:

1. Don't mind being poor
2. Are single, and don't mind being single (and unable to afford dates)
3. Don't mind living in (and spending all your time drawing in) a closet

Let's just say that you eat a lot of instant ramen, and your primary protein source is probably tofu, or natto if you can stomach it. You're living for your art, because you're probably not looking forward to your next meal very much.

Our aspiring mangaka gets published and...wonder of wonders! The manga is a hit. Circulation of the magazine goes up, the fan mail starts coming in, and there's talk of doing tankobons after there are eight or ten chapters done. The gravy train is rolling in right? Wrong.

The contract doesn't get renegotiated just because it's a popular entry in the manga magazine. Our mangaka is still doing the same work for the same money, and maybe will get a bonus, but now there's new pressure on him - If the manga really is a hit, the editors are going to start pushing for more content - color pages, character profile sketches, advertising copy, designs for toy licensing, etc. And no, they don't pay much/any more for it than they are already paying. So the workload has gone up, but the pay hasn't much, if at all.

Further, the mangaka is under a lot of pressure to keep doing whatever makes the story popular, all while still living in his closet, eating his instant ramen, and turning out the additional work on top of the weekly effort of getting the new chapter to press. He isn't getting much excercise, or good nutrition, and he's working millions of hours. The art quality is bound to suffer, and it does.

Eventually it becomes obvious to everybody that the manga is going to keep doing well. It also becomes obvious to the mangaka that he has to spread out the workload or he's going to get sick, burn out, or both. So he gets a small advance for the first tankobon and hires some assistants. but he can't afford a lot of help, and he can't afford experienced, talented assistants - they're probably chums from art school, or other aspiring starving mangakas. They are given jobs of doing things like backgrounds, color fill work for magazine covers, feature pages, and the upcoming tankoubon covers and extra pages. It's a welcome reduction in mangaka workload, but now the artist has to work on management and team-building skills...and he's still having to be creative on a weekly deadline.

The first chance of real income is tankobon sales. Mangakas generally get 10% of the gross of tank sales. Tankobons typically sell for less than ¥400, so a single tank sale nets our mangaka an astounding $0.32 US. A minimum run is 10,000 copies; a good first press run for a popular new manga is in the 30,000 range. Bingo - if the manga has good buzz, the tank is appealing and is properly publicized by the publishing house (including uncompensated interviews for the mangaka), our mangaka might make $10,000 US from the first printing of volume 1 of his hit manga...but he had to shell out quite a bit of that to the assistants who freshened the art, did the color work, and filled in the omakes from his sketches. Nonetheless, he's a happier mangaka who possibly gets some meat on his soba noodles once in a while instead of tofu.

If he keeps doing his job well, he'll finally hit a level of comfort around volume four. At that point, there's enough residual income from the prior volumes still selling (and presumably in later print runs) that he can afford to pay his art team decently, and they, in turn, can afford to put honest labor into fleshing out his creation. If the consumers are addicted to the manga, they run out and buy the prior tanks, and as word of mouth spreads, more readers come on board with each additional tankobon publication. Meanwhile, of course, everybody on the team is learning how to draw the manga better and faster, because they've been doing it for most of a year by now (assume 8 chapters/tank and four tanks - that's 32 weeks' run in a weekly).

So let's say that he makes the same $10,000 residual from the first printings of all of the first four tankobuns. That's $40,000. His base pay from the weekly is still $26,000/year as long as he keeps pumping out pages. So our hypothetical mangaka has more than doubled his projected annual income from tankobun sales in the first year. Life is suddenly a lot better. And as his assistants get more proficient, he can possibly take a little more time and money for things like personal hygiene and a social life. He can rent an office, maybe upgrade apartments.

But now comes the ugly truth: all good things must come to an end. Most mangas have a sweet spot plot length between six and 12 volumes. If it's a fast-running manga in a weekly, it may only have a run time of a year or so, and then our mangaka has to start the process all over again. He will probably get some more money per page now that he's a known quantity, but most mangakas don't get lucky with a second hit as big as the first, and publishers know this.

Suddenly, there's a mass of economic pressure to keep the manga going just a little bit longer. It's a proven seller. It's making everybody money. Milk the cow a little more. Many mangakas do exactly that - they slow the story down, or put in filler plot arcs. Probably the most egregious filler arc I can name offhand is the Tsubasa/stepbrother arc in Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou. It's pretty clear that the only purpose of this plot derail into the life of a pop band with a high schooler lead singer was to extend the manga's run length from 19 to 21 volumes. Likewise, it's pretty apparent that Akamatsu was willing to keep going indefinitely with Love Hina, and I would guess that falling ratings were the only thing that saved us from another lame digression like the trip to MolMol.

On the other side of the ledger is that drawing a manga, particularly for a weekly, is a grueling task. It takes a lot of genki to do this week after week. If the mangaka isn't of the starving artist variety, and if he has been thinking ahead and has already successfully pitched the next manga to a publishing house, he might well decide to wrap the plot up neatly, take the money, and go vacation in Okinawa or somewhere to recharge before starting the cycle again. These are the manga that end neatly and well, like Mahoraba, Midori no Hibi, Planetes, Chobits, etc. Of course, there are also mangas that go on indeterminately because they can and should. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is one such. Gunslinger Girl appears to be another. The common element in these seems to be that the mangakas really like the living as much as they hoped they would. Sure it's long hours, but it's long hours doing something they like. Combined with genuine artistic ability and ability as a storyteller, these are the manga that give us something nice to remember and come back to years later.

At the top of the heap are the rare few mangakas who make a nice living because pretty much anything they draw sells well, and they have name recognition. Publishing houses are willing to give people like this a lot of money to get their product. Takahashi Rumiko is probably the obvious example of today, but there are several others. I suspect, though, that Takahashi-sensee has suffered her share on the way to the top.

Gunslinger Girl: What it is, and what it isn't

Something tells me that a lot of western manga and anime fans are put off by the name of Gunslinger Girl. It sounds like another fanservice-intensive lolis-with-guns effort.

Before you make that assumption, remember that English titles for manga are often a little mangled in their meaning to native English speakers. How else do you end up with oddities like Yakitate!! Japan or Stroke Material?

So, what is it? It's bloody, gentle, subtle, gross, beautiful, ugly, loving and abusing. The themes and characters are complex, the setting is beautiful, and there's nothing resembling fanservice.

It's like Simoun in exactly one way: the creator is mostly a mystery. We know the author is named 相田 裕 (Aida Yutaka), and it's generally believed that said author is male, mostly because of a love of European cars and guns and great care taken in drawing them. There's a stated date of birth which would put him in his mid-20s. If so, I hope he keeps drawing manga for a long time to come...

Gunslinger Girl is also a little like Simoun and Ai Ren in that it's not hugely popular, but it has a base of enthusiastic fans who tirelessly promote it to anyone who'll listen. I'm one of those fans. If you're into Naruto or other shounen hack-and-slash, you probably won't like it. If you're ready for something more complex with simultaneous light and darkness and missing easy answers or simple problems, you might be interested in Gunslinger Girl.

Here's an art sample from the end of volume 5 (it's the mangaka helper credit page). Yes, that's typical of the art in the later volumes. These three people are all on the, uh, other side from the eponymous Gunslinger Girls (I won't call them 'bad guys' or 'villains' simply because, as is often the case in good stories, who is good and who is bad isn't always an easy question to answer). The car is a late-50s to mid-60s Alfa-Romeo Giulia Spider (the author identifies it as a Giulietta spyder, but the Giulietta series didn't come with the 1600 CC engine noted on the boot lid), and is carefully drawn, if mis-identified in text.

If you'd like to see just how good a job Aida-sensee has done, on this site may be found a photo of an almost-identical car identified as a 1965 Giulia Spider Veloce. Likewise, note the anatomy and posing of the people in the picture. It's typical of the art in the manga. Sometimes some characters (the two youngest Gunslinger Girls, Henrietta and Rico, in particular) are difficult to tell apart by their facial detail, but you're seldom left wondering who is who because Aida-sensee uses distinctive hairstyles, distinctive wardrobe (which sometimes is a plot point, as with Henrietta's overcoat) and good establishing shots to show you where something is happening.

Of course, if you know about guns, you'll seldom be confused about who is who if it's an action scene and weapons are drawn. Aida-sensee carefully pairs each character with a gun or three, and the guns are always meticulously drawn. Henrietta's SIG Sauer P239 Tu-Tone is so well drawn on the cover of volume one that you can make out the decocking lever and the logos on the grip and slide. There are a couple of loose rounds along with the ejected magazine beside her, so I can tell you that her pistol could be chambered for either 9 mm Parabellum (my guess, given that the story is set in Italy) or .40 Smith and Wesson, but it's definitely not .357 SIG (no bottleneck). Most of you could care less, I'm sure, but it's nice (and unfortunately rare) to see real technological objects drawn with accuracy and detail in manga. Likewise, the gun choices make sense. Henrietta may be a powerful cyborg assassin with amazing strength, agility, and reflexes, but her stature is still that of the 11 year-old girl she was before her upgrades. A small, lightweight, single-row semi-auto pistol like the P239 is a good choice for someone with small hands, especially if it must often be concealed on a small girl, as is the case here. So GSG wins on another point - the technology isn't just window dressing - it makes sense in context, and it propels the story.

And that brings us to the heart of Gunslinger Girl. Henrietta is introduced first in both manga and anime for a reason. She's the girliest of the girls, among the youngest, and sticks closest to the traditional Japanese school-girl roles (she wears a seifuku when not on assignment, for instance). Her 'handler' (Joze in the Japanese original, which is tweaked variously to Jose, Giuse (my favorite), or Giuseppe by translators) treats her as he would a little sister, buying her gifts and trying to educate her in the ways of a young lady of the world. He also orders her to kill people periodically, which she generally does very efficiently, be it with guns, knives, or her unaided body. She has been psychologically modified along with her cyborg modifications so that she has a creepily obsessive emotional attachment to Giuse and the same burning desire to protect him as a military or police dog has to protect its handler. Each of the girls is paired with such a handler (who usually has prior experience in police work, the military, or some intelligence service). Together, the handler-cyborg team is called a fratello (Italian for 'brother.' Why not fratelli (brothers)? Ask Aida-sensee). Your sample page here (remember, manga read right to left) illustrates Giuse's conundrum: Henrietta has just acted against orders in reaction to a perceived threat to Giuse. She very efficiently used the FN P90 submachine gun she's clutching in the bottom frame to protect him, and thereby made it harder for him to do his job. This is a good example of an early page from Gunslinger Girl. Comparing it to the other pages shows how far Aida-sensee has come as an artist during this manga's run. To be fair, this is also a pretty awful scan. I have no idea what the toning and detail looks like in the Japanese original.

The several fratellos are all part of the Italian Social Welfare Agency Section 2, which is a black-ops anti-terrorism unit primarily tasked with combating the extremist elements of the Northern Italian seperatist movement Padania Republic Faction, which seems to have many of the qualities of the Red Brigades of the 1980s.

If the handlers were all dimwitted, hardened killers and the girls mindless killing machines, then the story would be straightforward and not particularly interesting. They're not. They all are intelligent people with their own opinions, lives, motivations and misgivings about their work, and about their coworkers. The handlers vary in their approaches to their task, just as any group of real people would in the real world.

Similarly, none of the girls is particularly like the others in personality or temperament. Henrietta is more concerned with pleasing Giuse than anything else in the world. Here she is off duty in her trademark seifuku checking her hair in the side mirror of his ragtop Porsche 911 before meeting him upon his return from vacation.

By comparison, Triela is older, wiser, and more sure of herself and her place in the world. Because she's wiser, she's also more thoughtful about her strange dual life of being an adolescent schoolgirl and an assassin. She acts as 'wise older sister' to the younger members of her strange sorority. Also, among the cyborgs in Gunslinger Girl, Triela is unique in having some knowledge of the horrible near-death experience that resulted in her new, strange career. All the girls feel the strain of their unnatural occupation and their handlers try different techniques to help them cope, varying from a brusque all-business approach to brotherly affection.

The girls are, however, all aware to varying degrees that they would most likely be dead or bedridden if it were not for the Italian Government's desire for girl cyborg assassins. They understand that what they do isn't normal, and that they aren't normal. They also understand that, while there are distasteful aspects to their existence, it beats the alternatives.

About now, you're probably wondering if there's actually any action in this soap opera. Oh yes. Here's a two-page spread of Triela going mano-a-cyborg with one of the people from the PRF. She's just been thrown through a window from the second floor to the first, and while it doesn't seriously injure her, as it would a normal human, it definitely smarts. Unlike a lot of manga action work, Aida's is clear, concise, and gives a feel for the intensity of combat. And yes, that is, in fact, the SIG Sauer P230 SL of which she was disarmed the last time they met in Montalcino.

I won't go into the relative merits of Hillshire's choice of sidearm for Triela, other than to say that I think Giuse made a better choice. This is Triela dressed for battle. She carries a sharpened bayonet in a scabbard over her shoulder and an assortment of other dangerous things secreted about her person. The bayonet seems an odd choice until you remember that she can fling a man about as easily as one of her many teddy bears. With her strength of grip, the extra reach of a bayonet over a combat knife is a big advantage (she's about 13 years old, I think, so is a bit deficient in the reach department), and the leverage problem it would pose an un-augmented human isn't a problem.

The particular battle detailed above is the payoff at the end of volume 5, which points out the strength of Gunslinger Girl as a story: While violence is their job, it does not define the characters. It does, however, create complications for them when seeking self-definition. Triela has been training and hoping for this rematch for more than a volume of story, and she's perfectly willing to take a few hits if it means she can off this guy who shamed her last time. Since we the readers know her so well, we are definitely cheering for her.

...Except that her antagonist has a back story and quite a bit of ink behind him as well. I won't spoil anything except to repeat that this isn't mostly a story about good guys and bad guys. There are welcome (to the readers and the members of Section 2) exceptions, but most of the time what is good is determined by where you stand.

You're sold? You want to know where to get it? Well, I have good news, and bad news. The good news is that it's licensed and is partially available from ADV Manga. The bad news is that they licensed it, translated vol 1-3, then stopped for several years. Further, their translations, while OK, are not wonderful, and the graphic quality isn't what it might be - I'd classify it as MQ scanslation at best. This points to the old rule of fansubs versus commercial subs that I've covered elsewhere.

We went through an awful dry spell there for a while - fan scanslations disappeared after licensing, but ADV Manga dropped dead after three volumes and we were stuck in limbo for several years waiting for vol 4. Aria was left in the same lurch. Eventually, the fans got frustrated and started scanslating again. I have three different translations of volume 4 - none done by ADV, which finally released theirs this month. Of the three fan scanslations, I generally like Toukoubi's the best. I have compared it to the Japanese raws I found in an undisclosed location and found little to complain about.

ADV got an infusion of Cash from Japan, and now promise to mend their tardy ways by turning out a volume a month until they're caught up with complete Japanese volumes. As I pointed out, Vol 4 is out there, and I'll take a look at it when I get a chance. In the meantime, I have no compunction in recommending the Toukoubi translations of GSG. ADV blew it, and the burden of proof is on them to show that they can do a decent job scanslation and turnaround time before I'll recommend their product.

But Wait! There's More! That's right - there was a 13 episode anime done. And a very nice one it is, too. It's slice of life, with lovely art and backgrounds, and the story is canon to the manga. it goes through part of volume 2, so there's plenty more to read than there is to watch. Madhouse and Marvelous Entertainment did the anime for the winter 2003-2004 broadcast season in Japan, and it was licensed, subbed, and released by Funimation in the US in 2005. The Funimation subs are reasonably good (could use some culture notes and a little more care with politeness levels), and what little I've listened to of the dub track was OK. Funimation fluffed the stock with a box set released in late 2006 (possibly because they, too, were happy to hear about ADV manga coming back from the dead). Not a bad purchase, and worthy of your anime dollar.

The rumor mill has been humming with news of a second Gunslinger Girl series to be done by Marvelous again, (found on Moon Phase by way of Marvelous's financial report - line entry GUNSLINGER GIRL 続編) but it's still just a rumor. Well...we can hope.

The good news is that Aida-sensee is young, the story is going well, and interest keeps growing. It's all good. Enjoy.

Simoun - The Primer

Well, we finally finished Simoun. Milady felt the end was a bit of a letdown, as did I initially, until I went back and thought over what had happened and why. And I realized that I had been wrong in my comprehension of what the show was really about.

So what is Simoun about, then? And should you want to watch it? I'm going to address that question here while avoiding spoilers as much as reasonably possible.

One warning: Stay away from the wikipedia article if you are planning on watching the show - it is comprehensively spoiling.

The technical stuff: It's a 26 episode half-hour show. There's a strict chronological plot order. It's not derived from a manga or light novel (although two manga series came out after it premiered). Frankly, I haven't had much luck finding out who actually came up with the idea, who wrote the scripts, etc. The anime production and mecha design stuff is pretty well documented, but I have yet to see lots of discussion about where the complex setting and plot came from.

When Simoun came out in early April 2006, it arrived along with several other anime that quickly developed huge followings in Japan and in the West: Suzumiya Haruhi, Ouran High School Host Club, and Nana. In Japan Simoun did pretty well, and got some buzz from bloggers who were sucked in by the yuri (girl-on-girl romantic/sexual) tones of the show, and others who stuck it out past the first two shows and realized they were looking at something complex, unique and special.

Here in the West, the Naruto and Batman fanboys completely ignored it. Somebody, looking at the pre-release press materials, christened it "Loli-Copters." It might never have been widely seen here, but for a few hardcore viewers watching the raws who talked the show up in their postings. It looks like the early fanbase here might also have been mostly Yuri fanatics (who were also, no doubt, also celebrating Strawberry Panic). The good news is that they had non-yuri-fan friends who liked anime and were curious to find out what the fuss was about.

So what is my take on the whole whole yuri thing? I'm very heterosexual, not a yuri or yaoi fan, don't have issues with what other people choose to do, and so had no problems with it at all. Further, it all makes sense in context - the story doesn't happen on earth, and the people involved aren't actually humans. They just look and act like humans. Simoun obviously falls in the (very popular) convergent evolution school of TV Science Fiction. Yes, I recognize that this is a handwave for dramatic purposes. So is most science fiction and fantasy set on other worlds. Your mileage may vary.

There's another issue for a few - if you're strongly religious, and have problems with willing suspension of disbelief where your faith is concerned, you might not be happy with Simoun. This different world has a different religion, and different results and expectations thereof.

At some point (about two episodes in), a critical mass was reached and people started to talk about fansubs. Doremi dug into an adequate job, then dropped the project about six shows in. The rabid fans got together and formed their own fansub group, logically enough named Simoun-Fans. Enter a great truth: The more the fansubbers love the show, the harder they will try to make the subs perfect. This is the reason why fansubs are always better than commercial subs. Simoun-Fans' subs are excellent - as good as Solar's subs of Honey and Clover, which are my benchmark of subtitle quality.

Their love, whether or not it dares speak its name, is not misplaced. Simoun is as interesting and worthwhile as any 600 minutes worth of TV anywhere. It shares a quality with other worthwhile literature in that it doesn't tell you what to think. It shows you happenings, and leaves it to you to figure out what you think.

So, should you watch Simoun? Maybe. You should not bother with Simoun if:

• You like clear-cut villains, heroes, and predictable character stereotypes
• You can't handle seeing girls and (on one occasion) guys kiss each other
• You can't stand the idea of sexual indeterminacy (and no, I don't mean gender-bending, I mean neither one nor the other, as in LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness)
• You get bored if people in the show aren't shouting at each other or trying to kill each other
• You think nonverbal symbolism is for sissies
• You don't want to pay attention enough to learn to tell eighteen characters apart
  

You should watch Simoun if:

• You like seeing characters develop
• You like seeing people wrestle with problems of duty, identity, and self-determination
• You enjoy Studio Ghibli-style scenery
• You appreciate a soundtrack with musical complexity and subtlety
• You enjoy being surprised by plot developments, and rarely are
  

Interested? Good. I'll give you a little primer on what's good to know before you start.

Good stuff to know:

• Latin. Latin is hard to work with in Japanese, but they give it a good try. Place names, technical terms, some character names, and other miscellaneous words are often Latinate. This isn't a bad idea if you think of how alien Latin is to the average Japanese TV viewer. The few who recognize the derivation will also get that it's an ancient, dead language, which fits the milieu of the story as well. The fact that the phonetics are awkward makes figuring out what the Latin word actually is something of a challenge. Here (from Hashihime) is a pretty spoiler-free vocabulary list.
  
• The shows come in pairs. If you've got time, I recommend watching an an odd number episode and its following even-numbered episode immediately afterward. I think this is because the scripts were written for an hour-long timeslot and then cut in half.
• There's a big cast of characters. Print this (from Hashihime again) and keep it handy when you watch. It'll save your sanity during the first few shows. Just about everybody on this page advances the plot in some way, so it behooves you to get to know them all. Don't stand on your first impressions of any character - they're all deeper than the initial impression suggests (yes, including Floe).
  
• The world's name is Daikuuriku, which translates as something like 'Land of Great Skies.' It is in a binary star system.
  
• People on Daikuuriku are all born female. As teenagers they choose (or have chosen) a permanent sex. The process of becoming male, if necessary, takes some years to complete. If this sounds farfetched to you, I'll note that there are a number of vertibrate species on Earth that do exactly this.
  
• Our principal characters are all citizens of the nation of Simulacrum, which is a theocracy.
• Simulacrum is at war with all of its neighbors. We don't know how many neighbor states there are, but the two that matter are:
• The Argentum Archipelago, (Latin: 'silver') which is in the midst of a coal- and oil- fired industrial revolution (think Edwardian Britain), and appears to be either centralized communist, a monarchy, or a dictatorship with limited personal rights
  
• The Plumbum Highlands, (Latin: 'lead') which is an impoverished mountain nation
• Simulacrum appears to be feudal and agrarian. It has no heavy industry and is not doing well fighting the artillery, tanks and aircraft of Argentum.
• The Theocracy of Simulacrum worships the deity Tempus Spatium, (Latin: 'time' 'space') which is apparently responsible for setting people's permanent sex, among other things. There is no evidence presented of anybody in Simulacrum not worshiping Tempus Spatium, and no evidence of religious repression, either.
  
• Along with services held in temples, in which wings and stained glass figure prominently, Tempus Spatium is worshipped by performing certain ritual aerobatic maneuvers called ri maajon with aircraft called simoun. When the simoun perform a ri maajon, they leave a sparkling silver trail in the sky.
  
• different ri maajon have different functions. Some are diplomatic or ritual, some have a destructive effect. A number of ri maajon are documented in ancient writings, but only a few of them are fully understood.
  
• Simoun are regarded as holy artifacts. They can only be operated by pairs of girls who have not yet chosen a permanent sex. These operators are addressed as miko-sama (translates as something like 'honored temple maiden') by ordinary citizens of Simulacrum, and as sybillae (singular: sybilla (Greek: 'prophetess')) by themselves and the theocracy.
  
• Simoun do not use propellers, airfoils, or jet engines. They fly by virtue of two helical motors and are, apparently, moved by the direct blessing of Tempus Spatium.
• Simoun are capable of performing maneuvres that would be impossible for any aircraft that can or forseeably could be built on earth. Quite a feat for a pre-industrial agrarian society.
  
• There are also trainer aircraft called Simile Simoun (or just Simile) which are powered by one helical motor. They are not regarded as anything special, and can be flown by anyone with sufficient training.
• There is a cadet system for training young women in the practical and theological ways of being a sybilla. It appears that many are called, but few are chosen. Cadets are easy to spot because they wear a distinctive white-and-blue uniform, are younger, and are often attending sybillae.
• Because simoun are so maneuverable, and because they can perform destructive ri maajon, the Simulacrum government has been using them to fight the war with Argentum. Since simoun are holy items, and their pilots are preistesses, there are profoundly mixed feelings about this move in many quarters.
  
• Sybillae are organized into a chor (latin: 'choir'). A chor at full strength has 12 members and six simoun, and is capable of performing the most complex ri maajon known. They are normally based at the Simulacrum Grand Temple, but have been relocated onto various helical motor powered airships acting as aircraft carriers.
• The sybillae who are most of the show's characters are all members of Chor Tempest (Latin: Choir of the Storm). Chor Tempest is based with two other chors on the former luxury liner Arcus Prima (Latin: 'first ship') at the start of the show.

One last thing - as I said, I sort of got the show wrong on initial viewing. I won't spoil it with excessive detail, but will point out that you should pay attention to what the populace expects of the sybillae, and what are the effects of having them around. You won't learn much about either of these until about halfway through the series, but they figure prominently in understanding what the show is really about.

That's it. Anything more would spoil the fun. Enjoy.

Fansubs vs. Commercial Subs, and Common Errors of Fansubbers and Scanslators

...and why commercial distro companies are doing a bad job of competing. To be fair, it's always hard to compete with people who do something for free out of love of the product, which is why Microsoft is so terrified by Linux (frankly, having produced a crapoplex like Vista, they should be terrified). It's also probably a lot of why fansubs/fan scanslations keep circulating long after the commercial subs/scans are out there, even if the commercial ones have been ripped off as well.

Put simply, fansubs are usually better. Here are my comments about it when psygremlin at Mangaforums asked about mangled fansubs. I honestly couldn't think of any I'd seen in recent memory that really butchered the dialog. Scanslations, yes, but not fansubs.

I know a little Japanese. I try to learn a little more every day. One easy way to do this is by osmosis from subbed anime. Here's what I've decided about subs:

1) Commercial subs are, at best, as good as average fansubs. Most of the time, they're worse. If you're really unlucky, they used the dub script for the subs, and so you have mangled meaning both from translation errors and from the dub director's edits to retime to mouth motion. If you're doubleplus-unlucky, you get something like the Disney sub track for Kiki's Delivery Service, which includes lots of annoying patter that doesn't even exist on the Japanese voice track and whose only purpose seems to be to distract from the beautiful pictures on the screen. (insert generic I-hate-Michael-Eisner rant here).

2) Fansubs (and manga scanslations) sometimes suffer because the source material for translation isn't a Japanese soundtrack, but a commercial or pirate Chinese or Korean dub or sub track. Nothing like two layers of translation to ruin your day. The problem, simply put, is that there are a lot more people who can, and choose to, translate Chinese or Korean into English than can translate Japanese.

3) Fansubs, most of the time, are labors of love, and fansubbers take them seriously. This may result in slow release schedules, but usually means good product. Generally speaking, the more widely popular the content, (consider Welcome to the NHK versus Slayers), the more care is taken in translation. Likewise, standards have gone up over the years. I have yet to find good subs of the Captain Harlock series, and the subs of Devil Hunter Yohko are pretty weak as well, but the average sub of last season's stuff is generally pretty good. I'm grateful there are groups out there like Central Anime who are currently doing a great job subbing stuff from my childhood like the Yamato series. (You guys rock!).

Likewise, there's talk now (mostly due to the strong underground fan support) of releasing a licensed R1 DVD set of Simoun. English-speaking Simoun fans are of two minds on this: On the upside, we'd get direct-to-DVD video quality. On the downside, it's unlikely at best that the subs that shipped on the DVD would be as careful, nuanced, and generally good as the ones done by Simoun-Fans (you guys rock, too!). So I guess I'd end up ripping the R1 DVDs to computer, building subs in from the Simoun-Fans subs, and then burning new viewing copies. Please, Simoun DVD people - if you're reading this - just use the Simoun-Fans subs - they'd license them for free I'm certain.

4) Fansubs, at their best are so full of otaku goodness that there's no way that a business would dare release shrink-wrapped DVDs with their content. Consider the detail in the Solar subs of Honey and Clover, where literally any piece of readable text in the frame is translated in a matching font. Sure, it takes three rewinds to read it all, but who cares? It's great, and adds a lot of meaning and depth to the scene. Oh, and yes, I did catch them in one translation error in all 41 (I think?) episodes of H&C they subbed, but it was minor. Careful sub work like this or Oyasumi's work on Welcome to the NHK (which translates the ads on the trains in Tokyo) just doesn't happen if somebody has to make a living from it. (You guys rock, too!)

Frankly, I've read a lot more creaky manga scanslations that creaky anime subs. Some of the chapters of Fruits Basket I have require considerable mental editing before a coherent English sentence emerges. Chobits was another one that I feel like deserves a best-possible scanslation and hasn't had one.

Originally Posted by psygremlin

I agree with the comments above. My intention wasn't to disparage the translators (who do a sterling effort!) but more to see if there are any classic examples of Engrish that crop up from time to time. Funnily enough, I've found the translations in scanlations to be better in some cases than in the licenced mangas - the latter often seem to suffer from mild censorship (*grumble*) that does then lose something in translation.

More often than not, I would say it's not Engrish you get as much as hybrid grammar. For instance, the Japanese equivalent of an indefinite third-person pronoun is "ano hito." This translates literally as "that person." Sure enough, you see "that person" a lot in scanslated manga, and it's often used as an indefinite, rather than a reference to a particular person. English, of course, has a perfectly good indefinite third-person pronoun as well - "one." Example: "One should be neither a debtor nor a lender." It's sexless (remember, words have gender, people have sex, and personal pronouns refer to people), and is therefore a perfect synonym.

Most of the time when 'ano hito' is used in an indefinite sense, 'one' is the only grammatically correct and logically consistent translation. But nobody ever seems to use it.

A lot of times I'll see someone's sentence stretch across two bubbles, and the grammar won't make good sense in English, because predicate phrases and verbs usually need to be switched around. This is a case of translating the bubbles correctly, but not the sentence.

And then there are sound effects. Some, like the 'gacha' a sliding door makes opening or closing are great and should be left alone or just rendered in the roman alphabet. I've actually gotten used to doki doki and dokun for heartbeats (in either katakana or romaji), and never have liked translations to 'ba-dum' or 'thump' because neither is specifically an onomatopoeia that only a heart makes like 'doki doki' is, and it can sometimes confuse the reader instead of explaining something.

Another area of complaint: Japanese uses a number of ritual set phrases. These are always the same, and carry a certain formality simply because they're rituals. Accordingly, they logically should be translated the same, and in a way that makes sense. 'Hajimemashite' generally does OK ('nice to/pleased to meet you'), but 'yoroshiku onegai shimasu' is frankly difficult to literally translate into English, because we don't use such formalisms in English any more. Perhaps the closest real English phrase would be something like "Hail and well met," or "May the sun shine upon the hour of our meeting." but they're both medieval. It'd be nice to see these used in a sword-and-sandals manga, though, since they're usually set in Japan's feudal period - using feudal English would be a good fit. Perhaps something like 'I hope we'll be friends' might not be out of place most of the time.

A common mistake is with 'onegai shimasu' and its variants. This phrase is usually translated as 'please.' But a bunch of different words and phrases can be translated into 'please,' and don't mean the same thing. 'Onegai shimasu' has overtones of humbly beseeching (it's what you say at the shrine when praying for something from a god). Just translating it as 'please' often isn't strong enough.

A lot of times its these ritual phrases that trip up translators who aren't native speakers of Japanese. They get mistakenly literally translated, so unless the reader knows that it's a ritual phrase, he don't understand that there's probably more gravity and formality to the situation than the literal meaning of the words suggests. The phrases used for "lets go steady/let's get engaged" are frequent victims.

A last example is poor modeling of degrees of completeness and politeness. You've probably noticed that girls generally say 'gomen nasai' when they are making heartfelt apologies. Guys, being in a more dominant position in society, generally get by with a bowed head and 'gomen...' A 'gomen...' from a girl means she either is not as worried about appeasing the recipient of the apology or she doesn't take the offense all that seriously. Frequently, the translators will miss one or the other case. A guy actually saying all of 'gomen nasai' while bowing is really profoundly apologizing (sometimes in a comic over-the-top way). A female needing the same degree of apology would probably have to raise her voice, repeat it several times, or abase herself to get the same level of intensity. Insults work the same way...

So that's the sort of thing I see most often wrong with fan translations. All of this said, they're still generally drastically better than some of the evil things that commercial firms have done to manga and anime to supposedly dumb down/broaden appeal to the western market. You know, if you take all the seasoning out of something, it becomes bland, and nobody likes bland. Tokyopop's earlier efforts on Fruits Basket (de-pervifying Shigure, among other things) as pointed out by Sephiroth's Samurai Girl (hard working translator) are a great example why I won't be buying the Tokyopop tanks of Furuba ever.

May 07 - What's On My Mind Right Now

Just a quick update because I'm in the middle of a big post on character archetypes and I don't know when it'll be done. Anime and Manga reading has contracted some as the weather has improved and Real Life (tm) has intervened.

Anime first:

We're four shows into the most recent adaptation (13 episode series) of Takahashi's Mermaid Saga (titled Mermaid Forest). It's quite faithful to the manga, and to the earlier OVAs, and milady generally likes it. I've always liked this story best of Takahashi's work (but haven't yet read Maison Ikkoku, so it's possible my opinion will change). My one complaint so far is that while there's gore and violence as there should be, I'm distinctly missing Yuta's melancholy. Likewise, Mana's character seems to have lost some genki somewhere along the way. The OVAs had a genki (and younger-looking) Mana playing against a melancholy (but cheered by Mana) Yuta, and it worked pretty well. We'll see.

Hataraki Man has been on hiatus because milady has been requesting Simoun every night. I must admit that this development pleases me. The last Hataraki Man we saw featured Hiro's masseuse and dealt with themes of compromise with corporate goals while still managing to have a sense of worth and accomplishment. I rather liked it. As I've said before, I think we in the west suffer from not getting more workaday anime and manga here. The Japanese spend a lot of their lives at work, and their fiction that touches on this is usually worth attending. That said, Simoun is just plain deeper and more complex.

Before e-chan goes to bed we often give him some anime for a half-hour or so. Since we haven't started Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2 yet, he's been getting Binchou-tan. He loves it. I like it. Even milady, who is a hardened cynic where kawaii is concerned is affected. This show may just be the ultimate weapon of chibi-kawaii. Drop it on an al-qaeda hideout and listen to the simultaneous 'awwwww!' (or whatever they say in Arabic).

And that leads us to the meat and drink of evening anime lately: Simoun. I'm probably going to burn some more electrons on this later, but we're over halfway through the show now, and I have to say that I'm siding with the rabid fans on this one. That said, it's like a shinkansen - the pace gets fast and furious, but it needs a few kilometers of straight track to really get moving.

One thing that milady noticed that hurts the momentum early on is the show length. She commented that the shows seem to come in pairs. I agree. We started watching two a night, and it flows a lot better. The plotting suggests that this was meant to be 13 one-hour shows instead of 26 half-hour shows. If you watch the first two hours of Simoun in two sittings instead of four, everything makes sense a lot faster, less forgetting happens, you learn the cast faster, and you get into the real meat of the plot faster. All good. It also makes Neviril seem like a lot less of a whiner.

By this metric, the plot really starts doing stuff during hour three, and you probably are going to be surprised by your first plot development around hour four.

Oh well, if the only slot they could get was a season of 1/2 hour showtimes, I'm still profoundly glad they made it.

Another thing that hurts the early shows: it has a Fruits Basket problem. By which I mean that there's a large cast of characters, they all have distinct personalities (good character design - they're all visually distinct, and are credible as people), and they all advance the plot in their own ways, so it behooves you to pay attention to them all. Yes, the guys in the hats, too. This means you're going to be confusing people for a while. Don't worry too much about it - as long as you pay attention, you'll have everybody straight in your head by the time it becomes really important to understand who's motivated by what. I'll warn you of this, though: Download and print this spoiler-free character list (from Hashime's blog) for reference in the first few eps. It'll make your life better. Also: stay away from the wikipedia article which is pure spoilers, and will reduce your viewing pleasure. Once you're about six eps in, you can check out this amusing Simoun Relationship Chart, from Kurogane's Blog. I may be sounding fanboyish here, but I think I'm in good company...

Good thing: They don't waste recap time. There's a little recap when they jump right back into the plot, but it usually contains a little new dialog along with the old, and maybe a reverse-angle shot (often with useful information in it) of the conversation you saw at the end of the last show. It's a great idea, and it works well at keeping you glued to the screen even though you just saw that conversation.

Another good thing: The soundtrack. I like the OP song OK, (but wish they'd kept the mournful a-capella sound instead of going with the drum-machine overlay), and like the ED song a little better (milady likes it less). The actual soundtrack music (all composed specifically for the show) is a wonderfully eclectic mix of orchestral music, dance music (including a very tasty tango), some synth work, and even a couple of pretty 'traditional' tunes (one a hymn, one a lullaby sung by Rodoreamon). It's just all so good. Sahashi's work is as good as any I've heard in anime for any sized screen (and that's high praise from a music snob like me).

We watched the, um, 'trip to the ruins' show (ep 17 and 18) last night (he said, carefully avoiding spoilers), and I'm here to tell you that I was honestly surprised by two plot developments in that 46 minutes of TV. I don't remember the last time that anything on TV really surprised me - thought I'd seen every 'creative' plot twist that had been tried. Heh. Y'all can keep Lost. I'll stick with Simoun, thanks.

It's going so fast and furious right now that I think the wheels are about to come off. But then I thought the wheels were going to come off at ep 10, and again at ep 14, and the train just kept going faster. It's masterful plotting. Now I'm wondering how they're going to wrap it all up neatly in the remaining four hours (which are actually about 46 minutes each).

My greatest sadness is that it's only 26 episodes. My greatest fear is that they'll try to do a sequel and ruin it. I think it's like Serial Experiments Lain in (only) one way - it is about something, and when it finishes talking about that something, it will be done and will exist as a perfect thing in itself.

Manga:

Pretty short list right now - I've been reading Ai Kora/Love Collage (by Inoue, who did Midori no Hibi, which remains my all-time-favorite shounen romance). Ai Kora isn't as good, frankly, but it's not terrible, either, and I'm hoping that he has an idea how to wrap it up neatly when the time comes. Right now (I've just finished vol 4) we're kind of stuck in character non-development limbo, but there are signs that this might change. I'll say this - Inoue-sensee is willing to do anything to get a laugh, and I still like his page design, plotting, and character design as much as ever.

His and hers bedtime reading is still Fruits Basket. Now that we've (finally) introduced all the juunishi, the plot is (finally) pleasantly humming along. We're into Tooru's second year in HS, and this is when all the fun starts to happen. Probably the last big plot hurdle is developing the student council characters, but these are vital to Yuki's plot arc, so I'm trying to keep milady from getting too annoyed at having yet more characters show up to be distinguished from each other. I've done a great job concealing the crucial spoiler about Akito from milady, so I hope it'll bop her right between the eyes just like it did me when I read the manga. She has developed an appropriate loathing for him, so all's going well so far. I have not yet read the last chapter (Sephie published it) but I have a pretty good idea where it is going, since I read through about chapter 128. Oh, and BTW, it appears that Tokyopop rethought their butchery of the US release and hired new translation staff for the manga. So the last few volumes should be good - just all the earlier ones will suck. Sadly another case where fan scanslation is better than commercial scanslation.

I did read the last two chapters of Kare Kano. Ha! the gag in the last chapter got an actual laugh out of me. Completely in character and exactly the sort of puckish humor a mature Yukinon would pull on Arima. I still found myself completely unmoved by the whole pop band story arc, and regarded it as being sillier and more marginal at +16 years than it was originally. Oh, and does this mean that love is fated, or just that Asaba was always a latent lolicon? Oh well, after the whole Maho-and-her-dentist plot, we know that Tsuda-sensee doesn't have problems with playing ball if there's any grass on the field at all. I can't say that anything surprised me, but it was a pleasant ride. Overall, Kare Kano gets a B+, which ain't bad for a shoujo romance manga that runs over 100 chapters. I'd give Furuba a B by comparison, mostly because the art and page layout aren't as good, but also because the character development isn't as detailed as in Kare Kano.

Other stuff in the can: Got hold of the Japanese raws for Chobits finally, so can at last check out some translation questions I had. Re-read Ai-Ren. Got teary-eyed again. I have some one-shots in the can suggested by smart people over at mangaforums. Maybe this weekend.

[post-weekend update]

I read up through the currently-translated chapter of Ai Kora (no big changes, except that we now know how many parts Hachibe can obsess over thanks to a diagram of his brain) and we watched up through ep 22 of Simoun, which finally had its first schmaltzy moment, but was bearable. I think I see where the big arc is going now, and I suspect that the plotting-ignorant fanboys/fangirls generally don't like it at this point, but it's necessary to slow the train down before it pulls into the station. Of course, there may be another huge plot twist yet (I'd write one in, and I see a couple of possible ones). I think Checkov's gun is still hanging on the wall from about ep 6 (in the form of something that used to belong to Aaeru's Oji-chan), and I suspect that it's about to be taken off the wall.

The bulk of Sunday's post-yard-work TV watching was the Elsa arc in Gunslinger Girl. I admired the job they did with it. That manga chapter brought tears to my eyes and I was both dreading and looking forward to seeing it in the anime. Apparently I wasn't the only one so affected - the Anime production staff did a beautiful job on it and stretched it into a three-episode arc. Milady kept justifiably admiring the scenery. Among other things, the anime is a fine tourism advertisement for Italy both urban and rural. Certainly Sicily never appealed to me as strongly as a destination before Giuseppe and Henrietta visited it, even with the purse-snatching scooter bandit. I'm sad to say I was completely oblivious to the "Roman Holiday" references in the earlier Henrietta episode, and only twigged to them when I read it in a blog entry somewhere.

I felt like the plotting and pacing on the whole arc was pretty close to perfect. Certainly the payoff scene (which I was dreading, and stone-facedly refused to spoil in spite of all of Milady's questions and conjectures) had all the emotional freight of the manga. It sparked an interesting conversation between milady and me about Giuse's burden because of the the metric ton of emotional anvils that 'Etta dropped on his shoulders when she smilingly uttered her "but I wouldn't do that because you treat me so well!" line.

I twitched and shuddered at the thought of being Giuseppe. He's simply never allowed to have a bad day around Henrietta - he's the totality of her universe, and her happy little applecart stays upright every day only because he's nice to her. Rico is happy to be alive and whole, Triela wants a supportive friend more than an obsessive onii-chan. Henrietta, however, is incapable of being happy unless she thinks Giuse is pleased with her. And we see just what are the consequences of an unhappy Henrietta in Elsa's story. The episode works even better because they immediately preceded this scene with the conversation between 'Etta and the female section 1 agent about how being a little girl cyborg assassin just isn't 'normal.'

Milady had a...less cheerful childhood than mine. She simply can't imagine why anybody would sign up for Giuse's job with its inevitable painful emotional freight. My response was obvious (to me) both because I'd read the manga (which includes Giuse's back-story) and because I think I'm more than a little like his character: "Because you know that somebody's going to do it, and probably wouldn't do it as well (as compassionately, in this case) as you could. These girls have such a terrible, brief existence that there's a moral imperative to palliate it as much as one can." She completed my sentence for me (some days, I think she really does understand me). And then said that she just doesn't emotionally understand noblesse oblige, which is how she defined my reaction.

Behold the power of good anime made from good manga. It causes people whose brains have not yet been rotted by US network TV pablum to have interesting conversations about relevant topics. How different might the current Battlestar Galactica have turned out if the writing staff had been forced to sit down and watch Gunslinger Girl instead of Desperate Housewives, or whatever dreck caused them to come up with season 3.