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.

Manga Markets and Genres defined, or how not to confuse Seinen and Sword-and-Sandals

I've found myself answering this question repeatedly in different places, so that must mean it needs a proper treatment.

Here are the four major (and two minor) markets of readers for which manga are written:

Shounen
Shoujo
Seinen
Josei
Yaoi
Yuri


And here are some of the genres:

Magical Girlfriend
Magical Girl
Harem Comedy
Historical Adventure
Slice of Life
Romance
Comedy
Sports
Science Fiction
Fantasy
Giant Mecha
Sword and Sandals (my term, from hollywood movie genres. Maybe it should be 'katana and geta?')


Note that these two groups don't look anything alike. It behooves you not to confuse them.

OK, so I've thrown out these words, now I'll define them. First some background: The manga market in Japan is huge. Everybody in Japan reads manga of some kind or other, even if it's only Azumanga Daioh (vaguely analogous to Peanuts in its heyday) or Tonari no Yamada-kun (which is kind of the Japanese Blondie). Because there's so much money to be made in manga, there are a lot of manga out there, and it's a big business. Manga are published in all kinds of magazines, from newspapery rags all the way up to slick, fat monthlies like Kodansha's Afternoon.

Because so many manga are published, categories (based upon the demographics that read a particular magazine - their markets, if you will) have arisen. There are four big markets defined (five if we count small children):

Shounen Means "young men," refers to male readers between about 10 and 17 years old.
Shoujo Means "young women," refers to girls the same age as shounen above
Seinen Means "mature men," refers to readers 18+.
Josei Means "mature women," as above.

There are also some marginalized markets that nonetheless get magazines and (lots of) doujinshi printings:

Shounen-ai is male-male romance stories (think shoujo romance with all guys)
Yaoi = male homosexual stories
Yuri = female homosexual stories

Differences: If it's meant for underage readers, it'll be short on nudity, short on adult themes, and (if you're looking at the Japanese original) there will be teeny-tiny 'helper hiragana' beside the kanji (Chinese characters) that much of Japanese writing uses, because school kids haven't really learned all the standard kanji until they hit age 15 or so.

I include shounen-ai, yaoi and yuri under markets and not genres because they seem to be in their own 'mauve ghetto' just as in the west, are written for distinct readerships, and don't much cross over into the mainstream, although the lines are definitely starting to blur, especially with more anime being derived from (more thematically complex) light novels instead of manga. Simoun and Strawberry Panic are two examples of non-marginal anime that definitely have some yuri going on in them. Shounen-ai and Yaoi, by comparison, still seem to be relatively marginalized except as a source of humor.

How to tell what it is if you don't already know:

Shounen: usually has adolescent male hero, friendly, possibly romantic but not sexual opposite-sex relationships, mild fan-service, action but not gore, and plots that would appeal to a boy in junior high - lots of aliens, espers, time travelers, strange monsters, and saving the world, or at least winning the big game and getting noticed by the desired girl because of it. Girls (and usually adult women) will be unusually busty for their age and (these days) beyond the realm of anatomical possibility. There are also often female character archetypes like meganekko (glasses girl), klutzy girl, brash girl (uses boku), etc. Bishounen (pretty-boy) character designs never occur in shounen or seinen manga except as a source of humor (cf the "Seiji in Kouta-Vision" scene in Midori no Hibi).

Examples: Naruto, Midori no Hibi, Great Teacher Onizuka, Eyeshield 21, Ruroni Kenshin.

Shoujo: Hearts and flowers. Adolescent female heroine. Heroine often chibi (unusually small even for a Japanese schoolgirl) Real, hardcore shoujo usually involves lots of romantic yearning and melodramatic situations (dead/absent parents, etc.) Nothing even vaguely resembling fanservice; girls are drawn as flat-chested as real Japanese girls are. If you see a girl in a swimsuit, it's arranged like a fashion show, rather than eye candy. Males are often drawn unrealistically 'pretty' (bishounen, as in Fruits Basket). Heroine is usually striving for some unattainable standard of goodness/moral perfection often in hopes that if she tries just a little harder Mr. Right will notice her/want to be romantically involved with her, or she'll fix everybody's emotional problems, or some combination of the two. Often spends ink on the relationships between heroine and her posse of female friends. Even when Shoujo wanders into more adult themes, lots has to happen offstage to keep things G rated, so we tend to hear about violence and sex rather than see them.

Examples: Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou, Fruits Basket, Bokura ga Ita, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Alice 19th, Fushigi Yuugi, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Jigoku Shoujo

Seinen: Hard to define because so broad a classification. Some seinen manga are basically shounen manga with more violence/blood and gore/heavy fanservice/sex. These are meant to appeal to high-school and older males who want more of that Drifting Classroom feeling in an R-rated package.

Other seinen manga are basically adult light novels with pictures. The most thematically complex seinen manga fall into this category: things like Ai-Ren. Still others are simple escapism (usually in the slice-of-life or school life genres), because being a salaryman in Japan is hard and exhausting, and there's a steady market for simple, comforting stories that soothe. Most of the genres available in shounen are also done in seinen manga, although some are much rarer - sports manga, for instance.

By comparison, comedy romance and romance manga seem to be commoner as seinen manga than shounen manga (though I suspect they draw a certain amount of older nominally-shounen readers). Likewise, the slice-of-life category doesn't much exist as shounen (with the exception of general-interest manga like Today in Class 5-2 and Azumanga Daioh).

Real hardcore slice-of-life like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou seems to be a uniquely seinen thing. Harem romance comedies tend to have a different spin, with the male lead having sexual relationships with more than one of his female companions, as in Honeymoon Salad. Generally, if it's R rated for sex, or sex forms a significant plot element, or there's gory violence, or lots of bare busts, it's probably seinen. If it is strangely plot-free and is slice-of-life, it's probably seinen.

The last seinen category that comes to mind is wistful nostalgia. You have something like a magical girl story but with deliberate anachronistic touches which is designed to appeal to older family men who want a simple story with happy endings that reminds them of the notionally simpler and happier days of their youth. Things like Kamichu! and Binchou-tan fall in this category.

Examples of seinen: Honeymoon Salad, Futari Ecchi, Vagabond, Ghost in the Shell, Kamichu!, Onegai Teacher, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.

Josei: Shoujo aged up for women. Most often grown-up shoujo stories (romances like Honey and Clover) along with workaday stories like Hataraki Man. You can spot a josei story pretty easily - there'll usually be at least one flat-chested chibi adult female in the female posse, and these never occur in seinen or shounen stories. Likewise, the shoujo drawing convention of creepy-big round eyes seems to show up in Josei as well. Again, the material looks superficially like what you find in shoujo, but with more adult plot elements and themes. If it's older-themed material, but the women are mostly flat-chested with big round eyes, it's josei. As in shoujo, the focus is on interpersonal dynamics and relationships rather than saving the world, blowing stuff up, or winning the big game.

Examples: Hataraki Man, Honey and Clover, Nodame Cantabile, Gokusen

That said, there is obviously a lot of crossover between josei and seinen. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou could easily be called josei, except that it's published in the largest seinen monthly, and the character designs don't quite fit the standard shoujo/josei model. I think it's pretty obvious that there's a lot of female readership of Afternoon, so the mangaka deliberately avoided alienating the woman reader with a more male-oriented set of character designs. Likewise Hataraki Man, which has a busty female lead. It's josei, but there's supposed to be some crossover appeal to the seinen reader as well. Similarly, Ayu in Honey and Clover has more eye-candy value than she needs to in the shoujo/josei mold. Bishounen designs seem not to occur as often in josei, probably because of the desired market crossover.

Shounen-ai: boys love boys, but don't actually do much about it. Tends to use a lot of bishounen character designs, and has its own iconography involving guys lying on beds of roses, etc.

Yaoi: boys (and men) love boys (and men). See above about shounen-ai, but add in more (ahem) mature content. My understanding is that the biggest consumers (and producers) of shounen-ai and yaoi material in Japan are women.

Yuri: girls/women loving girls/women. Tends to look like shoujo romances, but with all females.

Examples: I don't read this stuff, so know it more by joking mention in mainstream material than anything else. I could go to mangaupdates and look stuff up, but then so can you, and I'm not interested.

I won't spend a lot of time on genres - these should be pretty self-explanatory once you've actually read a few manga. One note worth mentioning: A magical girl story is about a girl (typically under age 15) who has some supernatural power and uses it do to good. A magical girlfriend story is a romance about a guy who gets a girlfriend via some unlikely/impossible/magical means. The girlfriend frequently has magical qualities or abilities. Probably the perfect example is Aa Megama-sami/Ah! My Goddess.

Genres mix and match - you can have a science fiction magical girlfriend romance (Chobits), or a fantasy magical girlfriend romance (Ah My Goddess). Likewise, nearly anything can be highly plotted or not. If it's not highly plotted, it probably qualfies as slice-of-life regardless of its other attributes. So yes, you could have a slice-of-life historical adventure romance-comedy. I can't name one like that, but there are some that need that many compounds to be adequately explained.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Chobits, Video Girl Ai, and Ai-Ren: Four views of artificial people

This is sort of a random-salad post about several manga that have a lot in common, even though they sometimes deal with very different themes: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Chobits, Ai-Ren, and Video Girl Ai. Three of the four could be classified as "magical girlfriend" stories, but both Ai-Ren and Video Girl Ai don't endow the 'girlfriend' with any actual magical/technological supernatural powers. Therefore, I'd have to say that neither really falls in the same category as, say, Ah My Goddess, for example.

No, what they really have in common is artificial people, to use a nice catchall Heinlein term (almost all females in this case - YKK has one artificial male). While exploring the psychology of why androids, etc in manga and anime are so often female might make a good post, I'm not going to do that one today. We'll lay some groundwork first.


Let's start with Video Girl Ai, by Katsura Masakazu which is probably the least complex of the four thematically. VGAi would normally be classified as a magical girlfriend story, but for the minor issue that the only really magical thing about female lead Amano Ai is that she was created in an alternate dimension to be an entertaining and confidence-building short-term romantic/sexual partner for inexperienced males. She's supposed to be relationship training wheels, if you will. But, in the usual nature of these plots, she ends up stuck in the real world, and with more real-world (and exasperating/inconvenient) attributes than the notional yamato nadeshiko (difficult to define in English - the traditional perfect Japanese woman/wife). This pic is from the OVA anime series, which is very well done. Whew: late update. I see that Justin Sevakis over at ANN has just named the OVA a "buried treasure." Boy do I feel old. There was a DVD release, but I've never seen one - I saw it in the fuzzy VHS days. Never heard the dub, although he says it's not bad. As usual, I like my whiskey straight, my coffee and tea black and my anime subbed, thanks.

Katsura's art starts off a little shaky, but improves rapidly through the volumes. I'd say that by the end of VGAi, Katsura is as good as anybody drawing manga today. He went on to do I''s, which looks better but is pretty tepid and not (in my opinion) worth reading. Since it's a shounen romance, there's lots of fanservice. This is from 1989, before character design became standardized with huge amounts of moe, random fan service, stereotypes (meganekko), etc, so the female character designs are within the realm of anatomical possibility, which is something I like. Overall, I give the art a good solid B+, which is way better than it needed to be to get the job done.

It does dip into deeper thematic waters once the obvious love-triangle stuff has been explored. Male lead Yuta has to come to terms with Ai both not being his notional perfect girlfriend and with her being an artificial creation not meant to make a permanent companion. Ai's makers try to 'take her home' on two separate occasions (because she's a 'defective product'), and Yuta has to appeal with logic, emotion, and lots of good old bloody, painful suffering to get her back. All of that said, it's easily the lightest of the four manga I'm discussing today, and makes a good introduction to shounen romances and magical girlfriend stories. Here's my conclusion from a discussion on mangaforums.org about good romance manga:

Video Girl Ai will always have a special place in my manga affections. It was the first manga I ever read with my then-new girlfriend (who is now my wife). She had been exposed to a little anime, but knew nothing of manga. Evening cuddle-and-read-manga sessions quickly became a staple and VGAi was a perfect introduction. If Midori no Hibi had existed then, we would probably have read that instead; as it was, Ai did the job nicely. Katsura is sometimes wantonly cruel to his characters (see Zetman for a harsher example) but I don't think he dared to mess with VGAi too much.

It does end happily, but you might want to stop reading before Katsura trots out his brand extensions. He tries to extend the franchise of the (highly successful) manga by trotting out new lead characters after the Ai/Yuta arc wraps up. It doesn't work. The good news is that Ai and Yuta are left undisturbed, and their plot completes well.


On to Ai-Ren (愛人), which is the one I discovered most recently. Set in the medium-distant, post-apocalyptic future, Ai Ren is definitely not a shounen romance (even though the male lead is a shounen), and I'd have to say it fails qualification as a magical girlfriend story as well. Ai (the female lead) is a genetically engineered human meant for some unknown (probably military) purpose back in the bad old days, and now repurposed before activation to be a source of solace and hospice care giver for a terminally ill patient. Yes, the male lead (Ikuru) is the terminally ill patient. Ai seems to have no special powers (hence my claim that this isn't really a magical girlfriend story), and is doomed to a short lifespan once activated.

Definitely not a light shounen romance, despite the superficial similarities to Video Girl Ai. It originally ran 1999-2002 in Hakusensha's Young Animal, which is Seinen (and also serializes Futari Ecchi and Chocotto Sister). It's sad, of course. It's not, however, depressing. At least I didn't think so. In fact, it's one of the most life-affirming things I've ever read. The real themes are the universality and transcendent nature of love and that life, hope, and renewal spring eternally if only we're smart enough to get out of the way of them.

Character designs are simple but expressive, anatomy is adequately drawn, and the scenery is almost as good as Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (more of this below). It's seinen, so it's pretty casual about nudity, but the casualness is always appropriate in context (the male lead is a teenager, and there's comic intent to his wild takes). The art meets my 'What Makes a Good Manga' requirement of being good enough to not get in the way of telling the story, and more than that we need not ask.

So if you're looking for a sad but life-affirming read that will make you want to hug your loved ones, look no further than Ai-Ren. Available completely scanslated from Solaris-SVU. At least one reader (Eureka, who put me onto the manga) claims it changed his life. Maybe it won't change yours, but it might just help you appreciate it more.

Here's some discussion between Eureka and me at mangaforums.org about Ai-Ren and its comparability to some other mangas involving artificial people:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eureka And Ai-ren is an amazing romance Seinen. I'm glad you're going to read it. Very tragic though...as I'm sure I've already said...it's the only manga to bring me to tears...but it's still THE greatest story of all time, and is mainly romance themed, but with alot of darker stuff in there as well.

I read most of Ai-Ren yesterday. Went home and hugged the wife and offspring more than usual. Finished it up today.

Evening manga reading last night was hurrying toward the conclusion of Chobits (which I'd read years ago but milady hadn't. She'd never seen CLAMP's work, and this struck me as their most-accessible and possibly least-annoying offering. There were some odd resonances for me between Ai-Ren and the themes of devotion and self-sacrifice in more-or-less humans in Chobits.

It may seem strange to say it, but Ai-Ren really felt like the personal side of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou to me. The drawing style isn't dissimilar (that's pretty high praise in itself), and the themes (end of humanity, plot happens by the sea at the end of a disused road), and slice-of-life quality were very reminiscent for me. It wouldn't have seemed strange to me if Director Alpha had been working with the Sensee at the institute.

Meet Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (Translates as "Log of a Yokohama Shopping Trip"). Very seinen - originally published in Kodansha's Afternoon monthly. And, unlike Ai-Ren, completely and utterly devoid of anything you could call fanservice. Here I am singing its praises further along in the compare-and-contrast-with Ai-Ren conversation:

I'll admit it - I'm a YKK fan. I completely understand the huge following the manga had in Japan among exhausted salarymen on their way home after a week of 12 hour workdays.

It's a sort of slice-of-life, plot-less, zen, post-apocalyptic episodic manga starring Hatsuseno Alpha, a type A7M2 robot (actually an android) who lives by herself and runs a cafe at the end of a disused road on a spit of land not terribly far from the mostly-submerged remains of current-day Yokohama. Alpha is an endearing and amusing character, and a bit of an innocent. Her relationships with humans and other robots are the glue that hold the manga together. Above is a screen shot from one of the OVAs done verbatim from the manga. It gets the feel better than anything else I could quickly find.

If you like lush scenery and just looking at pretty pictures, this is a manga for you. There are developments of both situation and character, and at times plot arcs go on for as long as a volume at a time in a loose sort of way, but don't expect to find out lots more detail next week on what happened last week. Chances are, however, that you will learn more about it at some point, but it might be two volumes from now.

Zen and the circle of life form primary themes. In this, it's rather like Ai-Ren. As a person, Alpha is more like the Sensee character in Ai-Ren, both in her position of being much longer-lived than the humans around her, and also in being a child of humanity, but not human. She has her own life and her own path, and while she walks with humans, their path is not really hers.

I think that on one level it can be read as a response to Asimov's "Bicentennial Man." (cf also the painfully bad Robin Williams movie) in which Alpha shows that a robot need not desire to become human to have a happy life, and need not shun humanity to that end either.

If you like the journey more than the arrival, you'll like YKK. If you're always in a hurry to see what happens next chapter, you probably won't like YKK.

It ended last year and is completely scanslated, best by ykk.misago.org and cafealpha.org. There's a torrent floating around of the whole thing, I think. You can read individual chapters at http://ykk.misago.org/. Never licensed in the US - the comic-book fanboys can't stand something with no fanservice, no plot, and no violence. For the rest of us, it's like a quiet cup of tea, and as welcome on busy days. Yes, I'm a fan. I've re-read the whole series twice, and have read some chapters at least five times, just because I picked up at some point and started reading again. It's like that. Enjoy.

And that brings us to Chobits, which I've extensively covered in another blog entry (spoiler at link). Described briefly, it's a seinen magical girlfriend story with an android as the female lead. In this, it sounds a lot like Boku no Marie, but it has a couple of huge differences: First, it was done by CLAMP, which is an all-women manga author collective, so you can rest assured that no female role will be thin-as-cardboard here (they do a fine job with all the male characters as well). Likewise, if you expect that a bunch of women doing a seinen/shounen magical girlfriend comic romance are going to tweak the reader's expectations of the genre, you're right. Second, it jumps straight into the ethics and philosophy of having an android as a loved one. I think it makes an excellent book-end for Asimov's Robot Stories and, in some ways, I think it paints a much more realistic portrait of what existence for a sufficiently heuristic android might entail in some possible futures.

The art is...almost too good in some places. The sample page is male lead Hideki explaining practical capitalism to Chii (she's holding her first paycheck). Yes, Chii generally looks like that. Yes, you should go brush your teeth now before they fall out from the cuteness. Note how easily the narrative flows, how there are no unnecessary words (isn't Hideki's wordless surprise take great?), and how just-plain-good the panel and page design are. This is a typical page which I chose mostly because it has Chii in some detail along with Hideki and no real spoilers. The mechanics are uniformly excellent. Page design and panel design always work well. We're told late in the story that 'Chobi' (plural Chobits) is a word coined by the androids' creator to describe something impossibly cute. Chii pretty much defined the chibi-moe heroine when she appeared in 2001, and I don't think she's been outdone since. There's some fanservice, but it's both contextually appropriate and plot developing. If I were assigning letter grades, for art, I'd give Chobits an honest A - maybe even an A+. This is one of a small list of manga I'd love to see printed on larger paper in an art-book format with marginal annotations, like what Christopher Tolkien has done with the drafts of his father's books.

The more I look at this manga, the more I admire how deliberately it is plotted. Every event that occurs has some specific place in the larger plot, and everything in the plot relates back to the themes of the story. With Chobits, it's best to assume that you're seeing something for a specific reason - even if it seems unrelated to the plot at the moment. Don't worry, it'll all make sense later on, and finding out how and why is part of the fun.

The anime is also well done. Skip the English Dub - Crispin Freeman is totally unconvincing as Hideki the Hokkaido farmboy. The Seyuu who did the part originally is the same guy who did Kyon in Haruhi and Yuuichi in Kanon 2006, and he's a good fit for the part. Tanaka Rie does her usual amazing job with Chii (even after having heard both, it's still hard to believe she plays Hiro in Hataraki Man). It's not exactly the same story as the manga, and discards some of the subtler themes, but overall it does a good job of treating the complexity found in the story given the limitations of family viewing and 26 1/2 hour episodes. I'd recommend reading the manga first, if you want to watch the anime. Your preconceptions from the anime might prevent you from seeing some of the subtexts in the manga, but you won't miss any of the fun in the anime if you've read the manga first.

So there you have it, four stories involving artificial people in four very different situations. They're all worth your time. Enjoy.