Category: Other

The Waking: Anthologies

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The Dreaming v2: I see that volume 2 is up on Amazon.com for pre-orders. It says there that the date it’ll be out is still November 7th, so hopefully that’s the day it WILL actually come out. Volume 1 is still available here, and right now I’m hard pressed to start volume 3. I’m going to do other work until the end of September and then start work on book 3 at the beginning of October. Considering it’s the last volume in the series, it’s taking some work to actually get in the mood to doing it, but that could be because I’m beginning to sketch out the look of the next series I’m doing, which is already fully formed in my head. Details are top secret, ofcourse!

 

On the Subject of Anthologies
There’s been alot of interesting discussion on manga anthologies these past few weeks, with alot of people in the “for” camp. Ofcourse, anybody who reads manga would welcome the idea of an anthology – in Japan, the anthologies are the lifeblood of the industry, and the manga-style of story-telling is more suited for serialisation anyway. Right now there are already anthologies out there, such as the American version of Shonen Jump and also Shoujo Beat, but then these are just English-translated versions of Japanese magazines. If you were to ask for a anthology to showcase non-Japanese, global manga, how difficult would that be?

Apparently quite difficult, because according to alot of people, anthologies have never been commercially viable outside Japan. The Japanese system has been around so long that it revolves around people buying anthologies printed on crappy paper, and then throwing it away to buy takoubans of their favourite stories. When other countries try the same model with Japanese manga, it sells because there is an inbuilt audience who knows they’re getting a tried-and-true Japanese product (with loads of merchandising). But what about trying it with original, untested work? The financial risk can be pretty great, and printing isn’t cheap either.

Which brings me around to the idea of e-anthologies. This is something that makes alot of people cringe, because they would rather hold a crappily printed book in their hands than shell out money for something “ephemereal” that comes attached to a computer. That’s a reasonable complaint, but one that’s a bit unfair, because personally, I believe that e-books are the way of the future. I just think that it won’t catch on with our current level of technology, though things may change in 5-10 year’s time.

 

E-Reading
I just outlined the first reason why people want print anthologies rather than digital ones – nothing beats holding the real book in your hands. But then that’s what the collected takouban are for in Japan – you read your story in the anthologies printed on crap, and then you buy the takouban. No one cares what happens to the intermediate medium afterwards; it is ephemeral and disposable. That is why I think e-anthologies may work in the long run, because anthologies in their nature are not meant to be the final product. It’s just a way of letting people have a taste of something without paying alot of money (or having it take up permanent space in their abode).

However, no one likes to fish out their credit card for a $2.00 online transaction. No one likes being forced to sit infront of their computer terminal to read their fluffy entertainment either. Consumers these days want things on-the-go; they want music on-the-go, and now movies on-the-go. They want to go to their favourite cafe and read their book, which brings us to the biggest hurdles e-commerce has yet to tackle: portability, accessibility and affordability. (The iPod has tackled all these problems, but I’ll talk about that later)

 

The Problem is always Money
Remember when subscription webcomics was meant to help us pay our grocery bills (the ones doing the drawing, that is)? Remember how Paypal was supposed to catch on like a wildfire and make bit-payments easy? Neither happened. Well, Paypal caught on, but not like wildfire, and I have to suffer at least 2 emails a week from scammers pretending to be Paypal. Paypal also keeps demanding I enter my credit card details into my Paypal account (which I’m NOT going to). I thought the whole point of Paypal was so I don’t have to enter my credit card details online. Bottom line: I find Paypal a real pain in the ass at times. It’s great when you’re receiving money, and sucks when you’re paying for something (I have a limit on how much I can pay because of my lack of credit card details).

I know the whole credit card details thing is the reason why alot of people hesistate to shop online. By alot of people, I mean the anecdotal group, namely my extended family. In a group of about 20 people, who shops online at all? One person, me. This is despite everybody else in my extended family having more than 1 credit card. Some use internet banking, but whenever anyone wants to buy anything online, they are either (a)desperate for it, or (b)know that I can buy it for them and they’ll pay me back later. But then these are only the adults, who never tire of the urban legends involving credit card scams. The teenagers don’t have credit cards, and won’t have for a long time, so there goes their chances for online shopping. The end.

 

A Word About Consumer Psychology
I said before that no one likes to sit at a computer terminal reading fluff entertainment. That will probably be true for the rest of eternity, but there is an additional layer of complexity there. There is some kind of psychological difference between having to log onto a site to read something, and downloading something onto your computer. It’s a peculiar feeling of ownership. I know that if I pay money to buy a movie online, I want to download that movie and save it onto my hard drive. I don’t feel comfortable paying $5 to watch it stream onto my screen. Point is, I can download it onto my hard drive, watch it, and never watch it again or delete it. Either of these experiences would mean I watched a movie once for $5, but the second one is much more rewarding.

It’s rewarding for a simple reason – when someone pays money for a piece of entertainment, they expect to OWN it. It doesn’t matter if it’s $5000 or $0.50, it’s the feeling of entitlement. I used to think that it was the feeling of holding something solid in your hands, but digital music has proved me wrong. People are happy to download digital music by the dozen and pay for it, but they DON’T want to stream it from your website if it means paying. People feel that when you buy something, only YOU have the right to destroy your copy of it. I’ll never pay to watch a streaming movie, because I’ll tell you when I’m tired of this movie and never want to see it again. I’m not letting a movie site decide for me when I shouldn’t be able to watch something I paid $5 for. After all, how many DVDs have I bought that I’ve only watched once?

 

Technical Hurdles
Which brings me to the subject of portable E-book readers. These have been around for a while. You just don’t see people using them. That’s not to say they don’t read e-books – my friend Paul read the whole Earthsea series on his pocket PC – it’s just that it never really caught on. There were technical difficulties. Battery life problems. Where the heck do I download e-books again? Where would I BUY an e-book reader anyway? How do I pay for it if I buy an e-book online (please don’t say “credit card”)? Is an e-book reader expensive? Will it be cheaper to just buy books? Will the screen glare make my eyes bleed after several hours? Will there be a lag if I turn the page? Can I view photoes and pictures on it (such a waste if I can’t)? Certainly the holy grail of the e-book reader is also the e-comic reader. Why want something that only displays text? Can it come with a touch screen and a 60MB memory backup as well? And so it goes.

Unless I have a one-stop answer to all these problems, I won’t be interested in an e-book reader. Though if an e-book reader catches on with the public, there is bound to be stiff resistence from the established book industry. Old industries are always resistent to change, much like how the iTunes store for Australia was delayed because music industry moguls fought back. How are they going to make money now, if Australians won’t buy their overpriced CDs? Australians have always been ripped off for any kind of entertainment, so ofcourse they embraced the iTunes store (gamers already order everything from overseas anyway). In the end, there was nothing the music industry could do but go with the flow. But it certainly hasn’t been an easy reality for them to accept.

 

Where the iPod Suceeds
Contrary to popular belief, the iPod succeeded not because of it’s portability, accessibility or affordability (though it is most of these things). The iPod succeeded because it’s cool. It has a sleek, sexy design, and the marketing campaign rode on the late-90s Apple catch-phrase “Be different”. Ofcourse, there are other portable music players out there, but these are considerably less cool. The iPod has the cool factor, and that is enough to make people shell out $400 to get one.

The moral of the story is: it’s not what you’re doing, but how you look while you’re doing it. No one wants a fancy gadget that makes them look like a dork in a public place, no matter how great it is. Does anybody remember Nokia’s disastrous attempt at entering the video gaming market, with the N-Gage? There was a whole website created just to make fun of the idea. Now, if someone wants to design an E-book Reader that takes the world by storm, think about that.

Ofcourse, you presume that people want portable music too, and that’s true as well. My mum wants to get an iPod, because her group of technophobic senior citizens have caught onto the craze too, and she’s figured out how to work the iTunes program on her computer. Because she’s so phobic she won’t even use an ATM machine, it’s a good thing that she can buy $20 iTunes cards from places where she normally shops, like Myers. It’s like magic, or the Octopus Travel card for the Hong Kong public transport system – instead of giving your financial details, you just get an anonymous prepaid card and drop cash on it when you run out. In other words, the e-commerce problem of payment solved in one stroke. If you can get prepaid iTunes cards in Australia, then you can get them anywhere.

Here is a complicated chart demonstrating how the iPod (and iTunes) solved the problem of accessibility, portability and affordability.

 

ipod chart

 

In Conclusion
I’ve gone totally off-track from the original topic, which was whether anthologies of global manga can work, but it’s a worthwhile diversion. If an anthology can be done, and it’s an e-anthology, then these are the factors I would consider paramount in creating your e-commerce scheme. Assuming you want global manga anthologies to become a mass-market thing, where every second person is reading it on the train, then the portable e-reading movement has got to be done hand-in-hand with reading real books as well as comic books (and probably newspaper, magazines and anything else involving words). What I’ve done is pointed out a similar model that worked, and explain why I believe it worked.

The reason why I whipped up this highly-sophisticated iPod chart is because the iPod was indeed successful. That speaks volumes in this day and age of crackpot get-rich internet schemes. In fact, the iPod is probably the first mass-scale, commercial product to harness the accessibility and ubiquity of the internet. They reached out to the masses and actually made money off something that can’t be held in your hands – digital music. This goes against what I’ve always assumed about the Psychology of Consumption – that in order to satisfy a paying customer, you have to give them something tangible in exchange. Digital music (and movies, and podcasts) proved this wrong – in fact, in the mere 10 years of the Internet, we’ve gone from “Check out my 56.6 kbps modem” to “I’ve downloaded 100GB of movies, manga and music onto my computer”. These things don’t happen so quickly because they’re a fad, they happen because that’s the direction society is heading it, like it or not. And if digital music is an indication, there isn’t anything the big money makers can do about it.

 

Animania 2006: I’m going to be attending Animania 2006 at the Sydney Town Hall, though this time I won’t be sitting at the artist’s alley. I can go and have fun for a change! I’m hosting 2 panels, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. Each event runs for an hour at the maximum, and the times for it are:

 

Saturday (30th Sep) 5:30pm:
Love Revisited: Exploring how yaoi and yuri relationships are expressed in Japanese popular entertainment

Sunday (1st Oct) 11:30am:
“Anime, Manga & Internet” discussion forum

Sunday (1st Oct) 12:30pm:
An interview with Queenie Chan

 

The Dreaming: On Girls Reading Shounen…

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I believe I wrote something on this LJ about the topic before, but it’s been a long time and I can’t remember. Maybe it was someone else’s LJ.

The folks at Pseudome posted up an interesting article of Matt Thorn’s. Matt is pretty well known – he’s an associate professor at Kyoto Seika University, and has been studying shoujo manga for over 20 years. He’s an avid fan, and there is no better person to talk to than him about shoujo manga in general, but I was surprised to see him lambast contemporary shoujo manga (or rather, shoujo manga editors) in the way he did.

Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of shoujo manga – I grew up reading and liking my “DragonBall Z”. I didn’t start reading shoujo manga in earnest until I was in my 20s, and by then I was too old for alot of 80s and 90s shoujo; even the critically acclaimed shoujo manga of the past few years. “NANA” bored the bejesus out of me. “Fruit Baskets” was cute and uninteresting. Nodame, from “Nodame Cantabile”, is a talented dimwit. But whether I like the stories or not, it doesn’t change my respect for shoujo as an institute. Nowhere else in the world would you find a cultural phenomenon as dedicated to women’s entertainment as shoujo manga and it’s offshoots. So I felt genuine sadness when I heard the news of “Margaret”, one of the oldest shoujo magazines around, struggling with low sales and cancellations.

This is a matter of grave concern. Weekly and biweekly magazines are the life-blood of the manga industry – how well they sell and what stories they carry can influence the direction of the industry. Most manga magazines have suffered a drop in sales since the early 90s, including front-runner “Shounen Jump”, but then shounen magazines have always outsold shoujo magazines. “Shounen Jump” may not sell 6 million copies anymore, but it’s not losing any readers. Instead, they’ve been gaining readers, mostly female. This isn’t a big surprise to someone who grew up reading shounen, but from the sales of the shoujo magazines, it seems that girls are either abandoning them to read shounen, or abandoning manga altogether. This has been happening for quite a while, and it’s the cause for alot of debate. We all know shounen is unapologetically aimed at boys, just like shoujo is unapologetically aimed at girls. Why is it that shounen is gaining girl readers, whereas shoujo hardly ever attracts male readers.

I have several theories for that, and one of them is that shounen is no longer unapologetically aimed at boys. It hasn’t been aimed purely at boys for a long time, and you can clearly see the delineations should you compare a 70s “Shounen Jump” with a contemporary one. The drawing styles have completely changed, for one. No more thick-eyebrows gekiga, rough edged art. There are less simpering, idiotic female characters. There is often romance, and large ensemble casts. And most of all, there are alot of pretty boys – bishounen and biseinen that only used to be found in shoujo. In other worlds, shounen manga has consciously become more gender-neutral in its appeal, by appropriating what used to make shoujo manga appealing to girls. If you were a girl and you weren’t all that INTO girly-romance, you’re just as likely to read shounen manga with cute male leads than you would read shoujo. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the shounen audience. Shoujo to this day has not done anything to attract a male audience, but if it tries, we’ll all end up with this unisex of an androgynous teen manga look.

The second reason for the rise of the female shounen readership may be the yaoi doujinshi subculture. Girls like to draw dishy young men in bed with other dishy young men, and the shounen magazines offer a very good selection of dishy young men for this purpose. “Prince of Tennis” comes to mind – it’s definately a shounen sports manga, but take one look at the (many) male characters in it, and you know the yaoi fans have descended on this title long ago. This is good enough reason for the yaoi fans to want to read “Prince of Tennis”, no matter how bad it is, and I guess some of this fuels the shounen magazine readerships. Certainly, professionally-drawn “Boys Love” has also been a sizeable part of the shoujo market since the 90s, but I don’t think it has much to do with the doujinshi market. As far as I can tell, girls buy BL manga, but they don’t draw doujinshi based on them. In fact, the most popular doujinshi tend to be based on existing shounen series.

Some people suggested the reason for this is because shounen manga often has larger casts than shoujo. This can’t possibly be true, because while “Prince of Tennis” has a large ensemble casts, other targets of yaoi artists have very small male casts. I take some recent Taiwanese yaoi doujinshi as an example. Taiwanese doujinshi has the advantage of being very attuned to what the Japanese doujinshi market is doing, and so they act accordingly. Thanks to Poshua bringing stacks of Taiwanese yaoi doujinshi into the workplace, it’s now possible to figure out a timeline for the popularly of certain shounen series. A few years ago, it was “Harry Potter” (yaoi doujinshi artists don’t necessarily work from manga, and they also do original work). Then came a huge wave of “Prince of Tennis”, and when everyone got bored with that, along came a stack of “Full Metal Alchemist”. Currently, the yaoi of the month is “Death Note” (or was, 2 months ago). The last two are particularly telling. “FMA” has only a hand-full of bishounen, a fraction of “Prince of Tennis”, while “Death Note” has only TWO yaoi-worthy males (and one of them looks like a freak). The fact that there are endless scenes of these same two guys in sexual situations shows that yaoi doujinshi artists aren’t attracted to shounen because of ensemble casts. The size of the cast has no bearing on who they choose to put into bed together. The qualities required seem to be based mostly on popularity in general society.

So does that spell doom for shoujo? Ofcourse not. As Matt said in his article, shoujo may currently be crippled by bad stories and formula plots, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. In the 70s, shoujo was mainly know for it’s innovation and its willingness to push boundaries – now, it just needs another dose of reactionary politics. Who knows what the future may hold? As Matt said, young Japanese are now more politically-minded than their parent’s generation, and if the editors know how to capitalise on that, they may win back their old readership. Only time will tell. I, for one, don’t want to see the market merge into something androgynous just to appeal to both sexes. There are advantages to appealing to only one gender, and you’re able to do things that you won’t if you were working in a mixed environment. And the existence of shoujo in the first place proves you can make money out of it too.

The Waking: Supanova Convention

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Supanova Convention: This is, what, the fourth convention in a row? I don’t remember what it’s like to have a free weekend anymore, even though it’s only been a month. But then Supanova is the big one, a popular culture convention that seems to have been taken over by anime a great deal in the past few years.

That said, I’m on yet ANOTHER panel for Supanova. And why not? It’s another great opportunity to talk about my work. For the details of my panel, it’s:
Supanova: Wharf 8, 53-59 Hickson Rd, Sydney
Area: Shin Tokyo Anime Area
Time: Saturday 15th October, 4:30 pm
About: The Dreaming!! This time, I think I ought to talk some more about the OEL phenomenon and what TOKYOPOP is aiming to do with the concept.

 

Animania: I had a good time at Animania, and I can say that I’m officially the Iron Artist of Animania 2005!!! Yes, I won the Iron Artist contest… almost by default. Truth is, the competition was spread over 2 days. Day 1 was the prelims, while Day 2 was the finals. Unfortunately, the winners of Day 1 (Iron Artist Sid and Challenger Naomi) were both busy on Day 2 – so it ended up being that the only people available to duke it out on Day 2 was Challenger Chuck and… me. I got a bottle of correction fluid out of it, and it was fun enough. I thought I’d be really nervous, but it turned out I had no trouble doodling on a stage infront of a big crowd with a guy poking a camera in my face. I have to put a word in for Chuck though – he was 16, and he handled the situation remarkably well. If I were 16, I would have been running off the stage instead of sitting there drawing confidently.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take many pictures of Animania, because I was involved in so many events. I had a chain of events running one right another, and frankly I was flat out tired by the time I got to the drawing panel. Iron Artist, immediately followed by the self-publishing panel, and then immediately followed by the Drawing Panel, which I hosted. God knows why I didn’t use the drawing panel to plug my book more – because there was a fair amount of interest in it. I guess I was so tired it didn’t occur to me to do so. I liked how I handled it too – I field questions from the crowd on what they wanted to draw, and demonstrated how to do it and told them what to look out for. However, at the same time, I was so tired I couldn’t even HEAR properly. I mean, I mistook “bishes” for “bitches”. Like, can you teach me how to draw bitches? If I was thinking straight, I might have realised something was wrong. In either case, I realised that I liked teaching people, and that I did it well. The panel was completely improvised, and if I can do it while half-asleep, I can probably do a better job while fully awake. Perhaps they’ll be an opportunity in the future to run a manga class of sorts.

There was also a bunch of art contests, including a doodling one filled by people doing sketches. I didn’t participate in any of the art contests, but ended up having to judge them. I think it’s safe by now to admit that I was the judge of the art contests – and that to shirk full responsibility for such a difficult and dangerous task, I dragged several innocent bystanders into it. Namely Iron Artist Dan and “My Neighbour Totoro” Kenny; last seen at Manifest as Saint Seiya. Together we chose something technically proficient but simple, and I was glad at the end of the day that the judging was anonymous. I’d hate to brave going on stage and explaining why I made the choices I did. For a moment, I pictured myself going on stage with a paper bag over my head, but then everyone would probably recognise me from Iron Artists that morning.

 

Nintendo DS: I finally bought a Nintendo DS, with Nintendogs, for $200. It’s a great deal, and I even bought a PINK one, to ward off potential thieves. I’m getting a labrador named “Major”, after my mum’s current dog. My mother will probably wrestle the DS from me to play it herself.

The Waking: TINA Festival in Newcastle

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LATE!! But not too late to mention that tomorrow, 1st and 2nd October, will be biggest bashes of the “This Is Not Art” (TINA) Festival in Newcastle. As I’ve mentioned before here, I’m part of the Electrofringe Festival in conjunction with RocketArt gallery, and will be presenting at a panel on Saturday. The details are as below:

 

Panel: Otakulture Artists Talk
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm
Location: City Hall, Banquet Room
Fellow Presentees: Corin Edwards, Halszka Masash, Kirsty Boyle, Rachel O’Reilly, Thea Baumann
About: The Japanese term “Otaku” translates to “obsessive fan” and is a global subcultural phenomenon. RocketArt exhibiting artists talk about their work and survey the personalisation of commodity culture.

 

Otakulture Art Exhibition: The RocketArt Gallery is hosting a number of exhibits, including mine, as part of their “Otakulture” Art exhibition. The exhibition had its opening night on the 22nd September (I missed it since I had to head over to Manifest), but the artwork there is fantastic and I hope to meet more of the artists when I go there this weekend. For my part in the exhibition, there are 6 pieces of artwork – 2 opera singers and 4 from “The Dreaming”, and I’ve included a first-chapter preview of “The Dreaming” at the art gallery too. For those attending the Newcastle Festival, information is as below:

 

Gallery: RocketArt
Exhibition: Otakulture
Location: 488 Hunter St, Newcastle
Opening Hours: Thursday – Sunday, 12pm – 5pm
Dates: 22nd September ~ 9th October
Others: This exhibition is travelling it’s way up to Brisbane on the 9th December, and I’m going to include a complete ARC copy of “The Dreaming” with the Brisbane exhibition.

 

I get free accomodation there too!! I’ll be staying overnight in Newcastle from 1st-2nd October, and attending the huge fanzine market on Sunday. It’s in conjunction with the National Young Writer’s Festival, so I’ll be sure to sit in on some panels that talk about writing.