Newsarama Asks: WHY IS THERE A COLUMN DISCUSSING MANGA ON THIS SITE????
Wow, look at that -- almost a week went by since I last updated this blog. I'd like to pretend it was all part of some
master plan (wouldja believe I was seeing if the comment threads for
the "Why Just Superheroes?"/"Why
Not Just Superheroes?" posts
would break 50 comments if I just let them sit there at the top of the
blog?), but really it's just been a combination of me being busier than
usual at
work and as lazy as usual at home.
So, my apologies for not updating the blog for so long, or at least
warning you about the lack of updates. (In that vein:
Advance Warning -- I may not blog at all next week (project deadline
looming) and I definitely won't blog at all the two weeks after that
(on vacation).)
There's probably a lot of interesting stuff I've missed or overlooked
in the past week, but this caught my eye today:
Newsarama
has a column discussing manga! The first installment of Troy
Brownfield's "Your Manga
Minute" gives short overviews for three manga --
Dark Angel Vol.
1,
Rurouni
Kenshin Vol. 1, and
Record of Lodoss War: The Lady of
Pharis. Of these, I've only read
Rurouni
Kenshin, which didn't do much for me. It'll be interesting
to see how this feature is received. I found the information too
cursory to be of much use, but perhaps others will get more out of
it. And if nothing else, it's amusing to read the reactions of
the mangaphobic Newsarama posters:
- Outside of Akira, the first few Appleseed years, 2001 Nights and
Area 88, I've found very little manga in print that does anything for
me other than go "do they all think we gaijin run around with stupid
gapes and wide eyes?"
- THERE IS TOO MUCH MANGA JUNK. UGH. It's like a flood, wiping away
much of the trully good stuff. And much of it looks exactly the same
which is sad, sad, sad. I feel like, I dont know, like it's the DISCO
of American Comic books.
Luckily, several posters have joined in to counter the "manga is crap"
line of thought. Is it cynical of me to think that this positive
direction can't possibly last for long on Newsarama?
