A weekly look into American otaku culture

I’m pleased to see that I’ve reached the landmark of 10,000 hits today. While this might not be such a big number for many websites out there, I find it to be quite an accomplishment for my first two months of operation. I would like to just thank the following for all their support in this very brief time.

I always have to start off with Matt. Forget JASCII, this guy is the king of the anime blogging community! His site serves as the town hall for the other bloggers to gather and talk. If you’re good enough to make it into one of his posts, you’ll see a lot of traffic brought to your site from him. And now that he’s going into producing fansubs himself, he brings a whole other group of anime fans interested in the stuff we blog.

Also, thanks to Mina for the fun exchanges we have; Satoshi for the comments and those funny comics I like reading; abq for keeping me up-to-date and many series that I can’t watch; Token Asian for talking about anime in Bethlehem, PA; and to all the other bloggers who link to me on their site.

But while I’m on the subject of Bethlehem, PA, thanks to all my (former) club members like Alex and Brad who visit my site and leave interesting (and sometimes incomprehensible) comments to my posts.

And while they’ll never read this, thanks to Anime News Network and Manga Jouhou for picking up one of my posts and bringing in a tenth of my total visits in one day! Hopefully I can supply more exclusive information for these guys in the future.

Also, thanks to all the people who google such things as “nude anime pix” and “kawaii lolicon sex girls” and were horribly directed to my site. It brings me a lot of laughter to see that.

And last, and most certainly not least, thanks to my lovely girlfriend who takes the time to read through my ranting and helps me correct the many typos I make while writing. Because I really want to improve the quality of this site for everyone, I’m asking her to become my official editor. So from this post on, expect to see better looking articles and reviews that will be a lot easier for you to read.

And if you have any suggestions on what you would like to see more of on the site or how I might improve on it, please leave a comment to any of my posts or email me thescott18 “at” gmail “dot” com. While things might be dying down for the summer, I hope to reach to over 20,000 by the time school starts again!

I stumbled upon this gem of information from this blog. After looking at the offical website, I can confirm that our nightmares have indeed come true.

Cromartie High School has been made into a live-action film.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, Cromartie High School is a parody of “tough guy” anime. It’s a school filled with the most baddest of the bad-asses. The main character is a transfer student who starts to learn the ways of becoming a juvenal delinquent. Among his classmates is a dude wearing a Mexican wrestler’s mask, an obvious robot who everyone assumes to be a normal human, a gorilla, and a guy who resembles the late lead singer of Queen, Freddie Mercury.

But as the recent Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon live action attempts have showed us, anime DOES NOT translate well into the real world! The reason why anime is so good is because it can break the limits of reality. When you have real life people doing this, it just looks cartoony and ridiculous. Yes, if you do tone it down a bit, it works. American superhero movies like Spiderman are good examples of this. But the Japanese don’t tone anything down, and so you just have something along of lines of Power Rangers. This will make the make foreign audience go, “this is stupid.”

However, given the completely goofy nature of Cromartie, I think this one might actually come out pretty good. The whole point of the series is to say “this is stupid” and to laugh about it. So I’m interested to see how they handle it. Hopefully the goofy guys at ADV will bring this over to the US, or someone out there will fansub this movie.

Though in my opinion, they should have had an American play the role of Freddie. That would have been sweet.

And now for something completely different.

There are many genres in Japanese comics that you really do not see being brought over stateside. A lot of them are understandable, such as series about Pachinko and Mahjong. But there’s a certain kind of comedy called “gag comics” that are very popular in Japan but not here. Why is that?

Well, simply put, the Japanese and Americans have different scenes of humor. There is a lot that can translate well between the two, but a lot of it just blows right over the foreign audiences’ heads. The problem with “gag comics” is that jokes are merely just for cheap laughs and come at you at a very rapid pace. Well this might be good for the funny pages in your newspaper, but it is very overwhelming in a comic book format. Typically a page would look like this:

Panel 1: set-up
Panel 2: set-up
Panel 3: punch line and reaction
Panel 4: new set-up
Panel 5: set-up
Panel 6: punch line and reaction
Panel 7: new set-up
Panel 8: punch line and reaction

This formula doesn’t usually work well with American readers. A number of years ago, I picked up the gag comic “Crayon Shin-chan” because I knew it was one of the most popular series in Japan. Well, I hated it. It was the stupidest manga I have ever read. It currently has the title of being the only book I have ever returned to the bookstore.

So what the hell was VIZ thinking with their newest release from Dragonball creator Akira Toriyama? Well, not only does “Dr. Slump” translate well in the US, but the fact that it is a gag comic sets it apart and anything on the store shelves at the moment. `

Written in 1980, “Dr. Slump” shows the antics of a crazy inventor, Senbei, and the robotic girl that he created, Arale. The plot really does not get more in depth then that, just our characters being put in different situations and watching how much they goof up. Hey, why don’t we send them to a coffee shop? How about middle school? Lingerie department? X-ray glasses? Prehistoric times?!?

Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous, but just don’t take the story too seriously. The real point of the series is the comedy. For something that’s over a quarter of a century old, the jokes are surprisingly not outdated. Most are about Arale having a naïve understanding of sexuality and the virgin inventor’s handling of the question. He tells Arale that he couldn’t make realistic reproductive organs for her because Japanese censorship laws prevented him from seeing a real female’s crotch in pornography. But the real gems are the jokes that poke fun at the comic itself.

Woman: [looking at Arale] Say, your nose…
Senbei: S-something wrong with her nose?
Woman: You don’t have nostrils!
Senbei: NEITHER DO I! This is a manga, for crying out loud! A manga!
Woman: Hey, you’re right! No runny noses!

The artwork is outdated, but that makes it interesting. Most of it is done in a silly cartoonish way, which I guess matches the silly cartoonish story. But every once in a while Toriyama draws an extremely detailed panel. This adds a little more emotion while setting up for some good punch lines. This switch works well with the medium for making great comedy.

What should be noted is that while the word “Dragonball” is plastered all over the promos for this title, this is about as anti-Dragonball as you can get. The art, story, humor, pacing… EVERYTHING is different! In fact, if you look at the Dr. Slump cross-over in volume 7 of Dragonball, you’ll see that even that looks and feels much different then the original series.

But it is for these differences that I recommend this book. Dr. Slump is the most unique reading experience I have ever had reading a manga that I actually enjoyed. I look forward to reading more of this series in the future.

Please support this series by buying Dr. Slump vol. 1 at the VIZ Media Store or your local bookstore.

It’s summer time. As many of my regular readers might have notice, I haven’t been doing too many updates lately. Being back home, spending time with my loved one, and trying to find myself employment for this summer has made me put this website much lower on my priority list then it was during the school year. However, blogging is still a very fun and relaxing hobby for me, so I still plan to keep this site active and alive or the upcoming month. However, there’s going to be many modifications to it.

First of all, blogging about every fansubbed episode is too overdone in the community. Because of this, I have found that they are pointless to review. So from this point on, I’m dropping all the series I have been working on. Yes, even my beloved Ichigo. Instead, expect more insightful views on the latest current storylines whenever I feel it necessary to comment on. Think about it like those first episode impressions I did for many series. They generally get a lot of positive feedback.

Also, licensed anime and manga reviews have really set me apart from other bloggers, and have also gotten me positive feedback from the readers. I’m going to continue to keep in contact with companies by providing them sample material of what I write along with the comments you leave. So all of you out there who leave the kind comments on my posts, thank you so much! They mean a lot to me and will probably help me out in my goal being a part of the industry I admire so much.

But for the summer, I would advise checking out the site once a week for updates. I promise I’ll at least have something new every few days. With a less hectic schedule, I can focus more on the quality of my posts then the frequency of them.

In other news, idleness truly is the Devil’s Advocate. I have found myself making daily trips to the bookstore and not coming out empty handed. I have started a couple new series, and debating starting a couple more. I’ve also noticed that Best Buy’s got some anime DVD now that are really, really cheap, so I might finish collecting a lot of series that I’ve had to stop since I’ve been a poor college kid. I’m also seriously considering collecting Girls Bravo on DVD since it looks like they’ve got the 2nd season available too. Hopefully their will be some very low prices for them.

Finally, there is a manga out there that speaks my language. The “slice of life” genre is very common in manga and anime, but just whose lives are we slicing? High school girls? Office ladies? Salary men? Well they might make up much of the manga market in Japan, that’s clearly not the key demographic in the US. After seeing the American anime culture represented at a recent convention, I discovered just where most of the fan base is.

College boys and girls.

We all know that college is the time for everyone to party and get wasted, but that’s just not the kind of lifestyle that nerds like myself tend to follow. Instead, we pursue other hobbies that are socializing but in a safe and creative way. Many turn to video games. It’s not uncommon to see a group of guys gathered around a dorm room playing the latest Madden game. Many others turn to anime and manga, with sharing fansubs with their friends, writing in anime web forums and blogs, or joining anime clubs on campus where they can watch and talk about their favorites. This is the anime culture in the US, but what about in Japan?

Well, it turns out things are similar there too.

Genshike is the story of a group of college-aged nerds. Sure, their school has an anime club and a manga club, but those are for sissies. These guys are the most hard-core otaku, not wishing to be limited to just one medium of choice. They form their own club, Genshiken, or “The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture.” Hmmm… I like calling it “Modern Visual Culture” instead of manga and video games. It sounds so much for sophisticated!

We start off with two college freshman as they stumble across this crazy crew. The first is Kanji, a very shy boy whose been a secret anime fan for a while. He’s always wanted to learn more about the culture, but is a little taken a back at first with dealing with the other club members.

Then there’s pretty boy Matoko. He’s quite the heartthrob and has an attractive girl, Saki, swooning over him. This is not your typical profile for an otaku, and yet he appears to be the most hard-core of them all. His dorm room is cluttered with figures, plushies, video game systems and accessories, hentai video games, and stacks upon stacks of manga magazines.

We’re also introduced to the older members of Genshiken. The leader is a tall and scrawny nerd with a bowler hair cut and glasses. Then we also have two heavy set fellows under him. Each member specializes in a different aspect of anime fandom, from personal artwork to cosplaying.

The story is great as it deals with the kind of stuff we anime fans enjoy. As Kanji makes learns about otaku behavior, the reader is taken back to when they first started making the same discovers. Hentai video games are the first topic brought up as the naive boy checks out his first one. During a demonstration from his fellow members, he joyously announces, “Wow, their ‘hair down there’ matches their normal hair color!” Unfortunately, they don’t quite share the same enthusiasm for the observation.

But the main focus in this volume is the world of doujinshi, which they appropriately translate to “fan-zines” in this version. Doujinshi is really something that Americans don’t understand the magnitude of it in Japan. And so this manga does a good job at teaching us this particular aspect of anime culture. The group makes several trips to stores and conventions to buy the latest issues of their favorites. Yes, they have huge three=day conventions for JUST doujinshi! There’s also a lot of talk amongst the members about creating their own, which I have a feeling will be explored more in future volumes.

So, as a college-aged hard-core anime fan, I found myself loving this series. I could identify with the characters, and I can laugh at some of the ridicules things that we do because of this. Genshiken is the “slice of life” manga that the US fans can finally identify with.

Come my children, gather ’round. Let me tell you the story of Jake Tarbox. A man who tried to reach out to the serious manga fans and revolutionized the industry in the US. Yet somehow he always ended up on the losing end.

Let’s begin our story last week. I had just seen the first DVD of Tenjho Tenge at Anime Boston, and I got really interested in the series. I was considering my options, and thought that I should go out and pick up the first volume of the manga. Now, everybody now knows that when you hear the title “Tenjho Tenge”, the first thing that comes to mind would be “censorship.” But was the censoring really all that bad? Is it worth boycotting a series that I really want to read? So I did my research and took a good long look at the Campain for Uncensored Tenjho Tenge website. There was one man in particular that they said everyone should voice their concerns to. He was the group editor for CMX, Mr. Jake Tarbox.

Tarbox… I know I’ve heard that name before. That’s really not something that a person would forget. So I thought about for a while, and then I remembered who he was…

Flash back to November 2002. For the first time in US manga history, manga anthology magazines hit the stores shelves in “authentic” right-to-left format. Fans were treated to not just one, but two very different magazines to chose from. The first would be Shonen Jump, a magazine from big name VIZ that was fortunate enough to feature some mainstream titles like Dragonball and Yu Gi Oh. All the titles were all action, and it generally catered to the pre- to early adolescent crowd.

The second one was from a newcomer to the industry, Gutsoon! Entertainment. The magazine was called Raijin, and it was meant for mature hard-core manga fans. It serialized a variety of titles from different genres. Some of them were popular (City Hunter, Slam Dunk, Baki the Grappler) and some of them were very obscure and unknown (First President of Japan, Bow Wow Wata). The idea was that they had something for everyone. But the best part about it was the fact that it was WEEKLY! That’s right, every week came another chapter of your favorite series. When you subscribed to this magazine, you really felt like you were living in Japan.

But another great part to the magazine was the editor, Jake Tarbox. He wrote most of the articles that were featured every week for the magazine. One of them was a very fun piece about Japanese sound effects and how they relate to English ones. Each article included an anime portrait of himself like looked shocking like a balding version of Tombo from Kiki’s Delivery Service. The inside joke with the pictures were that his receding hairline would get more and more profound with each issues. But aside for that, he also kept in close contact with the readers by frequently participating in the magazine’s web forums. He held many contests and were very easy to win. Case in point, I won two different posters, a mini figure, and a Raijin t-shirt that I still wear to this very day.

But the magazine was just too much for the average manga fan, and the company slowly started to deteriorate. At first they switched from the weekly format to monthly. Then they just ceased production of the magazine and graphic novels all together. I was very sad when I received my refund check for a subscription that never finished. They said that they were just on hold to rework the magazine, but news got out that the staff members like Tarbox were now without a job. And with the resent loss of the magazine’s website, it appears that Raijn is gone for good.

But Mr. Tarbox was able to find work not long after the magazine went out of production. American comic company DC got into the manga market with new line called CMX. They gave Tarbox the title of Group Editor. Unfortunately CMX wasn’t exactly producing chart toppers, and it appeared to be going down the same root that Rajin did a year ago. And then came the whole Tenjho Tenge controversy, and Mr. Tarbox quickly became the scapegoat for outraged manga fans around the US. However, I remember the awesome editor from Raijin that took his time to talk with the fans about what they thought of the magazine and manga. I remember the guy who helped me get a better understanding of the confusing nature of Japanese sound effects. I remember the balding Tombo. So last week I began to put my faith in Mr. Tarbox. I knew he would be fighting for the fans side and eventually would make a difference in the Tenjho Tenge issue.

Mr Tarbox resigned from his job just the other day, and I believe that this shows what his struggle was like with that company. The article says

***
“[…] Tarbox himself did not make the decision to edit creator Oh Great!’s (Ou Gureito) work to be suitable for a PG-13 audience, but did find himself in the position of having to implement it, which was strongly opposed by many manga fans. […]

For his tenure at CMX, Tarbox was something of an enigma publicly – all interview requests for the line’s Group Editor were turned down by DC […]”
***

You can form your own conclusions about it, but from what I remember of the man, I strongly believe that he was fighting for us the whole time. So I think we owe it as manga fans to pay more respect to him. He wasn’t the man to blame for manga censorship. He was the man who tried to satisfy the most serious manga fans. Unfortunately, the goal was a little too high, and the mainstream has washed that dream away. But I for one admire and support him, and I hope he doesn’t give up on fighting for us.

Twenty-four hours ago my blog went completely off line. The problem was with Blogsome and their upgrading of software. This isn’t the first time they’ve been doing this to me as I seem to be down at least once every week. Yet it’s never been out for this long of a time. I apologies to the 150 people out there that visit my site everyday. Hopefully something like this doesn’t lose any of my core audience.

However, Blogsome is still the best service out there for no cost at all. They let you have total freedom over your blog, plus if you really wanted to, you could make it all ads-free. Of course, I chose to keep the ads on at the bottom of the page because they’ve been so cool towards me. So while I’m still trying to get my act together with this site, I don’t feel a need to move somewhere else.

So maybe down the road I’ll fork over the cash and move to a more reliable server. But for now, just bare with me as these time-to-time blackouts happen with this site.

Ladies and Gentlemen.

I present to you the best quote to have ever been said in an anime.

Episode 23:

Episode 24:

See, didn’t I tell you that the afro revolution has begun? With a series based on ridiculous comedy, Yakitate can find ways of making the most stupidest little things funny. Hearing Tsukino say “A-afro Brothers!” in English is definitely the moment I loved the most in this double episode.

It’s a good thing that they had both episodes in one this time, because I don’t think I would have been able to handle waiting any longer to see the end of this tournament. If there’s something I gotta give this series credit for, it’s that they don’t drag the story on and on like most other “competition anime” will tend to do. If you look back that the 24 episodes we’ve seen so far, they did manage to squeeze in quite a lot of storyline into it.

The first episode was yet another setup for the final. It ends with the arrival of Kawachi sporting the ‘fro. They really don’t explain how he got it, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough. The 2nd episode delivers with the start of the match, the judging, and the happy results. I guess you can consider that a spoiler, but like you couldn’t tell that Azama was going to completely kick some ass?

What amazes me is how this simple show is able to keep all their jokes and gags so very fresh each time (pun intended). I mean, the reaction to Japan #44 was so funny that it leaves me to wonder just how they could top something like that? In fact, that’s even a joke in this episode as a crowd gathers at the tournament to ask the very same question. The answer came in the form of a cute peacock, which is so random and out of nowhere that you can’t help but to laugh your ass off.

So I’m very satisfied with a happy ending to the longest saga so for this series. I’m still very worried that they’ve reached such a high point in the comedy that they will never be able to reach it again. But I have a feeling that this show will have plenty of surprises left to completely blow us away.

Though actually it’s more like Tuesday morning now, but whatever.

First of all, I’ve come across another very awesome and unique blog out there. Bluemist doesn’t do your typical “fansub recap” like everyone else (myself included) does. Instead, he takes the time to notice little interesting things about all the fansubs out there. Some observations he’s had have been the very long pauses in Tsubasa, the roller coaster animation quality of Negima, and a very interesting Tsubasa / Chobits connection. This guy finds some pretty cool stuff, so you all should check him out.

Now, before I started this blog, I ran my own personal live journal for about a year and a half. But then I made the decision to do more with my blog and make it all about anime. I soon discovered that livejounral would not be able to do this for me. That’s why I moved over to Wordpress. My friends wanted my to stay on LJ, and I promised them that I would still update there. But in the last month, I’ve been pretty much focusing all my attention on this blog and not the other. So I think I might have only updated once or twice since then. Oops…

Well I found a solution to that. A person with a paid account was kind enough to start syndication of my site on LJ. I really wish I had gotten her name, but the post was deleted before I could. What this means is that anyone on LJ can see my posts on their friends page. Pretty cool, huh? So if you have a livejournal account click here to syndicate me!!!

Anyway, essay writing has made me a little crazy and incoherent, so I’m off to bed now. Expect to see a cool Yakitate post tomorrow.

Guess who’s back?
Back again?

Yui’s back!
Tell a friend.

Guess who’s back? Guess who’s back? Guess who’s back? Guess who’s back? Guess who’s back?

Okay, well maybe for just a cameo. But still, it’s just another positive thing to add on to the best episode so far in this series.

And I apologize, don’t expect to see another Eminem reference in this blog ever again.

Yes, I did go a little screen cap crazy with this one. It’s a shame that the video quality is so poor with this series.

This episode showed a lot of what makes a good shounen romance so good, sexual tension and lots of fanservice! The stage was set for all the directions in the Ichigo compass* to finally meet each other, and they even added a really hot schoolteacher for good measure. Let’s see… bikinis, loose summer outfits, big breasts in your face, more bikinis, implied lesbianism, nose bleeds, nude bathing in the hot tub, and then finally falling out of one’s robes… yeah, there was defiantly a lot to go o_O over with this one.

I mentioned last episode about how Junpei was driven by love and not lust… well, no normal healthy teenaged boy could resist all this sex being thrown at him. So he joins with the perverts in drooling over the girls or listening in on their sexy conversations, but he never “crosses the line” with his perversion unless he is literally thrown into it by the other guys (which makes up some of the funniest moments in this episode). But still, Jumpei feels more guilty about it then aroused, therefore you still can’t help but to still like him. He’s still a good guy, as they make clear at the end with how much he cares for the ill Satsuki.

So this was a really fun episode that shows off all the positive things about the Ichigo series. It reminded me a lot of the OVA episode. I hope that the rest of the series continues to be just as exciting as this.

IS IT SUMMER YET?!?

*By the way, the reason why I called it a compass is because all the girls are named after directions. Satsuki is North, Yui’s South, Aya’s East, and Nishino’s West. Furthermore, Junpei’s name means, “Center.” You can clearly see what they’re getting at with this. So when you see directions and compasses in this show, you’ll know why.