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NYAF in brief

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I’m finally home from NYAF! I had a very nice time, both visiting with old friends and at the con. Everyone else has already reported on the manga industry news and so on, so I’ll just talk about my personal experiences.

Many thanks to dear friends, Laura, Gavin, & James for making time to catch up with me at early hours of the morning, and to my dearest EA, little (or not so little!) Moo, and Malcolm, for putting up with me all weekend. I was also lucky enough to meet a couple of people I’ve become acquainted with through this blog. Here is my report (in order of appearance):

Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane: Friendly, fun, professional. I was very happy to spend time with her at a number of panels over the weekend!

Ed Sizemore: Kind, generous, BEST SHOES EVER. I wish I’d had the opportunity to chat with him more!

Overall, I really enjoyed this con. It was smallish, and with the exception of Saturday, felt actually kind of intimate, which is maybe not profitable if you’re running a con, I don’t know, but certainly enjoyable as an attendee.

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Quick check-in

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Heading out shortly to the train station for travel to NYAF! I’ll be staying with a dear friend in Brooklyn, and have plans to inundate her and her daughter with anime while I am there, specifically Princess Tutu, Mushishi, and/or Kino’s Journey. I’m also trying to work on getting her daughter interested in manga (she doesn’t read a lot, but I thought maybe comics would help her enjoy it more). I guess we’ll see how it goes. I’m not exactly sure what to try to start her off with. She’s ten, but has spent a lot of her life hanging out with adults, so she’s definitely not typical ten. She’s the kind of girl who would (and did) dress up for Halloween as “Dorth Vader,” a cross between Dorothy (from The Wizard of Oz) and Darth Vader. If you have suggestions, bring ’em on!

I’ll be at the con all three days, from opening to whenever I get too tired, so if you see me wandering around, please say hello! Just got my hair cut. Look approximately like this.

Just a quick note on xxxHolic chapter 166 before I go. …

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Writerly angst and fangirl squee

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I have a jumble of things on my mind today (what else is new?) and I’m going to attempt to organize it all somehow. Let’s see how I do.

First of all, Johanna Draper Carlson wrote this great article, How to Break Into Writing Comics which is pretty near and dear to my heart these days. I’m not exactly sure where I fit in to those options, and I’m thinking I need to figure that out. I mean, I know what I think I’m doing, but I’m not sure if I’m going about it in a useful way. Maybe, too, my gray areas are partly due to the OEL manga industry being (seemingly) a little different than the comics industry as a whole, in that from what I can surmise (and this is the “truth” I’m currently operating on), there is really no way in at all without doing the work of finding your own artist. So I’m doing that, while still holding out hopes that I might be able to get a publisher interested sometime after that point. It seems that this is how it needs to be done. I guess I’ll find out. In any case, I’m grateful to have read the article.

Switching now to fangirl mode, we finished watching Princess Tutu on Friday night, and it affected me so strongly, I haven’t really been able to talk about it yet. I love that. I’ll try to talk a little bit now, but it may take another week or so before I can be, you know, articulate.

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William Flanagan, Banana Fish, & NYAF: Could a post be more disjointed?

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Another scattered, incoherent post coming up here. I suppose it reflects my state of mind this week.

Random: Good news for CLAMP fans, I read here earlier that William Flanagan, who translates xxxHolic and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle for Del Rey is in negotiations to translate Mangettes for Dark Horse. You know what a big fan of his xxxHolic translations I am (he also translates Mushishi, which I love as well), so I was pleased to hear he may be working on more CLAMP!

In unrelated news, I just want to point gleefully at another Banana Fish convert! :D

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Miscellaneous jumble

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I don’t ever seem to have time enough for anything lately, so just a few brief items today.

I’m having a lot of frustration while trying to write these days, and I expect it’s a bit of anxiety over the self-imposed deadline I have coming up which I don’t think I’m going to make. For the most part, I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m not always going to make the deadlines I set for myself, and that it is still good to set them, because I’ll still get further along than if I did not, but I think in this case I may have paralyzed myself a little bit with the urgency of it, and how much important I’ve placed on it. I guess we’ll see.

In any case, time to move on to my topics of the day, Bleach, Bakuman, and Princess Tutu!

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Cool thing, FYI

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If you were thinking of going to NYAF, there is a contest:

Want to get into the 2008 New York Anime Festival for free without having to sneak in or bribe someone? Fancy yourself an artist like Yoshitaka Amano? Then this contest is for you! To enter the contest, submit one (1) anime-style portrait or rendering of yourself and one (1) unaltered photograph for comparison to said portrait to info@suvudu.com between 12:01 AM EDT September 10, 2008 and midnight on September 18, 2008.

There will be four (4) First Prize Winners. Each First Prize Winner will receive two (2) weekend passes to the New York Anime Festival and three Random House manga books. Judging the submissions will be Ali Kokeman and Tricia Narwani from Del Rey Manga!

Just passing it on! Thanks to Brigid Alverson for the info! I will be at NYAF (most likely fighting Ed Sizemore for xxxHolic merch :D) so perhaps we’ll run into each other!

Homecoming, Nana volumes 1-3

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I’ve returned home from a very productive trip to North Carolina. The auditions were exhausting, but i’ve got a day to recover at home before returning to work, which is nice. I downloaded the new iTunes last night, and now I’m listening to a “genius”-made playlist, which is surprisingly pretty good!

I never did find a local shop for manga in Charlotte, but as it turns out, there really wasn’t much time for anything like that, anyway. I did take a restaurant recommendation from a reader on the LiveJournal-mirror, who sent us to Macado’s in Concord for the macaroni and cheese, and I have to say it was delicious!

So, as I mentioned, I picked up the first three volumes of Nana for the trip. I’d like to talk a bit more about them now.

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Greetings from Charlotte!

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It’s a beautiful, sunny morning in Charlotte, though I’m still enjoying it through the window of my hotel room, as I lazily prepare for our first day of auditions here. I’ll just be watching our callbacks all day, so I don’t have to rush around to get to the general auditions when they start this morning. I suppose I’ve achieved something when I get to hire other people to do all the rushing around.

Charlotte is really a lovely city, though I admit I’ve only seen about three blocks worth of it so far. After arriving yesterday, our assistant production manager and I walked over to the theater where they were doing registrations, and there was an Indian cultural festival of some kind going on in the street. Multiple booths with delicious, spicy-smelling food, and lots of women walking around in colorful saris, it was really a nice welcome to the city.

For anyone who might be wondering, I ended up not taking any of the advice I was given on what manga to bring on the plane, though I did try. Our local bookstores and the comic shop were unhelpful in my search for volume 1 of Dororo (though I could get volumes 2 & 3 at one Barnes & Noble), which was what I’d most strongly considered. I’m happy with my choice, though. I ended up getting the first three volumes of Nana (which I’ve meant to read for a long time, finally cemented by Johanna Draper Carlson’s recent review of volume 9), and wow, what a charming series! Now of course I’m wishing I’d bought more of it, but the volumes I had effectively dulled the horror of my two flights yesterday, so I’m very grateful to them.

Time to start rallying myself to the day’s cause. More later, perhaps. In conclusion: Banana Fish. :D

Making the case for Banana Fish

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One of the series I’m always trying to draw friends into is Akimi Yoshida’s classic shojo manga, Banana Fish. I first discovered this series, embarrassingly, through wikipedia, as I was trying to find shojo manga that I could really enjoy. It was this entry that piqued my interested in the series, citing a quote from Frederik L. Schodt, which described Banana Fish as “…one of the few girls’ manga a red-blooded Japanese male adult could admit to reading without blushing.” Right around the same time, mention of Banana Fish began turning up in interviews with Jason Thompson, just before the publication of his book, Manga: The Complete Guide, and though I don’t remember exactly what he said about it back then, it had the effect of spurring my interest into action, and before I knew it, I began buying the series.

I’m certainly not the only person who has tried to generate interest in Banana Fish. Shaenon Garrity made it part of her awesome Overlooked Manga Festival (one of my very favorites of that series so far), and to my mind, no further persuasion should be needed. Still, I find Banana Fish is a tough sell with friends. There’s no way to effectively preview the series, as it is difficult to find in libraries or brick and mortar bookstores. There are not even fan scanlations available to view. Anyone who wants to jump into this series pretty much has to commit to buying at least one book they may not end up liking, and I’ve found just a few who are willing to risk that. I’m going to try here to build on the case that Shaenon Garrity has already made for this series, with hope that even just one more person might choose to take that risk.

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Travel & manga: Two great tastes that taste great together

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This post is a bit of a mish-mash, which probably reflects the state of my brain after the long weekend. At the moment, I’m thinking a lot about travel. This coming weekend, I’ll be heading to Charlotte, NC to attend the Southeastern Theater Conference auditions on behalf of the children’s theater company I work for. We have quite a few actors to cast for tours starting in January, very serious business, and yet my mind is currently focused on two things:

1) What manga should I bring on the plane?
2) Where does one buy manga in Charlotte, NC?

If you know the answers to these burning questions, please do let me know. Also, I’ve finally purchased my ticket for the New York Anime Festival, so there will be quite a bit of travel for me this month. Thankfully, that is a much easier trip, which also allows me to see old friends in the city, and I certainly won’t have any trouble figuring out where to buy manga. ;)

Speaking of manga, as I’ve mentioned somewhere around here, I’ve been subsisting lately off of what can be found on my local comic shop’s used shelf. They rarely happen to have whatever volume I need next of the many series I’m collecting, so I’ve been reading the first volume in a lot of series. A couple of the series I’ve started recently because of this are Million Tears (which is only two volumes, total) and Zig Zag, both of which I’ll talk about a bit here.

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How I got into comics, or why there is hope for Bob Thompson

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Yesterday, Brigid Alverson linked to an article by Bob Thompson at the Washington Post, in which he discussed the recent popularity of graphic novels, and his experiences sampling them as a steadfast “prose guy.” I link to Brigid’s post here, because her reaction to the article was much like mine (and a million other manga fans across the internet, including John Jakala, whose post on the subject she also linked to, and who spoke about it in thoughtful detail), which was something like politely irritated disbelief at the fact that he seemed to pass hasty judgement on manga as a whole based on one volume of Naruto and seemingly little else. This is especially interesting, given that he does recognize late in the article that, “in the world of Japanese comics, you can do anything you want.”

Nobody needs me to reiterate the article, and pretty much everything that could be said about it already has been, and by people much more eloquent and knowledgeable than I. If I have anything to offer here, it is my own story of learning to love manga, because really, if I could fall in love with it, anyone could, even Bob Thompson.

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Bakuman ch. 2, yikes.

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Well, a friend warned about the sexism in chapter 2 of Bakuman, but I didn’t realize how strong it was until I saw it for myself today. I’ll keep reading the series, and I’ll buy the books when they come out, because I’m a Takeshi Obata fangirl and there’s nothing to be done about it. But, wow.

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Quack!

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The day has continued very nicely, and I’m settled in for the evening now, pets snuggled up around me. I realized a few minutes ago that I have the “Waltz of the Flowers” from The Nutcracker in my head, and then I realized why. Hee. Lately, we’ve been watching an anime series from, I think, 2002 called Princess Tutu. I love Princess Tutu. I feel quite foolish saying those words, “I love Princess Tutu,” but that is really the truth. This series manages to be ridiculous, pretty, profound, whimsical, and tragic all at once. Oh, and there’s a duck. I really love the duck.

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Why you should read xxxHolic

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Once upon a time in my secret fannish life, sad and frustrated with the small size of the xxxHolic fandom, I created a so-called “persuasion post.” Its purpose was to inspire friends to begin reading the series, write lots of fanfiction, and join in on all my xxxHolic glee. I think, however, that this post deserves better than being hidden behind a fannish identity, so I have unearthed it from the clutter and reworked it for a broader audience. Behold, the new (de-fandomed) xxxHolic Persuasion Post:

Let your wishes be granted.

First of all, this post is specifically about the manga. The anime is nice enough in its way, but it can’t even begin to compare to the manga and I think it is better to watch it if you’ve already read the manga, so that you can fill in the blanks with your own mind.

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