Newsarama posted a news item today stating that Marvel would unveil a subscription digital comics site tomorrow, then as I was writing this post, they took it all back, stating that the original story was inaccurate. According to a commenter, the news was supposed to be embargoed until midnight tonight, which may explain this anomaly. Or maybe the writer of the CBC story that was the source for the Newsarama article did indeed make some mistakes. The industrious reader can find snippets of the original story in the comments section, but as the full scoop will be up tomorrow, I’m not sure it’s worth it.

UPDATE: Here’s a story credited to the AP. Caveat lector, as this may be the same as the CBC story that Marvel called “inaccurate.”

UPDATE 2: Well, Newsarama has posted an AP story identical to the one linked above, except for this paragraph:

News of the new Marvel initiative began appearing online Monday afternoon, via an AP wire story and sources like the CBC.ca website, prompting Marvel Comics to request any version of the story citing the AP or CBC be removed from websites due to the CBC version in particular being “filled with inaccuracies.” It is not immediately apparent what was inaccurate about the CBC version of the story.

Of course, nothing was inaccurate; Marvel was simply throwing their weight around because the story was embargoed. Classy!

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The New York Times Magazine has discovered Platinum studios. Writer Ben Ehrenreich seems to be fascinated by the fact that Platinum’s Scott Rosenberg made a movie deal for Cowboys & Aliens based on a few slim threads of a story—basically, no more than the title and a few character sketches, if the magazine is to be believed. If that’s true, maybe I should clear out my half-baked-ideas drawer and head West.

Ehrenreich’s article raises the question of what exactly constitutes a “comic” when he writes

For most of the intervening years, “Cowboys & Aliens” did not exist as a published comic. Platinum didn’t bother printing any of its comics, in fact, until late last year, when “Cowboys & Aliens” became its first property to exist in tangible, paper-and-ink form.

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Manga is sort of the original webcomic, as scanlations were the only way fans could get their fix before manga went mainstream. Now that American companies are publishing manga by the truckload, you would think that scanlation would have fallen by the wayside, but you would be wrong. Only a tiny fraction of manga has been translated, and the demand remains high for the quirky titles that will never be licensed here. Also, some people are cheap and prefer to get their Naruto fix for free.

Fansubs are the anime equivalent of scanlations, and the anime companies have made the occasional threatening gesture toward fansubbers, copyright enforcement has been pretty desultory. But that may change: Continue reading →

I gave up my subscription to Wired a couple of years ago, when I realized I didn’t even understand the titles of the articles. But this month, they have a treat for manga fans and a special treat for the curious-but-intimidated: How Manga Conquered the U.S., a ten-page manga, which is available for download from their website (it’s a 1.9 MB PDF). If you like your history presented by short-skirted schoolgirls, this is the comic for you! Seriously, the manga itself is very good, but Wired‘s awkward presentation really gets in the way.

The manga was written by Jason Thompson, whose knowledge of manga is literally encyclopedic: A former manga editor himself, he is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide, which covers literally every manga translated into English. Jason does a nice job of showing both the big picture and the interesting little details. His script includes cameos of well known personalities in the industry, examples of manga conventions, and even an interview with a blacked-out scanlator.

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In the course of helping my daughter with a high school English assignment (“Find a poem that expresses your personality”), I found something really cool: The Poetry Foundation is inviting artists to create comics to illustrate poems. There are five entries so far in their series, “The Poem as Comic Strip,” and each one takes a different approach. Like poems, the webcomics are deceptively small, just a page or two each, but filled with meaning and associations.

The first in the series is Belly Dancer, poem by Diane Wasoski, art by David Heatley. The poem, written in 1966, explores sensuality and repression: Continue reading →

Suppose Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher decided to do a manga.

The result might be something like the work of Shintaro Kago currently up at Same Hat! Same Hat!!

Your hosts, Ryan and Evan, specialize in offbeat manga, and most of what they post is either absurdist four-panel strips or the not-for-the-squeamish genre known as ero-guro (as in erotic-grotesque).

Everything on Same Hat is something you will never see anywhere else, but recently Ryan and Evan have found a few comics that are artier and at the same time more accessible than much of their other material. So if you haven’t stopped in already, now would be a good time to take a look.

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In Japan, manga is more than just entertainment; there is an incredible range of educational manga, from business textbooks to Tsundere Linux, in which big-eyed little girls tenderly introduce the reader to … Linux.

So what Pfizer has done is quite logical: They have put a manga up on their site about a guy who uses one of their products. Viagra.

Nisemono?, which ComiPress translates as “Fake?” is only in Japanese, so it’s a little hard to follow. It seems to begin with the hero ostentatiously taking one of the little blue pills in his company’s boardroom, a scene that illustrates why I love manga so much: just taking a pill is a dramatic event, with fist-shaking and changing background colors and lots of sound effects. Even if you’re not sure what’s going on, it’s fun to watch. Then our hero goes off and talks to a pretty girl for a while and has coffee with his skeevy friend, who is obviously giving him bad relationship advice. Some things transcend language.

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Transmission X is a Toronto-based webcomics community that has only been up for a couple of weeks but is already looking pretty good. There are seven comics, each of which updates once a week; the last two comics are set to debut on August 14 and 16, and the others have about 10 pages up so far, enough to get a good sample.

The site has a sleek, uncluttered interface, and navigation is straightforward. No blinking banners, no cleverly disguised “next” button. Almost all the comics are in a 4:3 aspect ratio, so they can be read in a single screen, with no scrolling. You know how a lot of people say “I hate reading comics on a computer screen”? I think this site might convert some of them, because it eliminates a lot of the annoying features of webcomic interfaces.

But what about the content? It’s definitely a mixed bag of genres, styles, and attitudes, but overall the quality is high. Here’s a quick look:

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Here’s something new, but with a familiar look: Gal Samurai, a translated Japanese web coming to you free courtesy of Popteen, which is the U.S. version of a Japanese teen magazine.

The manga jumps right in without much backstory, so check out the intro page first for background on all the characters. However, it’s a good introduction to the cliches of shoujo manga. The heroine, Ran, is a fashion-forward high school girl who just happens to be highly skilled in the martial arts, having been trained by her grandfather. (Cute girl who kicks ass? Check!)

She has a crush on her classmate Fujii, who is a TV actor. (Check!) They have been friends since childhood, when both had to deal with the loss of a parent. (Check!)

And in the first episode, someone is going around taking photos of the girls’ panties. (Panty shots? Houston, we have a manga.)

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About a month ago, DC Comics announced that it had made a major investment in Flex Comics, a Japanese company that develops comics for cell phones and the web. The news was noted at the time and then disappeared in the flurry of attention that DC caused when they announced their dedicated webcomics site, Zuda.

Keep your eye on Flex, though, because the folks at DC may have something interesting up their sleeves: They may be gambling that people who are accustomed to getting something for nothing will be willing to pay to get something better. It’s a strategy that has already worked for two other manga publishers, and this experiment may be useful to webcomics creators who are thinking about the best publishing model for their work.

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