But if you’re attending, you can meet me! I’ll be speaking on and moderating the Anime in Academia panel. You can see us: Friday, in Room 1E12, from 4:45pm to 5:45pm. The panel also features students, researchers, and published authors: Roland Kelts (“Japanimerica”), Mikhail Koulikov (Online Bibliography of Anime & Manga Research), Casey Brienza (PhD student, Sociology, University of Cambridge), and Jennifer Fu (undergrad, Comparative Media Studies, MIT).

Also, if you’re looking for me on the floor, I’ll be cosplaying the protagonists of Toradora with my lovely girlfriend, @ashleyseto:

Takasu Ryuuji & Aisaka Taiga

Also, yes, I know that the journal’s Style Guide is messed up. “Web site,” with a space, really guys?

Last spring, I sat down one night, shaken by an urge to write furiously. On a random whim, I wrote up a full paper for an academic journal.

Apparently this is what I do for fun in my free time.

The compensation: I’m finally published!

OK, so to put it all simply, I wrote a book review for the Transformative Works and Cultures journal. The TW&C journal is a peer-reviewed, open, online journal. If you hit the link, you can check out the amazing executive board. But in terms of my own publication, a book review is pretty low in the Important Publications hierarchy, but it’s a start, and definitely a good one for graduate students (though of course I haven’t even been accepted to a program yet…).

The interesting part of my book review is that it’s not actually a book review: it’s a website review! On the Online Submissions page, where it explains how and what to submit in the journal’s different sections, the review section states, “Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and web sites.” That last item, websites, stuck out at me, so I flipped through the older four issues of the journal. I found only book reviews.

Idea: do something really new. So I wrote a website review!

The review takes a look at Inside Scanlation, a well-researched fan site that catalogues the short history of English-language manga scanlation. I discovered this website a couple weeks before it launched and eagerly waited for its official publication. I really like Inside Scanlation because it’s a modern equivalent of older anime fansites that probably are only available today via The Wayback Machine.

If you’re interested in reading through my review, you can find it at the Transformative Works and Cultures Journal, volume 5. A direct link to the article is here.

Also, if you’re interested in more anime fandom-related academic articles, Mikhail Koulikov wrote up a paper on fansubbing communities. You can read that essay in the same volume: Fighting the fan sub war: Conflicts between media rights holders and unauthorized creator/distributor networks.

But what do I mean by an “academic review”? Well, put most simply, the fundamental form of academic writing is the literature review, and the social tenet that holds academic published research together is the citation. If you don’t understand this latter point, hit up Google Scholar, throw in a search term, and you’ll see that the “most important academic works” are those with high “cited by” counts.

Anyway, so how can we provide an academic bent to review writing? Well, there are technically already “academic reviews” available: simply pick up a copy of Mechademia and flip to the back pages, where you’ll find a host of critically insightful reviews of anime and manga titles. These reviews provide references to and citations of other academic texts, but tend to avoid other reviews from professional reviewers, other academics, or whomever.

The idea I would like to put forth in this short article, though, is that there’s another type of “academic review” that is not really used: reviews that reference previously-written reviews, as if the networks of reviewers mirrored the networks of academics that make up contemporary academic research matrices.

Looking through some criticism about writing reviews for anime and manga, once in a while I see authors writing, “So-and-so has already said enough about this title, so I don’t really have much more to say.” But I want to criticize these stances, because a reviewing author should take into account what others view about a piece of media, at the very least to inform his or her own opinion in the review-to-be-written.

I’ve been meaning to add more reviews of anime and manga titles to this blog, but I’ve continually taken the approach of writing critical, exploratory essays about the titles rather than mere reviews. So starting soon, I’m going to attempt to publish a few academic reviews on this blog that reference reviews currently written in the blogosphere.

Of course, I perceive an interesting gap in the current anime/manga blogging phenomenon, which is that there’s not much written about what both the Japanese- and English-language spheres are saying about a particular work. In the hopes that this will help (read: force) me to translate more Japanese writing about anime and manga, particularly from notable — though probably random — Japanese bloggers, I’m going to start writing reviews that reference the current discourse on Japanese popular media. Because that’s what academic is all about: creating, interacting with, and maintaining critical discourse about topics.

I hope that this will help foster greater communication between, or at least appreciation and understanding of, the Japanese and English fandoms.

I’d love to hear what others have to say about this referential approach: please leave comments! And hopefully I’ll have a review up in the next week or so. I’ll be starting with Asano Inio‘s relatively-unknown manga, Goodnight Punpun (Oyasumi Punpun).

Yotsuba&!, pronounced Yotsubato (よつばと, or “Four Leaves and… !”) in Japanese to include the ampersand, is a comedy-driven comic written by Kiyohiko Azuma. It was published beginning in March 2003 and still runs in Dengeki Daioh magazine.

Yotsuba&! was made available to English-speaking audiences by ADV Manga; however, Yen Press took over the license and republished the volumes in 2009. You can buy it through the 3rd-party sellers on Amazon for pretty cheap. In fact, you should buy it.

Yotsuba&! is a comic about a young girl named Yotsuba who moves to a new neighborhood with her father. The comic follows the eccentric, everyday trivialities of Yotsuba as she interacts with her father, neighbors, and town.

It’s a fairly simple story that requires barely any explanation. It’s a comic about a girl who does stuff, akin to how Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway basically boils down to a story about a lady as she goes around her daily routines. As strange as that sounds, Yotsuba&! is a comic about dealing with the hilarious things that occur in daily life (even if some of those things might be caused by a weird, little girl). With chapters titled “Yotsuba and Drawing,” “Yotsuba and the Culture Festival,” and “Yotsuba and Typhoons,” it’s really just a comic about everything and a girl. Basically, what the title says: Yotsuba & !.

There are three things that I wish this essay to achieve:

1) Explore where Yotsuba&! is situated in the Japanese comics industry and the minds of its (adult?) readers.
2) Look at how Kiyohiko Azuma has developed as an artist and how that is illustrated in Yotsuba&!.
3) Explain why Yotsuba&! (in relation to Azuma’s other works) says a lot about writing comic comics.

1

To begin, let’s look a bit more at Yotsuba&!‘s method of publication. As I said previously, Azuma’s comic is serialized in Dengeki Daioh (電撃大王, King of Electric Shocks) magazine, and has been running since March 2003. Azumanga Daioh, for which Azuma is most known, also ran in this comics magazine.

Before I continue, I feel the need to explain how magazines work in Japan. Somewhat similar to American television ratings, the Japanese comics industry targets its comics to demographics. In America, these tend to look like “Male 18-30″ or “Female 45+.” In Japan, comics demographics are similar but are categorized by name. Basically, they’re split into four categories: boys (少年, shounen), girls (少女, shoujo), young men (青年, seinen), and young women (女性, josei). Most comics are targeted to one of these four demographics, though the actual readership can vary wildly (eg., older men can read comics for girls).

So, with that in mind, Dengeki Daioh caters to a specific demographic. If you check the Wikipedia page, it notes that the magazine is aimed at boys (shonen). However, you’ll note in the History of edits that this was changed from young men (seinen) back in 2006, supposedly when the magazine shifted to a monthly schedule.

Based on the actual comics we see in Dengeki Daioh, we might posit the magazine to cater to somewhere between the shonen and seinen readerships (Zac Berteschy argues for the same interpretation in 2005). The cover images above illustrate that most of the stories found in these issues revolve around bishoujo (美少女, beautiful young girls) protagonists. The image below, which is a 2009 calendar celebrating Dengeki Daioh‘s popular female leads, highlights the same point.

I take a look at Dengeki Daioh‘s stories and readers because Yotsuba&! has been constantly criticized for being a story about a young girl in a men’s magazine, and then subsequently is defended as a suitable — and specifically innocent — comedy for guys (one good piece is by Jason Thompson on Moé: The Cult of the Child). The underlying tone in this criticism, of course, is that Yotsuba&! might be seen as a moé or bishoujo comic, which spontaneously taints it. I’m not going to argue for or against these demographic-genres, but Dengeki Daioh is certainly a magazine aimed at a younger audience than other seinen or adult magazines (such as Comic High! — which contains titles such as Chu-Bra!! and Kodomo no Jikan or Comic LO, which publishes erotic lolita titles).

Instead of situating Yotsuba&! in the context of bishoujo comics, instead I will argue that it is a comic for (young) adults. Which might be a little ironic, given that the Manga Moveable Feast is meant to shine the spotlight on comics for kids. And with the all ages rating for Yotsuba&!‘s release in the U.S., it would make sense as a satisfactory choice. However, I will argue against this notion, and instead uphold that Yotsuba&! is meant for the audience that it targets in Japan. It’s a story about a young girl, but the humor is in the relationships she maintains in an adult world. When she interacts with kids, (older teen and adult) readers laugh at the ridiculous situations, expressions, and reactions that emerge. When she interacts with adults, older readers laugh because they connect with the adults in the comic, who also see Yotsuba as pretty ridiculous. Of course, Yotsuba&! is also about “all the rest” (&!), and the short stories that we see of the adults in her world are just as funny because older readers can relate.

Yotsuba&! is a comic for adults. Not in the sense of perversion or ecchi perspectives. Instead, it’s a comic that older readers will understand, and with which younger readers — while they might enjoy it — will have a more difficult time associating.

2 + 3

If you know anything about Kiyohiko Azuma, you should recognize his name from the cover of Azumanga Daioh, which — as I previously mentioned — also ran in Dengeki Daioh starting in February 1999. If you do a quick scan of Azuma’s Wikipedia page, though, you’ll notice that he has done other earlier work. These include:

Inma no Ranbu (1997)
Try! Try! Try! (1998–2001)
Wallaby (1998–2000)

Try! Try! Try! is actually the predecessor to Yotsuba&!, and follows pretty much the same characters with Yotsuba as the protagonist. Wallaby is a story about a girl who sews a stuffed wallaby in memory of her recently-deceased classmate, Warabi. His soul comes to inhabit the toy animal, though the girl never understands that it is her friend (because the name Wallaby in Japanese, ワラビ, is the same as わらび, the boy’s name… if that wasn’t already obvious). And Inma no Ranbu (淫魔の乱舞, The Lust Demon’s Boisterous Dance) is an adult, erotic comic about female warriors getting sexed up, illustrated by Azuma (though he published under a pseudonym, for obvious reasons).

It’s interesting to look at the spectrum of Azuma’s titles and how they define his career. The character designs are fairly set in stone if we begin with Inma no Ranbu.

The backgrounds are nonexistent (what’s the point in an erotic comic, right?), and the facial expressions are fairly plain. The art style overall is minimal with strength in the line work, though it barely varies.

Wallaby shows improvement. Definitely not in the background art, as it barely exists in this comic as well, but Wallaby represents probably the primary space where Azuma practices his facial expressions. The character designs are still a bit wonky, but they improve going into Azumanga Daioh. The background art, however, improves dramatically, as Azuma makes distinct decisions to create a world for his characters to inhabit. Almost in complete contrast to Wallaby, Yotsuba&!‘s backgrounds and peripheral images (such as objects that characters interact with) are fine-tuned and extremely detailed.

The only copy of Try! Try! Try! I could look through was a one-shot from 2001. The style mirrors that of Yotsuba&! if you compare it to the original chapters, which is a bit interesting, since it seems that Azuma’s solidified his art style by 2001.

However, Yotsuba&! is an interesting case if we want to move away from talking about just “art style” and talk about “comic style.” And to do that, we actually have two things to work out: “comic style” as in 1) comics, and 2) comedy.

Azumanga Daioh, while popular perhaps because of its anime adaptation, ran in Dengeki Daioh as a 4-frame comic (四コマ漫画, 4-koma manga). The 4-koma has a long history in Japan before World War 2 (you can read more about it at Wikipedia). All of Azuma’s other comics are in ordinary format, including Yotsuba&!. So what does it matter that Yotsuba&! is not a 4-koma?

First, let me remark on Azuma’s other comics. Comic artists in Japan constantly have to battle to find the right balance between text (the words on the page), image (the drawings of characters and place), and structure (number and arrangement of panels). Azuma’s early works, such as Inma and Wallaby, suffer from having an imbalance between these three comic elements. Azumanga Daioh‘s 4-koma structure, on the other hand, enforces a balance between the elements that Azuma masters and through which he creates hilarious situations in every column.

Yotsuba&!, though, is not a 4-koma comic. It is structured like an ordinary comic. But for reasons to be explained, it finds an excellent balance between these text, images, and structure.

From here on, I will argue that Yotsuba&! secretly hides a 4-koma-like structure in how it organizes its humor.

The 4-frame comic is organized as kishoutenketsu (起承転結, or “intro, development, turn, and conclusion”). Each of the four “stages” of the narrative development in 4-koma represents one frame of the comic, and one full joke is complete at the end of each set of four.

Again, Yotsuba&! is not a 4-koma comic. However, while each chapter is set up as a distinct plot (eg., Yotsuba plays with her dad) with its own jokes, every page in itself contains a joke or funny moment. Now, I could list off the jokes on every page, but I feel like you’ll just get the point by going out and reading the comic! But I can, at least, explain what I mean about the “secret 4-koma structure.” By working on Azumanga Daioh, Azuma adjusted the way he told jokes to fit the 4-koma format, but in doing so he perfected telling jokes by aligning one frame with another. Reading Yotsuba&! feels like reading a 4-koma with varying numbers and sizes of frames. You can read Yotsuba&! and pick out different jokes, and for the most part they fit into 4-koma-like structures. However, the continual jokes do not hinder the narrative; instead, they help with character development, and each chapter of Yotsuba&! seems like a handful of 4-koma gently woven together into a more film-like form.

In fact, you can see Azuma doing a special rendition of Yotsuba&! in the 4-frame comic format between chapters 27 and 28. And the great revelation is that it doesn’t feel any different from reading the comic as regularly written and drawn.

Improving on Azuma’s earlier work, Yotsuba&! also illustrates that Azuma has figured out how to create impressionable comics. What I mean, basically, is that when Azuma wants to let his characters’ personalities shine, he can give each moment an impact. Usually these impacts consist of Yotsuba becoming really surprised…

… but these moments are constantly hilarious. These quick changes in emotion — spanning across two frames — are, I believe, a direct impact of Azuma’s work with 4-koma, as you’ll usually see that kind of comedic dichotomy between the 2nd and 3rd or 3rd and 4th frames of 4-koma. Yotsuba&!‘s humor is aided by Azuma’s love of sound effects, which actually pervade and dominate all of his works (eg., see the image from Inma above). I love how he uses them in a lot of Yotsuba&!‘s early scenes, especially ones where there’s not a lot of necessary noise (like waking up in the morning or working quietly), to emphasize the personalities of his characters.

Interestingly, the hard-hitting humor that pervades a lot of Yotsuba&!‘s early chapters begins to dissipate in Azuma’s later work on the series. It’s not that the humor disappears, but we get to see a lot more humble moments shared between the characters, particularly in collected silence. In my opinion, I think the reason for the change is that Azuma realized the popularity and worth of Yotsuba&! as a comic that represents more than just “a comic for guys,” that it reflects a lot about the relationships between the characters in the world he has created. And it’s moments like these…

… that I think define what Yotsuba&!‘s all about: loving daily life and the awesome moments that humor us.

Online manga: where is it? Some would say it’s passed around via the Internet as scanlations. And that’s a problem.

That problem, though, is two-sided. The obvious first side is that scanlations are technically illegal. But the second — and more important — side is that legal alternatives to online manga distribution do not exist. Yes, you can say that there are experiments with online distribution (such as Viz’s online Signature Ikki magazine), but the fact remains that a universal and ubiquitous legal alternative for online distribution of every English-language manga published in the United States does not currently exist.

There are some subsequent problems as well, and I would like to take the opportunity of this post to go through them. I feel like these issues have not been addressed, particularly since no alternative to illegal distribution websites has been offered by the Coalition as of this writing.

The Problem of Terms: Scanlations, Scans, and RAWs

When people talk about the issues surrounding the illegal, global distribution of printed Japanese comics, they encapsulate the issues with the term “scanlations.” Instead of one issue, though, there are three issues at stake: scanlations, scans, and RAWs. The problem with the discourse surrounding online distribution of manga is that it’s a bi-national issue, though critics tend to come at it from one of the two perspectives. So, to break it down:

1. Japanese (and others) are uploading scans of original Japanese comics to the Internet and are distributing them illegally.
2. Americans (and others) are uploading scans of original English translations of original Japanese comics to the Internet and are distributing them illegally.
3. Americans (and others) are uploading fan-translated scans of original Japanese comics to the Internet and are distributing them illegally.

These are the three issues at stake, and they all account for different parts of the “scanlation” debate. To apply terms to each of the situations above, (1) is a RAW issue, (2) is a scan issue, and (3) is a scanlation issue. And to define these words for those unfamiliar with the terms:

- A “RAW” is a scan of the original Japanese comic, untranslated (the term “RAW” actually presupposed translation, hence the original untranslated print material being “unprocessed” by fans).
- A “scan” is basically the same thing as a RAW, but it is a scanned copy of officially translated material distributed by publishing companies outside of Japan (eg., Viz, Vertical, Dark Horse, etc.).
- A “scanlation” is a fan-produced translation of a RAW comic. A scanlation cannot be a translation of a scan, unless said scanlation is translated into a language other than the original scan’s language (eg., a French scanlation of Vertical’s production of Osamu Tezuka’s works, originally translated into English by Vertical, Inc.).

So, besides the issue of petulantly defining terms and situations, what’s the importance of drawing these distinctions? Well, to quote the first sentence of the Publishers Weekly article (above), “An international Coalition of Japanese and American-based manga publishers have joined together to combat what they call the ‘rampant and growing problem’ of scanlations, the practice of posting scanned and translated editions of Japanese comics online without permission of the copyright holders.” The article states that the Coalition will be addressing the issue of “scanlations,” but there are really two more ways to slice this phrasing:

1) Japanese publishers and English publishers are (or should be) more concerned about the illegal distribution of their own properties. That is, for Japanese publishers, they first and foremost do not want to see the illegal distribution of original Japanese language scans (ie., “RAWs”). For American publishers, they first and foremost do not want to see the illegal distribution of scans of their original English-language translations (namely, “scans”).

2) Less important — though still important — is that both Japanese and American publishers want to see a reduction in or end to the illegal distribution of scanlations.

Why make this distinction further? Well, if you have seen the argument about the illegal distribution of English-language fansubs or even the reverse importation of American DVDs into Japan, you’ll note that publishers want to make the most money possible. The most money, therefore, lies within the original products of these publishers. Japanese comic readers should read the original Japanese manga, so having these online negatively impacts the market in Japan. American comic readers should read the official English-language translation of the manga, so having these online also negatively impact the market in America. For scanlations, it’s a bit trickier: they obviously represent a direct opposition to official publications, but the draw to buying official publications is the physical material: “better” translations, “better” physical quality (image and book), etc. But, of course, “better” does not always happen: be it in the failure of companies to produce a better product (eg., the translation might actually suck) or be it in the personal aesthetic values of different fans (eg., some fans will argue that scanlations are better because they avoid localization with a more literal translation).

There have been some arguments that scanlations help the American side of the distribution industry because it helps introduce titles to fans. While this was true in the past, I personally will deny this to be true today: the fans that are reading manga online already seek out or are at least introduced to titles in respective online communities (forums, chatrooms, social networks, etc.). In the end, there are no numbers to support this assertion. Entirely separate from these numbers are the numbers that illustrate the effect of scans and RAWs on distribution companies, of which there are statistics (and you can hear about them in this episode of the ANNcast with guest Ed Chavez, from Vertical, Inc.).

So, as I’ve introduced above, the scanlation debate is complex and definitely does not aid fans in understanding how the industry works (since there are practically no case studies publicized anywhere). But the debate really does have to be contended distinctly, because there are many issues at stake which without well-defined boundaries will confuse a lot of people. Ultimately, the problem with the Coalition will be competing companies and differing cultural modes of print consumption (eg., serialized compilations in Japan versus tankoubon-style paperbacks in the U.S.).

The Debate Over Numbers

OneManga.com was recently revealed to be in Google’s Top 1000 visited websites (via Google AdPlanner). You can check out the page on which OneManga is listed here (using April 2010 data).*

* You’ll notice that the page states OneManga.com does not use advertising, but I believe the page account for Google Ads (because OneManga.com does in fact use ads on practically every page of its website).

Google states that OneManga.com has achieved a 0.3% penetration rate. According to the “about” page, “You can see a list of the largest 1000 sites worldwide, based on Unique Visitors (users), as measured by Ad Planner. This list is updated monthly as new Ad Planner datasets are released. The list defines sites as top-level domains.” The key here is that Google is calculating the size of a website based on its community. But even more interestingly is that while OneManga draws in 4.2 million unique visitors monthly, it achieve 1.1 billion page views (which, if you go examine the page, is waaay larger than most of the sites in that range). The reason for this is that 1) with such a loyal audience (who go to the website primarily to read manga, 2) they achieve a higher visit duration compared to other websites, and therefore 3) we see many more pages visited per user (particularly because the majority of the OneManga website is constructed of pages upon pages of comics).

The key point of the Top 1000 ranking, therefore, is not that OneManga gets visited by a lot of people, but that it retains a highly devoted audience. While the reason can be debated (it is perhaps likely that the internal community continually attracts users, rather than the manga pages; or, perhaps a small handful of series gathers 80% of the traffic), the point is that this audience is loyal to OneManga.com and not manga per se.

The Seclusion of Illegal Online Fandoms

Early media fandoms operated covertly in terms of distribution: most limited the dissemination of media objects to internal distribution within the (usually moderated) community. For example, many media-related LiveJournal communities still function as moderated hierarchies, carefully controlling the selection and admission of new members to the community. Even checking out Baka-Updates Manga illustrates that a large number of translation communities for manga still rely on IRC or similar communication protocols to distribute their translations amongst acquaintances. At the Media in Transition 6 conference, Professor Carolina Acosta-Alzuru (University of Georgia) accounts for similar gated community practices amongst the foreign, online audiences of telenovelas, which — as must be noted — do not have an official, legal translator-distributor outside of Latin America (in converse to the manga and anime industries in the United States).

I predict that, just like the online telenovela audiences, scanlation teams and communities will — in the face of legal action — retreat away from prying eyes into further gated communities, allowing only internal (sometimes P2P-enabled) distribution. But it remains to be seen what stances and strategies the international Coalition will adopt, particularly if they primarily target large distribution websites (like OneManga) or also go after smaller communities (like smaller scanlation groups). The equation pretty much comes down to the relative opposition between exposure (how noteworthy each community is), resources (how many people and how much effort the Coalition will be able to expend on this endeavor), and fan activity (how well they can maneuver around old and new online spaces).

Therefore, scanlations will not end, particularly since a small number of fans still produce fan translations as celebratory fan activities (or just to practice their translation skills).

Marketing to Online Communities: From Grassroots to Forced Seeding

One of my points of research is into how ideas spread online. Over the past few years, one term has been co-opted to describe popular trends in content (usually video) online: viral. Viral came to be adopted after the concept of memetic spread (for Internet memes) became popular, borrowing from the word meme‘s roots in Richard Dawkin’s 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. If you follow the online marketing space, then, you might have come across viral marketing as a new trend in getting as many people as possible to watch (and hopefully share) your advertisement (or other piece of media).

The problem with virality, though, is that mapping how users share content within an online community (or across multiple communities) is pretty damn complicated. It requires figuring out what audiences reside where and who acts as the links between distinct communities. My mentor, Henry Jenkins, has described that form of sharing as “spreadability” (which you can read about in his white paper, If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead: Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace). Anyway, one point that is never really discussed among marketers operating in “viral marketing” is the process of injecting content into communities that might appreciate and then spread said content. Ironically (since we’re talking about online piracy), the marketers have co-opted another term to describe the process of community injection: seeding (from the seeding of P2P BitTorrent sharing). Unlike strange, popular Internet phenomena (like Susan Boyle) which spread organically among friends, colleagues, etc., raising hit counts as people honestly visit them, these marketers have to literally introduce their media forcefully to communities that have been targeted as potentially finding value in that media. The spread, therefore, is not necessarily organic, due to this seeding process.

I bring up seeding, though, because it identifies one key component of the online manga fandom (also applying to other media fandoms online) that the Coalition will have to leverage (and perhaps exploit) when they decide to introduce a new legal alternative to online manga distribution: spreading content through communities. The undisclosed problem being that the manga readers the Coalition assumes to exist are actually just part of the community of each respective illegal manga website. Rym and Scott, in a recent GeekNights episode, purported that manga fans do not exist in the capacity that publishers think they do. Instead, there are teenagers without disposable incomes that utilize sites like OneManga but are extracting more value than just the manga. The manga buying audience, though, does not exist on these websites. They argue, therefore, that closing down scanlation websites will do nothing to help the American industry.

I am tempted to agree with the GeekNights hosts, but lets assume that the Coalition does introduce a new online distribution system: how are they going to find an audience for it? Or, more pressing, how are they going to find an audience for each particular licensed title, so that each can be monetized? Because while the system itself might attract some viewers, each title will have to fend for itself in the online ecosystem. At the moment, OneManga (as I hinted at above) creates an ecosystem where fans become acclimated to titles through a specific community, be it OneManga or another online forum. In order to create a fiscally successful distribution system, the Coalition will have to learn and be able to seed these titles to the correct communities (as well as set up a system that accounts for a potentially non-monetizable user base, aka. kids without credit cards). Otherwise, it will ultimately fail.

Years of Waiting: Where’s the Crunchyroll for Manga?

And then there’s one final point: how come nobody tried the whole Coalition thing five years ago? Crunchyroll started to craft a business model to capitalize on fans’ online modes of anime consumption back in mid-2006, but we still haven’t seen one distribution system that aggregates thousands of manga streams around a centralized community (à la Crunchyroll). The interesting bit is the potential for OneManga to become the next Crunchyroll, following the same historical progression of illegal-to-legal distribution website. A hypothetical, but: What if OneManga received enough venture funding to go legit by partnering with Japanese companies? And how does such a hypothetical reshape our understanding of the space that OneManga inhabits as an illegal site but also a hotbed for media fans in a thriving online community?

Then, too, what if we see ventures like OpenManga directly competing with any effort that the Coalition puts forth? (Of course, there’s also the subsequent question of how OpenManga will also drive its own community.)

A Conclusion of Open-Ended Questions

So, where do we go from here? Unfortunately, we just have to sit tight and wait it out. Not many (if any) publishers have made official statements regarding their involvement in the Coalition, strategies for tackling scanlation/scan/RAW websites, or announcements about further solutions to legal online manga distribution. But at the very least, I hope these issues have been fleshed out at least a little to provide some insight into the multifaceted problem with the problem of online manga.

Cross-posted from the Convergence Culture Consortium.

The Japanese popular culture industry, especially for anime and manga, is an interesting case study for global fandom, but also for global industry. The comics, television, and film industry for animated popular culture in Japan has its own history, structure, and approaches, but over the past five decades, as it has reached millions of new, international viewers, new industries have risen to cater to these fans. Still, with the rise of the Internet and the economic troubles that most industries have gone through over the past decade, both the domestic and international manga and anime industries have been hurting for money, even with a surfeit of fans.

The anime and manga industry is especially volatile, because its domestic and international audiences have utilized the Internet to spread and consume the media at the expense of industrial and commercial models that cannot keep up with the audiences’ changing tastes, modes of consumption, and cultural behaviors of media consumption (sharing with friends, international online distribution, the culture of collectors versus mere viewers, etc.). The industries, both in Japan and elsewhere, must change: however, the success that anime and manga brought a decade ago have influenced the producers of these media to stick with old models that are no longer fully applicable to the current fan cultures that drive the markets.

Today, I want to discuss two very recent issues of the manga and anime industries — in Japan and in America — publicizing comments to fans in a way that might be seen by many as “giving up”: without adapting to technological, cultural, and commercial changes, the industries representatives have voiced concerns to fans by pleading with them to stop behaving as they current are — mostly by using the Internet to circumvent commercial models for their media consumption — and to think ethically about how these behaviors are affecting the respective industries.

Shueisha, a major publisher in Japan who print manga magazines and also co-own Viz (one of the top manga publishers in the United States), last week printed a letter to fans in Weekly Shonen Jump, a weekly manga magazine and one of the most popular in Japan. You can see the message (in the original Japanese) by clicking on the image below (in the bottom right), or read the translation:

To all our readers,

There are now many people unjustly posting copies of manga on the internet. These unjust copies are inconsistent with mangakas’ feelings. They are also distorting the authors’ intentions of “I want the work to be read this way”. The actions of posting these unjust copies on the net, into which the mangakas have poured their hearts, are not only hurting mangakas in real life but are also against the law, even if done in a light-hearted manner. Every time we discover such “unjust copies”, we talk to the mangaka and consider every possible countermeasure. But the number of inconsiderate people is great, and at present we cannot deal with all of them. We have a request for all our readers. The unjust internet copies are deeply hurting the manga culture, mangakas’ rights, and even mangakas’ souls. Please understand once again that all of that is against the law. Also, the mangakas and Shueisha will severely deal with any unjust copies found on the internet. We ask that our readers please continue to support us.

- Weekly Shounen Jump editorial department (translation via Devang Haven)

This is a critical development in the manga industry, not because the publishers are finally making a statement about the state of fan piracy, but also that the message comes from one of THE important players in the Japanese industry.

Now, there is some context behind this message: although here in America, a lot of talk goes around about the negative impact of scanlations (scanned and translated manga, by fans), this message is calling out specifically to a Japanese audience: fans in Japan who are uploading RAW scans of manga magazine pages to the Internet (that is, scans of the original pages: a direct copy of the book, circulated online away from the commercial market).

Now, the uploading of RAW scans in Japan is an obvious act of piracy, and direct piracy like this does hurt the industry. An interview with Ed Chavez (Vertical, Inc., a publisher of translated manga in America) explicates that copying of the primary source affects sales and loses audience members. And in response to Shueisha’s plea, a number of websites that hosted RAW manga are now closed or redirect to Shueisha’s homepage.

The issue with a message to Japanese fans is how international audiences should react to this call for fan ethics. A number of English-language sites carry RAW manga scans, for fan translators to distribute scanlations to English-speaking audiences. Although these scanlations still affect the market, they are not scans of the official translations published by companies in North America: therefore, they occupy a slightly different space. If we think philosophically about scanlations, then, English-language-only scans of manga available in Japan but not yet in America operate in a strange space: they can’t be read by Japanese fans who are looking for free Japanese-language manga, but they help spread the word about titles not currently available in English-speaking countries (at the same time, though, the consumption of scanlations may still affect the purchasing of these official copies once they are released, because some fans will have already read the scans and will not want to buy the official publication).

Will Shueisha’s plea work? Sales of manga in Japan have been on a steady decline for a few years now, due in part to piracy, but also to new modes of media consumption, for example through cell phones. All in all, it appears that the most important part of this issue is that Shueisha, as a major publisher, has the capacity to send cease-and-desist notices to websites that are sharing their original content for free (an illegal activity). These endeavors may help the Japanese industry’s woes with declining sales, but I would venture a guess that it will not affect overseas fan economies.

If we jump across the Pacific to America, another rhetorical development took place, this time via a message published by the president of an imported Japanese animation production studio.

Anime News Network reports:

Eric P. Sherman, President and CEO of the anime dubbing company Bang Zoom! Entertainment, has posted an editorial on the AnimeTV blog on Saturday, urging fans to buy anime instead of watching it via fan-subbed videos.

Bang Zoom! is a North American distributor (voice dubbing, subtitling, production, etc.) of Japanese animation television series, movies, and the like. Sherman, in his blog post entitled “Anime – R.I.P.,” writes in bold, “Anime is going to die.” He reiterates what many critics have been saying for years — “If people don’t resist the urge to get their fix illegally, the entire industry is about to fizzle out.” — but readers, both fans and those in the industry, realize that his words are about a decade too late.

The issue, of course, is that Sherman argues, “Japan is already suffering and struggling to bring out quality titles. They can’t rely on everything being picked up by US distributors anymore.” The problem with his argument is two-fold: 1) the Japanese domestic market is the key contributor to the financial success of Japanese animation, not a reliance on foreign distributors, and 2) the Japanese domestic market has been deteriorating as much as the redistribution market abroad (Adrian Brown, of SBS Dateline Australia gives a good rundown of the Japanese industry’s problems in this video segment).

In terms of American redistribution, FUNimation Entertainment currently leads the market in DVD releases (both dubbed and subbed), with Crunchyroll picking up the majority of what titles are left, releasing them subtitled online in their video portal. However, to repeat, the American licensors only provide a reasonable (though still small) fee to Japanese companies to distribution their intellectual property. Basically, the Japanese producers are taking what money they can get (especially money they can use to make up for domestic piracy losses), instead of letting reasonably accessible money slip by while foreign fans share subtitled anime online. Justin Sevakis, of Anime News Network, breaks down the process below:

The cost of producing TV anime has tripled in the last decade. The Japanese DVD market is also maturing, and R1 imports back into Japan for a third of the price (or less) of R2 are a growing problem for them. Hence, if they’re going to part with their intellectual property, it has to be worth at least the amount they’re likely to lose in reverse-imports, plus the production burden relative to whatever value they’ve attached to the R1 market in relation to the rest of the world.

When an anime is licensed, is the fee paid to the Japanese companies in the form of a one-time XX dollar payment, or in the form of XX dollars or XX percent profit off of each DVD that is sold?

Sort of a combination of both. Let me preface this by saying that the following isn’t just how anime works, but pretty much every motion picture and TV license.

First, there is an up-front change of money, known as the “license fee” or “minimum guarantee”. In the case of TV or OAV, this is usually a per-episode amount (though a licensor may insist on dividing longer series up in specified chunks of episodes). There’s also likely a charge for materials duplication (as cloning master tapes is expensive).

The releasing company then produces whatever DVD product and sells it (and may also have other rights like theatrical, TV, etc…). A certain percentage of those grosses are separated into a separate fund. That fund is used for the following:
1. Recouping any production costs. This includes dubbing, DVD authoring, replication and manufacturing, etc…
Once that’s all recouped, THEN…
2. Recouping the minimum guarantee. As the “minimum guarantee” implies that this is the guaranteed amount of revenue the licensor will make from the deal, funds are withheld until that amount is actually reached.
AFTER THAT POINT…
3. That percentage is paid as royalties to the licensor.

Now, that’s a lot of money to make back before the licensor sees any residuals. You’re probably wondering how many titles actually result in residuals being paid, and the answer is “not many”. The minimum guarantee is there so that even if the release tanks, the licensor will have made enough money to call it a day, but OTOH won’t lose out if it’s an unexpected success. Likewise, since the label takes the majority of the risk, they get to keep the lion’s share of the profits, should the release do well.

This is how the vast majority of deals are structured, and this system has been around in the entertainment industry for as long as anyone can remember. There are some exceptions, and the minimum guarantee and back-end percentages (“points”) vary substantially. Also, sometimes production expenses are recouped before separation into royalty percentages.

Justin Sevakis, Anime News Network (via ANN Forums)

All in all, the ultimate problem facing American distributors is that the cultural modes of anime consumption in America is changing once again: instead of needing a general and mediated flow of access to Japanese animation (which was achieved via voice-dubbed distribution), fans now want 1) immediate access to content to keep up with fellow fans, with whom they discuss shows online regularly and at a quick pace; and 2) subtitled anime, because hardcore fans have lashed out about authenticity of dubbed productions, through which many American redistribution directors have taken upon themselves to “redirect” in terms of voice acting (ie., it is a novel production, recontextualized for foreign fans). Instead of needing a moderator to introduce Japanese cultural concepts, terms, etc., most contemporary fans understand (at least the basics) of Japanese lifestyles, language, and behavior.

Therefore, it seems to me that Sherman’s plea for fans to “not pirate anime” is moot, at least at the end of this decade. He states, “Do the right thing. Plain and simple. Because if you don’t, I can guarantee you that this time next year, Bang Zoom won’t be bringing you anymore English language versions of it.” However, it seems that in relation to American fans’ modes of consuming anime, English-language dubs are no longer necessary. Instead, the model provided by Crunchyroll — immediate licensing of popular series, subtitled, and only set to stream online — caters to the largest general American anime audience. Dubbed anime in America might slowly fizzle out, but that business model will be replaced by another company that can better respond to fans’ behaviors.

Has manga criticism reached new heights? Or are our manga literati still in the dark ages? Join journalists, podcasters, bloggers, industry insiders and manga academics as they reveal why manga your fandom originates and always comes back to manga!

Last weekend at Anime Boston 2010, Ed Chavez (of Verical, Inc.) held a panel with some popular Internet writers and reviewers of manga to ask them critical questions about the manga industry, manga criticism, and manga fandom. The panelists included Brigid Alverson (MangaBlog), Michael Toole (Anime Jump), Scott Green (Ain’t It Cool Anime), Clarissa Graffeo (Anime World Order), Erin Finnegan (Ninja Consultants), and Ko Ransom (welcome datacomp).

Erin also recently uploaded a recording of her own, which has slightly higher audio quality (she recorded from the stage; I recorded from the audience), but also cuts off a bit of the end. You can reference her recording here, but catch the end of the panel by listening to the DoAAA podcast.

Listen below, or use the direct download here (55 minutes 59 seconds).

Anime Boston is almost upon us! If you’re coming up to the city for a weekend at the Hynes, be sure to drop by one or more of my panels to say Hello!

Update (Thursday 18 March 11:30 pm): Time for “Hentai Manga” panel has been moved later into the night.

Update 2 (Monday 22 March 9:30 am): Location for “Anime Themes” panel changed. Also, time for “Cowboy Bebop” panel moved earlier in the afternoon.

Update 3 (Monday 29 March 11:10 pm): Time for “Intro and Ending Themes” panel has been moved earlier in the day.

Friday 12:00 pm noon (Panel 302) – Introduction to Anime Intro and Ending Themes

Friday: 5:30 pm (Panel 306) – After Cowboy Bebop: The Works of Shinichiro Watanabe

Friday/Saturday 1:30 am (Panel 202) – Chains, Trains, and Happy Endings: Japan’s Underground Sex Culture (18+)

Saturday 6:00 pm (107 Panel 6) – On the Road for Anime Pilgrimages

Saturday 10:00 pm (Panel 202) – Impact of Evangelion

Saturday/Sunday 1:30 am (Panel 202) – Hentai Manga: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (18+)

Sunday 1:00 pm (Panel 202) – From Antisocial Loser to Economic Hero: The History of Otakudom

Sunday 2:00 pm (Panel 202) – Anime in Academia

On the Road for Anime Pilgrimages
107 Panel 6 on SATURDAY
starting at 06:00:00 PM

Many anime reference real-world locations, inspiring otaku to seek out these destinations. Come discover the significance of the “anime pilgrimage”!

After Cowboy Bebop: The Works of Shinichiro Watanabe
306 Panel 2 on FRIDAY
starting at 08:30:00 PM

Many fans recognize Cowboy Bebop’s director, but let’s look at his other shows, from Macross Plus to Samurai Champloo to Genius Party and more!

Hentai Manga: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
107 Panel 6 on SATURDAY
starting at 12:00:00 AM

What makes a good ero-manga? We’ll show and support some of the funniest & more artistic adult comics (and hilariously bad, “imaginative” ones too).

Chains, Trains, and Happy Endings: Japan’s Underground Sex Culture
202 Panel 5 on FRIDAY
starting at 01:00:00 AM

The Japanese sex industry is pretty closeted, but here’s a peephole into host clubs, no-panty bars, hentai magazines, costume play, and love hotels.

Apparently I have good word that a number of my other panels will proceed past “wait list” status, so I’ll keep everyone updated here! (You can view the rest of my panels by clicking here.)

Anime Boston 2010

New panels for 2010!

On the Road for Anime Pilgrimages
Many anime reference real-world locations, inspiring otaku to seek out these destinations. Come discover the significance of the “anime pilgrimage”!

Bite-Size Anime
Some anime don’t fit the film- or TV-length format, so we’ll take a look at these dwarfs: webisodes, music videos, anthologies, and all things short!

Hentai Manga: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
What makes a good ero-manga? We’ll show and support some of the funniest & more artistic adult comics (and hilariously bad, “imaginative” ones too).

Revamped panels for 2010!

After Cowboy Bebop: The Works of Shinichiro Watanabe
Many fans recognize Cowboy Bebop’s director, but let’s look at his other shows, from Macross Plus to Samurai Champloo to Genius Party and more!

Introduction to Anime Intro and Ending Themes
Today, many OP and ED themes are ignored! We’ll show the best and worst anime themes from Space Battleship Yamato to Evangelion to One Piece and more!

From Antisocial Loser to Economic Hero: The History of Otakudom
From the 1980s subculture, the concept of the obsessive fan has changed in Japan & America. Come learn the history of the fandom and its obsessions!

Chains, Trains, and Happy Endings: Japan’s Underground Sex Culture
The Japanese sex industry is pretty closeted, but here’s a peephole into host clubs, no-panty bars, hentai magazines, costume play, and love hotels.

Anime in Academia
Learn about new research, which resources are available, and what’s necessary to understand the history, trends, and meanings of anime and manga.

Impact of Evangelion
Neon Genesis Evangelion is the most successful Japanese animation ever. Come learn why Eva matters, and how it had such an impact on Japanese culture.