The problem:

Anime con schedules guests, panels, events. Anime con prints schedule one month to two weeks before con. Two weeks before con, schedule changes drastically: panels are added or dropped, events are moved, guests are canceled.

The solution:

Google Docs.

Anime fandom at conventions has changed drastically in the past three years with the mass adoption of mobile technologies (ie., smart phones). Numerous conventions have utilized Twitter for updates and made multiple changes to the designs and interfaces of their websites to push the constant activity of fans on Web-enabled phones into a better comprehension of how the convention works (eg., maps, food, hotels, and particularly schedules). However the latter of this list still proves difficult.

Last year, Otakon experimented with an online personal schedule system, so that each con-goer could manipulate the schedule with highlights of his or her favorite events. Ultimately, it was a good idea with poor execution. Near the main entrance, staffers placed two wide-screen television sets projecting the schedule, which ended up being too big to see the three days in their entirety. Also, with the lack of Internet* in the Baltimore Convention Center, along with not-so-great cell phone reception inside the building, the online schedule was pretty inaccessible.

* This seriously needs to be changed. Too many anime fans rely on the Internet for communication. Anime Boston, at least, has stepped up in the past few years by providing free wireless.

Let me reiterate: We can solve the con schedule problem with Google Docs.

1) Con staffer creates master schedule in Google Spreadsheet. Staffer publishes document as public webpage.

2) Con attendee can download document via phone (after installing appropriate and frequently free app). Attendee can manipulate document via Save As.

3) When necessary, con staffer can update Speadsheet with necessary changes and highlight in yellow. Update then tweeted to convention public.

4) Con attendee can notes changes via Twitter message and download new version of document.

It’s easy. It’s free. It’s scalable (zoom in and out). The staffer can even include a second page on the Spreadsheet with the panel descriptions.

So why aren’t we seeing more convention innovations like this?

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.

This was an actual error message I got many years ago…

Well, due to personal issues, I didn’t make any updates last week. Sorry! I’m still dealing with life at the moment, but I’ll try to put some kind of content up soon.

In other news, I’m applying to law school. I decided to トップをねらえ! and take the LSAT this September. The exam will interfere with New York Anime Festival, but I’m willing to make the sacrifice.

Also, if you sent me an email about Otakon, panels, etc. recently, it may have been added to my Spam collection and subsequently deleted. If you did send me a message recently, please be so kind as to resend it! Thanks.

The Department of Alchemy met with another great success at Otakon 2009 this past weekend. We had large audiences come out for all of our panels: Impact of Evangelion (Saturday morning), Anime/Manga Studies (Saturday late morning), The Problem with Otaku (Saturday evening), and Without Watching the Anime: Opening & Ending Themes (Sunday morning).

Our immense audience on Sunday, albeit a poorly compiled image. Click to enlarge.

We may take it easy for the next week, since Otakon ends our summer convention circuit (until September), but look forward to a lot of analytical articles in the next few weeks, as well as many MBs of podcast fodder for the newly-named Department of Alchemy Audio Archive. Thanks to everyone that attended our panels, and it was great to meet a lot of new people down in Baltimore!

If you have had no experience with Tezuka’s Black Jack, the silent man with a stitched face is an unlicensed doctor and surgeon who travels around Japan (and sometimes the world) to operate on the most difficult medical cases imaginable. Throughout his travels he establishes many friendships and encounters just as many if not more enemies.

Most manga follows a certain form: four-panel, short story, or long format; while the Black Jack manga is compiled into large volumes in Vertical’s release, short stories comprise the tale’s format. The comics magazine Weekly Champion serialized Tezuka’s set of short medical adventures for the length of a decade from 1973 to 1983. Originally, each serialization contained one of the stories, so the authentic experience of waiting X weeks before the next issue arrived is lost, but it’s not a bad consequence that English readers can read a number of stories in one go. Nonetheless, if you pick up a few of Vertical’s volumes and read them in one sitting, the narrative structure of each story may seem repetitive. However, Tezuka throws in surprises every few chapters, so it fails to ever become a boring read. In the long run of his manga production, Black Jack appears relatively late in Tezuka’s career, so the stories and art are respectively well developed.

Picking up the physical text, the reader might notice that Vertical’s paperback is no ordinary release. The colors, texture, and overall presentation of Black Jack’s fifth volume barely resembles the usual standard of manga out there on the market (flimsy pages and a shiny cover). Instead, Vertical provides an excellent physical book, with a rough cover that helps it stay in the reader’s hands (and doesn’t make your fingers sweat). The cover even flaunts a concrete indent that creates the allusion of the text’s “skin” being pulled back to reveal the bodily innards of the medical mysteries that await. The cover also shows off a few frames of the original Japanese manga (which with respect to the fifth volume is actually a spoiler!). Finally, the text reads right to left in a respectful, unflipped format to retain the original Japanese layout (which means, of course, that a humorous note in the “front” of the book notifies the reader of the design). In a way, it seems that Vertical attempts to create a sort of hipster manga that a reader can play off as a adult novel on the morning commute to work; but really, it’s basically a beautiful release.

In terms of the fifth volume in the set, Black Jack is entirely approachable by anyone, since the comic is comprised of individual stories. However, characters reappear in the fifth volume from earlier chapters, so I will reiterate my suggestion to pick up at least the first volume before reading the fifth. Actually, I would recommend reading Volume 1 through 4 at the outset if you can afford it. I did in fact read Volume 5 before Volume 1, which produced a very interesting surprise when I learned of the origins of Black Jack’s tiny assistant, Pinoko (illustrated above), which were explained in the earliest chapters of the first volume! Nevertheless, feel free to pick up Volume 5 before anything else, because the stories are just as good throughout.

In terms of the content of the fifth installment, Tezuka makes his stories as interesting as possible (or as unbelievable, given your preferences). Not only does Black Jack encounter a number of friends, rivals, and especially mentors from his past, but he also makes contact with aliens, ghosts, and even a popular idol of the times. And if you have been a fan of the first four volumes, the secret history of Black Jack’s medical equipment is finally revealed!

Overall, Tezuka’s Black Jack is one of his more popular works, but also one of his more mature texts. The maturity of his artwork particularly stands out in his panel layouts, which reflect both the inner consciences of his characters’ personalities and the unruly power of nature. His distorted and meandering panels resemble the surgical cuts of the scalpel that Tezuka abandoned when he left the medical profession to take up drawing comics. Alongside the intense, realistic depictions from the operating room, the feeling exuded from the stories are graphic yet true to life. Ultimately, the pictorial medicine of Black Jack is merely objective, as the real force behind Tezuka’s work lies in the personal connections to his characters. Sometimes “big eyes” of Japanese animation are still criticizes by young fans, but the profiles and facial expressions in Tezuka’s productions continue to tell the real story.

Are there any faults? With a academic background in English, I tend to notice typos right off the bat, but Vertical produces a streamlined piece of copy with no errors. A few references might go over the head of the reader, such as the opaque allusion (illustrated above) to Weekly Champion, the magazine which serialized Black Jack. However, if you have already read through Volume 1, a footnote in one of the initial chapters explains this reference, since it seems Tezuka likes to play frequently with the concept that a kid can learn to be a doctor by reading comics. My other complaint is a bit petulant. In the first chapter, a footnote explains a pun made in the original Japanese that plays off readings of kanji (one of the most common literary forms of humor in Japanese, Chinese, etc.). The problem for the reader is that the original kanji are not printed in the footnote, so unless he or she possesses a knowledge of Japanese, the joke cannot be reverse engineered. If the kanji were printed in the footnote (it would take about six extra characters, so it’s not difficult), it would provide readers unfamiliar with Japanese a method of understanding a subtle bit of humor that usually goes unnoticed.

Overall, Black Jack is an excellent story, and Vertical’s release of the fifth volume should capture any manga fan’s intrigue. As always, I recommend Tezuka’s work because he established so many foundations and trends in the manga universe. Black Jack Volume 5 is available at most book stores for US $16.95. But don’t go off the price; buy Black Jack because you will enjoy it!

The Department of Alchemy has started prepping for the summer convention circuit!

If you’ll be at Anime Boston this weekend, I’ll be talking at the following panels:

Genre, Music, and Shinichiro Watanabe
Friday @ 6:00 pm in Ballroom A
A chance to praise Watanabe and his musical direction! Finally!

Akiba Empire: The Influence of Otaku
Friday @ 8:00 pm in Ballroom A Constitution Ballroom
Pairing up with Nicole from Design Benign, a talk about marketing and the otaku economic force.

The Virtual Worlds of Anime
Saturday @ 1:30 pm in Back Bay Panel/Video
A survey of anime and manga about virtual spaces and how the medium helps us understand new worlds.

Chains, Trains, and Love Hotels: The Japanese Sex Industry
Saturday @ 10:00 pm in Ballroom A
A presentation on, well, sex in Japan.

The Anime That’s Not Anime: Opening and Ending Themes
Sunday @ 11:30 am in Panel Room 207
An attempt to examine and contextualize a solid number of opening and ending themes of anime.

Also, Otakon panel acceptances have just come in, and the Department of Alchemy will be making more appearances:

1. Without Watching the Anime: Opening & Ending Themes
2. Chains, Trains, and Love Hotels: The Japanese Sex Industry
3. The Real Story of Japanese Street Fashion
4. The Impact of Evangelion

With other possible talks to include (pending the waiting list and notices):

5. The Problem with Otaku
6. Japan (and Anime) Beyond the City
7. Anime in Academia

Hopefully, the Anime Boston panels will be recorded if you can’t come up to New England for the weekend, but some of these panels may also appear at Anime Expo and Anime Weekend Atlanta!

I thought it already difficult to take notes and eventually blog after a live feed had already informed the people who cared about the content. Is there really a point in taking notes if the original content is available in full? Probably not. But I don’t want to suggest that blogging is out of the option. For one, blogging, although a form of journalism, is also a form of exploration, through essay form. The author may process the original content and produce reactions: argument, hypothesis, questions. The blog medium may also take on a hypertextual nature, unlike paper or televisual journalism, so even more information can be accessed to provide more context for the audience. In fact, blog articles plus original visual media is possibly the best opportunity for the digital author, because he has a primary text to reference directly, like a film.

I bring all this up because Berkman@10 is webcasting the conference’s panels and lectures, and will most likely publish the video recordings as it has done in the past. The Berkman Center’s actions help push forward initiatives like BU’s OpenCourseWare project to get videos of lectures, and other course materials, online for public use. And I’m happy about that.