Missing Bamboo Blade? Me too. The folks at Anime News Network may have heard our lamentations, as they have posted episodes of the animated version online, free and legal to watch. As of this post, four episodes have been dubbed and posted, so go check them out. Or, if you prefer to read cartoons instead of watching them, you can check out the subtitled version. And yes, I did just go there.

If you’ve been a Yen Plus subscriber for a while, you know it’s tough to find kind words about whoever they have managing their subscriptions. I recently received a dire message in the mail that it was my “third notice” to resubscribe lest I miss an issue and so on and so forth. Where were the other two notices? I don’t know; I never received them. Any suspicions of shenanigans on the part of these dweebs are confirmed by the fact that I can find no less than three comments on Yen Press’s own site from other people who have received “third notices” - one, two, three. There seems to be no way to renew the subscription online, so I’ve gotta do it by mail. The notification said I could send them a check to pay for the renewal, but I don’t really have a checkbook (I use my debit card for everything), so I checked the “bill me later” check box in the hope that whatever bill they send me will give me the option to pay with plastic, then drove to the post office to purchase a single stamp so I could mail it. And when they send me the bill, I’ll drive to the post office again and purchase another single stamp. God, I hope Yen Press dumps these guys… in a river, if possible.

The Manga Critic (aka Katherine Dacey) named Pig Bride as one of her 2009 Manga Hall of Shame Inductees, citing contemptible female characters and awful art. It didn’t seem like a particularly special negative review to me, but it got Kurt Hassler fired up enough that he actually took the highly unusual step of posting a lengthly reply. Dialogue between Hassler and Dacey continues in the comment thread, though neither side yields much.

Be a superhero! Donate blood!

Great news! Yen Press recently posted on their site, well earlier than they ever have before, the cover art for the right-to-left cover of the January 2010 issue. (The left-to-right cover art isn’t anywhere to be seen at this point.) Check it out on their site, or take a quick peek of it below.

Isn’t it wonderful? I must admit that, when I saw that pointy-nosed blonde teenager, my heart leapt for joy. It’s been a long wait, but I think I can speak for many of us when I say…

…What? Oh, you mean that Barbie lookalike? Oh yeah… her. Well, along with the cover, Yen Press announced that they’re not only going to comic-ize another one of their sister publishers’ young adult novel series, they’re going to immediately start serializing it in Yen Press as well. (For the record, the “next issue” pages of the December issue said that Jack Frost would be on this cover.) The Gossip Girl franchise started out in 2002, and already spans a whopping fifteen novels and hit cable TV series - and now it’s coming to comics.

Obviously, I’m outside the target audience for this by about fourteen years and one chromosome - and the title “Gossip Girl” brings back memories of reading “Pride and Prejudice” in my high school English classes - an incredibly dull novel about insufferable snobs talking (and talking and talking) about each other behind backs and then getting married. But good for Yen Press anyway. No, the girl I want to see in this issue is this one:

That’s right, it looks like Maximum Ride is still on schedule to make her triumphant return in the January issue, and not a moment too soon. Welcome back, Max! I missed you - and unlike that manicured priss taking up most of the cover with her eyes somehow hovering above her hair, I think that you would have at least pretended to give me the time of day back in high school.

Not that I’m still bitter about that sort of thing.

(sniff)

Via MangaBlog - which I highly suggest you subscribe to if you have more than a passing interest in Japanese comics but don’t want to spend all day reading and aggregating news and reviews from all over the entire interweb like tireless author Brigid Alverson seems to do - comes this new interview with Kurt Hassler at Publisher’s Weekly. To back up a bit, it was announced a few weeks ago that Yen Press would be taking the Maximum Ride/Twilight formula of bringing a Korean artist on board to create a comic serialization of a popular American young adult novel and apply it to Daniel X, another book series by Max Ride scribe James Patterson about a teenaged alien-hunter. (I believe there was actually an advertisement for it in the December issue, but I’m away from home for the holiday and can’t confirm that at the moment.) I didn’t post anything about it at the time because it’s not directly Yen Plus related and I don’t think it’s as big as the Twilight announcement, but it looks like, according to Mr Hassler, Daniel X will in fact be appearing in Yen Plus in one way or another:

Both Daniel X books will be adapted by Korean artist Seung-hye Kye and will appear in Yen Press’s manga anthology magazine, Yen Plus. However, Hassler commented that he did not know whether the Daniel X adaptation would appear in the magazine as a full serialization or a preview.

I’m kind of surprised that hasn’t been decided yet - seems like a rather vital detail to me. Perhaps two serializations of young adult novels by James Patterson about supernatural teenagers would be one too many. Anyway, the interview also mentions that Nightschool has been extended; originally intended for three volumes, it will now see a fourth. The article closes by mentioning Yen Plus’s open submissions policy, mentioning that apparently many submissions are rejected for being too derivative:

“We want to see artists develop their own voice, not mimic what they’ve read. We want to see artists tell something closer to home for them,” said Hassler. “It’s the necessary step for establishing the market here.”

I imagine that Hassler may have something like Prom Night in mind here. Though it wasn’t a favorite of mine, it was notable for its un-manga-ness, both in terms of plot and art style, in a magazine which is otherwise seething in it. I hope that up-and-coming comic creators who would think they wouldn’t have a chance in Yen Plus because their creations are not typical manga-style fare will take note and get their submissions in.

Tangentially related… From the same post at MangaBlog comes the tale of some back-and-forth on the subject of manhwa, or Korean comics; Daniella Orihuela-Gruber complains that most manhwa strikes her as shallow and with characters prone to petty bickering (the sample of Goong which ran in Yen Plus earlier this year exemplified those traits, I think), but a Korean American comics fan going by the name Tari responds, saying Orihuela-Gruber’s sample is tainted by the rather limited selection of manhwa available on the market, and that that sample is not representative of the most popular or best-selling domestic comics in Korea at all.

I think both writers make valid points. But it reminds me that Yen Press doesn’t really seem to use the word “manhwa” much, despite currently having the widest range of these products on the American market, as far as I know. Marketing for Max Ride describes it as a “manga,” as has its decidedly Korean scribe NaRae Lee, at least in translation. (Svetlana Chmakova of Nightschool also calls her work “manga,” for that matter). It raises the age-old question; what do words like “manga,” “manhwa” and “manhua” (the Chinese equivalent) mean? Are they convenient words to refer to comics originating from a certain geographical location, or comics of a certain artistic style regardless of geography? I’ve always felt the former, but Yen Press feels more comfortable with the latter, apparently. Does Yen Press have an aversion to labeling their product “manhwa,” or are they just preferring to use “manga” as it’s a better-known term? Am I just overthinking all this? What do you think?

As I’m continuing to read through the December issue of Yen Plus, I noticed an anomaly, though I’m not sure of the extent of it. The eleventh chapter of morality manhwa Time and Again was supposed to be printed in this issue, and the Table of Contents page indicates such; seeing as how the story started in the last chapter ended with a selfish character going uncharacteristically unpunished, I was looking forward to see if the storyline would continue through this chapter, with the young lady in question finally receiving her just deserts. However, the title page for this issue’s chapter introduces it as chapter twelve, and the storyline is completely unrelated to last issue’s. The way I see it, there are two explanations for this:

1. The text on the title page is incorrect; what appears in this issue really is chapter 11, and, apparently, in the world of Time and Again, sometimes selfishness can go unpunished (though it very much did not in this issue!); or…
2. Yen Press accidentally skipped a chapter, and published chapter 12 this issue instead of chapter 11. How do you say “Oops” in Korean?

If and when I find out what the story is, I’ll pass it along, so stay tuned.