Word: mangas
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Finally, girls are getting their comics back. Having been abandoned by most U.S. comic publishers several decades ago, American girl comic readers have started voraciously consuming shojo manga, the Japanese comics genre targeted to young females...
...known in the industry as "the heat detector," the man who launches hot writers and discovers new artists. He has turned the staid Japanese publishing business on its head by selling to the demographic previously written off by traditional publishers as the manga market. He published the poetry book Ejiki by singer-actor-writer Kou Machida seven years before the writer received the Akutagawa Award, one of Japan's highest literary honors, in 2000. In 1998 Takei released the art book Slash With a Knife by Yoshitomo Nara, long before Nara became one of Japan's top painters. The film...
...stereotypical otaku animator who's too immersed in his cartoon world to ever change out of slippers and pajamas. But Kon's distance from the anim? mainstream is more than sartorial; he is one of the rare animators whose creative point of reference isn't other animation or manga. Instead, he takes his inspiration from reality: "My ideas for movies come from the world that I live in. When I walk down the street I see homeless people. I started to wonder why they didn't show up in movies. It seemed like an obvious topic...
...Perfect Blue, a paranoid psycho-thriller about a teen idol dragged through the sleazier realms of Japanese pop culture. The film turned out to be Kon's breakthrough. Until then, he had been making slow but steady progress through the industry, working his way up from being an assistant manga artist to drawing his own manga to directing occasional episodes of animated TV shows. One of these episodes caught Maruyama's eye. "I needed someone who had the flexibility to make an animated film in a live-action genre," he says. Kon proved more than equal to the task...
...What the Future May Hold Micha Hershman's comments about shojo manga driving the expansion in the bookstores are accurate and can be proven by looking at the BookScan GN charts. However, given the 2004 publishing plans of some of the bigger manga houses (TokyoPop-500 titles, Viz- 400 titles) and the fact that major publishers are getting on the bandwagon, we just may live up to our industry's history of putting out too much of a good thing and thus creating an implosion. I believe this is an area you might want to look into to temper...