Fist of the North Star manga artist to revisit samurai friend of Maeda Keiji

This year’s 46th issue of Shinchosha’s Weekly Comic Bunch magazine has announced on Friday that Fist of the North Star artist Tetsuo Hara is launching a spinoff to his Hana no Keiji -Kumo no Kanata ni- manga about the historical samurai figure Maeda Keiji. The new Gifū Dōdō Naoe Kanetsugu -Maeda Keiji Tsuki-Gatari- series will begin in the magazine on November 7. According to Hara’s comments in the current Weekly Comic Bunch issue, he feels that he didn’t delve far enough into the life of Maeda’s close friend, the samurai Naoe Kanetsugu, when he drew Keiji from 1990 to 1993. A four-installment Keiji short story that focuses on Maeda and Naoe’s first meeting is already running in the magazine.

Hara and his writer Mio Aso loosely based their samurai stories on a novel written by Keiichiro Ryu. The defunct North American manga publisher Gutsoon! Entertainment published portions of the original Keiji manga in its Monthly Raijin Comics magazine.

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I recently purchased the popular and ground breaking anime Paprika.  For those of you who don’t know about this anime, it was recently (semi) released into the UK after its long awaited release.

The animation style is ground-breaking, and once you have watch Paprika, you can fully understand why it was so awaited.  It’s just brilliant and beautiful, it really is, so much so, that can’t even really begin to tell you about it, so here is the synopsis:

The visually striking thriller is set in the not-too-distant future, where doctors are developing a groundbreaking new psychotherapy treatment called PT. This coincides with the invention of a device called the ‘DC Mini,’ which enables researchers to enter the dreams of a subject and explore matters of the unconscious mind. But one day, a ‘DC Mini’ prototype goes missing, and the doctors are thrown into a world of confusion. They realize how dangerous a turn of events this could be, and to ensure that things don’t spiral out of control, they embark on a mad quest to track down the missing prototype.

So anyway, any anime fan must see this film, it’s one of those few films that more or less everyone loves and appreciates!

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The Yaoi Jamboree convention has announced that the Shōnen-ai manga artists Eiki Eiki and Mikiyo Tsuda will be attending its inaugural June 20-22 event in Phoenix, Arizona. Eiki Eiki created and drew ‘Dear Myself”, ‘The Art of Loving’, ‘World’s End’, and other popular manga titles. Tsuda created ‘The Day of Revolution’, ‘Family Complex’, and ‘Princess Princess’ (pictured left).

Digital Manga Publishing, which is responsible for the release or the announcement of all the above titles except Color in North America, is sponsoring the two artists’ appearance.  Tsuda also co-created ‘Color’ and other manga with Eiki under her other pen name, Taishi Zaou. In fact the two creators share a website called Kozouya.

Yaoi Press, the sponsor of Yaoi Jamboree, is also hosting le Perrugine, the two Italian artists who draw the ‘Winter Demon’ series and created the Cain graphic novel trilogy

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Right Stuf interviews ‘Emma’ Manga creator Kaoru Mori.

The North American distributor and retailer Right Stuf, has included a two-page interview with the creator of the popular manga ‘Emma’, Kaoru Mori, in its Spring 2008 catalogue. The catalogue is available as a downloadable 16-megabyte PDF-format file which is completely free.

Kaoru Mori describes her lifelong interest with Victorian England, her thoughts on the anime adaptation, and what she thinks when she looks back at her six years devoted to the manga. Right Stuf is offering the first season of the anime series on June 24, and CMX Manga is releasing the original manga version in North America.

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The computer software, Hatsune Miku Virtual Idol, has hit the number 1 spot on Amazon!

Crypton Future Media is promoting its new Hatsune Miku virtual idol software that makes human singers obsolete. It allows musicians to inject the voice of their self styled 16-year-old pop idol into any melody and sing the lyrics to any song they choose.

Voice actress Saki Fujita (Tokimeki Memorial) provided the model voice for the program. The software ranked in 1st place in Amazon Japan’s top software sales rankings as of September, 10th and sales have just increased since then. The achievement is very unusual for DTM (Desktop Music) package. Retail stocks of the software are said to be extremely low and in many places are completely depleted!

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The live action Death Note movie could be coming to the UK some time soon.

According to the BBFC wesbite (for those unfamiliar with this, this is the certificate board who set the age limits on games, fils etc), the company  ILC Entertainment (’ILC Prime’ are known for their low budget UK anime DVD releases) are planning to release the first live action Death Note movie here in the UK. Also, tit is suggested that it has been awareded a 12A certificate which suggests that it may have a theatrical run (limited) for the movie as the 12A  certificate rating is only awarded to films set to be released in UK cinemas. The BBFC page for Death Note suggests that they expect it to "open" on the 25th of April.

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Hentai is not something I personally bother with to be honest, but I know a lot of people enjoy watching hentai, so I thought I would blog about it.

To me, hentai is no worse than pornography, If not in a way better.  The reason I say this is because hentai, unlike pornography, does not degrade women, and especially not in the same manner as pornography.

Interesting fact actually – hentai originally came about in Japan as porn was…Well…not illegal, but much frowned upon, due to its degradation of women.  It was then that the Japanese realised that they could still get their ‘thrills’ without having to degrade women, if they just made an anime with a sex theme.

And thus hentai was born.  It’s strange to think that it was created just to stop women being seen as objects for man’s pleasure and abuse.  And in a way, it was a truly groundbreaking creation.  Since then, pornography has become common place in Japan, however, it is still not appreciated as much as hentai – after all, in anime you can create any scenario, commit any acts, without the character REALLY being involved, used and abused etc.

With the introduction of hentai have come many sub-genres, such as Yaoi (men with men) and Lolicon (Children with adults).  The latter is a touchy subject here in the UK.  Although ‘theoretically’ lolicon has nothing to do with paedophilia since it’s just a cartoon, however, in European countries it is still frowned upon…though I’m almost positive if you looked at the statistics with regards to paedophiles in Japan in correspondence with those in the UK, you would probably find that the UK has the highest crime rate.

But I will talk about Lilicon in another post at a later date as there is much to be said on this subject.  So I leave you to take in all that has been said today with regards to hentai, please feel free to comment about anything you have read here.

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 Anime merchandise in the UK is near impossible to find these days.  The problem is that the UK is taxed so much for importing that people just get sick of it and realise that in actual fact, they can’t live off the money from selling such things.

Personally I think it’s insane the amount of tax the UK pays on goods, we pay more than any other country I know, and it’s not even as if it is compensated by our wages.  Minimum wage in the UK, is now somewhere around £5.60 for 21 year olds, and MUCH lower for 18 year olds.  £5.60…well, that gets me a bottle of drink and a sandwich at lunch time…if I’m lucky.  So, having worked for 8 hours, I then only get 7 hours pay…oh yes, and then there is the income tax too…well, lets see.

We pay: Income tax, Tax on food, Tax on goods, Tax on cigarettes and alcohol, Road Tax, Council Tax….there must be more.  See, tax is fine, but I never see what it goes into.

So, anyway, the fact that anime merchandise is taxed, makes it even harder to buy stuff of interest in the UK…even buying on eBay means that you may be liable to pay import fees for importing the item into the country, despite it being for personal use.

So it’s annoying, and then, online sites in the UK raise their prices to compensate for their losses, making it near impossible to pay a good price for a cool item.  However, there are a couple of places where you can still grab a deal.  For one, www.animeexchange.co.uk, they sell anime and games merchandise at an affordable price, with no hidden costs.  Amazon is also a relatively good place to go, but the problem with them is that they don’t  have much specialised stock.

I just wish the government would stop milking its’ citizens for all they are worth, because I’ll be honest, we are not worth much and it’s all thanks to them.

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