How Manga Conquered the U.S. (WIRED magazine)

[FlipMcgee]

Current issue has a big article about manga and actual manga-style pages documenting it's growth in America.

Links to the the article and the manga pages in low-res .pdf here: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-11/ff_manga






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[Vhan Juju]

I read it all, and something about it makes me want to boycott manga, and stand up and applaud it at the same time....

(Lol, I was never very good at makeing sence :) )

[idoru]

That article has much less to do with manga's import power as it does with the doujin market. >_O

[Ian Mack]

What got me most was the remix element they mentioned. I like the idea of taking a comic series that someone created and doing it your own way. Kind of like how people take the half-life engine here and created counterstrike. For a high school writing final...I created a fanfiction using the characters from FF7. I loved the game and in the book(it was 150 pages long), I was able to explore the world further. For instance, I really liked the idea of summons as sentient creatures so I explored that end of it and ended up creating a world where they were summoned from. One that was in danger of being taken over by evil summons and of course, the cast and crew of FF7 got to save the world. Except for that wierd white puffball character...I completely forgot about him. I also got to explore Nanaki's(Red XIII) character because I was always a fan for some reason. In short, I wrote this fanfiction and I was told I should publish it but I couldn't because of copyright laws.

From the marketing perspective...it's cool to see that the big guns could watch in real-time what was popular or not but I don't think the market in Canada is big enough for that sort of marketing to be appealling to our big guns.

aaaah, intellectual property laws...I love how you can rip what a guy did 150 years ago but not someone who's still alive.

[sujen]

This actually kind of depressed me. Though I can't say how the popularity of manga in the US will be like in the future, the future of OELs (I think there's a new name for them now? I'm so behind...) in the US seems grim. I'd definitely like to think that doujin circles are thriving in the U.S., hiding underneath the huge rocks like conventions such as AnimeExpo, and on online sites such as smackjeeves. But I question how much these circles will be allowed to expand before the "peripheral" lawyer comes and lifts those rocks.
In the meantime, it was definitely an interesting article; I would have hoped for more on the OEL scene though...

[Elwell]

From the article:
Europe has caught the bug, too. In the United Kingdom, the Catholic Church is using manga to recruit new priests.
Considering some of the mangas out there, and some of the priests, this is absolutely hilarious.

[Vhan Juju]

I threw away my mangas today (by throwing away I mean that I stuffed them in a paper sack and threw them in my closet)

[steve kim]

you think with their budget they coulda hired a better artist for the cover :/

[idoru]

I threw away my mangas today (by throwing away I mean that I stuffed them in a paper sack and threw them in my closet)
...That doesn't really make any sense?

[INNOC3NC3]

...That doesn't really make any sense?


well... he did say he was never much good at making sense:yayca: