Transitioning over to Eastern Standard?

It's been quite a while since I've updated (almost a year since serious updates - though it's also been about that long since I had watched much anime, to be honest) and just when I was going to get back into the swing of things, some friends of mine finally got together to put together another collaborative blog under the banner of our old magazine: Eastern Standard.

We've got it up and are still tinkering with format and whatnot, but we've started adding content to it, so y'all should head over there and check it out. It's not just be doing it, so it should be a little more fresh, regular and varied than what I was doing here.

With that said, I'm not really sure what the future of this blog will be. Double-posting is unlikely to be worth it unless I can get some program to do it automatically... we'll have to see, but I might put this on hiatus and only pick it up if Eastern Standard falters at some point.

Either way, head over there and check it out. Leave some comments. Let us know what you think.

Select reviews from Manga: The Complete Guide

A while back I asked Jason Thompson (the driving force behind Manga: The Complete Guide) if I could reprint some of the reviews I wrote for it here. I wanted to share them with everyone and also promote the book a little.

Not only was he kind enough to give permission, but he also took some time out to pick his favorites. Here are his selections.

Adventure Kid (Adventure Kid) (アドベンチャーＫＩＤ) • Toshio Maeda • Manga 18 (2002) • Brahman (2001) • 4 volumes • Straight Adult Manga • X (explicit sexual content)
A kid is next to a computer when it explodes and before long he and his girlfriend are sucked into the digital world and dumped into the past – in the middle of a World War II battlefield. A bunch of delinquents follow them in and fight off the evil, lecherous American soldiers. It turns out the computer was haunted by a mad scientist and the only way to escape is to go back in time and stop him from entering the machine. But then all the dead solders start moving again – they’re zombies! Meanwhile, the kid’s fat father has sex with a bunch of women. Back to the action! The kids are transported to a fantasy realm based on a video game where they fight/seduce demons to escape! As you can probably tell, this manga is more interest in not making sense than anything else. There are plenty of sexy women and frequent (but brief) sexual interludes, but really it’s just a weird mix of video game references, zombies, yakuza-wannabees, and demon sex.
3 stars

Battle Binder Plus • Rulia 046 • Antarctic Press (1994-1995) • 1 volume • Straight Adult Manga • X (explicit sexual content)
It might start as a sci-fi story of cyborg combat and rampant lesbian sex in the future but Battle Binder Plus quickly leaves all the sex behind. The first few chapters feature our heroine getting naked and engaging in sexual show-downs with a variety of beautiful female criminals before transforming into a giant armored robot and killing everyone, but eventually the whole sex pretense is abandoned entirely in favor of getting right into the cyber-suit powered armor combat. Lots of bystanders and big buildings are destroyed in the process, of course. Not that there aren’t plenty of nude reaction shots, but it’s more about blowing things up than blowjobs by that point. The mechanical and environmental designs are rather good but the humans just don’t measure up (and the artists skips more than one frame, jokingly apologizing for being lazy). In the end, the entire thing was probably just written as an excuse to draw a destroyed skyscraper on the moon and have a hot chick in power armor fight and kill herself.
2 stars

Fantasy Fighters • Koh Kawarajima • Manga 18 (2002) • (1998) • 1 volume • Straight Adult Manga • X (explicit sexual content)
Everyone knows that the rich rape the poor, but rarely has it been so graphically (and absurdly) demonstrated than here. A poor girl’s father is nearly killed after a fight with some mutant delinquents and is now only kept alive by a coin-operated life support machine. How does his daughter pay for it? By being the sex-slave for the evil rich boy that led the gang of mutants. That’s when things get interesting. The girl’s father is used in an experimental program to create supersoldiers for the rich (androids for the bourgeois – thus he’s a “bourgeroid”) so he escapes to rescue her. But it turns out that the father of the rich boy tried to stop his son from defiling her and committed suicide in atonement – only to be brought back as a bourgeroid himself! Now the two old men/cyborgs must fight (after traveling through a secret tunnel hidden in the bathtub) – and it is revealed that they were friends as children. Thankfully, the cyborg dad has angelic wings, so he can fly to safety. “The hidden power of the wretchedly poor has defeated me!” The art may be a cheap copy of Satoshi Urushihara and the sex boring, but the bizarre story and sheer absurdity of the dialogue gets high marks,
4 stars

Love Touch • Akira Gatjou • Studio Ironcat (1999-2000) • Vision Publishing (1993) • 1 volume • Straight Adult Manga • X (explicit sexual content)
Another entrant into the category of terrible fan-art that somehow got published, Love Touch begins with a sense of humor but quickly loses amid jumbled, incompetent storytelling and art that degenerates to the point where it is almost impossible to distinguish characters form each other. Even more puzzling is that the series also becomes more focused on relationships as it progresses instead of just straight-up sex (though it never really did that particularly well either). The art is basically pretty simple, but still manages to end up a cluttered mess without any real sense of eroticism, aside from the fact that people are naked and (might) be having sex.
1 star

Oh My! (Iya!) • Protonsaurus • Sexy Fruit (2002-2003) • Izumi Comics (1996) • 1 volume • Straight Adult Manga • X (explicit sexual content)
The best that can be said about Oh My! is that it is cute, once or twice. Everything else is terrible. Stories of incest and inappropriate student-teacher relationships might be worth the time if the art wasn’t entirely abysmal, amateur sketches – and if it didn’t go to such great pains to try to convince the reader that the clearly underage girls are eighteen and just about to graduate college. The sex is fine, but no one should care when it looks like this.
1 star

Manga: The Complete Guide is available on Amazon. Jason Thompson is a cool dude and available on LiveJournal.

The Robbers

This comes highly recommended by the quality Kaiju Shakedown, and the trailer certainly looks like it could be cool, so I'm interested.

some concerning trends/tidbits

Apparently FUNimation's share of the anime market is even bigger than I had thought:

The market share info, provided by FUNimation from VideoScan data, showed FUNImation at 32.7% in the first half of 2008. It’s worth noting that VideoScan numbers do not include Wal-Mart, which may sell as much as 30-40% of all anime in the U.S. If Wal-Mart were included, it’s likely that FUNImation's market share would be larger than the number provided here due to the company's significant presence in the country's largest retailer.

While I'm happy for FUNimation's success, I don't actually think that's a good thing. It would be much better to have several mid-sized companies than one big guy and then everyone else. For a wonderful example of how screwed up an industry can be when you have one company that's just orders of magnitude larger than everyone else, look at the hobby game industry.

I also worry that FUNimation will have a repeat of the ADV choking-on-their-own-success story. That's another danger when so much of the market hangs on one company - when it falters, everyone's start crying "ADVpocalypse!"


And then we also have the Big Guys from Hollywood still stepping in to kick some anime shit around:

Sony has acquired the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand rights to Production I.G. anime feature The Sky Crawlers.

I suppose that's a bit dramatic, but I find it kind of annoying when a "real" studio steps in and licenses some anime.

Why? Because they don't really do anything special with it (it's not in more theateres or doesn't really get more exposure or anything) and they're a giant, impossible, pain-in-the-ass to work with to get screening permissions or do anything special with. They come with all the baggage of a giant studio with none of the benefits.

Mad Detective

Johnnie To has been everyone's darling for a while now. Election and Exiled garnered a great deal of attention and were heralded as revitalizing Hong Kong cinema. Johnnie To was bringing back the heyday of good ol' HK flicks. Mad Detective has also been very widely (and highly) praised and it very much lives up to its reputation.

To's love for the great movies of the 80s and 90s is clear in the rough, unpolished feel of the film. Effects are kept to a minimum and the cops-on-the-edge with their tiny pop-cap guns woudl have been just as comfortable walking through scenes 15 or 20 years ago. The atmosphere is set with billowing smoke, dirty windows and grainy film.

The tone is similarly brutal, blunt and nihilistic as well. The movie is ostensibly about the unsolved mystery of a missing cop but the classic story of the eccentric, insane detective with a unique insight into the mind of criminals comes across as much more ominous and disturbing. The "eccentricities" quickly spiral into raw, paralyzing madness, seemingly tainting everyone around him. It quickly becomes clear that the movie is more about the instability and multitudes within everyone. The film's spots of surprising and effective humor serve to reinforce its overall tone instead of undermining or diluting it.

Mad Detective is definitely recommended to fans of Asian cinema. Johnnie To takes a pat, cliched story and manages to make it engaging and unnerving, though the rough and unpolished feel may make it difficult for newer fans to really get into.

based on a screening during the Seattle International Film Festival : Wikipedia : IMDB : YouTube

Parenting and Video Games

Going into a full rant about how video games get all the blame for all the perceived terrors of "kids these days" is of little use. It would really be nothing more than preaching to the choir and regurgitating what everyone else has said already. I have little patience for just telling an audience what it wants to hear (and knows already).

I also rather like Obama. The more I hear from him, the more I like him. There's something very powerful about a charismatic, articulate leader in a real position to become president. I think there is wonderful potential in his chance of combating apathy and ennui in the US.

But I must take issue with a recent speech where he said "...parent better, and turn off the television set, and put the video games away..." and not because it's the usual "video games and TV are to blame for the terrible state of our children" blame-shifting.

Taking away when your children enjoy is not, in itself, good parenting. Most parents would have no idea how to interact or relate with their children if they took the TV remotes and controllers away. Most of the kids probably wouldn't know what to do with their parents either. Just because you took your kids to the park instead of letting them watch MTV doesn't mean you actually are the World's Best Dad. It means nothing.

What parents should be doing is playing those video games with their kids. Don't take what they enjoy away from them just because you don't understand it - try to get involved with them as best you can. You don't need to love it or even get it. Your kids probably won't expect you to. But if you at least give them the chance and play a bit of Halo with them and treat their interests with at least a semblance of the respect you expect them to treat your own interests with then you're already doing a much better job of helping your kids grow into respectable adults than hundreds of "You're going to have fun and enjoy yourself whether you like it or not!" trips to the park could ever do.

Remember: don't just take the video games away from your kids and expect them to grow up properly. Play the games with them and show them how to treat other people properly.

Who knows. Maybe if you're lucky your kids will have Rock Band or Guitar Hero or some bullshit on the Wii that you might actually end up enjoying yourself.

Of course, then it'll be that much harder to blame video games for ruining the children you didn't know how to raise yourself in the first place.

This all stemmed from an article on Kotaku about Obama's speech.

Hatenkou Yuugi

I tried to give it another chance (the fun banter between the leads lured me back) but the episodes simply continue to get worse. Predictable, trite plots made worse by ridiculous scripts intent on saying instead of showing just make it unbearable despite often very fun chemistry and bishonen boys who are just so ridiculously over the top it's impossible not to laugh at them.

So I'm done. Not recommended to anyone, unfortunately.

based on 4 episodes : ANN : Wikipedia : YouTube : Crunchyroll