San Diego, California, Tuesday, December 9, 2008

JAST USA announces that Princess Waltz, its new PC dating-sim/card battle game for adults, has shipped and is available on PC DVD-ROM as well as Internet Download Edition. Princess Waltz is one of the most popular adult anime-style PC games to be released in recent years in Japan, and it features high quality graphics, a compelling fantasy storyline w/innovative card battle action, and a degree of erotic and emotional intensity that only Japan's love-simulation games can bring.

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Author of the Honey and Clover manga Chika Umino will draw the cover of Japanese pop group Dreams Come True's "Tsuretette Tsuretette" CD album, which goes on sale on November 12. She will also draw a 16-page "winter story" manga for the upcoming album.

Few manga have broken the coveted "100 Million" sales mark, an honor reserved only for the most popular and influential works. Below is a translation of an article from ACGTalk comes an article looking at various "100 Million" manga and their influence in the world:

Articles like this can be found all over the Internet; this is what I thought at first, and was excited with the idea that this year any comic could sell over a hundred million copies, but it turned out after getting a translator to have a look around on Japanese websites, I felt I had blown things out of proportion a bit, so here I have opted to write a more accurate account of these awards.

Japan, as everyone knows, is the world's biggest producer and exporter of comics. If you add together the overall annual tax and the sales volume of each big-name comic book magazine and all the separate volumes, the figures could only be described as "astronomical". As a result, comics in Japan have become more than a mere cultural phenomenon, constituting now a whole industry with financial goals. Some of the comics in this industry have become highly successful best-selling works that have sold over 100 million copies. In view of this, we pulled together some information from the Japanese Wikipedia about Japan's twelve best-selling manga.

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The folks over at Rumic World have been doing some extensive on-location coverage of Rumiko Takahashi's gallery show over the past week. Check out the feature in "It's a Rumic World" Event Coverage.

Comic Market, or Comiket, is the world's largest comic convention. Currently Comiket is held twice a year, first in mid-August then late December, at the Tokyo Big Sight. Comiket 72 took place from August 17th - 19th. According to Mantan Web, over 170,000 fans attended Comiket 72 on day 1, 40,000 more than during Comiket 71 last December. The next Comiket, C74, will take place from August 15th to 17th.

Comiket is a place where doujin artists and groups gather and sell their works. While many groups hardly make any profit, Comiket is the place where they would try and make a name for themselves. Many of today's popular artists and groups began their career at Comiket. From Saimon Fumi to Rumoki Takahashi, or the mega-popular CLAMP, they all attended Comiket in the early days of their career. Some doujin groups, like Type-Moon, became so popular and made enough money to go professional.

Comiket began in 1975, and gradually grew into the world's biggest comic convention. In the last few years, each day of the convention saw an overall attendance of over 100,000, and C66 saw a total attendance of 510,000.

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Companies to collaborate on a wide variety of publishing and trans-media projects

San Diego, CA, July 24th, 2008 ??? Global manga giants TOKYOPOP and GENTOSHA COMICS have entered into a worldwide partnership to advance the cause of the manga revolution. Under the terms of the alliance, TOKYOPOP will provide sublicensing agency services (outside of Asia, France, and Italy) for GENTOSHA COMICS???s world-class library of manga hits, including titles like Gravitation, Lament of the Lamb, and Arm of Kannon. The companies will also pursue a wealth of co-development opportunities in the digital, film, and merchandising spaces.

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The Japan Foundation reports that the 11th and final Asian Cartoon Exhibition will take place this year from July 31 to August 25 in Bangkok:

The 11th Asian Cartoon Exhibition this year will be marked as the final Asian Cartoon Exhibition, which has been held continually every year for 11 years as a contribution to the greater understanding of Asian societies, cultures and people.

Also, CoFesta is taking place from September 30 to October 28:

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Tokyo???AlphaCreatio Inc., operator of Manganovel (http://manganovel.com), today announced that it will expand its on-line download services to include delivery of flash animations in multiple languages. The new service will start this month, and will offer animations in eleven languages.
Manganovel is the innovative on-line service that takes manga out of Japan and introduces them to a global audience. Manganovel allows readers to download and read manga in Japanese, and then takes user-interactivity to a new level by allowing readers to post and offer for sale their own translations of downloaded manga content in a wide range of languages.

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From TMCnet comes an article that talks about how top creators in Japan are calling for the creation of museums to save Japan's "modern heritage":

What do industrial design, architecture, manga, anime, video games and traditional craft techniques have in common? Well, apart from each having spawned some of Japan's most popular cultural exports, the similarity is this: Japan has no national museums dedicated to their preservation, display and study, writes Edan Corkill.

From Yumiuri Shimbun comes an article titled "First and last manga exhibition answers important question," which looks like the "Inoue Takehiko: The Last Manga Exhibition" that will end this Sunday at the Ueno Royal Museum in Ueno, Tokyo:

I was astonished by the idea that a newly created manga--which normally would be mass produced--could give visitors the experience of reading it for the first time.

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