This was an experiment to see how difficult it was to draw a manga…and certainly, it is not an easy task. I have the whole idea in my mind and I want to continue and finish this story…someday!

I wanted to share with my readers some of the highlights of this personal project I thought about, 12 years ago! I abandoned the idea because my whole portfolio was stolen with my laptop…Fortunately, I managed to recover some of the sketches and the first chapter of the story I draw many years ago. Here is one of the main characters…An Elf!

I still need to think her name. I thought of several…Faye, Amber…You could help me here!

Black and White Sketch!

Final Drawing!…Do you like her? I think She is cute…. …But She will not appear until chapter 2!

I abandoned the pencil and not sure how is my drawing style now. Certainly, I need to improve my drawing skills…Lots of things! However, the experience of doing the things you love has no price and I had fun doing this project. You can check out the first chapter here!

[View with PicLens]

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

If you like this manga, I might consider the idea of drawing the next chapters as a weekly project and add it to Cartoon Leap. After all, I thought about using this site as a platform to launch it at first but it ended up as an anime blog! Please feel free to comment and share your opinions. 12 years ago, this was just an experiment…Today, this could be something fun!….

The US military is to use manga-style comics to teach Japanese children about the two countries’ security alliance. Four comics featuring a Japanese girl and a visiting US boy will be posted online, each exploring how US and Japanese troops work together.

A US spokesman said they were intended as a light-hearted explanation of the history of the alliance. The comics, marking 50 years of the security pact, come amid strained ties over US bases in Okinawa.

The first Japanese-language manga comic, entitled Our Alliance – A Lasting Partnership, will be posted online on Wednesday.

In it the young girl, Arai Anzu – which sounds like alliance when pronounced by a Japanese person – asks the boy, Usa-kun – a play on USA – why he is protecting her house.

“Because we have an alliance,” he says. “We are ‘Important Friends’.”

“It’s good to have a friend you can rely on to go with you,” the little girl concludes.

Major Neal Fisher, deputy director of the US forces’ public affairs office in Japan, said the manga were intended as a “light-hearted approach to telling the story of the alliance through the eyes of two young people who are learning why the US military are in Japan”.

The manga format was chosen because it was “a very commonly accepted format of media in Japan – it is read as much if not more than newspapers”, he added.

Some paper copies of the comics would also be available at bases, he said.

Japan hosts some 47,000 US troops in return for security guarantees from the US, under a security pact agreed in 1960. More than half of these troops are based on the southern island of Okinawa.

Plans to relocate the Futenma airbase from southern to northern Okinawa have caused outrage amongst residents who want the base moved off the island completely.

The row toppled Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, after he was forced to renege on a pledge to re-evaluate the base relocation deal.

Source: Our Alliance Webpage, US Force Japan, Maritan Nikki, BBC via MAL News

In a curious note, Hirai Yukio (“Magical Marine Pixel Maritan”) is the main author of this manga. I am really interested to see the art of this manga.

Japan is newspaper-crazy. Its biggest daily, Yomiuri Shimbun, has 10 times the circulation of The New York Times. For now, at least. Just as in the US, young people in Japan aren’t reading newspapers as often as their parents. But the Japanese have a solution: Manga No Shimbun (Manga Newspaper), an online outfit that covers the week’s events in comic book form.

These aren’t the funnies or political cartoons—they’re actual news articles about everything from foreign policy to pop culture to murder trials. The site employs more than 100 manga artists to cover breaking stories, updating 10 or 15 times a day. Graphic style varies—some pieces are in color, others black-and-white; some are realistic, some exaggeratedly kawaii (cute).

Manga News is also available via iPhone app and will come to Android and other mobile platforms later this year. There’s even talk of international versions.

Good idea, but what happens if Astro Boy gets elected to parliament?

Source: Wired

I really like the idea…and We are sure this will lure young readers as well.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 10th of November 2009 531 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 59.3% of the sample were male, 34.7% in their twenties, 30.9% in their thirties, and 34.5% in their forties.

Q1: Has any manga that you like ever been made into an anime? (Sample size=531)

	All	Male N=315	Female N=216
Yes (if yes, jump to SQs)	66.3%	65.4%	67.6%
No	33.7%	34.6%	32.4%

Q1SQ1: How did you feel when you first heard it had been made into an anime? (Sample size=352)

	All	Male N=206	Female N=146
Really happy	25/3%	27.7%	21.9%
A little happy	31.0%	33.0%	28.1%
Nothing in particular	22.2%	23.3%	20.5%
A little bad	17.6%	12.6%	24.7%
Totally bad	4.0%	3.4%	4.8%

Q1SQ2: Have you watched the anime version of a manga you like? (Sample size=352)

	All	Male N=206	Female N=146
Yes	94.9%	94.7%	95.2%
No	5.1%	5.3%	4.8%

Q2: Has there been an anime that you enjoyed when you first saw it, but then found out later that it was based on a manga? (Sample size=531)

	All	Male N=315	Female N=216
Yes	52.7%	51.1%	55.1%
No	47.3%	48.9%	44.9%

Q3: Has there been a television drama, movie, etc that you enjoyed when you first saw it, but then found out later that it was based on a manga? (Sample size=531)

	All	Male N=315	Female N=216
Yes	53.7%	47.9%	62.0%
No	46.3%	52.1%	38.0%

Q4: What do you think about anime versions of manga? (Sample size=531)

	All	Male N=315	Female N=216
Completely approve	15.4%	19.7%	9.3%
Approve to some extent	52.9%	48.3%	59.7%
Disapprove to some extent	26.4%	25.1%	28.2%
Completely disapprove	5.3%	7.0%	2.8%

Q5: What do you think about live-action versions of manga? (Sample size=531)

	All	Male N=315	Female N=216
Completely approve	4.7%	5.4%	3.7%
Approve to some extent	30.5%	28.6%	33.3%
Disapprove to some extent	42.7%	41.0%	45.4%
Completely disapprove	22.0%	25.1%	17.6%

Source: iShare via What Japan thinks

I am not surprised by many of this answers, especially the one about live versions of manga…There have been quite a lot of disasters lately, trying to adapt manga into live action…

It was the simple clacking of two wooden sticks on a street corner that signaled to children the start of kamishibai, a popular pastime during Depression-era Japan. Kamishibai means “street theater using painted illustrations.” Author Eric P. Nash examines the little-known art form and predecessor to modern-day anime and manga in his recent book “Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater,” published by Abrams ComicArts.

Storytellers would travel from town to town with their butai (miniature stage) on the back of a bike. The set-up was reminiscent of a “Punch and Judy” show, but instead of puppets the narrator would slide a series of poster boards with water color illustrations in and out of the box. He would act out the script, which was written on cards placed on the back of a board.

Each show consisted of three stories of about 10 minutes each: an adventure for boys, a domestic drama for girls and then a simple comic story. The majority of performances ended in a cliffhanger, forcing eager audiences to return the next day.

Nash, a New York Times writer and research editor and author of several books on architecture, has always been a fan of comics. It was while reading the book “Getting it Wrong in Japan” that he came across “kamishibai,” a word he had never seen before, and decided to dig further. Unable to find any book on the topic in English, he traveled to Japan two years ago to investigate and found more than 300 images in two children’s libraries in Osaka and Tokyo and discovered countless contributions that kamishibai had made to the comics genre.

“A lot of attributes seen in anime are present,” Nash said, “such as Giant Robots and monsters from outer space.” He also mentions the “manga-sized eyes,” wide and oversized, meant to convey emotion found in popular characters such as Jungle Boy.

Golden Bat, created in 1931, was considered to be the world’s first true comic superhero. Although visually resembling Captain America’s nemesis Red Skull, Golden Bat and Superman share more commonalities: the red cape, skill of flight, superhuman strength and a fortress of solitude, albeit in the Japanese Alps.

Kamishibai artists departed from traditional Japanese line art drawing by creating a cartoon-like style and applying chiaroscuro, the Western style of contrasting light and dark, providing depth and mass.

During World War II, the Japanese government used kamishibai for propaganda, as did Americans during the occupation with stories centered on democratic values such as baseball.

The demise of kamishibai coincided with the end of the occupation and introduction of television in 1952.

Many of the form’s writers and artists then migrated into manga in the ’50s such as Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka.

In “Manga Kamishibai,” Golden Bat creator Takeo Nagamatsu summed up his feelings on kamishibai‘s role in Japanese society: “Pictures that look nice in someone’s house are great . . . but kamishibai are loved by many children and cheer them up. When I think of these children later growing up to be honorable Japanese adults, it makes me realize the significance of creating kamishibai.”

Source: Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times Liesl Bradner wrote an interesting article about the origins of Manga and Anime, and probably, Otaku should pay attention how it started…

As home to one of the world’s finest collections of historic artifacts, it seems fitting that the British Museum will feature a comic book series about a professor who studies ancient civilizations in its first exhibition of Japanese manga.

Starting on Nov. 5, a two-month long exhibition is showcasing original drawings from the series “Munakata Kyoju” (Professor Munakata), by Yukinobu Hoshino.

While manga has a growing fan base around the world, its legitimacy as an art form has sometimes been questioned.

But its endorsement as an important part of Japanese culture by the 250-year-old museum, which attracts 6 million visitors each year, should go a long way to answering its critics.

The “Professor Munakata” series appeared in 2004 in the Big Comic manga magazine published by Shogakukan Inc. It was also adapted into a TV series.

The protagonist, Professor Tadakusu Munakata, is an ethnologist who unravels mysteries surrounding ancient Japan by visiting archeological sites and places of legend across the country.

Hoshino, who lives in Sapporo, said he was amazed when Nicole Rousmaniere, a Japanologist who first conceived of the exhibition, showed up to make a pitch to him in August.

“She came all the way and told me that she wanted to put my drawings on display at the British Museum,” said Hoshino, 55. “I was stunned.”

Born in New York, Rousmaniere grew up watching Japanese anime. One of her favorite comic books, she said, was Osamu Tezuka’s “Astro Boy.”

After doing her bachelor’s degree and master’s in archaeology and a Ph.D in Japanese art history at Harvard, she taught Japanese art at the University of East Anglia in Britain. She also taught at the University of Tokyo’s graduate school as a visiting professor for three years from 2006.

It was during her stay in Tokyo that she came upon “Professor Munakata” after browsing comic books in a bookshop.

“I feel that Hoshino sensei’s drawings are compelling and beautifully executed,” she said. “I enjoy Osamu Tezuka and Shigeru Mizuki as well, but Yukinobu Hoshino is my favorite.”

Organizing an exhibition for the British Museum is nothing new to Rousmaniere.

She has previously worked with the museum on an exhibition of Jomon dogu, Japanese ceramic figures from the Jomon Pottery Culture, a period spanning between 8000 B.C. and 300 B.C.

Timothy Clark, 50, who heads the Japanese section in the museum’s Department of Asia, approved the project, calling it an experiment linking manga, which is popular in the United States and Europe, with the museum through archaeology.

Hoshino made his first visit to London in early October, taking about 30 drawings with him. The city did not, however, seem entirely unfamiliar, he said.

Hoshino’s inspiration for the protagonist of the series was Kumagusu Minakata (1867-1941), an ethnologist-cum-naturalist who worked as a researcher for the British Museum after he visited London in 1892.

“It felt like it was destiny,” Hoshino said.

During his stay in London, he executed two new drawings.

The exhibition features enlarged versions of Hoshino’s illustrations for the comic. Publisher Shogakukan also supplied 100 volumes of Big Comic for visitors to flip through, so they get a feel for manga magazines and their stories.

Hoshino is now working on a storyline for Professor Munakata’s latest adventure; the ethnologist will visit the British Museum to unravel mysteries from ancient Europe.

“I hope to launch the new series in spring,”

Source: Asahi

It is quite an interesting choice for a manga exhibit in a well known museum. I will not be surprised if We see more manga exhibits around the world…

Simona Stanzani has translated a number of hit manga titles, including “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” and “NANA” (both published by Shueisha), and believes that manga and anime are important parts of Japan’s culture. The following interview took place, not in a maid cafe, but in a “megane & suits cafe,” where the male waiters all wear suits and glasses.

MDN: How did you become such an otaku?

Simona Stanzani (SS): When I was a child, many Japanese anime were already being shown on TV in Italy, such as “Lady Oscar,” “Aim for the Ace” and “Rocky Joe.”

The first time we Italians realized that the anime were from Japan was when “Grendizer,” the anime adaption of Go Nagai’s manga began. Before that, anime such as “Heidi” were European stories and the drawings were not so different from Disney’s, so we didn’t really think much of where they had come from.

But Grendizer was such a culture shock that you couldn’t possibly ignore the fact it was Japanese. It had all sorts of weird aliens modeled after Japanese demons. After Grendizer, the second most famous was “Captain Herlock.” I think all the boys wanted to be Herlock.

MDN: I heard you wore a black dress when your favorite character died.

SS: I get moved very easily when watching a movie or reading a manga, so I cried so much over anime like “Candy Candy,” saying, “Oh no! They didn’t meet again!” I think the Japanese are really good at doing this setsunai thing. Setsunai is hard to translate, but to me it has something to do with solitude. It’s a very Japanese way of making people cry, I think.

MDN: So it was manga that prompted you to study Japanese?

SS: Studying the Japanese language actually came as a consequence of my love for manga. I wanted to become a cartoonist, but there was no market in Italy at that time. So my first logical thought was, “Of course I’m going to study Japanese to live in Japan and draw manga.” So I did a two-year intensive course in Japanese at the University of Bologna.

I also studied banking and bookkeeping, which may prompt you to ask, “Why?” I did it because I knew I was not going to work in a company, so if I wanted to be a freelancer, then I had to be able to look after my money.

MDN: I heard that you practiced Japanese through correspondence with pen pals.

SS: I once had a Japanese music magazine, and there was a pen pal corner so I wrote I was looking for pen friends in Japanese and English. Then I got 200 letters! I replied to everybody and I kept 50, and it was like every day I was receiving letters and writing back. I actually learned kanji from those letters.

Obviously I was not speaking Japanese, but they did send me tapes with their favorite songs. So I learned a lot of Japanese songs, for example BOOWY, Yutaka Ozaki and of course a lot of anime songs. This is kind of how I learned speaking Japanese, listening to Japanese songs, and watching anime tapes they sent me as well.

MDN: And you started translating in 1992?

SS: At the beginning, there was a four-person team of editors called the “Kappa Boys,” and I started working with them. And one of the big Italian publishers they worked for introduced manga in 1992. They contacted me asking if I would like to translate, and I replied, “Yes. Why not? Then, I’ll be able to read them before anybody else!” I don’t think I’ve ever stopped translating manga since that job started.

My first job was the translation of the original manga of “Ghost in the Shell”, which was really hard, especially since I’d just learned how to use computers at that time and wasn’t very familiar with the concepts. Ghost in the Shell includes so much cyberpunk stuff, such as cyborg humans whose brains are directly connected to the Internet.

MDN: This is a labor of love for you.

SS: Of course. Sometimes you have to translate stuff you don’t like, but apart from that, the only pressure that I really have is my deadlines. It’s the freedom, really. Also, I welcome a challenge, and I’m a very positive person, so I can always find the bright side even in the worst situation. Even when translating is very hard, on the next page there might be something really amazing. I’m very happy with my job.

MDN: Could you please conclude with a general statement about manga and anime?

SS: I think that manga and anime are a very important part of Japanese culture, and that, at their highest level, they have a pivotal role in modern communication art.

It is time to get rid of the ancient, outdated concept of “if you read manga you become stupid” or to consider them mere commercial entertainment; of course a big share of them is made to sell, but even the most commercial titles do have artistic and cultural value.

Japanese should be proud of anime and manga, because they are very strong and unique means of expression, and a symbol of excellence for Japanese culture in the world.

Profile: Born in Bologna. A self-styled “professional otaku,” who has translated Japanese and anime into English and Italian. Her first published translation was “Ghost in the Shell” in 1992 and went on to work on many other works, including “BLEACH” and “D. Gray-man.” She re-located to Japan in 2007. Her favorite manga character is Sosuke Aizen from “BLEACH.”

Source: Mainichi

The interview was fascinating and proves that if you want something, just go for it with great effort and dedication.  After all, it is a labor of love!

Demographics

Between the 26th and 28th of October 2009 456 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.3% of the sample were male, 31.8% in their twenties, 33.8% in their thirties, and 34.4% in their forties.

Research results
Q1: Do you like to read manga? (Sample size=456)

	All	Male N=252	Female N=204
Love it	37.3%	31.7%	44.1%
Like it	41.4%	43.3%	39.2%
Dislike it	14.3%	16.7%	11.3%
Hate it	7.0%	8.3%	5.4%

Q2: Do you like console gaming? (Sample size=456)

	All	Male N=252	Female N=204
Love it	20.0%	17.9%	22.5%
Like it	43.2%	46.0%	39.7%
Dislike it	24.6%	26.2%	22.5%
Hate it	12.3%	9.9%	15.2%

Q3: Have you ever read doujinshi? (Sample size=456)

	All	Male N=252	Female N=204
Yes	54.4%	46.8%	63.7%
No	45.6%	53.2%	36.3%

Q4: For a while, the government set aside a budget of 11.7 billion yen towards building an “Anime Palace” (National Media Arts Centre) for manga, anime, games, etc. Did you agree with this plan? (Sample size=456)

	All	Male N=252	Female N=204
Completely agreed	3.9%	4.0%	3.9%
Agreed to some extent	23.0%	22.6%	23.5%
Opposed to some extent	33.8%	32.5%	35.3%
Completely opposed	39.3%	40.9%	37.3%

Q5: Meiji University have announced that they are collecting manga, anime, games, etc for the “Tokyo International Manga Library”, which they plan to open by 2014. One aim is to preserve this large sub-culture and keep it for future generations. As well as paper publications, they also plan to acquire doujinshi, figurines, etc. What do you think of this plan? (Sample size=456)

	All	Male N=252	Female N=204
Completely agree	14.7%	17.9%	10.8%
Agree to some extent	42.5%	43.3%	41.7%
Oppose to some extent	25.9%	23.0%	29.4%
Completely oppose	16.9%	15.9%	18.1%

Source: iShare via What Japan Thinks

What do you think about the results? I think the idea of a Manga library is better than the expensive Anime Shrine.

A “manga” library opened in Tokyo this weekend, featuring traditional Japanese comic magazines that were popular nearly half a century ago and a rare compilation of romantic comics for women.Visitors can also browse old issues of the smash-hit girls’ magazines “Ribon” and “Nakayoshi” as well as most comic books published in Japan in the 1960s or later from among some 140,000 items stocked at the Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library of Manga and Subculture, which opened Saturday at Meiji University.

The library, named after the manga critic Yonezawa who died in 2006, is a preparatory facility for what the university is trying to complete as one of “the world’s largest” library featuring manga comics in 2014, it said.

Source: AP via BreitBart

Exciting news…I cant wait to see the world’s largest library for Manga…Just a little bad thing that We have to wait until 2014..It should worth the wait.

For those who are not familiar with his work, here is the wiki entry:

He was born in Hiroshima, and was in the city when it was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945. All of his family members who had not been evacuated died in the bombing except for his mother, and an infant sister who died several weeks after the bombing.

In 1961, Nakazawa moved to Tokyo to become a full-time cartoonist, and produced short pieces for manga anthologies such as Shonen Gaho, Shonen King, and Bokura.

In 1966, following the death of his mother, Nakazawa returned to his memories of the destruction of Hiroshima and began to express them in his stories. Kuroi Ame ni Utarete (Struck by Black Rain), the first of a series of five books, was a fictional story of Hiroshima survivors involved in the postwar black market. In 1972, Nakazawa chose to portray his own experience directly in the story “Ore wa Mita” (“I Saw It”), published in Monthly Shonen Jump (In 1982, the story was translated into English and published as a one-shot comic book by Educomics as “I Saw It”).

Immediately after finishing “I Saw It”, Nakazawa began his major work, Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen). This series, which eventually filled ten volumes (six volumes in English translation), was based on the same events as “I Saw It” but fictionalized, with the young Gen as a stand-in for the author. Barefoot Gen depicted the bombing and its aftermath in graphic detail, but also turned a critical eye on the militarization of Japanese society in the World War II years, and on the sometimes abusive dynamics of the traditional family. Barefoot Gen was made into an animated film, released in 1983. It was followed three years later by a sequel. It was recently made into a live action tv drama.

Source: Wiki

It is a bad thing that this acclaimed mangaka had to retire due to his health problems but He left a good legacy. Due to his experiences with the Atomic Bomb, He wants to express the horror of it in a large canvas painting.

Source: Chugoku Newspaper via MAL