Jonathan Clements's Blog, page 19

Mark Blumenfeld 1971-2011

Mark Blumenfeld, who apparently died in May, led a troubled life. He had over a thousand friends on Facebook, although it speaks volumes that few commented when his cousin announced his death. For my part, I waited several days to write this obituary, unsure of whether this was yet another stunt, or "regeneration", from someone who regularly purged his Friends list and changed his identity. The facts I repeat here are true to the best of my knowledge, although I never had much confirmation of any of them.

I met him at university in Osaka, where he was known to his fellow students as the Prince of Darkness. He coveted the image of a comic-book villain, lurking at the sidelines in a black raincoat, surveying the crowd with the glowering air of a Jewish Terminator. He had few friends, and had the unerring habit of losing those that he made. When reminiscing with him about our classmates, I found myself faced with a long list of slights real and imagined, people who had wronged him, and fellow students who seemed to have insulted him unawares. He alluded in conversations to childhood illnesses and teenage ostracism, setting up a script for his life of exclusion embraced, and a simmering resentment directed towards in-crowds that he would never have really wanted to join.

He finished his education with an LPT1, a powerful qualification in the world of Japanese, where a bachelor's degree is rated as a mere LPT2 and a high school diploma as LPT3. Getting an LPT1 is not impossible, but it is the mark of a superior intellect: an ability to grapple with one of the world's most difficult languages, at a level reasonably describable as fluent. It was, to some extent, the only proof that Mark ever had that he really was as smart as he thought he was. Coupled with computing experience that favoured his obsessive, focussed nature, he seemed to have had a brief and successful career in information technology, although by the time we met again, he claimed to be making a living from online poker, which he fit in around caring for his elderly parents.

After 15 years, Facebook brought us back in touch in 2009, coincidentally when I was heading for New York on samurai business. We met up in Chinatown, where I found him lurking outside my hotel, tormenting passers-by with a toy sonic screwdriver. Both of us were fatter than in our salad days, but he was twice his previous weight, supposedly due to the medication he was on. He swayed as if already drunk (he wasn't), and only seemed to listen to half the things I said. "It's my happy pills!" he trilled. "So much better than when I haven't got any!"

He was ebullient and oddly charming. A passer-by asked us for directions and he invited her to dine with us, kissing her hand as she scurried away… though I was sure he'd almost won her over. We sank a crate of Tsingtao Beer at the Grand Sichuan restaurant near Manhattan Bridge, and he told my wife that it was the first time he had left his apartment in months. He addressed the waiters in slurred and gabbled Japanese, seemingly unaware that this was sure to leave them unimpressed.

In the restaurant, he presented me with a signed Haruki Murakami book, which, he claimed, he had been saving for me for the last decade. I had, apparently, brought Murakami to his attention by enthusing about Hear the Wind Sing in 1992. I had no memory of this, nor much appreciation of the passion that would acquire it, stand in line to get it signed, and then sit on it for ten years pending a possible meeting with a chance acquaintance.

He found an outlet for his frustrations in the world of Doctor Who fandom. He loved the Doctor's Edwardian eccentricity and off-world Britishness, but also saw in the Master, the Doctor's dark half, some symbolic re-enactment of his own inner turmoil. He agonised for days over whether to leave his apartment to attend a New York fan gathering, worried that they would think him "weird".

"Trust me," I said. "It's a Doctor Who event. There is no way you will be the weirdest person there."

He subsequently made a complete arse of himself by hitting on Karen Gillan from the audience during a Q&A on 14th April 2010, although that was not how he remembered it. For weeks afterwards he would brag of how he had whipped up a round of applause by telling Matt Smith: "YOU ARE THE DOCTOR!"

"I had them eating from my hands," he claimed, speculating for some time about the possibilities of a stand-up career. It was a typical Blumenfeld delusion. In the time I had known him he had aspired to be a novelist, a film director, a screenwriter, and any number of other occupations. He was genuinely, exuberantly pleased that I had made a career as an author, and would often dream of doing something similar. I told him what I tell everybody else – that starting a story, and then finishing it, was the first step to anything. He claimed to have started; I never saw anything complete. Mark could be a kind-hearted innocent or a spiteful sulk, but the wild swings in his moods played havoc with his creative ambitions.

He spoke to me of one story idea, in which the Moon became an allegory for Mark himself, a satellite calved from the hateful Earth, which comes to delight observers on the ground by its apparent changes in shape. In Mark's story, the Moon comes to love its own inconstancy, and forgives those who caused it to be separate in the first place.

Doctor Who fandom forced him to confront the existence of people who would disagree with him. He would rant and rave about fellow fans, sorting them into categories based on whether they had noticed which episodes were the "best", in a series of bipolar reversals. Russell T Davies was the greatest creator Doctor Who had ever seen. Russell T Davies was a hack. Steven Moffat was the saviour of Doctor Who. Steven Moffat was the despoiler of Doctor Who. After a while, I stopped discussing the series with him, seeing in our "discussions" a zero-sum game.

Mark snatched up a large collection of Big Finish audios, to which he would listen repeatedly – he once confessed that he had spent seven hours listening to Immortal Beloved on a loop. Oddly, the sole opinion of his that remained constant was that Mark Wright's cameo performance in Sympathy for the Devil was the greatest in Christendom, an assessment that baffled even Wright himself. He also developed a taste for the works of Paul Magrs and would harangue me for not keeping up with them.

Mark died sometime in late May, in his sleep, from a massive coronary. I only know because his mother found the phone number of his Australian friend, Paul, on his computer. Paul posted the news sometime later, long after Mark's New York funeral. Had Paul not begun recounting his own friendship with Mark, I might well have written off Mark's death as another "regeneration", sure that he would turn up in Facebook within a few weeks, dressed as Doctor Doom or a steampunk villain, and boasting of a new Japanese online pen-pal who was sure to be his "next embittered ex". It is only as the silence persists, and other friends begin coming from the woodwork to mourn him, that I believe he has really gone.

If Mark were able to read this, his reaction would depend on where he was in his cycle of medication. There was a Mark Blumenfeld who would be mortified to see his life discussed in public, insulted beyond belief that I should have chronicled his existence without mentioning any one of a dozen more interesting facts to which I should have been privy. There was also a Mark Blumenfeld who would have been deeply touched to know that anyone, anyone at all was paying attention. And it's for that Mark that I write this.

Jonathan Clements

A Hero's Legacy

We've just had an impromptu private screening of Koxinga: A Hero's Legacy, the National Geographic documentary that's been part of my life, on and off, for the last two years. It's already been twelve months since I was flown to Taiwan, where I had a fantastic week poking around historical sites with the camera crew, wittering into the lens about pirates, revolutionaries and my enduring obsession with the greatest Ming loyalist, Zheng Chenggong, a.k.a. Coxinga, a.k.a., for the purposes of this documentary, Koxinga.

The programme charts the reconstruction of a replica of a Chinese war junk, and bravely includes the fantastic cat-fights that broke out over construction, design, materials and additions, as tourist officers clashed with historical recreationists and seasoned boat-builders over where they should stick their screws, what 17th century pirates would have made of Swedish motors, and the likelihood that a tourist attraction would be "real" enough to fall apart after three years. I wade through the middle of it all, waving around things I've stolen from the shipyard, and getting so badly sunburned on the launch day that the HD camera had to move ten feet back to stop me looking like a leper in all later footage.

In what is likely to be an unrepeatable highlight of my career, I was also forced to address a conference of marine historians in Mandarin, hacked my way through a bamboo forest near a funeral home, filmed at an illegal shrine built on a sandbar, and had a blissful two hours shopping for old Chinese music CDs in Tainan. I must have cut a strange dash, caked in Cover Girl for the camera, and with my radio mic still sticking out of my back pocket, snatching 1940s propaganda songs from the bargain bins. I had also been wearing the same shirt for five days for the sake of continuity, so the Chinese gave me a wide berth.

Koxinga: A Hero's Legacy will be broadcast first on Taiwanese TV this coming August, and should be on other countries' National Geographic channels in the months after that. I have had an absolutely fantastic time working on it, and I can only hope that National Geographic wake up to the documentary potential of Admiral Togo or Mannerheim some time soon…

In the process of making the documentary, the director Sigal Bujman also stumbeld upon a Chinese Coxinga cartoon series currently in production, so who knows, maybe this will cross back over into my other specialty soon enough.

In Plain English

A while ago, a friend of mine in a large corporation asked me if it was possible for me to use my translation skills to translate an email he'd received from Management-speak into English. Herewith my best attempt. I may have changed some of the names to protect the guilty:

Large Corporation has a vision – to be the new force in banking, and at the heart of this is the diversity of our people, products and services. Treasury has its own Diversity Strategy which places a focus on excellence and aims to get the best out of the people that we have, and to be able to attract the best candidates into the organisation.

Translation: Hello. We are a bank, and there are lots of people working here. They are all different and not the same. We would like to be good at what we do. We would like to have people who are not rubbish.

To achieve this we need an environment of inclusiveness where everyone feels able to contribute. We will limit our business potential if we do not create an environment that is attractive to all. We should all value difference and recognise that people from diverse backgrounds, skills, attitudes and experiences can add positively to the business success.

Translation: It would really help if everyone was nice to the fat girls and the blokes with B.O. Please don't take the piss out of each other. Something's going wrong upstairs, and we've decided to blame you lot.

More details of the Treasury Diversity strategy are now on the HR site on the intranet which can be accessed by the following link: [snip].

Translation: Someone has written this all out again somewhere else, in words even Bob from Accounts can understand. Not that we would make that an issue with him or tell him that, because then that would not be inclusive.

To achieve this aim, we must demonstrate fairness and respect in our dealings with our colleagues, customers, shareholders, investors and communities in which we operate.

Are we not getting through yet? BE NICE TO EACH OTHER or we will fire your ass.

To achieve this aim, we must demonstrate fairness and respect in our dealings with our colleagues, customers, shareholders, investors and communities in which we operate. Therefore, a number of diversity awareness sessions have been arranged to develop our knowledge of the current issues. These sessions will be facilitated by Drama Llamas, who are leading providers of Diversity training and who will run the sessions in a fun, yet thought provoking way.

Some out-of work actors and someone who thinks he is Ricky Gervais will indulge in a futile effort to get you all playing a office-centred perversion of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, in which you will be asked to "role-play" dealing with difficult customers, and learn about "conflict resolution" in an office environment.

The only thing that will unite you with your colleagues will be your universal contempt for the people making you perform these bizarre circus tricks. However, the organisers do not give a toss because they get paid whether you enjoy it or not. And rather than admit they wasted thousands of pounds, Human Resources will report that the whole project has been a resounding success, and probably produce a chart that looks like a big pie.

Please respond using the voting buttons above to indicate which date you are able to attend, the sessions will be filled on a first come basis.

Someone with an English degree has realised that if we say "vote" and "first-come [first-served]," you might think that we were doing you a favour.

Fiona Collindale will confirm your place by email.

Fiona Collindale will be the person who reports that everything was a "resounding success".

The sessions are mandatoy.

Because if we only singled out the people who needed them, it would be unfair on them and ruin our special inclusion policy. So *all* of you have to go through with this, even though the whole thing is only really for the benefit of Gavin from Marketing, who still refers to the post-room as "his bitches."

if you cannot attend a session please inform Fiona of any reason why you are not able to attend any of the dates below.

Fiona will shortly realise just how much power she now has, and take great pleasure in berating people for "letting down the team" when they tell her to shove it. You are *all* going to have to do this, people, but anyone who thinks it's bobbins will have a little mark put on their file by Fiona, who will probably be head of personnel soon enough when Management read her report about how everything was such a "resounding success." She will then have the power of life and death over you, so woe betide anyone who gives her grief.

(For Glasgow staff, we will arrange separate training later in the year although anyone is very welcome to attend if in London)

We know that Glasgow staff will slit our throats if we try it there, so we're going to hide for a bit, and get round to it when we have hired some bigger people with cattle-prods.

Hope that helps.

Anime Journalism — 1997

A real blast from the past — the Sci Fi channel putting some of their anime bumpers to an unexpected use in a mini-documentary, albeit one with made-up statistics, quotes out of context and apples compared to oranges. I've never seen this before — if I had, I would have pointed out that I seem considerably younger, thinner, and apparently spelt my name differently back then. Then again, the Sci Fi channel can't even spell its own name any more.

Eurovision Shouty I-Spy 2011

Hello, Da-Da-Dum, Na-Na-Na, and welcome to the Eurovision Shouty I-Spy Game, back once again by popular demand.

Step One: you will probably need to be quite drunk. Step Two: The following sights will be seen during this Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest. Can you see them first? Remember to shout it out. Party hosts will need to keep score of who gets what first, or otherwise dish out the forfeits to those that aren't quick enough. As ever, there is more than one key change, more than one "surprise" costume change, and plenty of orbital cleavage. Keep your eyes (or ears) open for any of the following. And when you notice it, SHOUT IT OUT!

With great disappointment we have had to say farewell in the semi-finals to Turkey's blue-haired caged contortionist, and Armenia's meaningful BOOM-BOOM CHAKA-CHAKA chorus, performed by a woman who brought her own boxing ring. And Portugal, Portugal how we loved you, as if the Village People had been redesigned by a colour-blind committee of Communists. But they are gone, leaving us with eye-strainingly intense backdrop screens, including, at one point, an EPILEPSY-INDUCING SIXTIES SUPER STROBE RAINBOW EFFECT.  And the chance to shout "ACHTUNG! HUMOUR!" every time a joke from the German presenters falls terrifyingly flat.

But in no particular order, in the finals you should look out for:

Winking

Tartan Jacket

KEY CHANGE! (every time you hear one)

Mystic Meg and Her Onstage Sandpit

The Pointy-Headed Beastie Boys

Bimbling*

Four body-stocking gimp dancers

ORBITAL CLEAVAGE**

Feathered Shoulder Pads

Monocle

Unicycle

Men Kissing Men

MULLET DRESS (short at the front, long at the back)

Costume Change

FLAME ON! (every time there's pyrotechnics)

Ukulele!

Lock Him In a Box!

World's Worst Fake Piano Playing

Breaking Glass

BACK FLIP (several)

Light-up Clothes (several)

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na

DRUM KIT (several)

The Biggest Ring in the World (on her finger)

Onstage Magic

Singing for the Deaf (Sign Language While Singing)

DRY ICE (several)

Inadvisable Rap (a couple)

(*swaying one's head from side to side in a snakey fashion).

(**ostentatious cleavage sufficient to see from a satellite in orbit, which, according to Eurovision bra consultant Tom Clancy, requires a minimum of C-cup).

Bonus item: HORSE'S SADDLE. Blink and you'll miss it, but it's there and worth double points.

If there's any justice, we will be in Moldova next year, but according to the bookies, France is the favourite to win at 6/4. He does have a nice jacket.

Apologies to American readers, who will have to just imagine what the world's biggest, gayest song contest is like. Just imagine, for one day every year, Europe gets to behave the way that Japan does all the time!

The Reality Distortion Field

Several years ago, I wrote this report on the request of some industry pals, regarding a "manga" business seminar given by a prominent non-Japanese company in the field. I have changed all the names to protect the guilty.

—–

So I had a very interesting and quite enjoyable time at the Manga Seminar at the Yamato Foundation today. I suspect as well, that once SuperManga had got over the realisation that they weren't going to just do a sales pitch to a docile crowd of consumers, they rather enjoyed themselves, too. Mr Moderator got up and exhorted everyone to just stick up their hands and ask questions whenever they felt like it, because "after all, this is a seminar".

Dave Smith and Jimmy Jones (not their real names) seem like perfectly affable, intelligent people who know their material well, and have a reasonable grasp of the history of manga since about 2001. They seemed unaware of developments and innovations before that date, but it was difficult to tell if that was the usual wilful ignorance of the SuperManga Reality Distortion Field, or if they were simply uninformed about anything that was not of immediate concern to their company and their own roles in it. Jimmy, for example, was prepared to imply, or rather to allow his audience to infer, that SuperManga had invented back-to-front printing in English, and that SuperManga was "taking comics *to* Japan", as if this wasn't something that had been going on when he was still at school.

I found them both very likeable. Their sole shortcoming appears to be years and years spent addressing crowds of gullible sales clerks and Party faithful. If it had just been the three of us, I am sure we would have had a whale of a time, since they could have dropped the silly SuperManga TAKING THE WORLD BY STORM pretence, and discussed several serious issues within the manga field, which they had clearly pondered in the past. I felt almost guilty subjecting them to due diligence, but to be totally honest, Jimmy's first set of statements were founded on such vague figures that my hand shot up of its own accord. This was supposed to be a business seminar after all, and I predicted that it would become a SuperManga love-in and pseudomanga pitchfest unless I kept it on track.

So, I asked a "statistical question". How was it that their market share was 80% on the Power Point slide in front of us, but only 65% in Jimmy's own notes. Was the Power Point slide out of date?

Yes, he conceded, it was.

"So your market share has contracted 15% in just a year?" I heard myself saying. (Sharp intake of breath from the man behind me… not a good thing for him to be hearing just three minutes into a business seminar!)

"Er…yes," Jimmy replied.

"But that wasn't actually my question", I added. "My question was: If your market share is now 65%, it is 65% of WHAT? Of the comics business?" No, said Dave jumping in here, manga are not the same as comics.

"But," I pointed out, entirely on autopilot, "your company policy has divorced manga from its Japanese origins and there is no such thing as a single manga 'style', nor were Nielsen or Bookscan in any position to define it for themselves. So 65% of what?"

"What's your name?" asked Dave.

"Jonathan," I said.

"And you're from…?" he asked, guardedly.

"I'm a member of the public," I said. At which there were several titters at the back, and even the moderator couldn't help stifling a giggle. I heard some excited rustles from somewhere behind me, with the room now divided into people who knew exactly who I was, and people with no clue.

"Anyway," I said, "all these things considered, your market share is 65% of what? Of comics, of book sales, of Things That SuperManga Sell…? And if manga are separate from comics, could you please define for me, what exactly is the difference between a manga and a comic?"

Quite unexpectedly, the day had turned into one of the more fun episodes of Dragon's Den, with me in the role of the doubtful, scowling blonde businesswoman, and SuperManga's sales force as the beleaguered Russian immigrants trying to borrow twenty grand to sell lunar energy and cube-point pens.

Jimmy then launched into SuperManga Obfuscation Alpha, which didn't actually answer my question, but since both he and I knew the question was entirely unanswerable within his company's own parameters, I didn't pursue it. In fact, he firmly and politely closed the issue, without answering the question, and then moved on. (I am actually even more bored than SuperManga with the entire question of What Is Manga? But they're the ones who try to turn it into something it's not. As far as its use in English is concerned, Fred Schodt and Peter Goodman very specifically defined the word in 1983. Everyone else since then has just been, as I like to say, "trying to sell you something").

A lady on the other side of the room then very reasonably pointed out that SuperManga's figures distinguished between "kid's manga" and "manga", which seemed a bit arbitrary. Did their own market share figures, for example, also include competition with Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh, which were presumably also manga, albeit filed in the High Street as just "comics". (No, I wasn't operating her as a puppet! Although if I had been, I would have got her to add that Transformers has just sold 80,000 copies, and since it is a vaguely Japanese-looking thing with robots in it, and drawn by people who *think* they know manga, would that also qualify Transformers as a manga under SuperManga's woolly definition?).

These questions are important. Without proper definition of such issues, none of the company's sales figures mean anything. It makes it impossible to gauge how big the business really is, or how well it is doing. This irritates me, eternally, because such fudges and obfuscations place people's livelihoods at risk, including the many people in the room who "wanted to be manga artists", and who think that SuperManga will make that happen for them.

Dave's own presentation was weighted to drift ever closer towards their interests, allowing more and more of the dialogue to be dominated by me-me-me noise from the usual suspects, and bland managerial responses of corporate encouragement, drifting away from the actual hard facts of the business that would determine whether or not it was likely they would ever see a penny.

There was a breathless and stammering creature on the same row as me, asking plaintive questions about manga art style, and What It All Meant. I felt a bit sorry for her, because the question was entirely unsuited for a business seminar, particularly not one run by a trio of blokes who refused to define what manga was. Mr Moderator eventually delivered a stump speech about a few manga tropes, and rather desperately asked if anyone in the audience would like to step in with an explanation of Why They've All Got Such Big Eyes. He was, I think, rather hoping that I would bail him out. So I didn't.

Dave got back to the case at hand, which was bigging up SuperManga's manga nights at a chain of local bookstores. He quoted some interesting figures, namely that the average revenue at a manga night is £1000/event, but that the top sales were £2661 for one night in a southern university town. Had it just been us two, I would have quizzed him in depth about this — £1000 turnover versus what sort of outlay? Mean or median? How many first volumes sold? What kind of repeat business? But I really wasn't in much of a position to audit every one of their figures, and had to pick my moments carefully.

Maybe I was reading it wrong, but I think that Jimmy and Dave were having much more fun grappling with me than they were with fielding the usual "is it all violence?" "can you see nipples?" questions from the rest of the crowd. Inevitably, as the subject of "Original English-Language Manga " (i.e. "comics") came up, the white noise grew, as numerous would-be artists asked hypothetical questions about whether SuperManga would be interested in buying Attack of the Space Ninja, their new magnum opus.  Of course, once again, had we been on our own, I would have kept them very busy with this, asking about the precise definition of publishing "in partnership with creators", and the implications for intellectual property exploitation. I would have also liked to have asked about initiation costs, and asked for their opinions on whether the early manga business (pre-1997) was over-engineered in terms of design, retouch and production. We were, after all, supposed to be discussing the SuperManga business model — not that there was much of a chance to get to grips with it.

Instead, I limited myself to a question on the logistics of dealing with the back catalogue, with particular reference to ensuring that enough early volumes of long-running serials continued to be racked in stores. I could see from the look on Dave's face that this was an issue that SuperManga has only recently been facing, but one which they were obviously concerned about. He outlined their intent to push stores to rack, say, the first three and three most recent volumes of a given series, and to post signs on the shelves exhorting consumers to simply ask for the store to order any that were missing. I followed up by asking him if internet ordering could take the load off back catalogue in stores, but he surprised me by revealing that SuperManga do not have an internet ordering operation through their website. (Given more time, I would have quizzed him on this apparent omission, but time was running out, and he wanted to show us some pictures of some movies that SuperManga are making based on "manga").

At which point, I swear to God, a man I had never met before, sitting right at the front, stuck his hand up and said: "I'm very sorry, but I am totally confused now. That guy over there [pointed at me] raised a very interesting question about what manga actually is, and you tried to close the issue earlier on, but I would like to open it again…" He then proceeded to grill them for five minutes about what they thought manga was, and rather charmingly offered Kiriko Kubo's work as an example of something that is undoubtedly manga, but which doesn't fit their paradigm. By this point, I think Jimmy in particular was ready to shout ALL RIGHT, THEY'RE JUST COMICS! NOW FUCK OFF! but he offered SuperManga Obfuscation Beta.

Mr Moderator then jumped in with a circular argument, which amounted to the fact that people (including SuperManga themselves, although he didn't dare say it), had wilfully misled readers about manga for ten years, so it was a bit late to fight it, so manga was whatever SuperManga said it was. And wasn't it spiffing that it was TAKING THE WORLD BY STORM?

Dave then tried to round up by explaining that storyboards were comics and that every manga was a storyboard for a movie… a statement of the blindingly obvious, and delivered with a little smile in my direction, with all the authority of a SuperManga Wheel Rediscovery. I felt achingly sorry for him, delivering such nonsensical soundbites to crowd after crowd of excitable fifteen-year-olds really appears to have dulled his senses; senses which, when faced with real questions from the half a dozen audience members who were actually *there* for a business seminar, really do appear to be honed very sharply indeed.

I'm not sure what the rest of the audience made of it. I suspect that some of them just wanted to hear about Big Eyes and Laser Guns, or show the speakers their colouring-in. I have included the facts that I found interesting above, but obviously, they were buried amid such doubtful conclusions and claims, that I don't think it will have benefitted any members of the public. In fact, to anyone of rudimentary intelligence, listening to what was said today, the upshot would have *discouraged* people from investing in the business, as it soon became abundantly clear that much of its putative success was founded on smoke, mirrors, and spurious comparisons of apples and oranges.

Twice, and not at my urging, both SuperManga speakers outlined their future expectations that their own market share would continue to dwindle as others jumped on the bandwagon. That would have been an interesting subject for prolonged discussion, as it spoke to the very heart of their interests in intellectual property, and debate over what constituted "quality". But there was no time.

If I'd been in a bad mood, I would have asked them why they thought their enthusiastic descriptions of their publication of a Korean comic, drawn in Thailand, really belonged in the hospitality room of an Anglo-Japanese Foundation, but I got the impression that a lot of the audience were starting to think that themselves. My work was done!

I could have quizzed them for hours more about the SuperManga business model — of which we had barely scratched the surface. But hey, admission was free. I should go to more of these.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.

Travels in Time

My article on Time Traveller, the live-action remake of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, is now online at the Manga UK blog.

Taking the Miike

My article on Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins is up now over at the Manga UK blog.

Fractale Geometries

In January, unnamed members of a production committee demanded that the US distributor Funimation postpone further simulcasts of the Fractale anime until such time as the show was not being pirated on the internet. In other words, as a special reward for paying all that money for the rights to Fractale, Funimation was now lumbered with an open-endedly Sisyphean task akin to ending all crime and bringing peace to the Middle East.

A production committee is a multi-headed hydra of differing interests in a media title, often including a manga author, a comics publisher, the bloke whose factory makes the plushies, someone who supplies the music, and so on. On a good day, a production committee means that everyone spreads the risk and the profits of a film or TV show. On a bad day, it can mean a vast army of cooks fussing over the broth with contradictory directives; witness, for example the forty-six (count 'em!) different names on the production committee for K20: Legend of the Mask. You know how difficult it is to get three friends to agree on where to eat? Now imagine that you have to get consensus from a crowd of several dozen, including eight vegetarians, five people who hate curry, three devout Muslims, Aunt Mabel (who "won't eat foreign food") and a Shetland pony called Colin.

Production committees can also mean a number of hangers-on, relatives, spouses, and clueless lawyers representing estates or preoccupied members. I can only assume that the Fractale request came from similar interests – possibly the kind of person who doesn't know what the internet actually is, and who assumed that all "piracy" could be stopped by sending a SWAT team around to arrest a lone man with an eye-patch who cackles over a computer somewhere in Arizona. We can, at least, thank our lucky stars that someone explained to the offending committee members that simulcasts actually slap piracy down, and in the case of Fractale, gave an illegal version a window for success of less than sixty minutes, before good hearted fans could watch the real thing, legally, for themselves.

Meanwhile, Japanese academic Tatsuo Tanaka has recently published a discussion paper that the Fractale committee would do well to read. In it, he argues the common-sense case that fans benefit from a preview medium, and that it is folly to expect someone to pay £30 to buy a show they have never seen, merely because it has a girl in a miniskirt on the cover with big eyes and spiky hair. Access to legal streaming, clips and trailers helps customers make an informed choice about how to spend their money. They are more likely to spend their money on something they like, and hence come back to buy more if it.

Crucially, however, Tanaka is talking about legal streaming. Companies and creators have the moral right to decide how and when to give away free samples. That decision does not rest with pirates and thieves, no matter what self-righteous defences they might spout. Hence, sadly, the Fractale committee had the moral right to be as counter-productively idiotic with their franchise as they wanted, but thankfully someone talked them round before they could do untold damage to their own show.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #83, 2011.

Pet Hates — Anime Style

A couple of years ago, the British magazine 3D World asked me to list my pet hates in Japanese computer animation. This is what I sent them:

1. Over-long beauty passes. "We've rendered that spaceship, let's watch it trundle past for just a few more seconds…and a few more." The modern equivalent of the agonisingly long freeze frame.

2. Faceless robot minions. "Design one, design them all." A common temptation in all cartoons ever since Disney perfected "Xerox animation" for 101 Dalmations. But it just makes everything feel like a video game.

3, Any excuse for hovering off the ground. "That way, we don't have to touch it." Many Japanese cartoons make a virtue out of floaty contact, plumping for hovercars, weightlessness and psychic powers to keep from worrying about how feet interact with surfaces, and hands with objects.

4. Flat lifeless humans amid vibrant, dynamic machines. Humans are the tough part, so why not ignore them? It doesn't help that the Uncanny Valley encourages modern animators to make their human characters less realistic, choosing instead to use "Toon-Shading" styling to make them look like big-eyed, spikey-haired manga moppets.

5. A cavalier disregard for physics. "We've got planes that fly backwards!" After all that effort in modelling reality, some bright spark just ignores it anyway for impossible leaps, and incredible feats of strength. As in overblown live action SFX, it just reminds the viewer that none of this is really happening.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.