Jonathan Clements's Blog, page 34

A Thorn in Their Sides

It's all been very quiet for a while over at Matt Thorn's blog. Despite its presence in the links section at right, I'd given up checking to see if he'd done anything new. Then I've been busy for the last few months on a new book project and I simply haven't had the time. Which is why I am late to the party over at his site about this article, in which Thorn puts the boot repeatedly into what passes for translation in the manga field.

This is, of course, a subject close to my heart, and I...

Epiphanies

Christmas comes late for authors in Britain, as 6th January is when we receive our statements from the Public Lending Right. This is a wonderful body that pays a royalty for books taken out of British libraries. For a sole author, that's currently a payout of 6.29 pence every time someone checks me out (in the library sense, that is). The numbers are extrapolated from sampled data, so there's always a bit of wiggle room — this year, for example, one of my books earned nothing at all when I...

Rumspringa

Apparently my Judge Dredd: Devil's Playground is now in the shops. Herewith the words I wrote for the bit inside the sleeve that nobody ever reads.

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My Judge Dredd: Solo was about the people who lived on the edges of Dredd's world, in the no-man's land of Alientown. Judge Dredd: 99 Code Red forced Dredd to confront situations more familiar from our own time – an old fashioned hospital. Trapped on Titan dealt with the rejects from Dredd's world, a society largely comprising the perps that...

Spending Spree

The scoop of 2009 in the British anime world was a very simple piece of information that has been lurking unnoticed in the public domain for months. It was Andrew Partridge of Beez Entertainment who broke the story, when he began poking around for possible sources of funding for anime. Putting a film on in cinemas costs a lot of money, because the cost of an actual, physical print is much more than you think. But Partridge discovered that the UK Film Council, a National Lottery...

"I have not told the half of what I saw."

Although they may be self-indulgent and self-regarding, I've really been enjoying everybody else's round-ups of the ten years since the numbers rolled over from 19– to 20–. Herewith the last decade as it looks from here.

2000. In the first week of January, I discover that I am not going blind after all. Instead, the screen is dying on the laptop I have used since grad school. The purchase of a new desktop unit brings the internet into my home for the first time, and with it, an avalanche of...

My Book of the Year

Since I do this for a living and have to keep my receipts, I know exactly how much I spend on books — about two thousand pounds a year. Huge stacks of my most recent acquisitions are still awaiting my attention, although things I have enjoyed this year include The Penguin History of Canada, far too many books about Chinese immigrants abroad (the harvestings of trips to about six different Chinatowns this year), and the cleverest of them all, Holder of the White Lotus, a biography of that...

2009: The Year in Anime Books

It has been a good year for worthy books on Japanese animation. Apart from my own Schoolgirl Milky Crisis, of course, there have been a couple of books I have yet to read but suspect I will like: Andrew Osmond's Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist and Thomas Lamarre's The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Surely the prize for best anime book of the year must go to Hayao Miyazaki's Starting Point, lovingly translated by Frederik L. Schodt and Beth Cary, and treating the anime fans of the...

Herald Angels

15th February 2010 sees the UK premiere of the Gainax movie Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance at the Glasgow Film Theatre. I shall be introducing it, although unlike the time I introduced Death and Rebirth in Oxford, I shall not be performing the finale solo using shadow puppetry and silly voices. There are all sorts of things going on the same day, as well, including a brief talk on anime censorship by a lady from the BBFC, and the UK premiere of the long-awaited Gentleman Broncos...

Advancing

As if by magic, the First Emperor of China rears his ugly head again only a few days later, with the word from my publishers that he's finally earned out his advance. This is a cause for great celebration for an author — it means that a book is performing in a manner which the publisher is liable to find satisfactory, and is now, at least in theory, a little income-generating machine that can be left to perpetually whirr away in the corner and occasionally spurt out coins.

Opinions are...

Better Days

Beijing's policy towards Google is nothing new. The First Emperor of China's advisers rounded up all 'unapproved' books. Single copies were retained in the emperor's own library, and all duplicates were destroyed. It was a criminal offence to possess a banned volume. When the Qin dynasty fell a few years later, the library of censured books was destroyed, along with uncountable, irretrievable works of classical Chinese.

The First Emperor's censorship scheme removed books considered...