One of the books I got for my birthday! Uuuuuuuuuuuuuwaaaa, so pretty!

I  just got it for Nakamura Asumiko’s work, but was so pleasantly surprised, I had to share some quick scans!

Basically, it’s a book with 52 “essays” and accompanying illustrations from various BL mangaka about their favorite kind of boy moe. Essays on various The full list can be found here! (Which also happens to be where I first found out about this book.)

(Click for bigger pics)

First off, my lovely goddess, Nakamura Asumiko:

The cover image opens to stunningly beautiful full color insert (And the fact that the subject is so ADORABLE and silly makes it that much more awesome)

Now, as for her actual essay page…

Her’s was: Unfashionable Megane Boy(非おしゃれメガネ男子) Basically, a boy who wear’s sexy glasses but otherwise has no fashion sense to speak of. SO CUTE! (and it made me loooool long and hard) Totally deserves the cover ♥ (I WANT that sweater now!)

(Btw, underneath is Nakamura Asumiko’s no doubt GENIUS essay, for anyone who can speak that speak and wants to check it out. Click for a larger image.)

Other favorites of mine!

Ishino Aya’s Poet Boy(ポエマー男子」) So cuuuuuuute! I want this as a poster!

Est Em’s Imperfect Boy(スキあり男子」) I’m not sure what this MEANS exactly, but it does hit my salarymen/suit fetish so ♥

Atsuki Kyouyama’s Bath Boy(お風呂男子) (I had to level the crap out of this so it’d actually be visible!) I always loved her light, loose, sweet style style. Ahh, if only she did more non-sport BL!

Marta Matsuo’s Reptile Boy(爬虫類系男子) I was SO SURPRISED to see her in here! I was afraid I’d never see anything by her again! I need to see if she ever got any tanks out..

(Also: that turtle is pretty moe himself)

Takeshi Matsu’s Muscly Megane Boy (スジ筋眼鏡男子) Lol, kinda boring concept but GAWD, I LOVE TAKESHI MATSU!

Those thighs! Those SOCKS! Very moe.

Miecohouse Matsumoto’s Ex Juvenile Delinquent Boy(元ヤン男子) Her excellent art really shine’s here! The concept translated perfectly, even though I can’t read any of the kanji. I love the apron!

Yuiji Aniya’s Gap Boy(スキマ男子) Another one I don’t GET, but I love love love how she did the feet. Yuiji Aniya is a mangaka who constantly confuses me. I love her and don’t GET her at the same time. It’s weird.

Nawo Inoue’s Languid Boy (けだるげ男子) I love the laid back kind of guys! And this guy looks like just my type ♥

Tetsuzoh Okadaya’s Transvestite Macho Boy (女装マッチョ男子) I’m honestly not a fan of this mangaka at all, but this image made my babe laugh and laugh and laugh, so it’s worth a mention, yes?

Well, there are a bunch of other illustrations, but those are the ones that popped out at me! If anyone has a request for a specific mangaka, lemme know!

Good? But she didn’t stop there. Check out the step by step How-To guide for signing the petition to oppose the ban. (Anyone can sign the petition but it’s in Japanese. This makes it tricky!)

Just signed it myself ♥

Interesting little note from a member of the [bobof-updates] (Boys-on-boys-film) yahoo-mailing list:

A couple of years ago I was at a Media Blaster’s panel at Otakon.  During the panel the guy talked about how Yamane Ayano is very picky about who licenses her manga and has a lot to do with the process, and has final say after she see’s the finished product.  So, hopefully she does the same thing with DMP and that will stop any censorship.

Though, I have this feeling that (censorship aside) the thing that will annoy me the most is the fact that June’s book are just. SO. FREAKIN’. HUGE. (compared to most Japanese tankoubons). Oh, DMP.

EDIT: Interview with DMP was posted yesterday: Digital Manga Reveals More About New Yaoi License, The Finder Series

Looks like B6 size is go! Sweet.

SERIOUSLY.

I was filling up my new bk1 cart, when I decided to FINALLY get a copy of Maou no Amai Keiyaku. (which is amazingly adorable, in case you didn’t know) I usually just search by mangaka and LOOK WHAT POPPED UP!

ALL I KNOW IS IT’S “INCUBUS” SOMETHING AND THAT THIS NEEDED TO BE IN MY HANDS THE SECOND IT CAME INTO EXISTENCE.

C’mon, bk1.  Get to it.

So, yeah, DMP licensed The Finder Series (I know, big surprise).

They put up a little website and everything.

(And then announced it on their twitter.  I must say, I’m not totally diggin’ this HEY FIND OUT WHAT WE LICENSE YOURSELF AND THEN WE’LL TELL YOU ABOUT IT PR strategy, which we’ve seen for Maiden Rose, (more recently) Desire sensibility and numerous other random titles. I’m not even sure why, but it annoys me.)

But the fact that it’s being published under the June imprint makes me pause. (see it mentioned on their PR post ) Along with with various other twitterin’ fujoshi, I’m wondering: Will DMP censor the finder series to get in on to bookselves?

Obviously, for a publisher to openly mention censorship is suicide, in many fans eyes. I’m not a conspiracy theorist and sometimes I just can’t wrap my head around ‘publisher motives‘ , so I can’t say one way or the other, how this will go. All I know is The finder Series is full of goood ol’ fashioned RAPE (and not, I-can’t-properly-express-my-FEELINGS yaoi!rape, I mean, RAPE RAPE.)

When I think June, I don’t think of HARDCORE GANGSTA RAPETASTIC DRAMAS. (I mean, they licensed Ikoku Irokoi Romantan
under 801 Media. That’s got rape. And ganstas. And it’s alot…smoother of a ride then The Finder Series, if you catch my drfit.)

Now, (Lighting speed commenter) @mebeasi mentioned in her post two possible reasons for the June imprint: trim size and wider distribution. I think the latter in particular is the best bet, though, as I said in my comment, if Finder was released under 801 Media, it would force DMP to have at least CONSIDER a more then decent print run (as most of 801 media’s books seem to be Out of Print these days, which is rather silly considering License Gobble Monster DMP doesn’t seem to blink at eye before moving on to it’s next target.)

Despite what anyone might think from my previous post,  I do WANT to support DMP on this (like I want to support them with Tyrant. It’s a sort’ve Good choice, DMP. Here’s a cookie system.) I own all the original Japanese tanks released for Finder, so it’ll be an interesting experiment to compare them.

So, figured I’d de-flower this new blog with a little post about scanlations, which has been a hot-topic on the manga-twitterverse and blogspere..

…well, at least it was when I STARTED typing this up.

So! A little backstory: In the beginning of the now dead-horse topic of Gene Simmons’ son plagiarizing mangaka’s art (In particular from the manga Bleach) @Debaoki made a post about it…which halfway in became a post about scanlations.

Wait, what?

But then @mbeasi cleared ‘the connection’ up for my slow brain:

They had been using images from scanlations to prove he’d been tracing.

Humm. Okay. I guess.

Now, first off, this post is for all the scanlatin’ holmes out there. (non-scanlators are free to shield away or read on at this point) To you, I say:

Shhhhhhhhhhh.

Let me explain.

See, because of all the chatter, a “controversial” (read: Pro-scanlations) article was posted at Animevice, a well-known anime site.  The article generated alot of page views and negative comments and is kinda one of those ‘hey, that makes all of us look bad‘ sort of things. There was a nice counter post written by @hermanos that pretty much summed up my feelings on the matter, except for one teeny tiny detail:

I’m pretty sure he isn’t a scanlator.

And I am.
I mean, I don’t attend any of the parties or get a newsletter (though the party thing would be kinda cool), but yup, I edit/typeset for a small BL scanlation group.

And how do I justify scanlations?

I don’t.

I don’t justify scanlations.

And that’s what I’m getting at. If you’ve checked the posts I’ve linked to so far (Another good example of this is in @mbeasi‘s “Confessions of a Former Scan Junkie“) you’ll see that the..er…discussion, gets pretty heated.

It seems like everyone is trying to convince the other side that their stance is the best and all I can think is WHY?

It’s really not an Us vs Them situation. It’s an Us AND Them situation.

They love manga.
We love manga.
They don’t understand how we can love manga while ‘stealing’ it.
We don’t understand how they can limit themselves to what the publisher provides.
(both shameless generalizations, but I had to start somewhere.)

I know it’s hard not to feel attacked, especially when you’re a scanlator and put so much stupid work into your projects. Like, for those who don’t know, I’m talking hours, upon hours, upon HOURS or work. Seriously.

I’ve been reading scanlations for over nine years, but I’ve only been scanlating for nine months, so I definitely don’t claim to be an expert in any sense of the word. In fact, when I was just reading scanlations, getting into some sort of  ‘how I justify them‘ confrontation would have probably evoked the same feelings I get whenever I’m caught doing something bad – to just drop whatever it is and run.

Awkward, but effective in the short run. Now, I’m just open about it. I’m not trying to change anyone’s views on the matter or ‘stick it’ to anyone. It just so happens that most of what I’m interested (think ‘Alternative/indie BL’) has very little chance of being picked up by publisher. I know publishers are there to sell a product. Why license something that probably won’t sell?

But even if they did license everything I could ever hope for (And good luck with that!) I probably wouldn’t buy them anyway.

Because I have an addiction to Japanese tanks. In all honestly if I never bought another English pub. manga again, I’d be 100% A-OKAY.

Another confession? I don’t speak a lick of Japanese. (unless sex-noises count)

The Japanese tanks are just so, so, so NICE. (I mean, sure it depends what you’re buying, but ALL my experiences have been good. And several have been downright AMAZING.)

I get that English pubs don’t have the cash to have that kind of print/paper/COLOR quality and that’s why I don’t bother with them. I import from Japan and happily flip though pages of art (They’re kinda like text filled artbooks to me at this point and could be written in moonrunes for all I know). I read the scanlations, I own the original books.

Well, these days, I pretty much just own the original books I LOVED.

In fact, before all this tank buyin’ started, I used scanlations to figure what I wasn’t going to buy more often then what I actually wanted to own in print.

And that’s just what that is. I don’t like 95% of what the English BL publishers license. So, I don’t buy it. And I read scanaltions. Simple as that.

So, that’s my story. Is the fact that I buy original tanks an excuse for reading scanlations?

Ehh, it doesn’t really matter, does it?

Under alot of these ‘anti-scanlation’ arguments, I should still be supporting the English BL pubs. who just came around in the last few years or so and have graciously decided to offer me loads of  fancy foreign gay goodies in my language. I COULD be buying up the BL because it’s BL in English and yes, (in some situations) I’ve read the scanlations.

But I don’t.

(though, I doubt I could ever really go 100% Japanese, if just for the fact that I love Borders and they seem to give me lots of coupons. True story: I have only ever left a borders without buying a volume of manga ONCE.)

Yes, we scanlate. No, we’re not gonna stop (at least not unless RL gets in the way). And, to bring in one of my favorite ‘sayings’:

That’s what that shit is.

A fellow scanlator put it so:

“Take the high road. Agree to disagree. Pirates are supposed to discourage attention, not invite it in!“

Though, I know it’s easier said then done. I mean, I said ‘lets agree to disagree’ with a certain OEL publisher on twitter (during my early introduction into the manga-twitterverse) and she proceeded to spam my timeline until I blocked her. They don’t WANT to agree. I get it. And neither do you. But we should come to a sort of quiet understanding. The same way I don’t bring up politics at dinner with most of my relatives. The goal is to try and keep it civil! Every post against scanlations, isn’t a personal attack against you.

Perhaps a “yeah, well, that’s what that shit is” isn’t the most diplomatic approach, but I’m sure you can come up with something better.