Left in the Doombin
MG Doom vs. Manga ends in a no contest
My fight with manga is now over after a rather dumb technicality on my part. I was pouring through lists of manga to try and come up with my own list of manga worth reading for someone like me. It turns out there is already a site that does this and more. The saddest part is that I came across that site a couple months ago but did not think to bookmark it. All my anger and frustration towards manga was for not.
With that said I encourage anyone interested in manga to checkout mangaupdates.com. All you have to do is type something like Pluto into the search and it will bring up the information about the title as well as give you a nice long list of recommendations of similar manga. It was the one little thing I was desperately looking for. Even if that doesn’t work there is a very active message board on the site with a section dedicated to recommended reading. I can vouch for the recommendation lists in the profiles as they were many of the same titles I was interested in after pouring through the lists and reviews the old fashion way.
Speaking of manga sankakucomplex.com has a very interesting post about the current problems manga is facing in Japan with declining sales. Icarus Publishing has a good post as well based on the Sankaku Complex article. This is another example of a print industry facing a digital world.
Word Balloon
The latest Word Balloon podcast has a very good interview with long time Marvel editor Tom Brevoort. I found it quite interesting hearing his side of things when dealing with grumpy fans like myself complaining about most everything Marvel does.
The interview with Newsarama’s Vanetta Rogers there as well was very good especially in light of all this talk of women reading comics. She only really became interested in comics a few years ago and she credits the internet in helping her find things she enjoyed reading. It’s interesting that she went from a somewhat new fan to now being a part of the Newsarama staff covering the industry.