Yes, you get what you deserve when you ego-google. But since I'm building a career and all that, I like to check what pops up first when a grant committee or someone I might want to collaborate with searches for my name.

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The suspension of Digital Manga from the Kindle Store over unspecified "content violations" has  been reversed, which Digital Manga attributes to the outpouring of support from fans who took action. That was fast!

While I'm glad Digital Manga can continue to sell via Amazon, I'm profoundly unimpressed with the robustness of Amazon's judgment here. If ( Read more... )

It seems Amazon just suspended Digital Manga Inc. from publishing on Kindle entirely. Reportedly, this was done over an ill-defined "content violation" related to Digital Manga's yaoi titles. It's not the first time that yaoi titles are the subject of censorship kerfuffles, but apparently Amazon is still not planning to clarify its famously vague ( Read more... )

Home from Tokyo, will get cracking on a bunch of replies now. In the meantime: I looked at the list of pairings on the cover of this dojinshi and felt like a really, really undeveloped fannish person because I only know how to ship mere humans. I should get more practice at looking at the world around me and finding the shipping angle in everything ( Read more... )

For the Dutch-speaking among us: my two latest manga translations just got published, the second part of Das Kapital and Les Misérables. Previous issues in this series were the first part of Das Kapital and War and Peace.

I'm having huge fun working on this literary manga series, and nearly as much fun rolling my eyes at all those who lament that ( Read more... )

Today I took part in a study day on comics in the library for Flemish librarians, organized by the most excellent Strip Turnhout. My presentation was on manga in the library. I tried to emphasize that manga aren't that scarily different from US comics or European strips, but that the way readers in Japan and manga fans overseas read manga -often in ( Read more... )

(I apologize for the lack of a cut in this post. There is something wrong with its html and it does not want to be fixed.)

A platform for the sale of digital content can impose restrictions upon customers, if customers get a great user experience in return. See iTunes. However, such a platform cannot impose baffling restrictions on how users are ( Read more... )

For those of us who read Dutch, a new report on the state of the comics industry in Belgium includes an article by Haruyuki Nakano (author of Manga Sangyoron) on the spectacular rise and quite exciting possibilities of manga on cellphones in Japan and Asia. The article starts from page 49 of this rather large pdf version of the report. Published by ( Read more... )

Just got back from the conference "Intercultural Crossovers, Transcultural Flows: Manga/Comics" (pdf) in Cologne. Apologies for the late update -hotel wifi was crummy and expensive, and wifi inside the conference hall was mostly nonexistent, so I couldn't post or tweet during the conference. At least half of the attendants I chatted with turned out ( Read more... )

The Kyoto International Manga Museum live-streamed its conference on the "virtual children" problem earlier today -the video is still available here. It was a good symposium, with many of the most important problems of this proposed legislation being explained by some very knowledgable people. I'm writing a longer post after I've gotten my grubby ( Read more... )