The End of Tokyopop Manga

This is the fourth post I've written tagged with Marmalade Boy, by the way.

If you're savvy on manga publishing in America, you might already know that Tokyopop shut down its US manga publishing operations on May 31.

I became obsessed with manga when I was about eleven. One of my friends, older and more informed than I was about the medium, took me to a Waldenbooks at a local mall. The manga section only took up one small shelf, crammed next to the cash register. I didn't know too much about what I was looking at, since while I was a comics reader, it was mostly of collections of Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side. I had read a little manga at the beginning of the whole Pokémon craze, a flipped version of Ono Toshihiro's Pokémon: The Electric Tale of Pikachu, when I was about six, but I never went too much beyond that and some dubbed episodes of Sailor Moon. I did draw a lot of Pokémon fan comics, but we don't need to go into that.

She suggested Wataru Yoshizumi's Marmalade Boy to me, licensed by Tokyopop. The cover was pretty unassuming, featuring a smiling girl looking at some unknown thing in the corner, but the story intro hooked me in the minute I skimmed its pages in that store, and I bought it.

The Mangaka Review: Yoshizumi Wataru

The mangaka herself.

Yoshizumi Wataru's mangas hold a special place in my heart. While I had seen and read manga for many years, her works were the first I bought in earnest, back when the manga in bookstores did not occupy five bookcases. Marmalade Boy was not truly a standout manga in any sense, but for my impressionable, naive, eleven-year-old mind, she was a genius.

MJ EVA AMV

I remember closely following my friend’s silhouette as she led me into the cool, dark room filled with booming music and sweaty anime nerds sitting in front of a large screen. As soon as I walked in I found a place along the perimeter of the room, folding my arms with insecurity. I was preparing to be bored, I admit, but instead I found myself somehow transfixed to that large screen.

Anime music videos. I never really expected to develop a crush on them, not at my very first convention of all things, but for some reason the combination of music and video, when done right was, I realized, kind of cool.

It's about time...It's about CHANGE....of hair?

At the end of the school year, after the stress of finals was over and the scent of summer was in the air, the atmosphere here at Manga Meditation was one of anticipation for change...a change in hair! The arrival of summer had effectively chased away all need for the heat-retaining, long and bushy look, and all three of us were itching to try out cute summer cuts, similar to the edgy new haircut of pop singer sensation Rihanna. A short journey to the beauty salon later, all of us had chopped off the excess keratin and now sported beautiful, swishy, shiny, bouncy bobs!

While it is easy for us to cut off our hair, it is not so simple in the manga world. Characters often look similar (if not exactly the same) without hair, and a signature hairstyle, be it short, spiky, long, curly, or blue often times is the only way to distinguish characters...especially in shoujo manga.

However! Not only is hair an important characteristic in physical distinction, it also creates certain impressions regarding the personality of a character. Based on the manga that I've read, I've compiled a list of character hairstyles and the personality traits that seem to correspond most commonly.

Oh, Yuu Slay Me: Fans with Low Self-Esteem

In creating this blog, I inherently had to admit a bitter truth to myself. After many years of my almost unhealthy manga and anime obsession, I finally kicked my addiction and lived a few years clean of screentones and clichés. However, my former fixation began to creep back into my life, and it is with this very recent reentry into the world of Japanese/Korean comic fandom that I have had to face a few demons.

My love for anime has always been a bit closeted. I remember my slow descent, the feel of the pages of Marmalade Boy rubbing coarsely against my fingers, the acrid smell of money full of the scent of a thousand sweaty hands as it slowly dripped through my pockets and seeped into the bank accounts of manga translation companies. You know what I mean. Like, I spent a crapload of money.

No one around me, save for a very few friends, shared my love. I never fell into a true anime culture, retreating into my own bedroom to burn through pages of Bleach like the soles of tennis shoes wearing down on a racetrack, to sigh over Yuki and Kyo and uselessly try to decide which one I would like more in real life (answer: Neither). Seriously, though. I was way embarrassed. As a result, I relinquished my manga tankubon for cooler endeavors, and even though I could fake it for a while, it really didn't fit. I would use another extended metaphor here but I think you guys get the point.