A Losing Battle Against K-Pop

So occasionally, I develop somewhat irrational aversions to things. These aversions are based on insignificant events/experiences which result in the not-so-insignificant effect of me writing off that thing for all eternity. Or at least until my perspective/opinion is amended by some outside force. A few examples are my aversion to almonds (blown out of the water when introduced to amaretto), my dislike of skinny jeans (disappeared when I actually tried on a pair), and my avoidance of cats (overcome when I met Starfish who is a cat lover). One more overturned aversion to add to this list is my distaste for K-pop music.

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.

For the Love of Peppers

Here's a quick post before the long Chunhyangdyun movie review coming up.

We here at Manga Meditation love K and J dramas almost as much as we love manga. And true to MM form, we also (lovingly) criticize those very dramas for their sometimes-more-than-campy qualities. It's part of their charm, after all!

The following video is a great K-drama parody titled Gochu (or "pepper" in Korean) by Unit 5 Films, submitted for a contest held by the magazine KoreAm. Think of this post as Manga Meditation's introduction to future K-drama critique. Enjoy!

--Blackbird

An Ode to Anime Conventions, or My Disillusionment

WARNING: The following is a long post that is long overdue. But it's finally here! The Animazement report thing! Please don't be discouraged from reading. Or skimming. Or commenting.

Quite an impressive spread.

Back in Manga Meditation's blog drafts are two entries detailing Polecat's and my (Blackbird) recent adventure to Animazement, a now twelve-year-old convention newly located to the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, NC. These posts, however, haven't been published like we had promised earlier. The reason? To be honest, they were a little boring to write. That, and the descriptions were becoming a little mean.

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.