Call of the Night Anime is a superb anime series that I shall highlight here. Kotoyama creates and develops this magnificent Japanese comic series.

Warning: the article has detailed descriptions of the accusations.

This isn't really book news, but I figured I'd post it since manga volumes are books and manga and anime fans often overlap.

I just read the article (mostly - I had to start skimming near the end, because it made my skin crawl), and I'm deeply disappointed. He really is huge in the industry - if you've listened to a Funimation dub, you've probably heard him. The one role of his I absolutely loved was Edward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.

I'm glad that Funimation seems to be taking this seriously, although it sounds like this has been going on for long enough that it should have been an issue for them sooner.

I haven't had a chance to read the full thing yet (I'm not even sure how long the full thing is - it seems like the "read next page" buttons go on forever), but this is really interesting, even though I think the comments sometimes oversimplify things. Then again, it can be hard to fit things into Tweet-sized bites.

If I remember right, I started off with my dad's comics collection (Marvel, DC, DC's Vertigo imprint, a bit of Image Comics) and then discovered manga via my wonderful public library and got completely hooked on that. I now read Japanese manga almost exclusively, for some of the reasons stated by the commenters. I like that, generally, it's easy to know where to start. While there are some authors/artists who create complex worlds and series with lots of crossover (CLAMP and their billions of cameos is the one example I can think of right now), and some authors/artists who "finish" a series and then reboot it or start a related series (Masashi Kishimoto, Nobuhiro Watsuki), and folks with related light novels and whatnot, you can still usually start with volume 1 of whatever they're working on and be fine.

I like that authors and artists don't generally change during a series' run - the consistency is nice (although even a single artist's style can change drastically in a relatively short span of time - good example, Maki Murakami's Gravitation, where the earlier volumes and later volumes look like they were drawn by completely different people but weren't). Now that I no longer live near a good public library with an excellent manga collection, I also really like that you can find lots of series with a definite ending and beginning, and lots of series with an affordable total number of volumes (less than 10 or 12 is my preference, anymore).

I got started with manga back in maybe the late '90s, which I think also made a difference. First, there was Tokyopop and its cheaper volumes. Second, volumes were more likely to include translator and cultural notes back then. Those cultural notes helped a lot.

Oof, so much nostalgia right now. I miss the days when I had good feelings about Tokyopop, and when Del Rey put out volumes of manga with pages and pages of translator's notes. ::sigh::

A popular manga genre for young women, for example, is Yaoi or “boy’s love”, in which young male characters indulge in homosexual relationships. “What’s appealing about it is that there are no women in the story.

A review of the first volume of Chobits