Category Archives: News

There You Go, Astro Boy

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It’s taken me a while to get to Astro Boy and Anime Come to the Americas, thanks largely to a £30 cover price. But I got there in the end, and my review of it is now up on the Manga UK blog. It’s great to have such solid information from Fred Ladd about the first ten years of the anime localising business, although I can live without the latter half of the book and its vague hand-waving about what happened next. That said, it’s still worth every penny, if only for the 100 pages of golden testimony about the way in which Japanese cartoons were treated in the TV industry of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Hello, Sailors

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The Mariner’s Mirror, or to give it its fantastic full title, The Mariner’s Mirror, wherein may be discovered his art, craft & mystery after the manner of their use in all ages and all Nations, has just published a glowing review of my Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East. Alessio Patalano, lecturer in War Studies at King’s College London and a specialist in East Asian security issues, really gets the book, noting its concentration on “the multiple applications of naval power, from diplomatic to constabulary and military functions.” This is particularly important in the case of Togo, as there was considerably more to his life than his sudden appearance in 1905 as the hero of the battle of Tsushima. He’d first encountered the British as a teenage samurai, and watched swordsmen standing knee-deep in water on the shores of Kagoshima, angrily brandishing their blades at “retreating” Royal Navy vessels. He’d studied for several years in Victorian England, and been part of dockside politics and naval espionage in China, Korea, and Hawaii before he saw military action against China and Russia. Patalano thinks, rightly, that I have romanticised Togo, but also notes: “This book is a refreshing account of a defining figure of modern Japan. It is well written and deals with themes such as leadership, individual commitment, social transformation and cross-cultural understanding of great contemporary relevance.”

Three Today

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The Schoolgirl Milky Crisis blog is three years old today. I’m going to keep posting stuff here until Titan Books grow bored with it. They will continue to think of this blog as a worthwhile expense for as long as people are buying the Schoolgirl Milky Crisis book, either here in the US, or here in the UK. So please do consider it as a Christmas present for your odder uncle or more eccentric aunt, that irritating sibling or that strangely with-it parent. Or even for yourself.

Primul împărat al Chinei

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My book, The First Emperor of China, is now available in Romanian, which I am sure is a great relief to all of you. It’s been published by Editura All in Bucharest with a nicely understated cover and has already got a glowing review from the film website Filme Carti, which clearly appreciates my appendix on the First Emperor’s screen appearances. Since Editura All also translated my biography of Confucius, I can only hope they are now moving on to Empress Wu.

Korea Advice

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The London Korean Film Festival starts today. In its honour, I point you at a few of the Korean entries I have written for the as-yet unfinished Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: the alternate universe dramas 2009: Lost Memories and Goong, and the author entry on Bok Geo-il. I’m supposed to be concentrating on Chinese and Japanese entries, but every now and then I get distracted… either by Korea or by something that seems like an omission, such as the entries on Roberto Bolano and Chuck Palahniuk. If an entry has “[JonC]” at the bottom, it’s one of mine.

Museum Piece

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My review of Yukinobu Hoshino’s Professor Munakata’s British Museum Adventure is up now on the Manga Entertainment blog. I don’t think I have ever seen an institution spend its junket money in a more productive way. The BM managed to get a ten-issue manga series read by tens of thousands of Japanese readers, and now this massive advert for what the BM is and what it means for the people of the UK. All because they invited the right artist at the right time, and made sure that he went home inspired. Now, if they’d invited Toshio Maeda…

Speculative Japan 2

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Although cover, front page and spine are all in disagreement about this book’s exact title, it contains stories of SF and fantasy from Japan, many lifted from a 2006 best-of survey. The oldest story here is Naoko Awa’s fairytale “A Gift From the Sea” (1977), while the most recent are a bunch from 2007. Clustered among them are superlative works such as Yasumi Kobayashi’s super-hard SF “The Man Who Watched the Sea” (2002) and Issui Ogawa’s “Old Vohl’s Planet” (2003), a first-contact tale told by the last survivor of a race of creatures from a gas-giant planet. There is a wide range of tone and quality in both stories and translations – one tale inadvisably attempts to make Japanese-speaking space-farers speak like 1930s English sea dogs, while another is a superior translation of a sub-standard sentimental romance. But in bringing thirteen Japanese authors to the attention of a wider English-speaking audience, this is one of the most important contributions to Japanese prose SF abroad in the last twenty years.

Jonathan Clements is a contributing editor to the new edition of the Encylopedia of Science Fiction, with special responsibilty for Chinese and Japanese material. This review first appeared in the SFX Ultimate Guide to Anime, 2011.

Party Like It's 1889

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Over on his blog, Andy Frankham interviews John Ainsworth and me about our work on the Space 1889 audio dramas. I can’t believe it’s already been six years since they came out.

Doing this reminds me I must write up my discoveries on Japanese steampunk soon. There are some really amazing stories I uncovered while working on the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, including Rhett Butler vs samurai and Byron’s daughter in space.

The Ties That Bind

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The manga artist Mutsumi Akazaki was having a bad day. She had been slogging through the latest instalment of the Fractale comic, a tie-in to the anime series of the same name, and mused on her blog that she wished she could work on something she actually enjoyed, that wasn’t “uninteresting.”

Fractale’s notoriously prickly director, Yutaka Yamamoto, hit the roof, demanding that Akazaki be fired, and adding insult to injury by suggesting that she sod off and draw her heart’s desire, instead of riding the coattails of others.

Akazaki had been very stupid. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you, particularly when you are just starting out. And bitching online about how harrrrd your life is is a rookie error, particularly when you are drawing comics for a living, and not, say, packing sardines in a factory or huddling in a tent in Fukushima. Nor are any fans (Fractale presumably still has some) likely to smile on a creative who makes it plain how much they hate the show that Fractale fans love. Fans like to think that creators are other fans, otherwise they feel bilked and cheated.

But Yamamoto’s knee-jerk response offers a glimpse of the way that tie-in writers are often treated – ridiculed by some other creators for not being “original”, even though fitting one’s creative output to meet the restrictions of someone else’s franchise is no mean feat in itself.

However, at the end of June, the Gangan Online website posted the next instalment of the Fractale manga bang on schedule. Akazaki had already delivered it, after all, and there was the upcoming compilation release to consider. It was, perhaps, a subtle little reminder that Fractale doesn’t actually belong to its director either. The story is by Hiroki Azuma, the show-runner is Mari Okada, and a committee of six executive producers form the actual Jedi Council that steers the franchise through the media. In other words, Yamamoto himself had been given quiet notice that he, too, was working for hire on a product that actually belonged to someone else.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #89, 2011.