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Forum - View topicREVIEW: A Midnight Opera
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Kagemusha
 Posts: 2783 Location: Boston |
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Couldn't have said it better. The reason why I'm wary of buying "amerimanga" titles from companies like Tokyopop is because I can't help but think the reason why they're publishing people is because they're art and storytelling emulates manga, not because that person is a particuarly good cartoonist. With companies like Oni, who despite the lagre amount of manga-influenced-comics they publish still sell to primarily an indy comic audience, most of the time you get a focus on real content rather than just style. The Tokyopop titles I've read (i luv Halloween, Van Von Hunter, Princess Ai) seem to be just imitations of various mangas without really accomplishing anything original (ILH not so much, but that had other problems). Still, they have a few promising titles on the horizon, and I heard MBQ is good, so I'll keep my hopes up. Anyways, Midnight Opera sounds abysmal |
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Cloe
Moderator
 Posts: 2728 Location: Los Angeles, CA |
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Very true. And every so often Oni puts out a real gem (such as the comic starring your dashing avatar. <3 ) I wonder how well Scott Pilgrim would fare in an ANN review. Pretty well, I'd expect. 
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Jimmy Balls-O-Steel
Posts: 60 Location: The Great White North |
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Now to be fair, I'm sure the typos aren't Han's fault. I've seen more than enough typo's in Tokyopop books to be sure of this. |
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Haru to Ashura
 Posts: 617 Location: Termina |
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I was looking forward to this title, but read through half of it (it was a very short read, by the way) at a comic shop and was thoroughly let down. It's more of a drunken rant than a story, and you loose interest quickly because all of the characters are purposefully bitter and dislikeable. Also, this book's sexual scenes are so downright disgusting - I would honestly call it some of the most unappealing, hideous work to come out of comics that are just short of pornography. While I respect that Tokyopop is searching for new talent and opening the American comic industry up to younger people, I think letting their RSOM contest winners make series isn't always a smart move. There's an obvious, sizeable difference between a 20 page short and 2+ 200-page long volumes that Tokyopop seems to be overlooking. Giving someone 4-6 months to make 20 pages of manga, then suddenly telling them to complete 200 pages within the year...that's when artistic quality goes strait down the drain. I've wanted to enter in the RSOM contest, but I haven't because I know that even if I got the chance to pitch an idea to Tokyopop, I'd have to drop out of college to actually work on it. And as previosuly stated, many of their artists have no prior training or artistic education of any sort. That's a bad, bad mix. |
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manafairy
 Posts: 113 Location: My own tweaked world.... |
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That's really a shame that it sucks so badly, as this is one of the very few American titles that I was actually looking forward to reading. Normally, I won't be totally dissuaded after reading but a single bad review, but after seeing that dialogue snippet, I can't believe that the review is exaggerating.
Nice review- saved me $10 
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CorneredAngel
 Posts: 854 Location: New York, NY |
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...on the flip side of this, there are at least a few titles in the Tokyopop pipeline where the creator *is* very much a known quantity if you've been following the US scene. Svetlana Chmakova (<i>Dramacon</i>) comes to mind most readily...and it would have been amusing to no end if what they tried doing with Warren Ellis had worked out. Bottom line is, Sturgeon's Law holds for OEL manga the same way as it does for the Japanese. |
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jfrog
 Posts: 925 Location: Seattle |
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I don't think that Sturgeon's Law is necessarily a constant. The factors that make someone an Original English-Language Manga artist, as opposed to just a comics artist with a strong manga influence (someone like Becky Cloonan, say) do matter quite a bit.
Look, I'm not an artist, but I am a musician, so I would like to hope that I understand the creative process. Sometimes my band sounds a lot like Throbbing Gristle, sometimes we sound a lot like Funkadelic, sometimes we sound pretty No Wave...but you try and become more than just the sum of your influences, you don't EVER say "hey, this is sounding a bit like DNA, let's change our sound so we'd fit in perfectly on to the No New York compilation!" That sounds fundamentally bankrupt to me, and that's basically what OEL manga is all about. Not trying to stick out, but to blend in. |
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CorneredAngel
Posts: 854 Location: New York, NY |
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Except just like a song is the sum total of the music and the lyrics, manga is the sum total of art *and* story. And just like it's highly unlikely that a Japanese manga author will be able to do a story that truly resonates with a US audience, it is a good deal more likely that an American author will. |
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CorneredAngel
Posts: 854 Location: New York, NY |
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[quote="CorneredAngel"]
Except just like a song is the sum total of the music and the lyrics, manga is the sum total of art *and* story. The art can be derivative, but there is at least some chance the story will be unique (and more relevant to an American audience than what a Japanese author can ever accomplish) because the setting of the story, its American elements, will resonate with the reader as no manga ever would. |
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jfrog
Posts: 925 Location: Seattle |
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Yeah, but who wants to listen to a song with good lyrics that sounds generic? I know that I don't.
Besides, I've noticed that many Amerimanga artists tend to manga-fy their stories quite a bit - so instead of just having Optic Nerve with big eyes or something, we have stuff like Ninja High School. I guess another reason Demo is great...there isn't the slightest whiff of manga about the stories. Be like Brian and Becky, people! |
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darkhunter
 Posts: 2992 Location: Los Angelas |
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I have a different take on it. From the few chapter I read, I like it (it's not the best title). The art and story quite different (which is good) and even parodies and rants of the mainstream comic industry. It has that hiphop feel. I don't think MBQ follow the cliche tradition of other OEL manga like Van Von Hunter. This is probably the only OEL title I'm interested in from TP. I also found a good review of it(IGN does manga review ). And yes it's a mature title, so it doesn't cater to everyone
Last edited by darkhunter on Wed Oct 26, 2005 3:07 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1598 |
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I'd like something different and mature, but MBQ isn't it. Like Haru to Ashura said, the whole thing reads like a bad rant by some kid who's convinced the comic book industry owes him a living, but who is also convinced that he's too good to draw superhero comics, manga, or anything else that young artists end up drawing-just because practically every artist in the American comics industry starts out drawing superheroes doesn't seem to matter to our hero-somehow he feels the rules should not apply to him. "I'd rather clean out toilets than draw s***t like superhero comics," he proclaims at one point. He'd better get used to polishing the porcelan throne, then.
So you get page after page after page of him whining about his job, his money troubles, and especially, comics and manga. He spends practically half the book dumping on every popular comic property ever made (especially Superman) because they're all "unoriginal," yet he never seems to have any terribly interesting ideas of his own. He comes off as an incredibly pretentious nobody who thinks he's some kind of unfathomable unappreciated genius, even while he fails utterly to present us with any evidence of that genius, or even a marginal amount of talent. I don't know if the protaganist is supposed to be a representation of the author, but I really hope he isn't, because if after ranting for 150 pages about how all comic creators but him are idiots and how he's going to revolutionize comics, all he has to offer is a whiney autobiographical book, then that's just sad. Autobiographical comics have been done nearly as much as superhero books-they're mostly done in the indie/underground scene so they don't get as much exposure, but that doesn't make them any less of a gigantic cliche, not to mention self-indulgent. At least the guys who write Superman are capeable of writing about someone besides themselves. So yeah, I didn't like MBQ all that much. Its main character me way too much of some insufferable jerks I've worked with, and by the end I wanted to reach into the comic and punch every single character. That's ten bucks I could've spent getting another Master Keaton DVD or something. The problem with American manga is that they're forgetting that the success of real manga isn't just about art style-there is a very harsh vetting process in place to make sure that not just anyone off the street can create a series for publication. People who get their own manga series are almost always professionals with years of experience in the industry-almost everyone starts out as an assistant on someone else's series as a kind of apprenticeship. They put in years of hard work before the publisher will even consider any ideas they might have for thier own series-and even then, many ideas are rejected,and many artists spend their entire careers as assistants. In other words, there's a great deal of quality control in place in Japan, and a creator is expected to pay his dues and prove his worth before he can even dream of getting his own manga. Compare that to Tokyopop's approach, where they hand a pencil to some kid who won a contest and expect him to be Akira Toriyana. There's your problem right there. To be fair, though, Peach Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim, and Dramacon are all great series. The concept isn't completly hopeless. |
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Neilworms
 Posts: 155 Location: Chicago IL |
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But Japan does have Optic Nerve like comics, its just that none of them are published here. There are plenty of more dramatic and serious manga that never makes it to these shores... To 'mangafy' means to do so only in a distroted westren sense... Being like Brian and Becky is my mantra too! ;) Hell I'm even running a panel next week at a local con that's in part is to tell people everything I just mentioned in this post :P. Interestingly enough one of these OEL manga is actually from Becky Cloonan, [http://estrigious.com/becky/]you can see it here[/url]. |
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midori kou
Posts: 469 |
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I personally like Dramacon out of all the ones I've seen published by Tokyopop. Although the first part of the volume was kinda rushed in character development, they were somewhat believable. And good artwork (especially with the panel progression and perspective) was well done. I hope with due time there will be good work out there. Now if only the higher-ups had some good English and art educational backgrounds. Hmmm...
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Ralboon
 Posts: 43 |
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First off, why are you guys talking about MBQ? It was never meant to emulate manga in any way, which becomes obvious pretty quickly when reading the story. The only thing it shares in common with manga is the fact that it's in black and white. Second off, it's dissusting for a reason, and that is to achieve something that you don't see enough of in Japanese and American comics these days: Grit. It's dark in all the right ways, and even manages to finally do the urban comic book the right way. As for the rants, all he's saying is that there is a serious lack of originally in comic books. For america it's beefcake spandex super heros, for Japan it's big breasted school girls fighting evil flying hippos of pain. He's not saying all comic books are bad, it's just the stuff in between that can get repetive. |
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