Otakuism

Some interesting news has come down this week, enough for me to comment on.

The awesome action manga Claymore is gonna get an anime sometime next year. This is perfect news as I love Claymore. There’s something highly satisfying in watching girls swinging swords around and covered in blood. Hopefully there will be some good animation for the many fast action scenes throughout. Ane Claire will be moe enough.

Tokyopop has finally put down a release date for the Trinity Blood novels, with the first volume of Rage against the Moon in April and the first volume of Reborn on the Mars next august. For those who don’t know the Trinity Blood novel series is split between Reborn on the Mars, the main plotline, and Rage against the Moon, which are short stories taking place chronilogically before ROM. Kind of weird to publish RAM first, as it was after ROM in Japan. I’m upset with how long it’s gonna take them to get these things out, with four months between each. Tokyopop really needs to drop a lot of it’s crappy series and get to translating the good ones faster. Remember those days (ie. a year ago) when you could expect a new volume every other month, or hell if it was viz every month? Now we got all these three/four month periods. Dammit someone needs to hire more translators. Though you could say their doing this because they want to lengthen the series if it’s ongoing, but it’s still annoying. I guess no one wants to end up like Hellsing and Dark Horse. Also you gotta love how full of shit the tokyopop press release is. I mean what “global manga revolution”? And I had no idea the Trinity Blood anime series was a franchise with, you know, one season that not many liked.

Several live-action anime news, with movies of Speed Racer, Blood the last vampire, and Street Fighter in the works. My prediction: all will be crap, with speed racer having nice visuals since it’s by the wachowski brothers. Also that street fighter movie is gonna star Chun-li, so they better get someone hot to play her. Maybe it can be during Alpha so we can have Sakura also ;).

Anime News Service has an interesting bit about American companies apparently falling behind on their licensing payments to Japanese corporations. Apparently when you license one show you get others by the same company and thus begins a slippery slope of missing payments. It even seems the Japanese want americans to buy dvd’s so they can get their money back. Interesting measure of how well the american market is doing I guess. Oddly enough, none of the shows I like are licensed. Maybe that’s why I don’t buy many dvd’s (though I’m seriously picking up Gaogaigar soon).