Manga Files

Digital Manga really wants to build their mailing list. Sign up for their new mail order catalog, Club Otakie, and you could win an iPod Shuffle or a Nintendo DS Lite Pack or a $25 gift card. There’s a prize every week until December 17. An eManga online account is required (which, oddly, asks for both Gender and Sex).

ICv2 is holding an expensive conference on Anime and Manga in conjunction with the December New York Anime Festival. They’ve just released information on the panelists, and I noticed something interesting. The sessions cover anime and manga trends (as ICv2 sees them), “Marketing to the Otaku Generation”, “Girls–The Other Half of the Otaku Generation”, and “Technology and the Otaku — The New Media Frontier”. Guess which is the only panel to have female speakers on it?

Now, they say that they’re still adding, so maybe this will change. But it’s disturbing to see the ghettoization of female-oriented subjects and women contributors continue when discussing a field whose success in the US was driven by the girl audience.

Viz’s live-action film arm, Viz Pictures, will be releasing J-Pop music video DVDs by GACKT this week. Press release follows.

VIZ Pictures, an affiliate of VIZ Media LLC that focuses on Japanese live-action film distribution, has announced the DVD releases of GACKT: The Greatest Filmography 1999-2006 Blue and Red editions. The two DVDs, sold separately, each feature a collection of 12 music videos by the talented Japanese rock star. GACKT: The Greatest Filmography 1999-2006 will debut on October 9 with a suggested retail price of $19.98 for each edition. The DVDs will be distributed by VIZ Media.

Gackt Red
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Gackt Camui is a musician, songwriter and actor, most notable for composing the theme songs for several popular anime and video game titles including New Fist of the North Star, Texhnolyze, and Bujingai and Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII. These contributions have made the artist very popular among anime fans both in Japan and North America. The genre of his music is especially referred as “Visual-Kei” or “Visual Rock” which is characterized by its own unique sound, related to glam-rock, punk and metal, and with strong emphasis on its particular style of dress and make-up. Gackt’s music also draws from a wide variety of musical styles and influences ranging from hard rock to romantic ballads and instrumentals. Traditional Japanese instruments are often used to accentuate electric guitar, piano, and other modern sounds and create an evocative and other worldly texture to his music.

Gackt Blue
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“The genre of J-rock and Visual Kei has become increasingly popular with anime fans across North America and we are honored to release these two DVD editions by one of the genre’s most notable artists,” says Seiji Horibuchi, President and CEO of VIZ Pictures. “The popularity of music drawn from anime and video game titles continues to grow and is an ideal vehicle to bridge cultural and language differences. This is our new challenge to open up the opportunity to enjoy even wider range of J-pop culture through the visual entertainment.”

Manga, art books, movies, DVDs, now music videos… what can’t Viz sell?