Bakuman

I am sort of grateful now, because it is kind of morbidly fascinating how many people are ready to defend sentences like “Men have dreams women can’t understand!” as being facts, not sexist. =_=

Then again, this makes me hate the manga more than it deserves. It does not deserve hatred. It deserves indifference. It’s slow, unoriginal, pretentious and unfunny.
Three chapters and I still don’t even know what genre it is supposed to be. There are instances of drama and instances of over-the-top parody… played straight. This is simply bad storytelling – Jump manga ned to grab the reader more quickly… if we’re 100 pages in and still can’t tell whether the authors are being serious or not, something has gone wrong.

Some people say they love the references to other Jump manga, but those references are mostly simple name-dropping. “We want to become more popular than One Piece!” and “My favourite manga is Dragonball”…

The only reason why we are talking about the manga at all is because it’s by Ohba and Obata.

Let’s just call it Freedom Manga!

Regarding Tokyopop’s Manga Pilot contract:

I’m not an artist, so sadly I can’t say “That’s it, I’ll never work for Tokyopop”, but I’m a potential customer, and I can say: “I’ll never buy their manga again”.

What really gets to me is the gratuitous French-bashing in the contract. A lame attempt to be cool and edgy? It kind of seems like they assume this is the general opinion -  everybody hates the French, every potential signer is racist.
But insulting France like that seems to be a typically American thing, and one I expect to find on teenager parties, in bad movies and on internet message boards – not in legal documents.

A legal document containing xenophobic speech, while the program is meant to appeal to non-US citizens as well – give me a break!

The language of the contract is obviously geared towards American kids, and not the intelligent, open-minded kind, but the lowest common denominator. And if this is the kind of artist Tokyopop wants, this is the kind of content they want to produce, and this means I’m not wanted as a customer either. Good riddance then.