Artist Brendan Lee Satish Tang created the Manga Ormolu series as an exploration of cultural mixing, blending traditional high art with modern pop. It's meant to reflect on cultural appropriation and assimilation, but with fun, slightly ridiculous results.

Manga Ormolu enters the dialogue on contemporary culture, technology, and globalization through a fabricated relationship between ceramic tradition (using the form of Chinese Ming dynasty vessels) and techno-Pop Art. The futuristic update of the Ming vessels in this series recalls 18th century French gilded ormolu, where historic Chinese vessels were transformed into curiosity pieces for aristocrats. But here, robotic prosthetics inspired by anime (Japanese animation) and manga (the beloved comics and picture novels of Japan) subvert elitism with the accessibility of popular culture.

Manga Ormolu [Brendan Tang via Nerdcore]

If phatic language is language which smooths over social tasks and reassures us rather than conveying information ("How's it going?" "Good, how about you?"), then phatic images are images which smooth over social issues, and they are one of Japan's biggest exports. From Hello Kitty to Pokémon to any number of big-eyed franchises, the Japanese love of kawaii (cuteness) is well known, parodied as just another weird Japanese thing in the Mister Sparkle episode of the Simpsons, but perhaps part of a common human urge. "We humans are a self-centered race," said Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics. To prove his point, McCloud drew a series of abstract squiggly shapes, then turned them into faces by adding a single element to each one: an eye. Instantly, the weird lines became noses and mouths, the random shapes turned into goofy faces.

It's comforting to imagine nonhuman things as humans, whether they're toys or vehicles, foods or animals, or Pipo-kun, the mascot of the Tokyo police force. For corporate mascots and advertising characters, the cuteness softens the message. To quote Mary Poppins, "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."

A little sex in the sugar is even smoother. The male-dominated world of hardcore anime and manga fans had always had a taste for cheesecake, but in the '80s it had more of a science fiction and mecha edge; now, the girls themselves were growing in importance, as cutesy tweens and teens did cute things in shows like Azumanga Daioh (beloved by both 13-year-olds and grown men) and a variety of more "adult" anime and manga continuing the dubious tradition of the early '80s lolicon ("Lolita Complex") anime/manga subculture. Oldschool fans grumbled, bemoaning the loss of their hard sci-fi and their Gundam military action, but the kawaii-ization and, arguably, infantilization of geek culture marched on. Di Gi Charat, a 1998 gag manga about the green-haired, cat-eared, maid-outfit-wearing corporate mascot of the "Gamers" store chain, became popular enough to be spun off into a series of graphic novels and anime shows-the equivalent of a TV show based on Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar.

But Digiko merely worked at Gamers - she represented a cute, maid-outfit-wearing Gamers employee, not Gamers itself. On message boards and drawing desks, geek culture soon developed an even purer expression of cuteness, moe anthropomorphism, the representation of inanimate objects or concepts as cute girls. What better way to dress up boring, abstract concepts? Fans created Wikipe-tan, a character representing Wikipedia, and the OS-tans, based on various operating systems: a cat-themed Mac OS X girl, a gnu-horn-wearing Linux girl, etc. ("Tan" is the Japanese suffix "-chan" pronounced in a cutesy baby voice.) Nothing was safe from anthropomorphism. In Bincho-tan, the characters represent different kinds of charcoal. Demonbane reimagined the evil books of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, including the Necronomicon, as cute girls-the better to bond with the sorcerers who 'read' them, of course. Maru Asakura's manga 090 Eko to Issho ("090 Eko and Me") is a romantic comedy about cellphones who turn into girls. Like Life, a pornographic computer game "visual novel," features girls based not just on cell phones but vacuum cleaners, coffee pots, refrigerators and traffic lights-talk about objectification.

The predominant moe culture is one of sweetness and light and panty shots, but Japanese military & robot fans did not miss the moe bandwagon for long. Among the countless anthropomorphic experiments were robotized girls, aka mecha musume, made up of girls crossed with heavy equipment, robots, tanks, planes, etc. Cyborg doll/machine women have always had a huge following, and somewhere there must be a missing link between Battle Angel Alita's Gally, Ghost in the Shell's Major Kusanagi and Vikusen's Loli Airplane Machine.

Humikane Shimada, who coined the term "mecha musume," hit every fetish imaginable with Strike Witches, an alternate-universe WWII story whose heroes are young girls (check), magic-users (check), with animal ears and tails (check), who wear WWII airplane propellers on their legs like Transformers amputees or cybernetic stocking-fetishists (check, check, check, CHECK).

The magazine MC Axis, launched in 2006, focuses exclusively on the sexualized linkage of women's bodies and military weaponry.

Compared to this stuff, Yukio Hirai's Pixel Maritan is a mili-moe (military moe) manga you could show to your grandfather. The pink-haired Maritan, who first appeared in 2005 in a book/CD set intended to teach Japanese readers how to speak colloquial English, is the cartoon representation of the U.S. Marine Corps. Maritan's purpose is to teach Japanese fans how to swear like a Marine, through adorably testosterone-packed gag comics. "It's fucking English time!" reads the cover text on one of the several Maritan books. Within, you can learn phrases like "Your puny little ass is mine!" and "To show our appreciation for so much power, Marines keep heaven packed with fresh souls!", translated by actual Marine Corps members stationed in Japan.

Lightly digitized pictures of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (Maritan's enemies) are common, and a photo section in the back shows Japanese women hanging out with Marines and riding tanks and so on. According to a friend who works on the series, the Marines stationed in Japan are generally fond of Maritan and eagerly contribute to all this. Maritan's origin story is a parody of so-called mahô shojo "magical girl" shows (like Sailor Moon), in which the heroine usually visits Earth from some fairy realm on a mission of good. In Maritan, the title character comes from the magical realm of Paris Island and introduces herself by crashing a fighter jet into the house of the "Japanese" character. Soon we meet Army-kun (a "dogface" private with dog ears), Navy-san and Jiei-tan, a diligent girl with glasses who represents the Japanese Self-Defense Force.

American military bases on Japanese soil are not exactly beloved by the populace, but Maritan's adulation of the American military, however ironic and hipsterified, shows that Japanese politics are still generally in line with the U.S., 60 years after World War II. Jiei-tan's most notable trait is a heavy book chained to her shoulders-the book represents Article 9 of the Post-WWII Japanese Constitution, which forbids Japan from maintaining any sort of armed forces. (The Japanese Self-Defense Force is technically an extension of the Japanese police). Japanese public opinion is generally pacifistic, but a sizeable minority supports overturning Article 9, with some fans of mili-moe probably among them. In 2004, at the request of the U.S., Japan deployed non-combat troops to Iraq, in the first foreign deployment of Japanese troops since WWII. For the deployment, Japan dusted off their 'official' military mascot, Prince Pickles, the sort of JSDF equivalent of Pipo-kun.

Pickles, together with the general concept that anime and manga might promote Japanese nationalism, was praised by Japan's then-Minister of Foreign Affairs, the right-wing anime lover Taro Aso. With his tubby salaryman-manga look, though, Prince Pickles looks distinctly behind the times, and his female companion, Miss Parsley, isn't exactly the cosplay choice du jour either. For really effective propaganda, the military-industrial complex has to be, you know, sexy.

"But the coals were murmuring of their mine, / And moans down there / Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men / Writhing for air," wrote the gay World War I poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) in his poem "Miners." Although moe usually refers to works about girls enjoyed by men, manga and anime have a large female readership too, and thus we enter the realm of bishonen ("beautiful boy") stories, which are often full of men writhing and moaning. In 2003, Hidekazu Himaruya, a Japanese designer/artist living in New York, started drawing a gag webcomic in which the countries involved in World War II were anthropomorphized as good-looking, endearingly incompetent boys. The strip proved so popular it was picked up by a print publisher, redrawn for the graphic novel editions, and adapted into an ongoing animated series. Hetalia Axis Powers was born.

Hetalia (available online here among other places) is an almost plotless reinterpretation of World War II with people, mostly boys, playing the role of countries. Germany is serious and hardworking (when the series begins, it is getting tired of making cuckoo clocks to repay its WWI debt to France); America is a gung-ho, hamburger-eating idiot; Japan is old-fashioned and mild-mannered; and Italy…well, Italy is a frivolous idiot who loves pasta and flirting with girls. (The series title, "Hetalia," is a composite of heta- ("bad/incompetent") and "Italy.")

The characters are theoretically at war, but the manga is basically a series of loosely connected gags about WWI-WWII trivia and, more often, the stereotypes of different countries/ethnicities. The manga is annotated by the creator, who points out little bits of WWII trivia. The gag in which America can't recognize the other countries on the map is pretty dead-on, but most of the humor in Hetalia is on the level of the other countries asking Italy "what do you think?" and Italy shouting out "PASTAAAAA!"

More than anything, reading Hetalia gives the impression of a Japanese creator retelling fading European stereotypes for a Japanese audience for whom such things are just entertainment, divorced from any context of prejudice. One gag is based on an old saying: "Heaven is when the cook is French, the officer is British, the engineer is German, the banker is Swiss and the lover is Italian. Hell is when the cook is British, the officer is German, the engineer is French, the lover is Swiss and the banker is Italian." In the end, though, even this is just a shallow gloss on the cuteness and wackiness of the characters. In true moe anthropomorphism fashion, the characters in the series are so divorced from their historical analogues that fans can make music videos about the deep OTP love between Lithuania and gay crossdresser Poland without knowing anything at all the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Hetalia is basically no more political than "It's a Small World," and there are places it won't go. While the Axis powers are the "good guys," Hirumaya scrupulously avoids any mention of anti-Semitism, swastikas or Nazism, aside from Germany's occasional complaints that he has a "crazy boss." Considering that Nazi-esque uniforms show up occasionally for fetish value even in mainstream, bestselling manga like Hisaya Nakajo's Hana-Kimi (censored in the VIZ edition; Nakajo's original comments read "I know it's bad, but I just love Nazi uniforms!"), it's a remarkable show of restraint.

It wasn't restrained enough. When a Hetalia anime was announced for January 2009, Koreans protested the show on the basis of the manga's Korea character, depicted as a sort of pest to Japan. In one scene in the manga, Korea grabs Japan's nipples; Korean protesters considered this a reference to the Japan-Korean struggle over ownership of the Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo island to Koreans, Takeshima island to Japanese). The producers of the anime countered that the Korea character wasn't included in the anime anyway, but faced by angry Internet petitions and a statement by Korean congresswoman Jeong Mi Kyeong ("I think this is a crime against Koreans…this is an illegal and insulting act"), they canceled the TV airing of the anime. The cancellation probably had little effect on profits; the anime still went on to become a hit on mobile phones and the internet. Although all the stereotypes in Hetalia were equally cheesy, the West-on-West stereotypes were cobwebby and unlikely to offend anyone, whereas the Korean stereotype brought up memories of Japanese war crimes about which Japan has been notoriously unrepentant.

Is all moe anthromorphism a trivialization of serious events? A glorification of violence for gun-happy nerds who've never experienced a real war? Is it even possible to do a meaningful cartoon representation of such vast concepts without resorting to stereotypes? One manga which might pull it off is Timaking's 2005 Afghanis-tan, a small press manga in which the countries of Central Asia are represented as little girls. Afghanis-tan, a hard-suffering farmer girl, is based on the real-life photograph of "Afghan girl" Sharbat Gula who became famous from a 1985 National Geographic cover (and whose name, incidentally – "Rose Sherbet" – already sounds like a manga character). When the story begins, Afghanis-tan is tired of being picked on by big girls Russia and Britain. She makes friends with Pakis-tan, Uzbekis-tan and her other neighbors. Some jokes are just simple cuteness: Afghanis-tan is too little to carry her AK-47 rifle, aww! But others are both dark and astute, as when little Afghanis-tan becomes enthralled with Pakisu-tan's favorite show, a mecha show called "Space Detective Tayariban." (He's a force for justice in a wartorn world, get it?) Soon all the girls in the neighborhood are arguing: "Let's play Northern Alliance!" "What are you saying? We should play Tayariban!"

For all its jokes, Afghanistan is basically a serious educational manga; it's loaded with historical info. Unlike Hetalia, it's also got something like a plot; the climax of the short manga comes when Afghanis-tan's house becomes the base of scary stray cats (Al Quaeda) and one of them bites the rich girl, Meriken, on the hand. Meriken's misguided rage wreaks havoc on the –tans, and makes Timaking's position on the Afghanistan War clear. After a three-year hiatus, in 2008 Timaking returned to geopolitical manga with Pakisu-tan.

"Come for the cuteness, stay for the historical geopolitics," might be the slogan of Afghanis-tan. Afghanis-tan manages to combine both moe and a message; and in a subtler way, so does Pixel Maritan (in fact, its pro-war, pro-U.S. message is the exact opposite of Afghanis-tan's). Pasta jokes I'm not so big on, but one thing is for sure: with the success of Hetalia, other sweeping, shallow mixtures of politics, war and marketable character design are sure to follow. The Last Temptation of Christ: The Manga, anyone?

"Invisible Manga" columnist Jason Thompson is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide, manga editor of Otaku USA magazine, and the editor of numerous manga series. His graphic novel King of RPGs comes out in January from Del Rey Manga.

Variety report that Laeta Kalogridis - newly hot in Hollywood after completing the script for the upcoming Martin Scorcese movie Shutter Island, but better known to us as writer and executive producer for the Bionic Woman reboot of 2007 - will replace originally-announced writer Jamie Moss on the project, which Dreamworks is now planning to make in 3D.

The movie will be produced by Avi and Ari Arad, perhaps more familiar to fans as executive producers on Marvel movies like Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and Iron Man.

Kalogridis to adapt 'Ghost in the Shell' [Variety]

"What a hideous and polluted land I have come to unawares!"
-the Shinto deity Izanagi upon viewing the Underworld, as quoted by Ian Buruma in Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (1985)

On October 7, Joe Holloway, a 53-year-old County Councilman from Wicomico County, Maryland, displayed photocopies from Akira Toriyama's martial arts comedy manga Dragon Ball before his shocked fellow council members. On display were topless girls, jokes about dirty old men and girls' panties, crotch-patting, and a naked monkey-tailed boy with a Maurice Sendak-esque baby penis-this in a book rated "for teens aged 13 and up." The mother of a 9-year-old child had found the manga in the school library and alerted Holloway, who went to the council rather than contacting the school board. "The drawings and story lines are disgusting," Holloway, a Republican grandfather, said. Although some county and state library officials spoke out in favor of graphic novels and parental responsibility, the book was quickly pulled from the school library. The blog Delmarva Dealings ran the post title "Wicomico Schools Peddle Smut to Children."

In response, Greg Latshaw, a journalist for the Del Marva Daily Times, made the brilliant observation that "The book, 'Dragon Ball Volume 1: The Monkey King,' is laid out like a comic book." The word "manga" doesn't even appear in Latshaw's article, nor does this summer's already-forgotten bomb of a Hollywood film adaptation Dragonball Evolution (which excised the panty jokes anyway).

Despite its recent rise in popularity, manga, like most pop culture in the kaleidoscopic media landscape, is invisible if you don't know to look for it. The fact that it's published right to left, in keeping with the original Japanese format, surely deflects the eyes of a percentage of nosy parents who might otherwise figure out what their kids are reading. Manga is just the Japanese word for "comics," one of the many forms of graphic novels. But to serious fans, manga is a language of its own, a private space.

Created for Japanese readers, manga exhibits different "community standards" from those in America. In manga, it's perfectly fine for a villain to chain the hero to a cross in a kid's show; and it's common to see lots of bare breasts in a teenage boys' comedy like Negima! or Tenchi Muyo!. Aware of these cultural differences (which are often censored in American editions), many manga fans defended Dragon Ball's right to mix nudity with martial arts scenes. "Every single example you can pull out of the DragonBall series for 'offensive material'…are childish mockeries of offensiveness," said a commenter on Anime News Network." "Nudity does not mean pornography, and Dragon Ball is strictly 'naked people are funny'," said another. Other Anime News Network commenters, however, pointed out that Dragon Ball is labeled "for ages 13 and up" and shouldn't have been in an elementary/middle school library anyway (though the fact that it was also pulled from the local public library was more troubling).

Meanwhile, just a few days before the Wicomico story broke, another battle was being waged across the mangasphere. When Yen Press announced their plans to publish the Japanese wolf-spirit fantasy novel Spice and Wolf with a paranormal romance photo-cover rather than the original big-eyed manga-style cover, fans exploded with outrage. The light novel blog Ranobe Cafe was fairly even-handed about the new cover itself, but closed with an urgent request that Yen Press retain the English subtitle from the Japanese edition, "Merchant Meats Spicy Wolf." ("This tagline is IMPORTANT. The author has admitted that the tagline's mispelling (sp.) of "Meets" to "Meats" is eluding (sp.) to something not yet shown in the story.")

The complaints about the cover itself, however, had a common thread of surprising prudishness. Here are just a few comments posted by fans:

"I find this cover prurient and distasteful." "This is absolutely horrible, you are trying to GAIN customers by putting a blurry nude woman on the cover?" "It's too erotic." "I think it's shameful that you feel you have to resort to a cheap tactic like nudity to sell this book." "Low class person who enjoys reading trashy romance novels…filthy American adult novel…Twilight fans and sleazy romance novel fans…cheap erotic novel…trashy romance novel…trashy sex-romance novels…degrading…"

Never mind that the heroine of Spice and Wolf does, in fact, appear naked for much of the first volume, and that one nude scene is even illustrated in the Japanese edition. Regardless of the trashiness of the cover, the message was clear: People felt the Americanized version of sexuality was disgusting and crass, and considered the original Japanese sexuality subtle and delicate. It's the kind of "fetishizing the Japanese" sentiment that could have been expressed 120 years ago by European visitors to Japan talking about geisha and gathering artifacts japonais.

As much as American manga publishers might deny it, one of manga's big appeals to Americans is not its "high quality" but the fact that it is Japanese, and has a Japanese sensibility. There are incredible manga in many genres, such as cooking manga (Oishinbo and Iron Wok Jan), football manga (Eyeshield 21), and manga about lovesick alien ovaries (Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu), but America's current #1 manga, Naruto, is a ninja story. Naruto, whose highly realistic artwork is actually very Western-influenced (by way of Katsuhiro Otomo), offers Americans the thrill of Japaneseness without challenging them too much.

For hardcore manga fans, though, Naruto and Dragon Ball are already too Westernized. In the classic 1991 anime Otaku no Video, proselytizing anime fans overcome the haters, take over the world and sail off on a spaceship into the stars, but most manga and anime fans are more like the ones in the 2002 manga Genshiken: perfectly happy in their private fandom but not so eager to spread the message. The easy availability of scanlations (online bootleg translations of manga) makes it even easier for hardcore fans to self-marginalize by removing any economic weight from their opinions. CMX's censored edition of the martial arts manga Tenjho Tenge in 2005 infuriated hardcore fans, but those were the ones most likely to just read the scanlations anyway. If you look around, you can find free scanlations of almost any popular manga online. By the 2000s, manga and anime fandom had entered the age of the hikikomori (shut-in), becoming increasingly withdrawn and insular, obsessed with fetishes like cat ears and maid uniforms.

When the alternative is Dragonball Evolution, who can blame hardcore fans for refusing to assimilate? The truth is that I, too, am guilty of Orientalism; I think manga are objectively some of the best comics on Earth, but I also read it for the weird, the extreme, the sincere craziness which you can't find in American young adult comics and fiction.

As Naruto and Bleach creep into the mainstream, the truly hardcore fans are the ones who keep manga disrespectable-the female fans reading yaoi guy-on-guy pornography, the (shudder) guys who play galge (girl games, aka dating simulations), the retro freaks reading "gar" macho-man manga of the kind that stopped being popular with Fist of the North Star in the 1980s. I'm not suggesting we embrace everything thoughtlessly; I wouldn't want Americans to become comfortable with the ways some manga artists draw black characters, just as I wouldn't want the sexual harassment in manga, including Dragon Ball, to become assimilated into an anti-feminist backlash by clueless weeaboos. (A college-age fan once explained to me at length how the breast size jokes in Slayers weren't sexist because "She's flat-chested, but she's the heroine! It shows that a heroine can be flat-chested!") On the other hand, I love the disrespectful Japanese attitude towards Western religion, I love the violence, I love the imagination, I love the sincerity.

Perhaps the sincerity most of all. Manga can be funny and cynical as hell-look at Excel Saga-but there is something refreshing about most manga's earnest attitude, its lack of hipster irony. It makes for great stories. (Sadly, it also attracts fans who have no sense of irony about things like changing the cover of Spice and Wolf.) At this moment, while manga is engaged in a battle between mainstreaming and marginalization, it's worth mentioning that manga publisher VIZ's very same Dragon Ball was censored once before, in 1999, after parental complaints led to it being pulled from Toys 'R Us. The result satisfied no one-parents still complained about the semi-dirty jokes which remained in the censored edition-and VIZ went back to the uncensored edition a few years later. It was the uncensored edition which Joe Holloway called "disgusting."

But when teenagers smoking cigarettes is enough to get popular weekly boys' manga SHONEN JUMP magazine pulled by retailers, despite an "ages 13 and up" label, how can you win? In American culture, where you can't show the briefest nudity in less than an R-rated movie, the really surprising-and encouraging-thing about the Dragon Ball incident is that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often. I would love for manga to become more popular, but I also embrace its sub-cult nature. Long live the invisible manga, the manga that gets overlooked because it's not about ninja or fox-eared girls. Long live manga that doesn't pass through American cultural filters. Long live filth.

"Invisible Manga" columnist Jason Thompson is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide, manga editor of Otaku USA magazine, and the editor of numerous manga series. His graphic novel King of RPGs comes out in January from Del Rey Manga.

Hisae Iwaoka created this gorgeously-drawn, haunting tale of an orphan coming of age in the lower echelons of Saturn Apartments society. VIZ is publishing the newly-translated manga for free in their online magazine Sig Ikki - a new issue goes up every month, and there are three up already.

Here's what Sig Ikki says about Saturn Apartments:

The society of the Ring is highly stratified: the higher the floor, the greater the status. Mitsu, the lowly son of a window washer, has just graduated junior high. When his father disappears and is assumed dead, Mitsu must take on his father's occupation. As he struggles with the transition to working life, Mitsu's job treats him to an outsider's view into the various living–room dioramas of the Saturn Apartments.

Saturn Apartments via Sig Ikki

Astro Boy the movie about a robot boy who's rejected by his maker (Nic Cage) then turns tiny superhero, will open in theaters on October 23rd.

[via MSN]

When MTV News talked to Cameron about the possibility of adapting Yukito Kishiro's cyberpunk manga series, the director first responded with a less than resounding, "Maybe, maybe." But as the interview went on, he began to talk more animatedly about the technology needed for an Alita film:

If Cameron can work out the technology in a timely fashion, Alita might be just the project to follow Avatar. From what I've seen of the footage, Avatar is an enormous technological leap in animation, but if viewers ultimately find the storyline too Dances with Wolves/Ferngully, it might make more sense to turn to an already established property. And Kishiro's dystopian 26th century would be lush in an entirely different way from Pandora,Avatar's botanical wonderland. And even if Avatar is every bit as incredible as the early footage suggests, I'd much rather see Cameron push his technology in new creative directions before we take a second visit to Pandora.

James Cameron Says 'Battle Angel Alita' Adaptation Could Be Next, But Evolving Tech Is 'Critical' [MTV Splash Page]

Fabled graphic novel publisher Last Gasp announced this week that they will be publishing a translation of weird manga The Strange Tale Of Panorama Island, created by Suehiro Maruo.

According to manga translator Ryan Sands:

Panorama is an adaptation of a novella by Japanese detective fiction godfather, Edogawa Rampo. The story takes place at the end of the Taisho era, and follows an unsuccessful science fiction author with an uncanny resemblance to a former classmate/son of a rich industrialist family. When the industrialist's son dies, the author fakes his own death, digs up and hides the other man's body, then washes himself up starving on a beach in a town where the dead man's family lives. After some more intrigue and scheming, he proceeds to take redirect all of their money to build a mysterious pleasure palace island, and live like a sensual weirdo king. Crazy and amazing stuff!

This sounds fantastic to us. There's much nothing more dangerous than a failed a science fiction writer who blows a bunch of money creating fake paradise – I think there may be some parallels between this manga and the story of Scientology.

And this isn't the only tale of a criminal science fiction author coming out soon. The upcoming movie Gentlemen Broncos> features Jemaine Clement as a famous SF author who plagiarizes ideas from a student. (You can see a fake web site for this fake author here – it's hilarious, filled with videos of Jemaine Clement.)

Via Same Hat! Same Hat! and Anime News Network

39-year-old Christopher Handley, an office worker, was brought up on charges of possessing child pornography in 2006 when customs officials seized a package for him. It contained several manga, some of which were "lolicon" that showed what officials said were children being sexually abused. There were also images of bestiality. Handley has a huge collection of manga, and only a few are lolicon. He also had absolutely no child pornography of any description in his house or on his computer.

Nevertheless, Handley entered a guilty plea. According to Threat Level, it was simply because his attorney had exhausted all other options:

"It's probably the only law I'm aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can't tell them," says Eric Chase, Handley's attorney.

Chase says he recommended the plea agreement (.pdf) to his client because he didn't think he could convince a jury to acquit him once they'd seen the images in question. The lawyer declined to describe the details. "If they can imagine it, they drew it," he says. "Use your imagination. It was there."

The manga collector faces up to 15 years in prison for possessing comic books.

Handley is the first person to be convicted under the controversial Protect Act, which makes drawings of fictional characters into potential child pornography. How did this happen?

In 2002, the Supreme Court struck down the so-called Morphing Law, which held that fictional cartoon or photoshopped images depicting minors having sex would would also be treated as obscene (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition). Under that decision, last week's conviction of Handley could not have happened. But in 2003, the Protect Law passed, which held that "a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting" showing children in sexual situations could be ruled illegal if local community standards consider it "obscene." This is particularly relevant given that Handley was tried in an area, Southern Iowa, where average community members may not be aware of the styles and content of typical manga.

In the United States, the original intent of the child pornography laws was to protect children from sexual abuse. The idea is that when actual, living children (not images of them) participate in the making of sexual images, they are harmed. The US Supreme Court heard a case in 1982 (New York v. Ferber) whose outcome, in short, made any sexual images containing minors obscene and illegal - even if those images had redeeming social value. New York v. Ferber did not cover fictional images, only photography and film which involved actual children.

The Protect Act dramatically expands the scope of laws permitted under Ferber. But will actual children be protected by sending a man to prison for collecting fictional comic books?

As Comic Book Legal Defense Fund executive director Charles Brownstein put it:

This art that this man possessed as part of a larger collection of manga … is now the basis for [a sentence] designed to protect children from abuse. The drawings are not obscene and are not tantamount to pornography. They are lines on paper.

via Threat Level

NOTE: Image above comes from the manga/anime Oh! My Goddess, a typical children's title. It is not considered Lolicon.

Warners have picked up the rights to adapt Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's suspenseful 12 volume series about a teenager who ends up in possession of a notebook that allows him to murder anyone anywhere in the world, as long as he has seen them and knows their real name, according to Variety, and are clearly looking at the potential for a franchise; the movie will, apparently, only adapt the first quarter of the series.

Death Note has been phenomenally successful in its native country, spawning anime, three live action movies, a video game and a prose novel. It has also - somewhat unsurprisingly, given its amoral nature - inspired some copycat crimes, including one Belgian murder where the killer claimed to Death Note's fictional killer, Kira. It'll be interesting to see what, if any, steps Warners will take to avoid similar controversy from this more mainstream movie version.

Warner brings 'Death' to bigscreen [Variety]

Toriyama used only very few assistants compared to most manga artists, so his work lacks the stiffly drafted backgrounds and obviously traced photos which give so many manga a cookie-cutter look.

Dinosaurs, dragons, monsters, and strange sci-fi vehicles of all kinds float through the strange world of Dragon Ball. If his style looks familiar, he also did the art for the Dragon Quest video game series. We've created a gallery of some images from Dragon Ball and Toriyama's first series, Dr. Slump.

Jason Thompson is the author of "Manga: The Complete Guide" and the forthcoming Del Rey graphic novel "King of RPGs". As a manga editor for Viz and Random House, he has worked on the English editions of Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh!, YuYu Hakusho, Uzumaki, Fullmetal Alchemist and many other titles.

Dragonball: Evolution is the live action adaptation of Akira Toriyama's manga Dragon Ball. Fans of the original manga and anime series are seething with questions. Does Justin Chatwin look enough like Goku, who's supposed to be 12 years old in the original manga? Is James Marsters, playing Piccolo, green enough? Regardless of these quibbles, the movie's goofy haircuts, landscape-leveling super martial arts, and magic orange balls with little stars in them are all recognizably Dragon Ball.

Like most manga, Dragon Ball is a single story, not part of a universe of characters like DC or Marvel comics. But with over 8,000 pages of comics since 1984, countless anime and video games, and lots of characters with names like "Trunks" and "Vegeta," it's easy for outsiders to get lost. Here, we answer some basic questions about the arguably unfilmable series.

What is Dragon Ball?

What is Dragon Ball Z/Dragon Ball GT/Dragon Ball Kai/etc.?

What exactly are the Dragon Balls? (Spoilers, though not for the movie)

So is it science fiction or fantasy or what?

Bulma, Goku, Piccolo, Chichi-what's up with the names?

Isn't Dragon Ball just a bunch of speedlines and ripped dudes with bad hair screaming "It's over 9,000!"

What do fans think of the live-action version?

Jason Thompson is the author of "Manga: The Complete Guide" and the forthcoming Del Rey graphic novel "King of RPGs". As a manga editor for Viz and Random House, he has worked on the English editions of Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh!, YuYu Hakusho, Uzumaki, Fullmetal Alchemist and many other titles.

One of the problems with the TV series was that it had to follow the plot of the manga, which was also being produced at a rate of one chapter a week. However, one 14-page chapter, consisting mostly of fighting, does not easily fill up a 20-minute animated TV show. As a result, the originally brisk and action-packed manga became padded out into a bloated mess of a TV show. To kill time (and save animation costs), characters would just talk endlessly about what was happening, rather than doing anything. Sometimes the animators created their own non-canon storylines, "filler arcs," in which characters wandered off and got into little adventures or fought one another in different combinations. However, these side stories were never allowed to alter the main plot. Countless animated movies and TV specials, which regurgitated concepts from the manga (Hey! Freeza's got a brother, and he's a bad guy too!) usually just exacerbated the problem. The animators also do an inconsistent job of adapting Toriyama's cartoony character designs for the screen.

For those who would prefer a tighter Dragon Ball Z anime, there is hope; on April 5, 2009, Toei Animation released the first episode of Dragon Ball Kai ("Dragon Ball altered/modified") a remastered edition of the original Dragon Ball Z created for the show's 20th anniversary. According to Toei and Fuji TV, in addition to audio and video remastering, Dragon Ball Kai will eliminate the many "filler arcs" and redundant scenes created for the original Dragon Ball Z anime and make the story stick more closely to Akira Toriyama's original manga.

As for the speedlines and crazy hair and the guys shooting energy out of their hands due to their mastery of martial arts, that's all there in the original. (The yellow hair is the outward sign of a power-up, "Super Saiyan," which doesn't show up until the second half of the original manga.) And for those who embrace the absurdity, there are many fan-made live-action Dragon Ball movies.

The original Japanese anime series, based on the manga, was also called Dragon Ball. It ran from 1986 to 1989, and covered a little past the ending of manga volume 16, up to the end of Goku's final battle with his first archenemy, Piccolo. At this point, Toriyama was gearing up for a major new story arc, and Toei Animation decided to relaunch the anime under a new name. They chose the name Dragon Ball Z (pronounced "Zet" in Japanese). The reasons for the name change are obscure, but Toriyama joked in an interview with Banzai!, a now-discontinued German manga magazine, that he chose the subtitle "Z" because he was getting tired of drawing Dragon Ball and the last letter of the alphabet would make readers think the end of the series was approaching. (It's an open secret that Toriyama intended to end the Dragon Ball manga years before the actual ending, but was pressured into continuing it since it was such a moneymaker.)

No such luck; the Dragon Ball Z TV series ran from 1989 to 1996. At this point the manga series had already ended, but the licensors decided to continue the series in an anime-only form based on some of Toriyama's ideas and character designs. The resulting new series, in which Goku travels through outer space and meets a lot of aliens, was titled Dragon Ball GT ("Grand Tour"). Dragon Ball GT ran from 1996 to 1997 and is not considered canon by many fans of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.

Imagination-rich and information-poor fans spread rumors of other spin-offs with names like Dragon Ball AF. None of these are real, except for the 2009 Dragon Ball Kai, which is not a new series but a remastered version of Dragon Ball Z. (See "Isn't Dragon Ball just a bunch of speedlines and ripped dudes with bad hair screaming "It's over 9,000!"".)

None of these anime adaptations and spin-offs have any direct relation to Dragonball: Evolution, and the subtitle "Evolution" is purely an invention of the American filmmakers.

Eventually, in the manga and anime, we learn a little more about the Dragon Balls: they are artifacts created by Kami-sama (literally "god"), the mysterious supernatural being in charge of protecting Earth. When Goku meets Kami-sama he finds out why the Dragon Balls were made, although the explanation isn't so convincing (basically, Kami-sama made them to give humans something to strive for). Gradually we also find out that there are various rules that apply to the wishes. For instance, you can bring the dead back to life, but you can't bring the same person back twice. Further complicating matters, the second half of the series introduces a second set of Dragon Balls, the Namekian Dragon Balls, which have different rules and summon a different dragon. The anime-only storyline of Dragon Ball GT introduces still more Dragon Ball variants.

Bulma's quest for the Dragon Balls, for which she recruits Goku as her bodyguard, is what sets Dragon Ball in motion. However, the truth is that, in the grand scheme of things over the 42-volume graphic novel series, the Dragon Balls really aren't that important. Bad guys are always trying to get them so they can wish to rule the world or attain ultimate power, and the good guys are always trying to stop them. The only thing the good guys ever use the Dragon Balls for, more or less, is to wish their dead friends back to life. In short, they're a MacGuffin. Dragon Balls are the title of the series, but they're no substitute for good ol' martial arts training.

The long answer is, Dragon Ball was originally intended as a sort of Fractured Fairy Tale, a play on the Chinese legend Saiyûki (Journey to the West). (The same legend used as source material for the 2007 Monkey: Journey to the West stage musical and Jamie Hewlett's 2008 animation sequence, Gene Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese, the 1978 Monkey TV series, Kazuya Minekura's bishonen manga Saiyuki and much more.) Although his personality and appearance are quite different, Goku is loosely based on the Monkey King; that's why he has a monkey's tail, a magic staff and rides around on a cloud. (Most of these elements are jettisoned in Dragonball: Evolution.) Toriyama also added to the mix a large dose of Hong Kong martial arts movies, particularly Jackie Chan's Drunken Master. Toriyama has even said that Jackie Chan in his youth would have been the ideal person to play Goku.

The celestial bureaucracy of the Dragon Ball universe, in which there are several layers of by no means omnipotent "gods" in charge of the earth and the universe, is also vaguely reminiscent of Chinese mythology, although no comparisons to any real-world religion are intended. When asked about his world's religion in the January 2003 issue of SHONEN JUMP, Toriyama replied "To be honest, I wasn't really thinking about it too deeply."

The other big influence in Dragon Ball is science fiction. Toriyama is a fan of sci-fi movies (his favorite is Alien), and Dr. Slump is full of gags based on Star Trek, Star Wars and other sci-fi and monster movies, not to mention plenty of fanciful cars, hovercrafts and dinosaurs. In fact, the Chinese style of Dragon Ball was originally intended as a break from Dr. Slump's Western sci-fi themes. But over the long course of Dragon Ball the story loosened up and acquired more and more science fiction influences. Gamera has a cameo in the series, as does a thinly disguised Arnold Schwarznegger from The Terminator, and Freeza, one of the villains, transforms into a creature clearly based on H.R. Giger's Alien. Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball even take place in the same universe-the Dr. Slump characters appear in a lengthy cameo in Dragon Ball volume 8.

The clearest point at which Dragon Ball turns from mythology to sci-fi is the shocking revelation which opens the Dragon Ball Z part of the storyline-in which Goku, previously just a weird kid with a monkey's tail, is revealed to be one of the Saiyans, a race of mercenary space aliens. Of course, this was all made up retroactively, as Toriyama himself admits; originally Goku was just supposed to be like the Monkey King. Did we mention that in Dragon Ball, the gods are aliens too?

* Goku = a reference to Son Goku, the Monkey King from Saiyûki (very classy)
* Master Roshi = a translation of "Muten Roshi," Japanese for "the invincible old master." Muten Roshi is just one of his titles, however; he's also known as "Kame-Sen'nin", the "turtle hermit," because he uses the kame (turtle) style of martial arts. See the turtle shell on his back for weight training?
* Piccolo = a half-size flute
* Yamcha = Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word for "dim sum"
* Bulma = a phonetic misspelling of "bloomers," i.e., girls' underwear
* Chichi = Japanese slang for "boobs"

Will Dragonball: Evolution turn into an ongoing franchise, so characters with names like Trunks, Vegeta, Raditz, Freeza, Butta and King Cold will make their appearance? The box office will decide!

* In the film, Goku is a semi-normal high school student, rather than a childish monkey-boy with a tail who lives in the woods. However, even in the anime and manga, Goku does eventually grow up from a three-foot-tall Peanuts character into a normal-sized, perhaps Chatwin-sized adult.
* Piccolo's skin isn't a very bright green, and he doesn't seem to have antennae
* Master Roshi, who in the manga is a dirty old man who asks to look at Bulma's panties in return for a Dragon Ball, doesn't commit any acts of sexual harassment
* a bunch of characters have been removed, including Kuririn (Goku's fellow student under Master Roshi), the talking animals Pu'ar and Oolong, and Master Roshi's pet turtle
* plenty of plots and subplots have been removed, leaving the movie as kind of a mixture of Dragon Ball volumes 1-2 (the introduction of Goku and Bulma) and 13-16 (the introduction of Piccolo, and the big fight).

There's plenty more. A more serious complaint, however, is that "the script is an absolute, unmitigated disaster," to quote Zach Berlatsky of anime news network. What does the creator, Akira Toriyama himself, think about the Dragonball adaptation? Here's a translation of his words in a text announcement preceding a February 2009 promotional video:

"As the original creator, I had a feeling of "Huh?" upon seeing the screenplay and the character designs, but the director, all the actors, the staff, and the rest are nothing but "ultra" high-caliber people. Maybe the right way for me and all the fans to appreciate it is as a New Dragonball of a different dimension. Perhaps, this might become a great masterpiece of power! Hey, I look forward to it!!"

Toriyama is more charitable to Hollywood than Alan Moore-but then again, Toriyama, like most manga artists, has always had no illusions about producing mass entertainment. (Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that Dragonball: Evolution is not the first Dragon Ball film; that honor goes to 1989's Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins, an unlicensed Chinese live-action adaptation.)

The best thing going for Dragonball: Evolution is that, beneath all the spiky hair and shouting, Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball is a good story. (Particularly if you're a 14-year-old boy.) The fights and cliffhangers are exciting, the villains are reprehensible and the heroes are noble (and sometimes the villains are noble too, deep down), and the mixture of sci-fi, fantasy and comedy is entertaining and imaginative.

But there are other elements of Dragon Ball which may be difficult to make the transition to live action. One of these is the quirky, simple art style which gives Toriyama's work so much of its appeal. Toriyama's stories may be intense by the standards of American children's animation, but the appeal of his art is the cartooniness, which, when Dragon Ball started in the '80s, stood out among more square-jawed macho manga like City Hunter and Fist of the North Star. (Today, on the other hand, the influence of Dragon Ball has made the big-eyed, spiky-haired angular look the default manga style.) Putting simple, cartoony characters in dramatic situations is one of the trademark elements of manga and anime, and a more interesting way to adapt Dragon Ball might have been with film-quality animation or CGI, like the upcoming Astro Boy live-action movie. Although Keanu Reeves may not look entirely like Spike Spiegel in Cowboy Bebop, no real human being can look quite like a Toriyama character.

To use another example, Akira is set in a recognizably real urban sci-fi environment, but Dragon Ball is set in a primary-colored, fairytale world. The Wachowski Bros.' Speed Racer tried the "live-action cartoon" approach, with mixed success, but will Dragonball: Evolution go the grim-and-gritty route and turn out like the live-action Super Mario Bros.? Manga and anime fans cringe at the word "cartoon," but it's a good word to describe Toriyama's creations: a world which combines aliens and magic dragons, comedy and drama, absurdity and sincerity, a world of sweat and blood and winking unrealism.

Dragon Ball is, basically, a martial arts story with elements of fantasy, science fiction and comedy. The hero, Goku, is a boy with a monkey's tail (or not, in the live-action version) who is raised in the woods by a martial artist. Bulma, a girl on a quest for the seven magic Dragon Balls (a treasure which can grant any wish), accidentally discovers the guileless Goku and introduces him to civilization. Over many adventures, Goku travels around the world, develops his already prodigious fighting skills, and saves the world from evil martial artists many times over.

This is the basic formula: lots of martial arts, lots of training sequences, a few jokes. (Sometimes dirty jokes.) Whether Goku's opponent is the green-skinned Great Demon King Piccolo (his first major opponent, played by James Marsters in Dragonball: Evolution), or the alien mercenary Vegeta (presumably next in line for the sequel), or the artificial life form Cell, or the genie-like magical pink blob of doom Boo, the structure is the same. New bad guys show up, and Goku must defeat them (as much out of a love of a good fight as a desire to save the planet); if he's not strong enough, or he loses the first round, he hits the gym and soon he's buff enough to have a fighting chance. Rinse and repeat for 14 pages a week, once a week for ten years, and you have a 42-volume, 8,000-page graphic novel series.

This Dragon Ball formula became the model for a successful shonen (boys') manga, inspiring such little-known works as Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto. But it wasn't always intended as an epic, and if it seems to have lots of quirky elements (such as Bulma's blue hair, or the magic nyoi-bo staff which Goku sometimes fights with, or the titular Dragon Balls themselves, which really aren't even that important in the manga), it's because the series changed a lot over its 10-year run. When he started Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama was best known for his previous hit, the 1980-1984 mad scientist comedy manga Dr. Slump. Dragon Ball was also conceived as a comedy, or comedy-adventure, albeit based on Hong Kong martial arts movies rather than the science fiction genre. But readers reacted more to the action elements than the comedy, and so, with the guidance (or pressure) of his editors, Toriyama gradually de-emphasized the humor elements (such as the talking animals, which aren't in the movie) and emphasized the fighting and melodrama. The resulting hit combo was spun off into anime, video games, and merchandise, and made Shônen Jump magazine the manga equivalent of DC and Marvel put together; at its peak in the early '90s, before the magazine market started its slow worldwide decline, it sold 6.53 million copies per week. As for Dragon Ball, it was rated the #3 manga series of all time by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs .

The anime was first translated for English syndication in 1995, although it didn't become a hit until it started appearing on Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block in 1998, where less intense censorship allowed the characters to really beat each other up like in the original Japanese version. The manga was translated by VIZ and printed as two separate series, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z... which leads into the next question.