But my question is, out of those of you who still go to anime conventions, why do you do it? Video rooms have long since gone the way of the dodo, so is it for the friends, for the guests, for the loot, or for some combination of the above?

(Note: I actually wrote this on Thursday and didn’t hit Publish. Pretty smart, huh?)

According to some solicitations dug up by Mania, Media Blasters is ready to bring the satirical Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei to DVD in May. While we’d heard whispers of this at Anime Expo last year, it’s good to see such a fun series getting the proper treatment. The question is, what kind of treatment will it get?

There’s no dub listed in the solicitation, and that leaves the door open for a subtitled-only release. It would certainly cut Media Blaster’s costs on such a niche title, but one of the fundamental problems with an English-language Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei remains: the cultural barrier between its jokes and an international audience. SZS is soaked in decades of Japanese media and entertainment, and with all the study I’ve put in, I still have to spend a lot of time searching out its more oblique references every time it flashes one of its trademark text-heavy screens full of references and in-jokes.

So here’s a question to you, making this the Thursday Talking Point: if you were watching a show like Gintama, Excel Saga, or Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei, where much of the comedy comes from references to other Japanese media you may not know, which option would you rather have?

- The jokes are translated literally, and have very extensive liner notes to take care of any lingering questions (Example: “They get along like monkeys and dogs” instead of saying “They get along like cats and dogs”)
- The jokes are localized to Western culture, with some notes and alternate audio/subtitling tracks for purists (Example: “Little Sister Fever” instead of “Imouto Moe”)
- Excel Saga-style quick, on-screen liner notes to explain the obscure jokes, but letting the general flow continue as usual.

Thanks, Photoshop, we needed you!

If you’ve watched anime enough, you know what “Steam Girls” are, even if you haven’t heard the term before. “Steam Girls” refers to a time-honored anime tradition: in the obligatory “onsen episode,” the animators show a bunch of naked girls in a bath house, but cover their naughty bits with artfully placed bands of steam to avoid the wrath of the TV censors. Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu has perhaps the most hilarious variation on this decades-old workaround, doing visual gymnastics with everything from butterflies to rubber duckies to keep the viewer from seeing anything truly indecent.

In recent years, advertising revenues have plummeted, and DVD sales have become more and more important to the success or failure of a TV series. Accordingly, the focus of steam censorship has shifted away from making the show fit for TV, and has become a way of telling pervy fans “Buy the show on DVD and we’ll take this digital steam away for your viewing pleasure!” This season, the censorship has hit new heights (or new lows, depending on who you talk to) with the shows Omamori Himari, Seikon no Qwaser, and Ladies versus Butlers!

This week’s episodes of Omamori Himari and Ladies versus Butlers were especially butchered, with giant ham-fisted white splotches all over the screen (see above – other sites have more screen caps, or you can see it yourself on Crunchyroll) that basically scream “I am a crippled version of this show!”

Do you think it’s smart business, or does it just annoy you these days?

This sign has probably hung over more drama than any soap opera.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Tuesday Tunes – which was going to be I was originally going to be about the release of the Nanoha movie single – to talk about the highly publicized Anime Expo board brouhaha from the perspective of a man who’s spent years on the karaoke and press staff of the West Coast’s largest anime convention.

Staffers gossip like you wouldn’t believe, and my IM window has been busy today after last night’s news of a mass resignation from the Anime Expo Convention Committee. The news has been interesting, to say the least, and there’s a lot to dissect about why it happened and just how it affects the convention. Let’s start.

This whole mess was touched off by the termination of Chase Wang of BAM! Marketing after the new CEO of the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation, Michael Lattanzio, had a well-publicized professional disagreement with Chase. There is a lot behind that that I would like to keep confidential, but according to an SPJA board member I know, all of the AX ConCom members who resigned were friends and supporters of Chase Wang and they’re all unhappy with how Lattanzio is running Anime Expo (you know, like a business).

Their claims about bringing 80% of the staff with them need to be taken with a grain of salt, as a number of the staffers I know have spent the better part of a day asking each other “Are you staying?” and generally answering in the affirmative. I’ve confirmed that press staff is staying on,while karaoke, cosplay, AVS, and office staff are all staying too. So while this whole thing sure does sound like a mess and I assure you that it is just as messy as it seems, I don’t see it as being as bad in the long run as people think it will be.

I attribute this whole kerfuffle to a classic anime convention problem: continued growing pains from fan event to big business. Anime Expo definitely has the most high-profile struggles in this regard, but the general rule is that any convention that wants to grow eventually has to switch gears: what started as a small, fan-oriented event run by enthusiasts must by necessity become a professionally run enterprise or it will collapse on itself under the weight of its own poor logistics.What exacerbates the problems in this process are the people who refuse to change with the times, and people in charge who aren’t equipped to make tough business decisions that will affect what is often a tightly-knit group of friends. It’s a hard job balancing fan friendliness with financial viability, and the stress of the process has destroyed more relationships than I care to count – and that’s just within the confines of a few people I know who happen to be board members or chairpeople for a handful of anime conventions in the United States.

Anime Expo hasn’t quite balanced the twin drives of fan friendliness and financial sustainability in recent years – AX 2007 was a particular low point – but it’s made plenty of steps in the right direction, and this is the latest sign that they’re still working out the “drama” of the balancing act.

Do I think it’ll affect the convention this year? Of course I do. Do I think it’s the end of the world? Heavens, no. These changes are all coming at the top, and in my opinion, attendees of the show will never know the difference. Most of the staff I know of is staying on, and all this changes at the end of the day is who we have to call when things go pear-shaped. It sure isn’t nice to hear about all this board-room drama, but at the same time, it really doesn’t affect enough for me to care.

Come 4th of July weekend, I’ll be there at AX working long hours to make the event as enjoyable as possible for the fans just as I have been for almost a decade, and I’m pretty sure the attendees will be there for the exact same reason they’ve come year after year: to have fun at a weekend dedicated entirely to their hobbies of anime, manga, and Japanese culture.

Which Mario would you rather see? I know my answer.

The inspiration for week’s talking point comes from the flood of cosplay pictures that accompany every Comic Market, which remind me of how much of a cosplay snob I am. By “cosplay snob,” I don’t mean that I hold cosplayers to a high level of quality (though I do tend to poke fun at the more obvious corners they cut). No, I judge cosplayers by how much fun they’re having, and I think more people should as well.

The line “Cosplay is love” comes from the legendary game/anime Comic Party, Leaf’s love song to all that is good (and some of the bad) in the fandom represented at every Comic Market. I was still a fledgeling fan when I started playing Comic Party, a college student being introduced to the full range of Japanese anime/manga, and it had a strong impact on how I view the Japanese fan community, especially the cosplay community and its split into the cosplayers who do it for the attention and the cosplayers who do it because it’s just plain fun.

In Comic Party, the cosplayer character Reiko is caught in a dilemma between those two extremes of cosplay: she can either cosplay as the character she likes and have fun doing it, or she can dress up as a sexier, more prominent character to draw more camera lenses and popularity. She tries out the camera whore approach for a while, but she finds no satisfaction in it and goes back to her philosophy of cosplaying out of love for the character and for fun. I’m a big fan of that philosophy myself (I have some goofy cosplay photos around somewhere I may show you some day, but only if you ask real nice), so I usually skim past the glamour shots of wannabe Internet idols and seek out the pictures that make me grin.

Ronald McDonald cosplay makes everything more fun, except for coulrophobes.

When I went to Comic Market 74 in summer 2009, my attention didn’t go to the same places as the legion of cameramen who flocked to the costumes with the most cleavage and the highest-cut skirts. Most of my pictures came from the guy who dressed up as the Chuunichi Dragons mascot Doala and goofed off with all of the baseball fans in the crowd. Everyone who saw him left with a smile, and while he suffered under the heat while wearing a mascot suit, he had so much fun that it was all worth it. The girl dressed as Mario was having a blast too, jumping around like it was her birthday party and spreading joy without having to show skin.

Kintaros from Kamen Rider Den'ou having fun. Thanks to moeyo.com

The kusomiso technique folks (don’t look up kusomiso if you don’t know what it is, trust me on this one) who come out every Comike have the same kind of vibe, and their enjoyment is so infectious that I fall in love with the hobby all over again when I see them. Anonymous commentators on the Internet be damned, it’s not about who looks the best, it’s about who’s having the best time. It’s not a beauty contest, it’s a hobby. That’s how it should be viewed.

I know what I'm dressing up as next Halloween. Or Anime Expo.

I’ve wandered a bit with this post, but what I really want to say boils down to this: a cosplayer doesn’t have to look like an underwear model to be good; what you should judge the costume on is how much effort and love went into it and how much fun came from it.

Dom thinks: Put simply, yes. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but what this question boils down to is what the generally accepted definition of “anime” is, and what being a producer means.

Anime, in its generally accepted definition, means animation that comes from Japan. This is a pretty loose definition, especially when you consider how much of the animation gruntwork comes from outsourced studios in Korea and China, where the work is much cheaper. This situation isn’t unique to anime by any stretch of the imagination – check out the credits of The Simpsons some time and look at the names of the rank and file. Does that make anime any less Japanese, or The Simpsons any less American? No, because what defines a show is its creative team, not the staff.

What FUNimation plans on doing with its new Original Entertainment division is giving anime studios in Japan various projects based on non-Japanese properties. As producer, they’ll most likely be providing the licensing rights, some money, and a tiny bit of creative input – but most of the work will be done by the Japanese studio.  This is similar to what happened with  Witchblade, and what’s happening now with the Marvel anime from Madhouse. Even though the concepts and the money are from America, all of these are definitely Japanese anime.

If FUNimation intended on taking over things like animation or writing duties, we’d be talking about an entirely different monkey, but as it is, what they’ll be funding will definitely be anime.

Image from Inui Sekihiko

Welcome to the first-ever Thursday Talking Point! We have a pretty good question to start with, so let’s jump right in.

Meansdarling asks: What do you think of the American comic industry compared to the Japanese one? I don’t know enough to know where to compare the two. They seem very different, but I’m sure there’s times where ideas have cross-pollinated, or where they’ve worked together.

Dom says: This is a pretty tricky question, because we’re comparing two entire entertainment juggernauts against each other. There will be some overgeneralizations, but let’s dig right in to the heart of the matter.

The core difference between American comics and Japanese manga is who controls the stories. In general, the American industry is dominated by the iconic characters, who are owned by the publishers and not by the creators.

Writers come and writers go, but in order to keep the characters alive, the publishers will do pretty much anything. One of the most recent and obvious examples of this is the fallout from the “Brand New Day” story in Spider-Man, which led to J. Michael Straczynski’s departure from Marvel Comics due to Joe Quesada’s insistence on pushing through what JMS considered to be a stupid storyline. And, because so much of the American comic book industry is founded on making more money from the same characters, we’ve had 70 years of Batman and are creeping up on 50 years of the X-Men, and there’s no sign that they’ll ever stop.

Meanwhile, Japanese manga is much more of a creator-owned model. A manga series will have one artist and one writer (and the writer and artist are often the same person) through its entire run, and with a few notable exceptions, it will end when the creative team behind it decides that it will end.

I find manga much easier to follow for this reason – the characters don’t have decades of baggage to carry with them. When I read something like Ratman (my current favorite manga, which is amusing because Inui based half of it on his favorite American comics) I don’t have to find out what another writer did with it before, and I don’t have to worry about what will happen if the artist changes.

Now, as I said, there are exceptions to the wide generalizations I’ve made. Famously, Shuueisha forced Toriyama Akira to continue the Dragonball manga against his will, and Death Note continued on long past when it should have. And there are plenty of creator-driven comics in the American industry as well – look at Fables and Invincible, two of the best comics in the business.

Plus, I will never be able to let go of my love for Batman in all of his incarnations.

So that’s my stance on it – there’s a lot to love on each side of the ledger, but when it comes to picking up a book and sticking with it to the end, I lean toward manga.

That’s it for the first Thursday Talking Point – feel free to keep submitting questions like this one before next week!

Picture from 8bit on pixiv.

For the Thursday weekly, I’d like to make it a bit more interactive. Ask me a question! About the industry, about how something works, about why something doesn’t work, try me! I’ll answer it in a column format. It’s a bit late for me to do it for this Thursday, so there’ll be some spillover to tomorrow, but I’ll stockpile questions for the coming weeks as well. Ask away! I promise I won’t strangle you for even the stupidest questions, unlike certain witches in the above image.