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I live. The intro is often the last part I write whenever I draft up a new edition of the newsletter, and I’m fully out of steam this week so....yeah. Just read what’s below.

Mujirushi, Billy Bat, Saint Young Men, and the woes of Localization

A little while back at this year’s SDCC(@Home!), there was a manga publisher roundtable with one person from five of the big Western manga localizers/publishers talking about the current state of the North American manga industry. It’s a good, insightful talk, which you can find here (cliffnotes by Mangasplaining‘s Deb Aoki here), but the reason why I bring it up now is because it got me thinking about localization, and what gets chosen to be licensed for North American audiences.

Billy Bat is a Seinen manga written and illustrated by manga legend Naoki Urasawa. It ran from 2008 to 2016 in Kodansha Ltd’s Morning magazine, and was compiled into 20 paperback volumes. The story takes place in 1949 and it follows a comic book artist getting caught up in a web of conspiracies after unknowingly copying the design for one of his characters from an image he found while in Japan. At the time of this writing, almost five years after the end of the series, it has yet to be localized in English. The book has been officially localized in French, Spanish and German, with the German edition even winning the 2014 Max and Moritz prize. So, with the book receiving such critical fare, and Urasawa’s popularity in North America, why hasn’t it been localized in English yet?

The biggest factors that go into which books a publisher chooses to localize are the potential for sales success, and the size of the audience looking to read said book (which are more or less the same thing). Publishers will look at a variety of criteria to determine this, like looking at how much pull a series has on social media, if the series is getting an anime adaptation, and in the case of certain publishers like Seven Seas media, a reader survey, where readers can request which manga/light novels they’d like to see localized.

But every now and then, publishers can get stopped in their tracks if the original creator doesn’t want their book localized for a Western audience. On the tokusatsu side of things, this is the case with the vast majority of Toei’s catalogue, with them drip-feeding content to be localized despite the size of the fandom for their shows. In the case of Billy Bat, Urasawa himself has expressed hesitance towards localizing it due to how it may be received in North America. Urasawa expressed the same hesitance towards Mujirushi, his 2017 collaboration with the Louvre, which featured a presidential candidate whose looks, he felt, could have landed the book in hot water with an American audience:

In Billy Bat‘s case, Urasawa’s hesitance comes from the possible reception to the portrayal of real-world figures, as well as possible similarities between the eponymous cartoon character featured in the book and other famous cartoon characters. I’ll let you figure out who he looks like:

But Urasawa isn’t the first to express such hesitation about localizing their work. Saint Young Men, a slice-of-life manga series by creator Hikaru Nakamura, started in 2006 but only saw localization in 2019, a whole 13 years after the series released its first issue? Why’s that, you ask? Well, simply put, the series follows Jesus H(oobastank) Christ and Buddha as slackers living amongst regular humans in Japan. Surely you can see why that might cause problems if localized in North America (and more specifically, in the United States).

But within those 13 years, the cultural landscape across the world changed rapidly. We went from forums, MySpace and burgeoning IM services in 2006, to the social media hellscape rapid-access information highway of 2021. There’s definitely a variety of factors that might have played into Nakamura and Kodansha finally ceding and pushing forward with an English localization, but a grand shift in the relationship with religion in popular culture is most likely what let Saint Young Men through the door in the end.

In researching for this, I found a great collection of tweets from 2010 between former Vertical Inc marketing director (and current Denpa founder) Ed Chavez and Kodansha/Vertical readers that offers some great insight into the localization process, including this exchange:

Mujirushi did eventually get localized and collected into a slick single volume by Viz Media in 2020, with no alterations to the story content (at least, that I could find), and Billy Bat is a Kodansha project like Saint Young Men, so the potential for Billy Bat to finally be localized isn’t off the table yet, but we’ll have to see.

What I’ve been:

Working On

It’s been a transitionary month for me (in that I’ve been transitioning between two jobs), leading to a rather busy month as I got all my affairs in order. I’ve started thinking lining out some topics that I’d be interested in tackling if/when I find the time in my schedule to start making youtube videos, and on the Next Big Thing side of things, I’ve been looking at pop culture magazines old and new to see what we lost out on in the transition from print to the digital rat race, and what current publications are doing to circumvent that. One in particular that I’ve been looking at is Nintendo Force, a spiritual successor to Nintendo’s Nintendo Power magazine. It’s very well-designed, and has a lot of what the former publication had vibe-wise, while eking out its own identity. The toughest part of this whole process is doing something different from the hundreds of comics/pop culture sites that currently exist (a pervasive problem in the comics crit sphere too).

Reading

• Saint Young Men Vol. 1 (Nakamura): Reading the first volume of this is what spawned this issue’s topic, but aside from that, I liked it! It’s a rather slow read, since it is a slice of life manga, but the jokes, especially in the latter half of this first hardcover volume, are pretty good! There’s a bunch that could otherwise fly over readers’ heads that’s explained in the translation notes after each chapter, which is nice. I’ve got two more volumes of this from the library to read, but I’m gonna hold off on them until I can really settle down and read them.
• Asadora Vol. 1-2, Pluto Vol. 1-3 (Urasawa): Reading this around the same time as my Pluto reread has given me the opportunity to compare the two works, specifically regarding how Urasawa’s storytelling has changed over the past two decades. Even at the time of this writing, I’m still pondering over Urasawa’s pacing with Asadora, and the way the story’s been broken up between volumes. Without spoiling too much, the first volume ends right in the middle of the action, which is picked up in the second volume. But before that pickup, the second volume starts with a seemingly-unrelated vignette, which leads me to surmise that the break between the two volumes was planned accordingly. There’s also a timeskip late into the second volume which could make for a good breakpoint between volumes in a potential Perfect Edition reprint, but in the meantime, kinda has my head spinning. The story itself though? Very good. A lot more meditative and pensive pacing-wise, but still incredible artistry from Urasawa. And Pluto? Still as fantastic as I remember it.
• Black Jack Vol. 1 (Tezuka): It’s a really good book that I probably wouldn’t read any more of, simply because I don’t have the stomach for 16 more volumes of surprisingly-graphic surgeries. Tezuka, god of manga he is, does a fantastic job of delineating between the cartoony style of his characters and the viscera of the surgical process. In the first volume alone, there are some fantastic stories (every chapter is standalone) that deal with the moral weight of being in the medical field. I might come back to the series one day, albeit on an empty stomach.
• Helter Skelter: Fashion Unfriendly (Okazaki): A reallllly good psychological thriller. It’s a shame we never got to see what Okazaki had planned for subsequent volumes. But as a single-volume work, Helter Skelter is a fantastic read about the dark side of the modelling/idol business. It pairs well with Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue.
• Blood on the Tracks Vol.1-2 (Oshimi) : I read the first volume online a while back, but I finally managed to find print copies of the first two volumes for relatively cheap on Kijiji, so I sprung for them, and gave them a quick read while I was at it. Haunting, discomforting, and spine-chilling. It’s so beautifully drawn, such that the imagery of the more shocking moments throughout the story get stamped right into the recesses of your mind. I gotta find the rest of the available volumes quickly.
• Free Comic Book Day Books (Various): I still haven’t read all of them, but of the ones I read:
  • Hulk had some good art but was largely disappointing, doubly so as a followup to Immortal Hulk. I do not like Cates’ Banner dialogue one bit.
  • Avengers was good until I realized it was an Avengers story. The Deathlok part of the story seemed genuinely interesting before devolving into the tripe that Aaron’s Avengers run has come to be known for.
  • Venom interested me the most out of all the Marvel offerings, with the teasers of future happenings really piquing my interest. Also, surprisingly Hitch and Sinclair’s best work respectively in a very long time. Here’s hoping that they stick to that level of quality throughout the run (or that better artists/colourists hop onto the run).
  • Star Wars (VIZ) was cool but the way they made Stellan Gios look sexy sure was something.
  • It was nice of Viz to preview Zom 100 as their FCBD feature but I also feel like they didn’t showcase nearly enough to give me a feel for what that series is really about.
  • Dark Horse’s Avatar offerings this year were very enjoyable. I particularly liked the story with Uncle Iroh trying to secure a date.

Watching

• Tower Heist: Movie was garbage. Possibly the worst heist movie I’ve ever seen. Fuck you Brett Ratner, not even Alan Alda could save your stupid-ass movie.
• Nava Rasa: I consider myself a very-lapsed Kollywood viewer, but I decided to sit down and watch this with my parents, primarily since they were using my Netflix account to watch it. It’s an anthology series of 9 short films, each themed around one of the 9 Indian emotional aesthetics. The hit rate was roughly 60% for me; Most of the short films had great cinematography, unlike a lot of Kollywood’s usual fare, but some of them didn’t hold my interest the way the standouts of the series did. My favs are Edhiri, Summer of ‘92, Payasam, Roudhram, and Thunintha Pin.
• Space Jam 2: The first movie was also trash, but it also didn’t drain my life force with a CGI roided-out Don Cheadle, so. Yeah.
• What If?: The first episode was a boring retread of the first Captain America movie but with slight edits to the plot, but I really enjoyed the second episode, as it finally did something interesting with the plot deviation, complete with a stellar final performance by Chadwick Boseman. The Zombies episode is a perfect encapsulation of the absolute worst elements of the MCU, but I do like that the Doctor Strange and Killmonger episodes took turns that felt closer to what What If? comics of yore have done.
• The Suicide Squad: I liked the movie well enough. Probably the DCEU’s best movie simply by process of elimination, but one that has no idea where it stands politically, which is ironic considering the source material. Were the Herreras the communists, or the Luna regime? All we get from the nondescript LatAm villains is that they’re Anti-United States, whatever the fuck that means.
• Kamen Rider Saber: I bumrushed through the entire series in preparation for its last episode a few weeks ago. I’d watched the first episode last year, but was turned off by it, doubly so when I realized the lead writer for the season was Takuro Fukuda, who’d done Kamen Rider Ghost previously. A year passed, I learned Fukuda ended up writing less than half of the season whose direction he was supposed to lead, and I decided to give it a shot. My verdict? Eh. It’s fine, I suppose. The first 14 episodes had more focus on the deuteragonists than the actual protagonist himself, the middle 15 episodes were a mess that finally solidified a bunch of the characters, the 9 episodes after that were a clusterfuck of character heel/face-turns, then the final 6 episodes constituted one of the strongest final arcs of any Kamen Rider season. So yeah, overall it’s probably a high C-tier to a very-low B-tier.
• Kamen Rider Zero-One: After I’d finished Saber, I figured I’d rewatch Zero-One, the first of the Reiwa-era seasons, since I hadn’t watched the two post-season movies and needed the refresher before going into them. And wow. Wowowow. What an amazing season. The Workplace Competition arc that constitutes the middle portion of the season comes across far better on rewatch when there isn’t a week-long gap between episodes like there had been when the show was initially coming out. After careful consideration, if Jonathan Hickman were to writing a season of Kamen Rider, this would certainly be it. From the way the plot carefully unfolds, the layers and layers of depth to the lore, the fact that it got screwed over heavily by COVID, it’s a great season even despite the obstacles it had to face. I’m excited to see this season officially translated by Shout! early next year.
• Kamen Rider Revice: I went into the first episode of the 2021-2022 season with trepidation and a slight bit of fear because I had no read on what the series would end up being like. The suits looked great, but the series head writer was also new to the world of Tokusatsu writing. That, coupled with the controversy surrounding one of the lead VAs made me approach this with some level of apprehension. But to my surprise, the first episode was pretty good! Probably my second-favourite first episode of the Reiwa era thus far. Vice, the protagonist’s sidekick, was nowhere near as annoying as I expected him to be, and the family dynamic at the core of the story is really refreshing to see in a series where protagonists rarely have living parents. The second episode was also pretty good, shoddy CGI nonwithstanding. While the possibility exists that the show will go downhill quickly (see: Wizard, Build after episode ~30), it’s a strong start to the series’ 50th anniversary season.

Playing

• Back 4 Blood Beta: Tried the demo out with friends during the public beta almost a month ago, and enjoyed most of the experience. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from it: Left 4 Dead, but with prettier graphics. The card-based modifier/upgrade system was actually pretty fun, but the gameplay itself felt a bit clunky and repetitive at times. Thankfully the game is coming to Gamepass day one, so I’ll probably pick it up again with friends when that rolls around.
• Gunman Clive 1 & 2: Frustrating yet fun. It’s aged about as well as a 3ds-era indie platformer/shooter can age, though I’d hoped that a Switch port would help shave down the more frustrating parts, but alas.
• Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity: I finally finished the game, and overall, I really enjoyed it. While the main missions never really posed a threat (probably thanks to my completionist grinding of sidequests), the later side quests in the game, as well as the postgame, really add meat onto Age of Calamity‘s already-meaty bone. Will probably pick up again whenever I’m in the mood for some mindless fun.

Listening to

• Donda - Kanye West: An album that’s really two albums in one: the first being the more poppy, vivid Kanye that evokes 2016 TLOP-era Kanye, and the latter, a meditation in faith and its role in the relationship between a broken man and his dead mother. While Donda is far from a perfect album, the way it handled faith, both in terms of religion and adherence to personal beliefs, resonated with me far more and felt far less performative than 2019’s Jesus is King did.
• The Melodic Blue - Baby Keem: A Freshman album, but in the vein of Amine’s GoodForYou; there’s quite a few skippable tracks in here, but of the ones I’ve kept listening to since the album’s release, I think the potential exists for Baby Keem to really develop his style and sound in a way that he could drop a whopper of a sophomore album à la Limbo. Most people will probably be looking to compare this album to Section.80, and they’d be wrong doing so. In the couple of tracks Kendrick Lamar is on in this album, the contrast between his and Baby Keem’s styles is clear-cut and apparent, but in a way that coalesces with the flow of the tracks themselves. They really have fun with the dynamic in Range Brothers, which, TOP A DA MOANIN aside, really exudes both of their personalities.

Rapidfire Round: 8 Thoughts on that Big, Crazy Substack Deal

It’s been a month (roughly) since the big Substack exodus was announced, and I’ve got some thoughts on them.

1. Good for the Creators: First and foremost, it’s good that comics creators can finally secure livable wages (even if it’s only guaranteed for a year, subscription revenue nonwithstanding), and I can’t really fault any creator for going for the bag, especially with figures like $500k contracts flying around—
2. ‘Stak-Fil-A: — that being said though, to consider Substack a big win for creators’ rights, or really just ethically pure in any sense, is frankly stupid. I know some creators have tried to circumvent the morals of it all by either donating a portion of their income to charity, or deluding themselves into thinking that they’re not feeding into the detritus that resides on the platform, but at the end of the day, the money that they make for Substack (which, in the first year of their contracts, Substack takes 85% of) ultimately funnels back into Substack funding shitheads that spew hateful, harmful rhetoric on that very same platform. Good for all the creators getting their bag, but making it a big moral “this is for creators’ rights” play is disingenuous and frankly kind of insulting.
3. Noah’s SubstArk: Substack’s been incredibly selective about which writers they’ve reached out to, and it seems like it’s only the real big writers in the industry that they’re reaching out to, which makes sense given they want the biggest possible profit margin, which they also won’t get out of smaller creators. But with these contracts ultimately only being given to the biggest writers in the industry, it creates a sort of Noah’s Ark-type situation where only a select few creators are being given salvation from the woes of the comics industry, leaving smaller creators to continue to suffer in the trenches. Smaller creators can join Substack, but they’re not getting any 6-figure deals out of it, so what’s the point?
4. Parasocial Push: This sort of plays into #2, but one thing I’ve been seeing pushed as an incentive for readers to subscribe to various Substacks is the access of it all. With creators offering deeper insight into their creative processes (in some cases, too deep), as well as closing themselves off from other communicating channels and effectively making Substack their primary point of contact for their fans, there’s a parasocial element to it all, I feel. It’s not to say that it was much different when a bunch of these creators were on Twitter (where readers had that direct access to them), but cutting off all access to their followers, then testing said followers’ loyalty to the creative brand through paywalled access, and then pushing that as an incentive for people to subscribe to their newsletters? I dunno, man.
5. This is How You Lose the Twitter War: The funniest part of the morality/parasocial push are the creators claiming Substack to be a solution to their Twitter woes. Like, don’t get me wrong: they’re 100% in the right for dipping from Twitter, and in calling Twitter for what it is: toxic. But to act like Substack is a reprieve from that is again, disingenuous.
6. Format Frenzy: What’s great about this huge exodus to publishing comics through newsletters is that no one seems to have figured out how exactly to go about putting a comic into a newsletter. Newsletters have limitations, with them being static HTML pages at their very core. Some options outside of just putting them raw into the newsletter are attaching pdf-format comics (blegh) to each newsletter, and the recently-announced Panels deal/integration. Anyway, glad to see how planned-out this all is.
7. Substack != Kickstarter != Patreon: I’ve seen quite a few people say that Kickstarter is the new Kickstarter or the new Patreon, or that the platforms all perform the same role, and that’s not entirely true. While functionally, there’s very little separating Substack and Patreon (Users spend a monthly/annual fee for exclusive access to a creator’s frequent missives, updates, etc, with a free option that provides limited access), Patreon isn’t bankrolling any of its creators, nor is the cut it takes of its creators revenues as large as Substack’s, both before and after the first year of a Substack creator’s contract. As for Kickstarter, well, that’s an entirely different model. That’s users providing a one-time payment through crowdfunding in exchange for a singular product (or in some cases, a set of products), after which the transaction ends. No subscription (unless you count loyally returning to back future Kickstarter projects), no funding from Kickstarter itself (best you get is a “Projects We Love” badge), thus, not the same opportunity that Substack offers. All this to say that the reason why big creators are opting for Substack in lieu of the other two platforms is simple: money.
8. But do I care tho: I’m roughly a month into receiving emails from three creators’ substacks, amounting to roughly 40 or so emails, of which I’ve read.....2? 3, maybe? I think it’s splendid that James Tynion, Fourth of his name, thinks that I am capable of following the three-to-four emails he sends a week, but frankly, I’ve not the time nor patience to read even one, given the sheer length of the damn things. Hell, if you’ve made it this far into this newsletter, I consider that a feat (mainly because I’m an asshole who releases large chunky newsletters irregularly rather than a quick update thingy each week), because I simply do not have the bandwidth in me to open my inbox, click on an email, and commit to reading 2000 words about some writer’s creative process multiple times a week. That’s not even discounting the fact that the comics (y’know, the thing people actually signed up for), have only started to drop within the past week or two, almost a month after the big exodus announcement was made. Ellis (curse upon his wretched soul) at least kept it breezy with his shit, and on a consistent, sparse schedule. Here, I’ve got creators dropping newsletter updates haphazardly upon my inbox like it’s the Blitz. The poor thing can barely take the ravaging. Luckily, I’m not paying full for any of the newsletters in question (thanks to the beauty of working class solidarity), so the hit isn’t to my wallet so much as it is to my inbox navigation.

Some cool links (that aren’t viruses, I swear)

• A nice piece from The Great Ace Attorney‘s localization director talking about the localization process for the game
• On The Great Ace Attorney‘s English Dub
• A timely piece about the dark underside of Substack
• A mini-doc about how Yakuza presence in Japan has been dwindling
• An article about the evolution of video game capturing, and specifically when video game screenshots were literal pictures taken of a screen
• Naoki Urasawa’s Manben series, where he interviews and documents modern masters of manga as they work

Question Corner!

Here’s a fuckin question, yeah?:

Q: Digital comic sales are dismal, though we don’t know how subscription services weigh in. At the same time, Urasawa’s books are largely unavailable on kind of digital marketplace, while being pretty easily available to pirate. It’s the same case for many First Second books, and other book market focused OGNs. Do you think these hugely popular series having such a print focus has a meaningful effect on the digital comics market?

A: It’s a tough call to make, given how obfuscated the world of digital sale metrics (especially in Western comics) tends to be. Publishers like Kodansha have moved to a digital-first model with some of their titles, which they can then take a safer jump into putting into print based on sales (which is both good from a risk/ROI perspective, but also from a supply chain perspective, especially with the current supply chain issues), and there’s others like Shonen Jump that have moved to a streamlined digital streaming service, but at the end of the day, if readers want to read them physically, they’re going to read them physically. Speaking from experience, there is something gained in the tangibility of reading an Urusawa book physically, as opposed to digitally, and I think that Umami-but-for-reading is what publishers might also bank on with big Perfect Edition/Signature Edition printings of high-volume books, like Urasawa’s oeuvre. In terms of how that affects digital sales (or lack thereof, re: piracy), it’s all a matter of access. Life finds a way, and sometimes digital is the easier option for books that sell out faster than they can get printed, or that can’t be accessed at all due to monetary and physical restrictions.

Afterword

It’s a long one, I’m sorry. I really should’ve thought it through, now that I’ve got to compete with several big-shot writers and blowhards for your inbox and attention. If you’ve read this far, bless your soul. I’m gonna try and make the next one easier on your eyes. Until then, if you’ve got topic suggestions for future newsletters or questions for the Question Corner, you can ask them here. Next time, I’ll be talking about the beauty of helmet design.