Can you stand one more look at the CMX/Tenjho Tenge kerfuffle? Sure you can, because this time it’s by Paul O’Brien at The Ninth Art. O’Brien doesn’t generally cover manga, either critically at The X-Axis or in his Article 10 columns, but he does a very nice job hitting the low points of this particular situation. I particularly like his lawyer’s-eye view of the CMX brand statement:
“CMX advertises its material as ‘pure manga – 100% the way the original Japanese creators want you to see it’. This has the faint whiff of a slogan that was coined by an editor and then carefully revised by the legal department. You’ll note that the promise is to deliver the comics the way the creators want you – that’s American readers – to see it. It’s not a promise to deliver the comics in the form in which they were originally published, although it’s carefully phrased to look like one at first glance. In practice, it seems to mean nothing more than that the original creator has signed off on the changes.”
Elsewhere, the latest Flipped is up at Comic World News. In it, I ponder the eternal question: why should manga publishers care what the Direct Market thinks of them? It’s like a homecoming queen fighting desperately to become secretary of the gamers’ club.