This week’s Flipped is up. I’m not sure the world needed another review of Dragon Head after Rose Curtin, Jog, and Heidi MacDonald had their say, not even factoring in a recommendation from Bryan Lee O’Malley. (I’m still not quite sure how it’s “manga for the rest of us,” but that’s neither here nor there.)
Because I can’t resist a theme (or even the appearance of one), I also reviewed X-Day, one of the titles I received via MangaTrade. It’s an interesting book, and it has a lot of strong points, but I’m kind of glad I didn’t pay for it. I’m going to put it on my “available for trade” list, if anyone’s interested in giving it a look.
I have to admit that the column is kind of a fallback offering. I started off intending to write about the Viz-Tokyopop Big Two question, but after David Taylor, Johanna Draper Carlson, and Jake Forbes have weighed in on the subject, what is there to add?
Okay, maybe just one thing. I did come up with a really tortured anime analogy:
You know those cartoons where five or six formidable robots join seamlessly to form an even more formidable robot with the power to raze cities and send foes spiraling into the heart of the sun? That’s Viz.
You know those cartoons where a protagonist tries to scrabble out a living in a landscape made barren of resources by the greedy machinations of some military-industrial complex? That’s Tokyopop.
Okay, it really only applies as far as license acquisition goes, but I liked it.