manga (Page 88)

Fangirls fawn over Nagano police station’s new pretty-boy mascot characters

The central police station in Nagano Prefecture is revamping its image by introducing a new pair of mascot characters. But unlike the jiggling yellow blobs and big-headed animal abstractions that we’re used to seeing, these two image characters are beautiful men, drawn in a popular manga style that often appeals to young women. They’ve only been around for a couple of days, but these pretty-boy policemen are already attracting a lot of attention!

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The real reason Doraemon is blue? New sadder tale rewrites the robot cat’s past

Japanese children have been growing up with the resourceful robo-cat Doraemon since his creation in 1969. And while the original manga may have ended more than 15 years ago, the anime series and movie installments continue to provide fresh conflict for the funny feline and his human friends.

But with so much material to keep up with, there are bound to be a few contradictions along the way. Recently, the widely understood reason behind Doraemon’s blue coloring was flat-out replaced by an even sadder version of the tale. So, why is it that a robotic cat from the near-distant future is earless and blue?

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How cute is your numberplate? Japan’s Tottori Prefecture bring the kawaii to its cars

Coming from the UK, I was always both amused and envious whenever I saw car registration plates during visits to the US. Every one I saw had a little state-specific design or message etched into it, whereas all plates in the UK are the same: dull black letters and numbers on a yellow background. The same can be said about plates in Japan, although the names of larger towns and prefectures in which the vehicle is registered are also shown above the row of numbers.

The town of Kotoura in Japan’s Tottori Prefecture, however, just blew even America’s plates out of the water with this über cute design, which features a portly cow, a pair of frolicking flying fish, and one of the town’s mascot characters holding the produce the area is famous for.

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Hard-to-swallow cannibal manga Pupa to be released as anime for public consumption

Pupa is the touching (horror) story of extreme devotion between siblings, chronicled in a manga series. It tells the remarkably original tale of how a young girl became a monster craving to feed off human flesh, and how her older brother offered up his own living body as her “food source”. Spoiler alert: it takes a lot more than one meal to finish him off! If you’re anxious to check out it out, the anime version of Pupa was previously scheduled for autumn 2013, but a new release date of January 2014 was just announced via Twitter.

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Boys’ love manga company now raising funds to make a Japanese textbook

Anyone who has ever studied Japanese as a second language can tell you that it’s a difficult language to learn, and the textbooks currently available on the market don’t make it any easier. Japanese textbooks are largely outdated, not to mention sleep inducing. Not even the most dedicated language students find joy in flipping open the dry and uninteresting pages of their workbooks or assaulting their ears with the drone of their practice CDs.

Luckily, that could all change, thanks to the ingenious writing of Yumiko Akeba and the online manga distributer, Otome’s Way. This start-up company specializes in “boys’ love” manga and is hoping to bring the appeal of Asian pretty boys to the learning field by creating a series of Japanese textbooks that use everyone’s favorite manga tropes as effective teaching tools. They call it A Fujoshi’s Guide to Japanese.

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7-Eleven’s One Piece “Gomu-Gomu no Mi”: Looks kind of like an alien brain, but it sure is tasty

Always keen to cash in and come up with some new character-themed promotions, Japan’s 7-Eleven recently began selling blueberry and whipped cream-filled bread made to look like none other than Gomu Gomu no Mi Devil Fruit from the One Piece manga and anime.

We couldn’t resist finding out what the fruit that made Monkey D. Luffy the man he is tastes like, so when we spotted the new sweet bread at our local combini we grabbed one right away. Join us after the jump for our full taste test.

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Adorn your legs with JoJo’s Bizarre tattoo tights

Female manga fans understand that there’s more to Japan’s comic industry than the schoolyard romances and shojo sparkles with which we are targeted. A lot of us really love the action, the fighting, and the hero adventure stuff too! Thankfully, there are at least a handful of manufacturers out there who understand where we’re coming from. One such company is catering to us girls with less feminine fandoms by bringing us tattoo tights from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure!

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These one-eyed manga comic heroines are totally safe for work, slightly less so for your sanity

One of the most distinctive aspects of Japanese comics and animation is the size of the characters’ eyes. From a design standpoint, larger eyes make are easier to emote with, and some of anime and manga’s most expressive, and thus memorable, characters have had some of the biggest eyes. As the eyes became bigger, anime artists were left with less and less space to draw the nose and mouth, both of which are often tiny compared to those of Western cartoon characters.

But there’s only so much room on the face, and now we’re seeing the twistedly logical conclusion to the big-eyed trend in the growing popularity of otherwise cute female manga characters with only one eye.

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We fall under the spell of life-sized Madoka statue at magical girl anime art exhibit

For many years, fans of magical girl anime tended to be from the same demographic as its principal characters: little girls. The genre of young girls using mystical powers to fight monsters saw its potential broadened, though, in 2011 with the television premiere of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which cast an unflinching, unsentimental eye at the physical and psychological dangers of tasking middle school girls with battling extradimensional entities.

Madoka went on to become such a hit that its original 12 episodes were retouched and repackaged into a pair of theatrical releases. This month a third film, Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion opens in Japan, and a special exhibition of Madoka artwork and statues is being held in Tokyo.

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Anime fan and pet owner recreates Attack on Titan’s epic opening shot by shot – with cats! 【Video】

This year’s breakout anime hit Attack on Titan snuck up on a lot of people. Sure, previews for the TV series made it look like a fun adventure, but is wasn’t until sometime after it premiered that the franchise became the international success it is today, despite the comic it’s based on having been around since 2009.

Why didn’t more people, from the very beginning, realize just how much entertainment Attack on Titan has to offer? Maybe the story’s antagonists, naked giants who look like anatomy textbook illustrations, were just too repugnantly grotesque. Maybe, being creator Hajime Isayama’s first serial, the artwork on its heroes was a little too rough around the edges. How much more immediately accessible would Attack on Titan have been if they had all been replaced with a more traditionally pleasing aesthetic, like a bunch of cute cats?

Thanks to this feline-infused recreation of the show’s opening animation, now we know.

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New Crescent Moon Wand from Sailor Moon is as real as a toy gets

It wasn’t too long ago that we posted an article here on RocketNews24 cataloging the entire collection of Sailor Moon toys. Well, it looks like the people over at Proplica wish to add another item to the list. Fans of the Sailor Moon franchise are frothing at the mouth, hoping to get their hands on a real-life Moon Stick, more commonly referred to at the Crescent Moon Wand, Sailor Moon’s first attack item. This playful prop is being marketed toward adult toy collectors and comes packed with some pretty neat features.

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Popular new Japanese love pillows seem dirty but promise to smell clean

Well, wouldn’t you know it? Just because app developers are releasing a program which would allow otaku the interactive experience of sleeping next to Hatsune Miku doesn’t mean that Japan’s commonly found love pillows are losing any ground. In fact, two of Animate’s most recent pillow case and perfume sets sold out within a day of release! There’s nothing about this item set that isn’t to some extent creepy.

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Saiyans, pirates, and Jesus all come alive on Japanese blackboards

As we saw from their hilarious textbook doodles not too long ago, Japanese school children seem to be bursting at the seams with creativity. Now, with the slightly more public and temporary space of a classroom blackboard, some students with encouraging teachers were able to create some very impressive murals.

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Weekly Shonen Sunday’s newest manga artist is a 16-year-old high school student

Said to be like “spending a pleasant Sunday,” Weekly Shonen Sunday is one of the top three manga publications in Japan. With a weekly circulation of one million copies, Weekly Shonen Sunday has featured many noted manga artists. But their newest contributor is relatively unknown in the manga community and surprisingly young.

Sabanoneko is in her first year of high school in Hiroshima Prefecture. Deemed a manga prodigy, she won Shonen Weekly Sunday’s Rookie of the Year award for the powerful expression of emotion in her work, Oni-Hime.

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Manga and anime, my how you’ve changed!

Anime and manga have been in the global mainstream for a few decades now and like anything else, they have a way of evolving over time. Sometimes, though, the changes are so gradual that we don’t notice it until someone throws it all up in a handy infographic such as this one that surfaced on the internet recently. In it, the creator points out some key differences between female characters in the 1990s and those of the current decade. Let’s see what’s going on in the translation below.

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American casting for Hana Yori Dango (Boys Over Flowers) TV series receives harsh Japanese criticism

Starting this November, the first episode of a new romantic young adult series, Boys Before Friends, will be released to American audiences. The series is based on Japan’s hit manga, Hana Yori Dango (aka Boys Over Flowers). Already, the series has inspired the creation of anime, novels, and live action television dramas from Japan, Korea, and China. However, what should be a highly anticipated American adaptation of this much appreciated manga is encountering a lot of skepticism, especially from the Eastern side of the globe. It makes sense that some changes have to be made to implement an American setting for this Japanese tale, but how much change can the story endure before the tone of the original is totally lost?

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Meet the new model set to make manga artists’ lives a whole lot easier

When it comes to replicating human poses and natural movement, artists often look to anatomical models. Traditional figures do have their limitations, though, with the lack of details making it difficult to recreate the lines of a raised shoulder or a clasped fist. But things are set to change, with a new figure on the market called the S.F.B.T-3, (Special Full-action Body Type v.3). Ten years in the making, this girl has 80 moveable parts in her body, allowing for an unprecedented number of poses and anatomical designs. We take a look at the doll’s amazing details and see how it performs in some popular anime poses for the illustrator’s eye.

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Cosplayer makes Mario sexy, brings our favorite characters to life

Who doesn’t love to look at exquisitely executed cosplay photos? Whether it’s a Chinese kid who looks like a very convincing girl, champion cosplayers, or an adorable little Titan-fighting baby, there’s just something about our favorite anime, manga, and video game characters being brought to life that really makes us happy.

Cosplay-lovers take note, the beauty and elaborate costumes of Enji Night, a 22-year-old gamer model from Hungary, have the entire cosplay world talking.

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Before Dragon Ball: See the 1984 advertisements announcing the creation of this now classic manga

Anyone remotely familiar with Japan’s comic culture has likely seen or at least heard of the world-renowned adventure manga, Dragon Ball. Honestly, thanks to the anime, the TV specials, the films, and the Hollywood movie adaption, it’s hard to find anyone without at least some awareness of this awesome title. The impact that Dragon Ball has had on Japan’s comic industry is so great that a world without Super Saiyans is hard to even imagine. But, every series has to have begun somewhere, and before the 51st issue of Weekly Shonen Jump Magazine for the year 1984, there was no such thing as Dragon Ball!

…Actually, that’s a lie. Issue number 51 certainly contained the first chapter of the Dragon Ball manga, but the hype began a short time before that. After all, it’s hard to sell an all-new series without some form of advertising. We found this to be true when the Japanese side of our RocketNews24 staff managed to dig up a copy of 1984’s Weekly Shonen Jump volume 50, one issue prior to the release of Dragon Ball. Inside, we found some awesome illustrated spreads announcing the creation of this comic wonder. It’s fascinating to see just how highly the series was anticipated, though the comic’s branding might have been a little off the mark at first.

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Akihabara-based magazine blasts past Kickstarter goal, aims to bring otaku culture to the world

The word “otaku” in the Japanese language is a general term for anyone who is passionate about a hobby. But in English, “otaku” has become a term that refers to people who are obsessed with Japanese culture, particularly anime and manga. But the world of the otaku is sometimes misunderstood. That’s where JH Lab, a group of “otaku of the highest caliber” comes in, hoping to demystify the world of anime and manga fans and bring the culture of Akihabara to people everywhere.

To do this, JH Lab has created Akiba Anime Art (AAA), “a brand new pop-culture magazine from Akihabara, featuring cool OTAKUs, advanced technologies, kawaii-cosplays, Dojins and much more!” They’ve started a Kickstarter campaign to make their dream a reality and have quickly surpassed their initial goal, raising over US$42,000. Supporters of the project will receive special edition illustrations from featured Japanese artist, John Hathway, and have a chance to be drawn into his amazing Akihabara picture jockey cityscape. Let’s take a closer look at this rapidly growing magazine’s “ultra otaku power.”

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