Back to work!
I’ve just spent two and a half weeks traveling around Canada (Ontario to see friends, Montréal to go to a concert), so suddenly I have some catching up to do. There’s a heap of review copies awaiting my attention, for one thing, and they may go a bit slowly for the next couple of weeks while I work on the next volume of Sgt. Frog.
Frog is a very satisfying series to be assigned to, but it’s much harder than just about anything else I do–it has an abundance of puns, and has at least half again as much text as a normal manga series. On top of that, I inherited the series from Carol Fox, who gave the characters very distinctive voices (always a plus), and I’m still very conscious of trying to echo her work to maintain the internal consistency. But this is my fourth Frog rewrite, and every time I start work on a new one I feel a bit more comfortable with it. And it’s fun, even when I’m wracking my brains over the puns. My only complaint is that my favorite character (Dororo!) has very erratic screen page time, but that’s not a problem with this volume. ^_^
*****
Since my last post, a few reviews have gone up at MangaLife–two VIZ review copies, and the first volume of the Haruhi manga, which the nice people from Yen were kind enough to give me at NYAF (see also: con report, linked in my last entry):
La Corda d’Oro vol. 9 (B)
Kaze Hikaru vol. 11 (B)
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya vol. 1 (A-, Yen Press)
Post-NYAF reviews–and convention report!
I spent the weekend at New York Anime Fest, which was not only my first cross-border convention but my first visit to the US since…2004, I think. The primary reason I went was to network–I love adapting manga, and have room in my schedule to do more of it, or to work on anime if the chance comes up–but I also had the chance to meet up with some friends I don’t see very often, as well as meeting some online friends for the first time. It was a great experience, overall: all of the industry people I talked to were extremely friendly and willing to chat about all kinds of things.
Mind you, often my side of the conversation included things along the lines of “I’m so excited that [title] is coming out, and I can’t wait to give you money”. Which was always true. I don’t say that kind of thing lightly, especially with anime; I’m fairly willing to experiment with manga, but I have to be pretty sure I love an anime before I’ll commit to it.
So part of this week’s MangaLife update includes my NYAF convention report, and I’ve posted two reviews since I last updated (VIZ review copies, as usual):
Time Stranger Kyoko vol. 2 (C)
Wild Ones vol. 4 (C+)
The latter suffers from one of the potential problems with review copies, in that I haven’t read the prior volumes in the series. Sometimes this is more of a concern than others; in the case of Wild Ones, I suspect that I might have enjoyed it more if I’d read from the beginning. (This seems like a pretty obvious thing to say, but it’s much more noticeable with some series than others. Some books give enough of a feel for the series for me to have a solid idea of how much I’d probably like it if I read the whole thing, and I try to assign letter grades accordingly.)
A Radical Interpretation of the Text 