Bill Randall

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I want join the chorus with a pox on the Tokyopop contracts for their “Shining Stars” program, which were issued in “hey dude” language from a company founded by a lawyer.

The “hey dude” language, utterly disingenuous from a corporation, reminds that Tokyopop is essentially a marketing firm: it exists, and has been successful, as an importer of a popular culture wholly created and owned by other people. Its unique contribution has been spin. For instance, when Japanese creators uninterested in other countries’ customs refused to flip their art, Tokyopop released it unflipped and spun it (quite successfully) as “authentic.” No matter one’s flipping preference, it is clear that Tokyopop’s approach stemmed from no principled commitment to authenticity. That matters if you’re interested in a business relationship with the company.

Then recall what Stu Levy, Tokyopop’s founder and CEO, said in Tom McLean’s Bags & Boards interview for Variety:

I was realizing at the time, well we’ve proven our name as Tokyopop, that we can market and we can distribute. But a lot of people, especially in Japan, were treating us like we were a distributor, maybe even like we were an agent.

So I decided that, yeah, it’s important for us to prove that not only can we work with finished product and adapt it, but we can work with creative people and we can express ourselves creatively as well and become more of a studio. … We think we understand the secrets of the success of Japanese manga, and why it resonates worldwide, so let’s take a stab at it.

To put it differently, and simply, if Tokyopop only licenses, packages and redistributes Japanese-owned goods, then it has no company assests. If it loses a few of its top licenses, it could sink the company. The logical step is to own properties, so that their work building the company isn’t wasted. They have already taken this step with OEL manga, in a co-ownership arrangement. Whether these manga are “authentic” or not has given way to the “manga lifestyle,” Levy’s phrase, with the implication that this lifestyle is not (owned by) Japanese.

A paragraph later in that interview, Levy talks about copyright.

…my personal view on how to approach copyright is I really tend to lean towards opening it up and embracing fans expressing themselves creatively with [intellectual property] that other people have created.

This is in the context of fan-made tributes, mash-ups, and dojinshi, and my pointing it out is perhaps unfair. But I would hope that the creators of characters and stories (”intellectual properties”) might have the same consideration as fans and pirates.

Tokyopop does promise co-ownership, vaguely. However, their goal is clearly the development of related properties, like film and television. It brings to mind “Hollywood deals,” “Hollywood contracts,” all shorthand for getting ripped off. I fully admit the bizarre, sleazy Americana of the place and the industry, but at least they have SAG, DGA, WGA, and other assorted unions that ensure things like residuals and health care. Yes, they are very hard to get into, and no, just because you can get SAG rates doesn’t mean you’ll work every day, or even any day, but at least there is a strong institution with leverage in that industry.

Comics creators have no similar institution protecting them. They also don’t have the same barriers of entry into their field. Creating a movie requires piles of money and the cooperation of talented, unionized craftspeople. Comics require pen and paper. The tradeoff in making a movie is that you don’t own it, but it gets made, and you get paid (usually). The tradeoff in comics, in the case of this Tokyopop deal, is a lot less clear. What do you get, their distribution might? From a company who has produced exactly zero breakout hits in OEL manga? In order to consider signing away the rights, I would hope they would offer a hell of a lot more than they are.

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The Hollywood comparison reminds me that Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton both owned and had creative control of their movies (until Keaton signed with MGM and lost both). So everyone in the Bay Area please please please check out the San Francisco Silent Film Festival coming up in July. I wish I could be there to watch The Unknown, The Man Who Laughs, and even– HER WILD OAT!

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Also: if anyone has had good or bad experiences with Tokyopop or other OEL manga publishers, on or off the record, please drop me a line. I’m working on an article that is leaning in that direction, and I’d like to hear from you.

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EDIT: At first glance, it brought to mind the pay-to-play reading fees for contests in literary journals. Except that economics says these journals can’t afford contests without entry fees, as their readership fits in a pickup truck. By contrast, Shining Stars looks like trawling for marketable properties with a very wide net by charging the people who just aren’t good enough.

I misread and then misrepresented this part of the contract about the “pilot fee,” for which I apologize; it is evidence of my non-legal mind and perhaps the fact that “hey dude” is actually just as confusing as legalese.  Fortunately for my credibility, it was not my main argument.

I would still like to hear from OEL manga creators (and publishers) about their experiences.  For the record, it is not a Michael Dean-esque work of investigative reporting; I’m a critic, not a journalist. Normally I just read a bunch of books in context and react; in writing for the first time in several years on the English-language manga industry, it is becoming clear that the context of English manga centers on creators’ rights and licensing.

I’ve been watching the small row about the upcoming Kramers Ergot 7, the influential art-comics anthology. Chris Mautner has the best summary, with his own thoughts; the short version is that it’s an expensive book, so some readers feel priced out. More interesting, others see a tension with comics’ populist roots. At least one person thought art should reach as many people as possible. Others spoke of a need to expand the audience.

I suppose people who can will buy Kramers and the rest will borrow it and conveniently lose touch. But the row raises the question of whom art, any art, should reach.

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First, charging for art is always dicey. Gallery artists know this better than anyone, with wealthy buyers speculating on art like stock options or oil futures. But art is only treated like a commodity; good luck making a living with it. Many artists moonlight: Rimbaud (quit poetry to run guns), Joyce (taught at Berlitz), and half the comics artists now working (drawing spot illos). But the right combination, like a dog and a bald kid, can lead to absurd riches.

I know no better chart of these tensions than The Gift by Lewis Hyde, a mix of anthropology, economics, and poetic associations. Hyde supported his own art– criticism– with straight jobs as an electrician and carpenter before becoming a teacher. Read it, and keep in mind that music, like air, apparently wants to be free; that playing in the Hollywood sandbox now costs upwards of $100 million dollars; and that some artists make works that exist for just a few minutes before they wash away.

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Second, on Koya-san, the mountain at the center of the Shingon Buddhist universe, scores of monasteries have unimaginably beautiful religious art. I used to live by the foot of the mountain, but I saw little art. My trips up usually ended with ten empty cans and the shakes next to a coffee vending machine. I can’t read Buddhist art well, my own limitation, so I probably got as much out of the coffee as I would have out of the art.

The writer Alex Kerr has a better Koya-san story in his book Lost Japan. He’s taking some friends there (pardon if I misremember parts) from Osaka to show them Traditional Japan. During the train ride, he gripes about the cancerous urban development. Once he arrives, he gripes about the crummy town. Eventually, he lucks into seeing a particularly fine statue of the Buddha. It’s beautiful; he’s moved. The next day he discovers that they only reveal this statue for one day every few hundred years. The rest of the time it stays hidden from everyone, even the monks.

Another Japan observer, Chris Marker, notes in his film Sans Soleil that “censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show.  … It points to the absolute by hiding it.”  He’s reading soft porn, and the Vatican’s treasures, and old Shinto sex totems, but the idea expands past that. One could say it might be better that a work of art not be seen.

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Finally, on some obscure Greek island there’s a movie screen in a field. Robert Beavers, the protege and lover of Gregory Markopoulos, has been following the elder filmmaker’s last wishes and restoring his life’s work for display. On 27-28 June 2008 he will show the final parts of ENIAIOS to those who want to come. Campsites are available.

The site is called the Temenos, and watching these movies thus becomes a pilgrimage. I’ve only seen one; it relied on lush images and classical allusions. I understood only parts. Were I to travel to Lyssaraia to watch the 80-hour film cycle, I would certainly educate myself better, rather than rely on travel to make sure I’m worth what I’m watching.

Of course, Beavers could just upload them all to YouTube so the maximum number of people can watch them while simultaneously downloading porn and getting their scores. Now that we can fit the Complete Works of Humankind on the head of a pin, there’s no reason not to, if it’s just information, another commodity.

But there are different kinds of information. Some asks to be free; some asks to be enclosed. Some is enclosed, in a market, a box in a monastery, or a small community of people with the tools to read and appreciate it. By being so enclosed, it can increase its force, for those able to understand and see it, like water flows faster when it’s focused, like when as kids we put a thumb on the end of a hose and ran through the spray.

From my notebook, when I was working in Wakayama, south of Osaka:

I’m fascinated by Touch, but not for its eternal brilliance. It just comes on television every day when I get home from work. This 80s baseball soap, a creaky classic, matches nicely with new commercials for Calorie Mate and Boss Coffee. In a way, the 80s were to anime what the 70s were to manga, mapping the territory for everyone to follow. Touch, with its love triangle, high school tensions, and pop songs, could be any tv show from the 80s. Given that kids still watch it, it could be every tv show since.

Since I’m usually cooking when it’s on, I can’t say how the love triangle’s progressing. In fact, I can’t even tell whether they’re showing the episodes in order. They all run together: school, practice and games, tiffs large and small, life-changing teen drama. Sometimes I feel that five different scenes shoot out of a blender every day—there’s your show. In the episode where Punchy’s two illegitimate kids show up (he’s the dog, mind), in between slow-motion shots of Minami doing gymnastics and the baseball coach’s bobbing head, there’s an old school montage of baseball practice. The kids run, hit some balls, and hit the field like nothing else exists. It goes into the night, but it could go on forever.

This montage lifts the practice above the story, where it becomes an emblem of sorts. Touch does have a story arc, with twin boys both in love with Minami, both on a team headed inexorably to Koshien Stadium for the championship. The outcome is inevitable, and not the reason anyone watches. Rather, we watch to see the same thing every week, to see just a little progress without making it end, like everything in our lives eventually does. I finish cooking, turn off the television and the next day go back to school. Repeat.

Why not, then, a 26-episode series in which the road is clearly defined but the progress never told? It could work quite well, even as a thirteen hour loop played forever and only watched five minutes at a time. We don’t recall the long days and adjustments after, say, our first confession of love. We recall the excruciating buildup before we spilled our hearts out of our chests, terrified they wouldn’t make it out there on their own. We recall life on the edge of the cliff, right before you lose balance, knowing you won’t be able to pull back but enjoying every unmeasured moment.

My friend and colleague Genny Baudrillard invited me to speak with her college humanities class on documentary filmmaking. They have recently watched Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, a rich, complex film. So I mostly spoke on photography. A digressive version of the talk follows after the jump.

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On Wednesday, I’ve been invited to lecture at a small college out in the sticks, so Tuesday’s post will appear Wednesday, with notes on the talk. It’s a pleasant lecture about ethics and the documentary image, not a stern one about cleaning your room. Until then, some notes:

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In the inbox moments ago, Warren Craghead has released another downloadable, do-it-yourself mini of his fine drawings. Time to break out the saddle stapler.

Also, his Postcard project has recently appeared as a blog (link pilfered from Tom Spurgeon).

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The Economist gets in on the Murakami=Warhol kick. May soon become subscriber only. The title, “Infantial Capitalism,” scans well, and the reviewer notes that M.’s a better theorist than artist, but nothing much new save the copperplate prose.

More interesting that the Warhol angle: manga artist Eiji OOTSUKA elevating four-panel cartoonist Takashi MURAKAMI over the gallery artist. This will get even more interesting if Western critics throw their hands up and say, “we don’t get it,” while M.’s work becomes seminal in the East. In a way, it’s moot, because his sources are already that influential, even if his take on them falls away.

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I translated David B.’s “La Bombe Familiale” for a friend ages ago, and I have a book of anime scripts lying around from back in the day.  So the existence of the collaborative translation site Comics Influx came as a pleasant surprise.  Especially nice is how it skirts the scanlation conundrum of people reading and not buying these things (at least the Japanese ones).  (Link trail: Dirk > Katherine Farmar)

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Finally, preparing for this lecture, I’ve been watching When the Levees Broke, which is remarkable for both its restraint and its comprehensiveness. Movies suck at not shoehorning everything into an ill-fitting box, but this one manages to give things shape without distorting the things themselves.

Good to see more people saying what I have (on this blog & in an article in the new TCJ) about Takashi MURAKAMI not being “Japan’s Andy Warhol,” as Mia Fineman does in a slide essay for Slate . Instead, she compares him to Walt Disney, another master marketer. But Japan already has its Disney, Osamu TEZUKA, another example of a tidy comparison that muddies the water.

Tezuka, Disney, and Murakami all have signature characters; they all founded employed other artists in their studios; they all produced animation. Respectively, they’re a humanist, a fantasist, and an otaku evangelist. Murakami’s the odd one out because he’s trying to change the structures of the fine art market, whereas the others somehow created high art in popular media.

Since Murakami should be judged in his context, I propose that he become “No Irony Art Baron Jeff Otakoons.” Besides the faux Engrish and awful pun, it’s more precise, and includes the last Next Andy Warhol in the bargain. If it doesn’t take off, it’s clear evidence that we’ll suffer Next Andy Warhols for another fifty years until the media finally gets another celebrity artist it can use for shorthand. Murakami’s too Japanese, and too otaku, for that to happen now in the West. Maybe soon.

Finally, moving from Warhol to Disney has troubling implications. It relies on an arbitrary wall between high & low culture. Fineman writes, “For those of us who were reared on the idea that art is a special kind of luxury product—more contemplative, denser with meaning, somehow resistant to the status quo—- Murakami’s radical leveling of art and commerce can be pretty unsettling.” While I (and most Cistercians) bristle at the linking of luxury and contemplation, I can’t relate to the split. For those of us reared on the experience and not the idea of these things, there are multivalent works, some trash, some exalted, all on a level field. A lot of the trash commands high prices in the white cube, while some of the lowest forms reward the most contemplation. My reading of Murakami finds little in his work, outside the attempt to build a fine art market in Japan from scratch, not already fully realized in the anime and manga he mines. I think his writings confirm this. To call his work “historically important” without engaging the otaku culture that defines it is to suffer from myopia.

One more thing: can we declare a moratorium on “rictus”? Thanks.

“I’m a newspaper man—and the Pope is my beat!”

A relic from an odd union of the Holy See and Stan Lee, The Life of Pope John Paul II makes for a curious footnote in American comics history. Published in 1982, I remember quite clearly being perplexed, even as a child, by a four-color Pontiff next to Spider-Man on the drugstore rack. John Paul II must have seemed unusual enough to warrant such treatment: a young, vibrant Pope from a Communist country instead of Italy. Interesting how he turned out, more superhuman than almost anyone in recent memory, more of a world leader than those actually elected, and more polarizing than he had to be.

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Always interesting Harold Henderson has summed up an article in Technology Review on television news quite well:

TV “news” isn’t liberal or conservative, it’s stupid.

Written by former Dateline NBC producer John Hockenberry, it covers twelve years of missed chances as producers continually look for an “emotional core” where there isn’t one. Not Al Qaeda’s complexities; firefighters. Not politics; puppies.

His main point is that network news is doomed, thanks to the self-organizing communities made possible by the Internet. No kidding. He chronicles the inside reasons throughout the article, and make me feel glad not to work in network news. Let it die.

The vacuity of the network form, especially of Dateline, comes into fine relief near the end. Hockenberry laments one of his pet projects that got cut. He thought it innovative. In it, a porn spammer gets confronted on-camera by a miffed housewife, like a watered-down To Catch a Predator. When he mentions that dreck in the next sentence, I wonder if he can’t see the connection.

More interesting are the suggestions, not developed, that 1) ads are innovative because they respect the audience; and 2) something inherent in film/TV leads us to look for the emotional core. You can’t control the Kuleshov effect, in other words. So filmed war coverage has to be Us vs. Them. Even worse, it always becomes mythic. Which leads to the question: how different would my country and its politics look if we’d all just been reading about 9/11? Or better yet, if all the voters had seen nothing but tables of raw data the entire time?