comiket mini haul

[piranha]

as i mentioned before, i had a nice soul purchase some doujinshi [1] for me at comiket [2]. this was my first time buying any doujinshi at all, nevermind doing it long-distance through somebody i don't really know, but it all went very well. deverilin picked good stuff for me (i told her what type of thing i wanted and from which mangaka), packed it all up very well, and mailed it off speedily. if i may channel an ebay buyer for a moment: A+++++, will definitely buy from again.

wow, doujinshi are pretty. it's so much nicer to see the art this large, instead of in paperback size. (they're all about 7x10".)

click on images to see large-size versions.

miyamoto kano song birds (rules DJ)	nekota yonezou 満ちる部屋 # 4 (michiru heya 4) 神様の腕の中 (kamisama no ude no naka DJ)
sakura haiji それはきいてない (sore wa kiitenai)	naono bohra 恋愛痛 ~悪化~ (renai tsuu ~akka~)

oh yeah, i have a new scanner. :)

[1] doujinshi are amateur manga publications, though the "amateur" does not refer to the quality, only to the fact that they're self-published. the ones i've seen look very professional and polished to me compared to say, zines. some of them contain fan art, some original. the ones i bought are all original.

[2] comiket is the world's largest comics convention, held twice a year in tokyo. 3 days, 35,000 circles (amateur mangaka associations, kinda like APAs), 500,000 visitors. i know i would hate it. :) but it goes to show how absolutely huge manga and anime are in japan. no commercial publishers are allowed to sell at comiket, it's a grassroots, fan-based convention.

Comments

[julineh.livejournal.com]

Hi, very nice pictures ! And all my favorite !
Next time, if you have time, can you explain how to scan ? (size, color...)
:) Don't mind, i'm just lasy to read any tutorial...
(Although, i don't have money to buy a pc for now)

on scanning

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

"how to scan" is quite easy -- once you have your scanner set up correctly (so it is calibrated to do proper colour matching with your monitor and your printer). that's the fiddly part, but you don't really need to do that if you just want to scan manga; most of it is black and white anyway, and the few colour pages can always be corrected in photoshop.

i scan b&w manga at 300 dpi, colour graphics at 600 dpi; that's enough resolution to let editors do their work comfortably, and to represent the colours adequately. with these covers i just put the whole DJ on the scanner, previewed, defined the area to scan in my scanner software, and saved the resulting file as tiff. then i reduced the images to web resolution in photoshop, and made them all 600 pixels wide and saved them as jpg; i didn't have to do any further post processing because the scans were already straight and had the right colour. the nekota yonezou cover is the only one that didn't come out quite right -- it is slightly greenish-silver, and metallics come across very badly in scanning; it looks more dull in the image than in reality and even though i pushed it a little in photoshop it doesn't look metallic. i didn't want to fiddle with it any more or i could have probably faked it. or i should just have taken a photo of it instead, but i was too lazy to set up good lighting for that.

i take my manga apart before scanning, because that makes it much easier, faster, and cleaner. if you don't want to do that, xandria has written a great tutorial series on scanning for scanlation, with pictures: http://yaoi.ca/ -- on the left hand navigation, there is a whole section on scanning prep, doing it, and post.

[zorinth.livejournal.com]

Comiket does seem like something that would be way too overwhelming at least at first. The fact that the fanbase is that huge and that all the mangas sold there are amateur is pretty amazing though. Does the good (original) stuff that comes out of there ever get picked up by publishers?

original work at comiket

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*wave* -- hey there!

yes, some of the original work gets picked up. from what i hear, the pros go to comiket purposely to scout new artists. a lot of mangaka start out as doujinshika. though what's also interesting is that, once published, many don't stop creating DJs. the DJs i bought are all from established mangaka (i don't know enough japanese yet to find unknown ones on my own). i think there is always stuff that's too risqué or too cracky or too different a style or too personal to get published, and this way it doesn't just rot in a drawer, but fans get to see it. self-publishing is such a dirty word over here, but i really like how that concept works in japan.

and some prefer the artistic and editorial control they have over DJs. one of my favourite mangaka just got an offer to have an 11 volume ongoing series published. she turned it down (she has already got other work published and has even had some licensed in english now, so this isn't a once-in-a-lifetime sort of opportunity, though it is still big). she wrote on her blog that this is sort of her "baby" and that she doesn't want it changed or censored, or the timeline driven by a publisher.

sometimes a mangaka's DJ work gets picked up after she's become famous, to capitalize on that and easily sell more stuff even if new work is coming forth slowly.