Look Out, Pixar, Here Comes ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’

source:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/movies/12fox.html

By BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — Figuring out which film will win the Academy Award for best animated feature is usually the easiest part of filling out a ballot for your Oscar pool. Go down the list of nominees — often only three, because so few make the cut — and find the one produced by Pixar. Circle it.

But this year, unexpectedly, animation is becoming a hotly contested race.

The biggest reason is “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Wes Anderson’s quirky adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel. The film, from 20th Century Fox and the producer Scott Rudin, is soaking up a surprising amount of awards attention.

“Up,” Pixar’s 3-D flying-house adventure, dominated the multiplexes last May and seemed to have the animation Oscar sewn up as recently as a few weeks ago. And it’s still the front-runner. The movie industry cooed that “Up,” Pixar’s sophisticated 10th feature, was another artistic triumph. Critics agreed, with review-aggregation Web sites suggesting that the studio’s campaign slogan for the film — “The Best Reviewed Film of the Year” — was only a (very) slight exaggeration.

Then a fox snuck into Pixar’s henhouse.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which features the vocal talents of George Clooney and Meryl Streep in a story about a dapper family man who can’t resist stealing chickens and cider, arrived in wide release on Nov. 25. Despite stratospheric reviews, the holiday rush and a soft box office performance — it cost just under $40 million to produce and sold $20 million in tickets — made an Oscar run seem like a long shot.

But “Up,” which has been estimated to cost $175 million and cruised to a $293 million gross in North America, lost two influential awards to “Fox.”

In a mid-December surprise, both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association named “Fantastic Mr. Fox” the best animated movie of 2009. Similar awards from five other critics’ groups followed. The film is up for a Golden Globe on Sunday, as is “Up.”

“Nobody saw this coming,” said Jerry Beck, the author of 12 books on animation and an operator of the news blog CartoonBrew.com. “The animation in ‘Mr. Fox’ strikes some people as a bit funky, but the film is indisputably a piece of art — something that exhibits a really strong point of view from beginning to end.”

Many critics have been impressed that Mr. Anderson, whose other movies include “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) and “Rushmore” (1998) is thriving in a genre entirely new to him. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” was made using stop-motion animation, a painstaking process involving handmade models.

“It’s as if Wes finally found the perfect style through which to channel all of his obsessions,” said Scott Foundas, a former film critic for LA Weekly and now an associate programmer at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “You can really see the fingerprints.”

The producers of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” say they are just happy that there appears to be room at the awards podium for different styles of animation. “Up” was computer generated, or CG, in industry shorthand. Yet another contender, “The Princess and the Frog,” from Walt Disney Pictures, is a hand-drawn throwback to the heyday of the genre.

“ ‘Up’ is a brilliant movie, but the great thing that this year has shown us is that animation is more than just CG and 3-D,” Mr. Rudin said. With Mr. Anderson’s film, he added, “You feel like you’re being dropped into this perfect, handcrafted dollhouse, except that the dolls are George Clooney and Meryl Streep.”

The Oscar race is just hitting its stride, of course. Nominations will be announced on Feb. 2 and the awards given on March 7. In only the second time since the animated feature category was created in 2001, there will be five nominees. In recent years there have been only three. Rules state that a minimum of 16 films must be submitted to warrant five slots.

And “Up,” directed by Pete Docter, remains very much the lead contender for the best animated feature Oscar, a prize Pixar has won four times. “Up” has so far taken top animated honors from 14 awards groups, including the National Board of Review. It is expected to do well at the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards on Friday.

Many awards strategists consider “Up” a strong candidate for a best picture nomination, especially with that field expanded to 10 nominees this year. No animated movie has ever won in that category, and only one, “Beauty and the Beast,” has been nominated.

Rich Ross, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios, which owns Pixar, said in a statement: “We’re extremely proud that ‘Up’ was the best reviewed film of the year, embraced by audiences all over the world, and elevated the art form by combining great storytelling, animation, and technological achievements.”

Another executive at Disney said there were no concerns about competition from “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in the animation category, partly because the Los Angeles and New York critics’ groups have weakened as indicators. “It’s not even a contest,” said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not have clearance to speak publicly.

Even so, Disney and Pixar may have their hands full. Aside from the unexpected competition from “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” there is “Ponyo,” an odd but haunting film from Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese anime master whose “Spirited Away” won in 2002. Other prominent contenders are Universal’s “Coraline” and Sony’s “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.”

There is a history of the academy recognizing the small and arty, awarding the top animation prize in 2005 to the stop-motion “Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” And the little-engine-that-could factor is against Pixar. “To an extent ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ is benefitting from being the underdog,” Mr. Foundas said. Liccy Dahl, Roald Dahl’s widow, said she was tickled that “Fantastic Mr. Fox” was succeeding on the awards trail. Mr. Anderson spent three weeks at her home in Buckinghamshire, England, working on the script, incorporating details like the kitchen floor and lamp shades into the production design.

“What I love about the film is the sense of humor — it’s so Wes Anderson,” she said.

A demure Mr. Anderson credited his creative team in a telephone interview, saying he was thrilled about the attention but that he never gave much thought to how the animation could serve his style.

“I was always just thinking about Roald Dahl,” he said. “How do we make this movie seem like it’s happening inside his imagination?”

A comic treatment for the bard

source:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0106/1224261725074.html

Shakespeare’s greatest dramas have been adapted for a Manga reading audience. So are they a comedy of errors or a literary triumph? SARA KEATING finds out

‘The year is 2017. Global climate change has devastated the Earth. This is now a cyberworld in constant dread of war. The state of Denmark has grown prosperous and defended itself successfully against neighbouring states. But could it be that its greatest threat comes not from without, but from within the state itself?”

The voice-over script for a new science-fiction film, right? But doesn’t that “state of Denmark” bit sound familiar? Of course it does. This is the scene-setting introduction to Manga Shakespeare’s futuristic adaptation of Hamlet , just one of its 14 comic-book approaches to the bard. Modern technologies meet ancient tradition in a contemporary Athens-set A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Samurai warriors reclaim a future post-nuclear world of mutants in the Scottish play, Macbeth .

King Lear meets Last of the Mohicans on the American frontier. Depending on your taste, this is a Manga-style mutilation of classical literature, or an exciting new manifestation of the eternal popularity of Shakespeare.

First published by Self Made Hero in 2007, Manga Shakespeare merely marks one of the millions of re-imaginings of Shakespeare throughout the centuries, on stage, film, television, and in a variety of other popular cultural forms. From Shakespeare’s shrew being tamed in John Fletcher’s Elizabethan drama The Woman’s Prize to Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story to Baz Luhrman’s postmodern punk Romeo+Juliet , the plays have proved malleable to multiple ends: political in the case of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, whimsical in the case of Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You , absurd in the case of Theatre of Blood , in which Vincent Price plays an actor who takes poetic revenge on the critics who denied him recognition and kills them using methods inspired by Shakespeare’s plays. An anticipated re-imagining for 2010 is Kill Shakespeare, a new comic-book series that sees Shakespeare himself fight a battle of super-hero proportions, as “Hamlet must rally the bard’s greatest heroes to battle the bard’s most frightening villains”, who have turned on their very creator. (You can view a teaser trailer on www.killshakespeare.com.)

MANGA SHAKESPEARE is particularly interesting, because it pits its graphic interests alongside educational aims. Its editorial team was led by leading Shakespeare scholar Richard Appignanesi, and its illustrators were advised by teachers and other education specialists in the task of “making serious works of literature more accessible”. The target audience is teenagers who are being introduced to Shakespeare’s work for the first time, but the books are designed as a complement to their reading, rather than as a substitute for the texts themselves. Because Japanese Manga draws its core audience from youth culture, and is also often used as an educational resource in Japan, the adaptation of form and the complementary visual style has precedents.

The distinctive visual style of Japanese Manga animation evolved in the post-second World War era. It uses traditional Japanese drawing techniques and draws on Western influence, specifically the Disney and comic-book culture of 1950s America, to create an idiosyncratic, culturally-specific style. In the early 21st century, however, Manga has crossed all cultural boundaries, and has become embedded in contemporary popular culture, specifically the urban arts. Manga Shakespeare thus provides a stimulating resonance for students with their own lives and interests, in much the same way that hip-hop/slam poetry has been used to reinvigorate interest in poetry in schools.

In Romeo and Juliet , for example, Romeo is the rock-idol son of a mafia boss in present-day Tokyo, while in The Tempest , a global energy crisis sees Prospero washed up on the island. Crucially, however, Shakespearean verse remains verbatim, albeit in abridged form. Spoken by men with tattooed torsos and scantily clad heroines, Elizabethan poetry seems more like a living language than an archaic one, an idiosyncratic sexy slang.

Manga is traditionally rendered in black and white form, but the first few pages of Manga Shakespeare books (mangashakespeare.com) are vivid in neons; the flash of big-city lights, or futuristic visions, setting the colourful tone for the action that will follow. Characters are introduced formally, with a carefully-chosen key quote. The detailed costumes, gestures and symbolic iconography provide a snap-shot of traits and themes to come. In Romeo and Juliet , for example, the self-absorption and vanity of the teenage star-crossed lovers is rendered with dark-inked downcast eyes. Meanwhile, stage directions are framed in text-boxes and dialogue in bubbles throughout the pages. However, rather than reducing the play to a plot summary, Manga Shakespeare encourages you to study its form; the startling clarity of the Manga drawings focuses attention on how emotion can be embodied in images, be they literary or visual.

Manga is especially artful in capturing facial expression, while the visual rendering of the bloodshed of some of Shakespeare’s tragedies allows a concrete understanding of metaphorical violence as well as its reality.

For the most part, Manga Shakespeare has received glowing praise from teachers and graphic artists, as both an introduction to Shakespeare and to contemporary art forms, which students are given an opportunity to try themselves in workshops. They take specific scenes from the plays and condense them into comic-strip form, which forces them to pay attention to meaning as it is embodied in Shakespeare’s language.

Anything that makes classical literature more accessible and more interesting for young teenagers, teachers say, will ultimately lead them back to the original text. It is, perhaps, a mode of instruction that Shakespeare himself would approve of: “Those that do teach young babes,” he writes in Othello , “Do it with gentle means and easy tasks.”

5 Reasons Why James Franco Might Hug an Anime Body Pillow on 30 Rock

source:http://www.movieline.com/2010/01/5-reasons-why-james-franco-will-hug-an-anime-body-pillow-on-30-rock.php

Written by Julie Miller | 04 Jan 2010, 3:00 PM

With only ten days between us and James Franco’s 30 Rock debut, NBC released four tantalizing images from his stay at Rockefeller Center. Franco fans will be relieved to hear that he will not be reprising his General Hospital role as an artist whose canvas is murder — but a college student whose fetish is Japanese animation. The other full-size images and Movieline’s own hypotheses why James Franco’s arc involves an anime body pillow, after the jump.

In the January 14 episode, James Franco plays a version of James Franco who is roped into an agent-engineered fauxmance with Jenna (Jane Krakowski). But judging from the photos below, it looks as though Franco’s ramen-noodle-dorm-life and interest in geeky pop culture endear him to Liz Lemon (Tina Fey). Now let’s consider the possible significances of James Franco’s hot, new 30 Rock co-star:

1) Jenna’s agent manufactures the romance to make her seem young and relevant; James Franco’s reps design the relationship to quiet those rumors that he has taken up a Lars and the Real Girl-type relationship with an anime body pillow.

2) A play on that infamous Columbia photo in which James Franco was captured snoozing during a lecture, 30 Rock paints the Milk star as an obsessive sleeper with strange nocturnal fetishes including inanimate characters, cupcake pajamas and a poetry professor’s monotone lecture.

3) After a few staged photo-ops with Jenna drive him to a point of insanity and bad judgment, James Franco shares a tender menage a trois with Liz Lemon and the only woman who will never break into a rendition of “Oklahoma” at the drop of a hat.

4) Drugs. Much like Oprah’s visit to 30 Rock, the entire episode plays out before Liz Lemon realizes that the person appearing as James Franco is not James Franco but an acne-ridden dorm student with a predilection for eerie pin-up pillows. And those herbal supplements that Tracy gave her were not vitamins but a new strain of LSD and weed called LSDeed.

5) James Franco quadruples the meta-value of his appearance by sleeping with Liz Lemon and an anime pillow for performance art motivations — inside of a much larger performance art-motivated cameo.

· JAMES FRANCO DOES 30 ROCK [Oh La La]

Unbound: The year in webcomics

source:http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2009/12/unbound-the-year-in-webcomics/

• Posted on December 22, 2009 - 01:00 PM by Brigid Alverson

While the rest of the world went to hell in a handbasket, webcomics did pretty well in 2009, in part because the medium provided alternatives to structures that were cracking because of the poor economy. One of the most important events of the year had nothing to do with webcomics directly but probably had a huge effect on the medium as a whole: In January, Diamond Comics Distributors raised its minimums, that is, the number of units a comic would have to sell in order for them to carry it. As Diamond has a near-monopoly on distribution to comics stores, the result is that many comics will be squeezed out of the market—and webcomics became a more attractive alternative, especially for creators who are just building a following or are marketing to a particular niche. It's hard to know how many creators turned to the web because of that—how do you measure a negative?—but James Turner’s Warlord of Io has been mentioned specifically as a comic that did not make Diamond’s minimums and wound up on comiXology’s iPhone app.

Speaking of which, one of the big trends of the year was the diversification of digital media. Publishers and creators started putting comics on the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android systems, as well as the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s e-book reader, the Nook. And just in time for Christmas, Sony unveiled its comics store for the PSP. We’re still waiting for the Apple tablet, though, which is rumored to be the killer app for digital comics—if it even exists.

One of the first big successes was Star Trek: Countdown, produced by IDW Comics in collaboration with iVerse. Here’s IDW publisher Ted Adams saying the magic words in an interview with Heidi MacDonald for Publishers Weekly Comics Week:

"We will sell as many iTunes apps [of Countdown] as we will of as the print version," says Adams. "That's a lot of apps." The book—each issue is sold as an individual app—is regularly listed among the top 100 apps on iTunes and the first print issue of Star Trek: Countdown sold about 15,000 copies upon initial release, according to figures at the comics business site ICv2.com.

For the first half of the year, every comic on the iPhone/iPod was a single app, which led to confusion and cluttered screens. During the summer, a new operating system allowed in-app buying, so a single app could become a portal to many comics. The first publisher to jump in with this was comiXology, which had already set up a website that integrated Previews solicitations, actual previews, and links to bricks-and-mortar stores. ComiXology’s comics reader/storefront was a big hit, and iVerse and Panelfly soon brought out similar products. Many comics publishers are covering their bets by releasing content on one or more of these platforms as well as on the web and in print.

Back on the big screen, the paradigm continued to shift and evolve. The webcomic site Girlamatic, which had put some of its comics behind a pay wall, relaunched as a free webcomics site, and publisher Joey Manley has similar plans for the rest of the sites in the Modern Tales family. Octopus Pie became one of several comics to shift from regular to irregular updates, when creator Meredith Gran decided it was more efficient to update when she finished a chapter rather than three times a week.

Rin-ne

Viz, the powerhouse of manga publishers, also went the free-webcomic route in a big way this year, starting with Rin-ne, a new series from manga powerhouse Rumiko Takahashi (InuYasha, Ranma 1/2). In a move that may have been designed to pre-empt scanlators, Viz put each chapter of the new series online, for free, the same day it was released in Japan. They took the chapters down once the print edition was released, but they continue to put up new chapters weekly. Later in the year, Viz launched a second website, SigIKKI, which is an anthology of manga for older readers, with the idea that the more popular series from that site will eventually make it into print as well.

Digital Manga Publishing, which despite its name is primarily a print publisher, revamped its eManga webcomics site and recently added a new feature: Harlequin manga (Japanese adaptations of American Harlequin romances). Dark Horse published some of these a few years ago, and they didn't do well, but Digital's audience is probably closer to the sweet spot for that type of comic. Tokyopop also moved its global manga program online.

Despite being spread out across the entire internet, webcomickers did some community-building this year. At the end of March, webcomics folks from all over converged on Easthampton, Massachusetts, for New England Webcomics Weekend. Bobby Timony covered it well for Robot 6, and back at my old home, Digital Strips, Jason the Midnight Cartooner did a marathon set of interviews with fellow creators. In November, Least I Could Do creators Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza announced they were establishing a webcomic scholarship at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. And when swine flu (a.k.a. H1Nerd1) struck attendees at the Penny Arcade Expo, the organizers used their blog to list the flights that confirmed sufferers had taken and keep folks up to date on the spread of the disease.

2009 was a good year for lively internet debates. In February, Valerie D’Orazio predicted that within the next two years, Big Media will buy up all the good webcomics and put them behind a pay wall. Several webcomics creators commented to her original post, basically saying “Big Media can’t afford us.” What emerged is that the top tier of webcomics creators seem to be doing very, very well, and there is a substantial group who are making all or most of their living from comics alone.

My column about the Zuda test—at the end of eight pages, do I know what the comic is about?—generated some lively conversations as well.

It was a bad year for editorial cartoonists, as economic factors led to a number of veteran cartoonists being shown the door. This got ugly in April, when webcomickers and newspaper folks got into a shouting match after Gary Brookins lost his job. And in the most recent issue of The Comics Journal (unfortunately, not available online at the moment), Ted Rall blasts the free-webcomics model, complaining that webcomics suck and they are ruining things for everyone else.

But by far the most entertaining internet flame war was the one launched single-handedly by David Rees after he learned that Jamba Juice was ripping off his comic for their ads. Just keep clicking forward to read his escalating campaign against the purveyors of faux smoothies. Of course, Rees's comic, Get Your War On, is a clip-art comic, but that just makes the whole thing even more ironic.

If anything, Rees sums up the webcomics paradigm this year, which was to take a crappy situation, turn it into profit, and leave 'em laughing. Well played, sir.

And if adversity breeds creativity, 2010 should be an excellent year. Bring it on.

Unbound: The year in manga

source:http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2009/12/unbound-the-year-in-manga/

• Posted on December 29, 2009 - 01:00 PM by Brigid Alverson

At the outset, 2009 didn’t look like a promising year for manga. Tokyopop had split in two, laid off a third of its staff, and seemed to be tottering toward its grave; Broccoli had just given up the ghost; Vertical let its marketing manager go; and ADV couldn’t bring itself to publish Yotsuba&!, despite the fact that fans were climbing the walls for it. The economy had tanked, and the general feeling was that 2009 was going to be a bleak year.

And yet, here I am at the end of December, surrounded by so much good manga that I don’t know where to start.

Tokypop rallied nicely and, despite losing some licenses, is bringing back series that everyone was convinced were heading to limbo. Yen Press rescued Yotsuba&! and republished the earlier volumes as well. Del Rey tested the waters with a variety of global titles (with more to come next year) and kept cranking out solid shoujo and shonen series from Japan. CMX kept up a steady stream of tween- and teen-friendly titles as well as the more mature suspense series Fire Investigator Nanase and Astral Project. Vertical was the darling of New York Anime Fest with their announcement that they had licensed the cute cat manga Chi’s Sweet Home and Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo; they kept fans busy in the meantime with a steady stream of new volumes of Black Jack.

And Viz! Viz outdid them all, launching series after series to enthusiastic response: Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto and 20th Century Boys; the foodie manga Oishinbo; the beautifully drawn Children of the Sea; the new Rumiko Takahashi series Rin-ne (released online simultaneously with the Japanese releases); Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku: The Inner Chambers. You could go broke trying to keep up with Viz’s output, but if you did, you could console yourself with the free manga on their SigIKKI and Shonen Sunday websites.

While a few publishers responded to the grim economy by circling the wagons or just throwing up their hands, others took a more aggressive approach, licensing new series by established creators, putting marginal properties on the web, responding to fan feedback, and publishing manga that appeals to audiences beyond the traditional teenage readers.

Tokyopop, for instance, had a tough first half of the year. In January, bloggers started circulating lists of manga solicitations that had been cancelled from Diamond’s Previews catalogue. Then in August, Tokyopop revealed that Kodansha had cancelled a number of its licenses with them.

That could have been the end of everything, but Tokyopop followed up almost immediately with the news that they would be bringing back a number of non-Kodansha series, including one of my favorites, Suppli. They hosted a series of “webinars,” interactive online conversations with fans, and they seem to have really listened to the feedback; one immediate effect was an improvement in their paper quality. They also ended the limbo for many of their global manga properties by putting them online.

Viz also got off to a bumpy start, with Diamond announcing in February that over 1,000 Viz titles were being de-listed from their catalog. This sounds ominous, but they were mostly older titles and finished series, and they were still available through other retail channels The company also did some “restructuring,” which was largely opaque to the outside world but did seem to involve layoffs. Later in the year, they folded Shojo Beat magazine, although the brand lives on as a book imprint.

On the other hand, Viz has been heading off in some unexpected new directions. In February, at New York Comic-Con, they unveiled a slate of manga that was largely aimed at older, more sophisticated readers, from Fumi Yoshinaga’s All My Darling Daughters to Taiyo Matsumoto’s GoGo Monster, and all year they kept up a steady stream of high-quality titles. In April, they announced that they would be publishing Rumiko Takahashi’s new series Rin-ne online, posting each chapter the same week it was published in Japan and thus putting them one step ahead of the scanlators. They also launched two online manga sites, Shonen Sunday and SigIKKI, and they expanded their children’s manga line, VizKids. And they sped up their releases of the top-selling series Naruto and One Piece, which probably added some cash to the coffers.

Yen Press, a publisher that knows a winner when they see one, published new editions of the first five volumes of Yotsuba&! in addition to bringing out the new ones; Yen’s new translations, which are more literal than ADVs, have caused some discussion, but that just keeps people talking. They also brought out an omnibus edition of Azumanga Daioh, by the same creator, for good measure. Their manga adaptation of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride novels has been a commercial success, with both volumes making it on to the New York Times “graphic books” best-seller list, and they have followed with announcements of manga based on the Twilight, Clique, and Gossip Girls novels.

Del Rey published its Wolverine and X-Men manga to mixed reviews, and at New York Anime Fest they announced a new approach to their manga based on the animated cartoons Ben 10 and Bakugan; rather than screen-caps of existing stories, they will be doing original stories based on the series, with an interesting array of artists and writers: Peter David, Dan Hipp, and the team of Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir. Their manga adaptations of the Avatar movie and its prequel also look promising. And like other publishers, they continue to rely on established Japanese creators, with new series in the offing by Ema Toyama (Pixie Pop) and Natsumi Ando (Kitchen Princess) among others. And their fall releases included the second volume of Nina Matsumoto's much-acclaimed Yokaiden and the award-winning Moyasimon.

Digital Manga relaunched its eManga online manga site and also tried a new tack: allowing fans to push up publication of some books by pre-ordering. Digital continued to publish a solid line of yaoi manga under several imprints throughout the year, and, like the other publishers, diversified a bit with its license of the classic shoujo manga Itazura na Kiss and its online-only editions of Harlequin manga.

Aurora, which publishes a variety of different types of manga under its own name, plus yaoi manga under the Deux imprint and Teen Love stories under the LuvLuv name, had a big sale in March and has offered manga at bargain-basement prices several times since then. An Aurora employee admitted that the company was in danger of going out of business, but it managed to make it through the year, although it doesn't seem to have released any new manga since Cigarette Kisses in September.

Pioneer manga and anime publisher Central Park Media had been comatose for some time, and they finally made it official in April by filing for bankruptcy. Erica Friedman wrote a nice eulogy for them at Anime Vice.

There were some other interesting stories this year. We bid farewell to a number of long-runnng manga series, including Fruits Basket, After School Nightmare, Parasyte, Emma, and Naoki Urasawa’s Monster.

The New York Times launched its graphic books best-seller list in March, and the first edition elicited a round of WTF? from around the blogosphere, as it consisted of eight volumes of Naruto and one each of MPD-Psycho and Eden, two books with rather narrow followings.

Manga collector Christopher Handley pled guilty to possession of child pornography, a case that caused extensive debate online. The question raised by the case was whether manga that depicts children having sex should be illegal, despite the fact that the images are completely imaginary—no children were exploited in creating them. Just before the plea, ComiPress published a lengthy article (images may be disturbing) by lawyer Lawrence Stanley arguing that such images should not be criminal. Neil Gaiman and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund also came to Handley's defense.

Dragon Ball was pulled from an elementary-school library because of some sexual content in the first volume. The book shouldn’t have been there to begin with (it’s rated 13+), but thanks to the grandstanding of a local politician, copies were removed from all the local school libraries and the public library as well.

The results of the Third Morning International Manga Competition were released, and the judges had some sharp commentary, refusing to award a third prize because the gap in quality was so great between the top two and everyone else. And they changed the name of the competition to the Morning International Comics Competition, because they were tired of looking at the usual stereotyped array of subjects—schoolgirls, ninjas, etc.

Junko Mizuno drew a Spider-Man story for Strange Tales. No, really!

Crayon Shin-chan creator Yoshito Usui died, apparently in a fall from a cliff while hiking

Astro-Boy Magazine launched on the iPhone/iPod Touch

The ero-manga anthology Comics AG folded.

Finally, the non-story of the year was Kodansha’s entry into publishing manga directly in the U.S., which had been rumored since mid-2008. They finally announced the formation of Kodansha Comics in October, but the only books they have published so far are reissues of Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and they don’t seem to have much of an infrastructure yet. I couldn’t even find a website. But 2009 was full of surprises, and maybe Kodansha will surprise me in 2010.