Archive for the ALC Publishing Category


Journey Through the First 100 Years of Yuri Manga with Erica Friedman By Your Side

February 18th, 2021

It’s official! I and Journey Press are pleased to announce By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Manga & Anime.

The term “Yuri” began life as a coded reference to lesbianism within manga and anime genres, but in the last two decades has been shaped by creators, publishers and fans into a genre of its own. Though Yuri as a genre is a modern development, it has a century of artistic and literary history behind it. In “By Your Side: The First 100 Year of Yuri,” we take a stroll through that history, from Yoshiya Nobuko’s pioneering works for young women in 1920s Japan, to current 21st century trends in webcomics, light novels, visual novels, events, manga and more.

Factual, funny and highly entertaining, By Your Side is a series of interlocking essays, articles and lectures from Friedman’s work on Yuri anime and manga. Meant to be approached as informal discussion in the manner of convivial conversation over multiple dinners, or panels at an anime convention, through these essays, readers will become familiar with the key creators, tropes, concepts, symbols and titles of the first 100 years of the Yuri genre. Walk by our side as we journey through the past, present and future of Yuri!

By Your Side is scheduled for a June 2022 release, in time for both Pride Month and the 20th anniversary of Okazu, the oldest and  most comprehensive site on Yuri in any language.

 

About Erica Friedman

Erica holds a Masters Degree in Library Science and a B.A. in Comparative Literature, and is a full-time researcher for a Fortune 100 company. She has lectured at dozens of conventions and presented at film festivals, notably the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. She has participated in an academic lecture series at MIT, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Harvard University, Kanagawa University, and others.

She has edited manga for JManga, Seven Seas and Udon Entertainent, most recently Riyoko Ikeda’s epic historical classic, The Rose of Versailles.

Erica has written about Yuri for Japanese literary journal Eureka,  Animerica magazine, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund,  Dark Horse, and contributed to Forbes, Slate, Huffington Post, Hooded Utilitarian, and The Mary Sue online. The founder of Yuricon, she has written news and event reports, interviews Yuri creators and reviews Yuri anime, manga and related media on her blog Okazu since 2002.

 

About Journey Press

Journey Press was born in 2019 with the goal of bringing unusual and diverse science fiction to the forefront of the publishing landscape. They are dedicated to supporting the women and queer people who have been erased from the history books and reprinting novels that fell by the wayside, in addition to publishing new novels by creators of all types.

For interviews, signings or appearances please contact Erica Friedman

https://www.yuricon.com/contact-yuricon/

For all other publicity, please contact Christine Sandquist at publicity@journeypress.com

Contact Us

 

 





Get a Piece of Yuri Manga History at Cheapmanga.com

November 3rd, 2020

Our friends at Cheapmanga.com have been kind enough to make all remaining ALC manga volumes available at discount prices!

Yuri Monogatari Volumes 3,4 & 6, the English-language global Yuri anthology from ALC Publishing are available for $18.00 for the set! This Yuri anthology includes selections from Japanese artists like Rica Takashima, Eriko Tadeno, Akiko Morishima, Nishi UKO, as well as artists from every corner of the world.

 

 

YM1 and YM2 were very small runs and due to a host of reasons could not be reprinted. I’m sorry about that now, but the initial idea was to print it like a doujinshi, with short annual runs for shows. Then it got a little more popular and we had to print more, and then printing exploded and all our files couldn’t be read the same way and what had been high resolution was now very low and we didn’t have a way to fix that (or, in some cases, reach the artists to get the rights to reprint permission,) so those are long out of print.

 

WORKS by Eriko Tadeno, the second Yuri manga to ever be published in English is available for $7.  This collection of 4 stories that walk us through lesbian lives and loves, including stories of coming out to family, old school crushes and a workplace romance long before the current Shakajin craze.

Buy all 4 books for $25 – and with the code ALC2020, you’ll get free US shipping on orders of $25 or more! This code is good for any books and it’ll stay good, so feel free to hit them up later, for more manga!

 

 

I want to personally thank all of you who have already purchased these books – the folks at Cheapmanga let me know they *love* the kind notes and comments they’ve been getting. With all the conventions canceled, they’ve missed the interaction with fans. This morning I handed over another set of boxes and was told, specifically that my crowd was the nicest people. I’m so thankful to all of you for being the nicest people! ^_^ Definitely keep writing nice notes and comments for them, please. They’ve been good friends for many years, and the loss of conventions this year has been hard on them emotionally and business-wise.

Thank you all for your patience with this weekend’s website security issues and for your support of Yuri manga! And also of my massive cleanup of the office, because every box of books you buy is extra space for me! ^_^





Wynnona Earp on Netflix

July 26th, 2020

Wynonna Earp is ridiculous, it’s gross and violent (the very first scene involves someone’s tongue being cut out), it frequently makes no sense, it piles one plot complication on top of another, without resolving it, or the three previous plot complications before it. Worse, when 99% of the characters are undead, undying or unreal, no bad guy ever just…goes away.  It’s a modern paranormal western with absurd shootouts and some of the most godawful fight choreography I’ve ever seen.

But I kinda like it anyway. ^_^

It helps that several of the characters are openly queer and others are probably queer given the right circumstances. Queerable, if you will.

It also helps that this series, developed by Syfy, now also on Netflix, is so stupendously absurd that I can comfortably watch it with almost no real concern, since by the end of Season 3, at least, pretty much all of the main characters have died at least once and are still with us. It’ll get harder and harder to believe anyone is actually dead and out of the show until Twitter tells me so. ^_^

Descendant of Wyatt Earp, Wynnona, has her whole life struggled under a family curse that, (among other things,) ended up with her killing her father and, later, being sent away to an asylum. The curse is real, and so are all the hellish demons plaguing her family and Wynnona’s only real problem, it turns out, is that she’s perfectly sane and is the Heir of Wyatt’s curse. Wynnona and her sister, Waverly, are joined in their fight by the immortal Doc Holliday, and eventually by a host of adorable misfits and weirdos.

Waverly, a bubbly young woman who taught herself ancient languages in order to be worthy of being the Heir, falls in love with new cop in town, redheaded Nicole Haught. In Season 3, the team gets gay researchers/scientist/whatever they need him to be/generic lab guy Jeremy and then he gets a boyfriend who is also a total whatever they need him to be for that arc, forest ranger, lost boy, twink, Robin.

Ultimately what’s keeping me watching is the vulgarity and the fact that the all the characters, female characters especially, are written with depth, with variety and with skill. Even the bad characters have depth and not just tragic “evil person sad story” depth…although every character does indeed have a tragic backstory.

I was not blown away by this show at first, but I find that it has seriously grown on me and not just because it hasn’t given in to Bury Your Gays. That is to say, it has killed most of the gay characters at least once, but all of the characters have been killed at least once, so that’s not an issue.

Ratings:

Cinematography – 6  CGI effects, batman angles, too close on kisses, horrible fights
Story – Goes from ridiculous to laughable
Character – 8 Inconsistent, but fun
LGBTQ – 9
Service – 3 Some, but fairly sprinkled about

Overall – 8

I’m always on the lookout for a series to half-assedly pay attention to as I work and Wynnona Earp is perfectly suited to mostly ignore. ^_^ But when I do look up, the people are pretty, the gays get to have sex, too, and everyone is permanently not-dead. So, that’s good. The actress playing Waverly, Dominique Provost-Chalkley, has recently come out, which is sweet.

It’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer the western, in 2020.





“Tokyo Love ~ Rica ‘tte Kanji!?” named a “Best Manga for Grownups” at Comic-Con

July 23rd, 2013

We like to think that it wasn’t just because we’re friends with most of the panelists at San Diego Comic-Con’s 2013 “Best and Worst Manga” Panel, that our own Tokyo Love ~ Rica ‘tte Kanji!? was included on the list of “Best Manga for Grownups.” ^_^

Many thanks to Brigid, Deb, Christopher, David and Shaenon.

Experience Rica Takashima’s look at lesbian life and love in Tokyo in the 1990s for yourself. Read Tokyo Love ~ Rica ‘tte Kanji!? for free, legally online! Enjoy!





Stories, Stories Everywhere…

July 7th, 2013

Welcome to Special Announcements Sunday here on Okazu. A happy Tanabata to you.

When I stepped away from events and publishing in March, the most popular question I received at the time was, “What will you do with your free time?” I have an answer for that now. I am spending my time and money on getting things done that have been left languishing for years. So. Today we have two announcements:

Yuriko and Midori by KunThe final chapters of Saiyuu no Ryouko: The Continuing Adventure of Yuriko are (at last!) available on Yuricon.

Shoujoai ni Bouken and Saiyuu no Ryouko, the stories about our beloved Yuricon mascot, out lesbian pop idol Yuriko and her lover, novelist Midori, are completed and up for your reading pleasure.

The first book took a mere 7 months to write, but I had no other obligations and I spent a lot of my days and nights writing.  The sequel took several years to write, but it’s been complete, probably, since 2008 or so. Time just got away from me, with other, more critical tasks.  Looking back over the chapters, I’m still very happy with the stories.  Yuriko and Midori are characters I like to think about, even now.  Maybe one day I’ll even write more about them. In any case, I hope you enjoy reading their stories as much as I enjoyed writing it. ^_^ Please feel free to write fanfic for them. We put SnB/SnR fanfic up on Yuricon. Fanart is also welcome – it will go up on our Yuriko and Friends Gallery. If you are motivated to write or draw about Yuriko and her friends, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. ^_^

***

Worldshaking 2.0And, even further down the list of “stuff to get to eventually” was my poor little fan/fiction site, “Worldshaking” Fanfic. I originally built an archive in 1997 when I first started to write Xena fanfic. Like so many other people at the time, I had a free site (not Angelfire ^_^;)  and in 1998, I added my first Sailor Moon stories. It was about then I moved to my own site, “Worldshaking” Fanfic, although the Wayback Machine only has an image from 2001. I remember the first site I built. I was so proud of myself. ^_^  The image here is from my first site renewal. I spent *hours* on that tiled clouds background. /grin/

The site remained substantially the same from 1998-2006, when I ran a contest here on Okazu to get a new design. Kyanite developed a spiffy new site design for me – one that was not terribly different from what most people would be doing shortly thereafter on WordPress. I was writing more Maria-sama ga Miteru stories by then and a lot of Miscellaneous Fanfic from random, obscure series like Amakusa 1637, Transistor ni Venus, Hana no Asuka-gumi, and the like. ^_^

WSF2Also around then I started putting together more original fiction, aside from Yuriko and Midori. Fanfic is a great way to learn the basics of writing, with training wheels. With a fanfic, you don’t have to create the world, the situations or the relationships.  (Although I often do anyway. I tend to create original characters and situations, even while using the ones already established by the series. ) The new site allowed me to focus on whatever I was doing at the time, without losing access to the rest.

I haven’t written a lot of fanfic in the past few years. In 2008, I lost a job, got another one, lost that, got a *terrible* job, left that, had a series of awful jobs until 2010 when I got the job I have now, which I love. Those years were not easy on me – my health and creativity crashed and burned. Duh. And here we are, years later and I am *finally* back to a place where my creativity has returned to close to previous levels. I’m ready to write again. And now I have the time, too.

So, here is my second announcement.  “Worldshaking” Fanfic is back, with a new look  – and a new, original story! And I find myself mentally gearing up to finish a bunch of unfinished stories, (including a cyberpunk novella I have had in my head for probably close to a decade now, which is about 2/3rds done.)

WSF3

Before I wrap up here, I want to mention two things. One – you may have noticed that all the iterations of the site have that dorky little animated gif of Sailor Uranus doing “World Shaking!” I love it, do not grief me over it.  As long as there is a WSF, that gif will be there.  ^_^ (Does anyone else remember those?  They were from some game or other, I think I probably have them all on an unreadable backup disk somewhere.)

Secondly and most importantly, the recent Yuricon, Okazu and WSF site renewals have been worked on by the incomparable Lissa Pattillo. Lissa’s design skills, patience and WordPress wizardry cannot be praised enough. I recommend her with all my recommends for your website needs.

Thank you for reading Okazu and for reading my stories over the years. I hope to bring you many more. ^_^