My eye is marginally better and I wanted to get this down before it all started to mush into my collective con consciousness.  (For a Dutch perspective, please look here: http://forum.ngamer.nl/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10269)

Yaoi and Yuri Con (YaYCon) was held on April 1, 2012 in Enschede, The Netherlands at a music venue called Atak.

In addition to being a Yaoi and Yuri-focused event, YaYCon explicit bills itself as a LGBTQ-friendly space. With this, and with the Dutch reputation for tolerance and acceptance, we found that the people and the event at YayCon were welcoming and friendly. Not a single “Eww, Yuri” was heard. ^_^ American BL fans, you could learn from this.

Because Amsterdam is well known for art and architecture, rather than anime and manga, we spent several days simply walking around and enjoying the sites, the canals and the buildings, rather than rushing hither and yon filling our pockets with goods. I am sorry we didn’t get a photo of the 5 euro bag of mini “Delft” shaped like wooden shoes. That was the funniest and smartest bag o’souvenirs I’ve ever seen. ^_^ Imagine this in a plastic bag with a 5€ sticker on it:

We did take this picture, because we knew the Rijksmuseum was undergoing construction and the wife was dead set against going in if Rembrandt’s The Night Watch wasn’t on exhibit.

Amsterdam is a wonderful town for walking around randomly, since the architecture did not take a beating in WWII, we were able to spot houses as old as the 16th century that still were in use.

We stayed at a Hotel called Chic and Basic. Thankfully it wasn’t Chic, instead it was quirky and charming. The giveaway was when you walk up and on the window it says in large letters “Yes, you are standing in front of the window of the hotel.” Next to that on the door it says, “Yes, this is the door to the hotel.” I loved it right at that moment. The rooms had very thankfully not been updated to the Chic and Basic decor, so they were rather strange, instead. Our room had a clown, a smurf and holiday flags as trompe l’oeil on the walls, with a ribbon painted hanging down from the wall onto the headboard of the bed. Bruce had a “painting” of a naked man over his bed. I feel sad that these will be painted over for white with white trim one day and white non-furniture. Poor weird little rooms.. Other items that had comments – the room key expressed a wish to be a movie star’s credit card, rather than a hotel room key and the soap in the hotel was confident that it was the cutest soap that we’d ever steal. (It wasn’t, but I didn’t want to tell it that….)

After several days of Amsterdam and at least one breathtaking meal, we headed out to Enschede, for YaYCon.

We had some difficulty finding our hotel, but when we found it, it was nice, if full of steep stairs. We took a walk around central Enschede, found Atak, the venue and settled in for the night.

The next AM, we headed right for Atak, and were met by Liedi, who acted as our guide for the first part, until I was set up for my lecture. Both Marissa and Nicolle were lovely and I once again thank them very much for inviting me to visit their event!

It was relatively early, and I expected more BL than Yuri fans, but when I got started, the room filled up. It was gratifying and some of the questions – including the one from the tech crew – were great.

Wifey, Bruce and I wandered around the event, and went out for a lunch of epic proportions with Lililicious leader Wendy. (Epic as in, it was the worst meal we’ve had in years. ^_^) Poor Wendy. We laughed through the meal, then went back to look around the Artist Alley.

We finished the day off with Wendy and I running a very informal Yuri Panel, where we focused on Yuri that currently is or is soon to be available in multiple languages (from this post) and, as I have begun to elsewhere, I rewarded good questions with prizes. ^_^ Fans got books, we got good questions, and we all had a lot of fun. I was presented with a piece of original art by the artist, as a gift from the con organizers. It was a lovely gesture.

Once more, my sincere thanks to Nicolle for the invitation, Marissa for her help with accommodation, Liedi for her enthusiasm, all the attendees at YayCon for being fun and cute (and so young!) and especially Wendy for her help and for hanging out with us. As always, my undying thanks to Bruce for his train-schedule skills and companionship and to my wife, for traveling with me to wherever, for whatever.

I hope those of you in Europe will try to get to YayCon in the future – it was small, pleasant and really full of wonderful fans. I hope to get to another European con in the future, so if your local con is interested in having me as a guest, have them contact me! ^_^

No review today or tomorrow, because tonight I’m working on a couple of presentations. The first one will be for the Opening Party for Rica Takashima’s Celebrate Women! Exhibit at the Ft. Lee Public Library in Ft. Lee, NJ at 7PM tomorrow, Thursday March 8. I’ll be speaking about women and comics and art.

Rica’s art interactive, so come with cameras and energy and a desire to be yourself or someone else as the mood strikes you. I hope to see you all there!

The second presentation is for Yaoi and Yuri Con in Enschede, The Netherlands. I’ll be speaking there on April 1st and I especially hope to meet some of my European readers there! YaYCon is still taking entries for their AMV contest, so I hope a bunch of you Yuri AMV folks will send in your AMVs!

Sorry for the radio silence. I can type tweets and Facebook-y things easily (although not necessarily accurately) on Tabibito, but long posts are really tiring.

I spent the weekend at MangaNEXT 2012, my first full weekend at a con in a long, long time. I’d been taking the last couple of years off for a number of reasons, and this year was there to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund at their table. I would like to start out by thanking MangaNEXT for allowing CBLDF to be there, and to give me the chance to talk to people about the Brandon X case and how current laws about border crossing affects us in the manga fandom. The talking point that really seemed to be the biggest shock, was that border guards and TSA have the right to search your electronic devices. Canada has different obscenity laws than the US and the border guards are well-known for being very anti-comic, for whatever reason. Artists who have come from the US to the Toronto Comic Art Festival have had their inventory confiscated, content notwithstanding.

This is enough of an issue that the CBLDF has put together a Advisory on the Legal Hazards of Crossing Borders with Comics. (PDF)

I am passionate about people’s right to express themselves, and I wanted to help defend Brandon X, so becoming a member of and helping the CBLDF out at cons, is a no-brainer for me. There’s a good chance that CBLDF will be attending Otakon, this year, so look for me there at their table!

Some of you may know that I was one of the original founding members of MangaNEXT. I have a vision for this convention and it has much less to do with running back and forth in the halls wearing cosplay than it does about creating the first real grassroots manga boom in America. In my head, it will be where people come to learn how to draw, to edit, to layout, to publish, to promote manga – and it will be a place where Industry comes to discover talent. It’s not there yet,  but this year it really made a significant push forward in growth.

The guests this year were extraordinary. They had two Japanese artists, Tateno Makoto and Maeda Tomo and a host of North America comic and manga artists of all sorts, from Anarctic Press’s Ben Dunn to Dave Roman (Astronaut Academy) and Raina Telgemeier (Smile) to Felipe Smith who created Peepoo Choo, and is famous for being an American artist who broke into the Japanese manga industry successfully. There were a bunch of other guests too, and I didn’t get to talk with them all, but a shout out to Dave Lister, whose bio says he is fueled by coffee which appears to be the absolute truth. I never saw him without a cup of coffee in his hand. ^_^

(Rica Takashima popped in for a moment, and we screamed in delight at one another for like a minute, then she left. So fannish.)

Both Tateno-sensei and Maeda-sensei have titles on Jmanga, and they were brought over by Robert Newman and the publisher of Shinshokan Publishing, which happens to be the very same publisher that puts out Hirari magazine. In fact, Maeda-sensei had a story in this most recent Hirari…and I didn’t bring it with me, because I completely forgot. Durh~ I did ask the editor if there was any chance that Hirari would be including more stories of adult women, and he said they were pretty much sticking with schoolgirls for the foreseeable future. Oh well. But at least he was honest. ^_^;

Felipe Smith was 10 times cooler than he seems and he seems very cool. He’s one of those guys you wind him up and let him talk and he’s funny and interesting and you can just sit there and nod and laugh. I caught one of his panels and the insight he provided to the life of a mangaka is amazing.

The Yuri Panel was a lot of fun. It’s always fun, but sometimes it’s funner than others. This time people gave us some good provocative questions and we had a pretty sizable pile of Yuri manga and anime (where the Yuri was at minimum, the plot-driver, if not the actual plot) to suggest to North American fans. Just to sum up the list quickly:

Anime

Black Rock Shooter – Free Streaming – Nico Nico Douga, but you might have to register and the site is in Japanese. Google “How to register for Nico Nico Douga” in English and you will probably find someone who has a step by step on that (Thanks Sean, for that terrific idea!).

Puella Magi Madoka Magica – Free Streaming, Crunchyroll, DVD/Blu-ray from Aniplex

Maria-sama ga Miteru  – Free streaming episodes on Nozomi/Right Stuf’s Youtube Channel, DVD from RightStuf (also Aria, which really has no Yuri….)

Revolutionary Girl Utena – DVD available from RightStuf

Manga

Love My Life – Digital on Jmanga

Poor Poor Lips – Digital on Jmanga

Girl Friends – Digital on Jmanga, Print from Seven Seas

There’s a ton more things that “have Yuri” out there right now, like Bodacious Space Pirates on Crunchyroll and Morita-san ha Mukuchi on JManga, so this list is growing steadily. Also this summer Rica’tte Kanji!? ~ Tokyo Love will be out in digital format.

I gave a ton of stuff away at the panel, too. Books and postcards and magazines and things. I hope everyone enjoys their goodies. Thanks for coming to the panel and thanks for the great questions!

***

The second panel I was on was the “State of the Industry” Panel. Ed Chavez from Vertical was the moderator (we kind of made him do it, and he did a great job, thanks Ed) Robert Newman from JManga and Robert McGuire from Gen manga.

The panel talked at length about the very fractured state of, well, everything, in the industry right now, but unlike other Industry panels, maybe, both Robert from Gen and I stated unconditionally that we “get” scanlations and while, yes, they have an effect on sales, we think it will smooth out eventually, as better digital distribution makes it irrelevant.

The topic we spent most of the time on is digital and print and how the competing needs are  – at the moment, this too shall change – pretty heavy resource suckers on publishers. A lot of time was spent on trying to explain the layers that exist between fans and “why can’t I just get this NOW?” and how companies are, really, trying to get you everything you want. It’s just that there are competing formats and hardware and standards and layers and layers of decision-makers at Japanese companies. Robert from Gen said that that was exactly why they started talking to doujinshi artists, rather than through companies (much as we did, at ALC.)

JManga reaffirmed their commitment to a global solution and multiple languages. (You may have noticed in Robert’s interview with Brigid Alverson, he mentioned that Yuri is a top-selling genre for them.) We discussed the massive problem of distribution in this country, which is to say – there is none, anymore. Bookstores, gone, Diamond doesn’t want to deal with anyone but DC, Marvel and Dark Horse. And…that’s about all there is. That leaves us Amazon, and digital. (And shows, but they are so unlikely to ever make a company big money.) We talked about the market saturation that popular manga gets in Japan and how we really don’t have anything like that here, or like the fact that on every street corner you can get manga at a convenience store with your lunch.

We talked about how right now audiences still want an option for a printed volume. I pointed out that that’s only because we grew up with it, and in twenty years, people who would be college age might never have used a print book. We discussed the one genuinely frustrating issue with illicit downloading and that was the lack of understanding of consequence. Actually, that was a theme I encountered a lot during this weekend. That anime and manga fans frequently live inside a bubble where they are protected from the consequence of their actions. And if/when they go outside that bubble, they act as if the real world is in the wrong. For me, it comes down to a moral compass. I understand the downloading of a scanlation to a series that is not out, although I choose to not do it myself. But, when we, the industry, say, hey – that series is out, legitimately and you can get it…just not for free, because the creator, the translator, the editor, the letterer all deserve to eat tonight and the answer is, “well, screw you, I don’t want to/can’t, so I’ll just keep taking it for free” there’s a lack of moral compass there. One of the signs of a mature individual is that they do the right thing *because they can* not because they *have* to.

I see a lot of manga and anime fans who do actually develop that moral compass. They downloaded stuff when they were a poor college student. (Not really poor, mind, you, they just didn’t have money for stuff like anime and manga) but when they did get jobs and had money, they started buying those things, because now they can.  The problem with scanlation aggregators is that they look legit, and they make a lot of money off those folks who use them. And many of those folks, especially the younger ones, have no idea that those sites aren’t legit.  The problem is when you tell them that they are not legit, and so they are faced with the decision to do the right thing and go without downloading manga (they could borrow from the library, or buy it, but that takes effort…) or go to this site where getting that thing is frictionless and simple. THAT’s where you see who has moral compass.

I went on a rant about why is it okay with the those of you who like shiny things that Apple just told DMP to take their BL off the iPad app? WHY?!? If the TV hardware manufacturers told you what TV stations you could receive, you’d be enraged. When your work blocks sites, you find ways around it. So why the hell is it okay will all you Apple fans that Apple censors content? I cannot understand why you are not screaming at all, much less loudly? APPLE CENSORS CONTENT. Especially LGBTQ content. Why are you still giving money to a company like that? People boycott BP and Chik-Fil-A and Target…but are absolute sheep about Apple’s censorship of content. ARGGGGGHHHH.

One of the final things we discussed is the lack of infrastructure (because of lack of market maturity) in the American manga market. Most of the companies that started the first manga bubble are gone, except for Dark Horse, all of the original anime companies are gone. Most from the second wave are gone too. The companies growing the market now are new or niche or reboots. There is no infrastructure here to support a connection between readers and artists. There is no infrastructure here at *all.* So as fan demands run in front of company’s resources, fans have a tendency to see “the industry” as a homogenous thing, and they tend to see themselves as a giant untapped market. In reality, there is no “industry” just a lot of small groups with limited resources and personal relationships and while the manga audience is growing massively, the market simply isn’t; untapped or not.

I once again promoted my idea of a digital platform that allowed creators to control their work, and Ed was in agreement that the future is likely to kill off what we think of as “publishers” and create a more curation-oriented function, with individuals who get permission directly from the creator to translate, edit, letter, etc. becoming the new publishing paradigm, effectively removing some of those middleman layers.

Lastly, we all agreed with all the paper thin margins for profit in manga, no one will ever get rich, except for a very few, and of all the people making no money at publishing, editors get the the fewest chicks and the least money. ^_^

Before the panel, I had a chance to sit down with Robert Newman from JManga, and while I can’t tell you everything that we discussed, I can tell you this – JManga is working to get you more Yuri…and more of everything else, as well.

We talked at the industry panel about the lack of a bookstore or a library for manga, and Robert said flat out that that was exactly what JManga was angling to be – the place where you can find it all.

As MangaNEXT came to an end, I find myself more hopeful than I have been for years – about Yuri, about manga in general and about MangaNEXT. Next year, I’d like to see them add a specific soup-to-nuts track  on manga creation and publication and I encourage all of you who are involved with manga – as blogger, creator, reader – to join us there next year. Yuricon & ALC will be there in some capacity as we have been from the beginning.

Lastly, but not at all least, my sincere thanks to the following: Alex Cox from CBLDF for making it possible for me to be there, Sean Gaffney for being a all-around terrific person and a great con companion, John Bogan for his support, Erin, Hyo and all the staff of MangaNEXT and especially con chair Ezra. Ezra – I’m so proud of you. You did a great job.

I’ll see you all there next year! ^_^

Anime News Network has covered this panel in some detail,  so I’m not going to repeat what they said. For background of what the CBLDF does, how they came to be in existence, and how they are involved in the current Canadian Border case, please read the ANN article. Crystalynn did a great job in covering it.

I am a comics collector since, quite probably, before most of my readers were born. As a kid, there was that ever-present Comics Code Authority stamp on every comic I bought, signifying that a panel of censors had passed this comic as acceptable for me to read it. As an opener for the panel, Charles discussed how the CCA was a response by the industry to allegations of comics “harming youth” (does that sound familiar? Bill 156 was passed for the same reason.) As a child I was also subjected to stories of some kid, somewhere, throwing themselves off a roof, thinking they were Superman, and how, obviously, comics were bad for kids. My Dad was a comics reader, so there was never an assumption of the innate harm reading a comic could inflict on me in my household – but there were in others. I knew plenty of kids whose parents would not let them read a comic book, because comics make kids crazy or violent.

As I got older, Heavy Metal music was going to turn me into a Satanist, computer games would make me violent, etc. etc. As Charles pointed out, the persecution by adults of entertainment for children is pretty much a constant refrain. And now…manga is being targeted. Of course it is, because it’s popular among kids and their parents do not understand it. And, by extension our government, which is always the parental force for an adult life, also does not understand (and therefore, fears) manga.

The CCA was developed to protect publishers, CBLDF began to protect retailers who were targeted for selling comics. The battle, as Charles noted, has shifted to people purchasing manga – the readers. Us.

The CBLDF has a long, rich history with the creators of comics, but this new case brings them to new territory – the manga community. I am working with them to share resources and information in the manga community and hoping that we will all hang together, as Benjamin Franklin said, or we will assuredly hang separately.

Let me reiterate a few key points about the Brandon X case:

His personal electronics were searched. This is legal – both Border Patrol and TSA have the right – and imprimatur – to do this. (That this is legal is another issue, but one we should consider addressing with our government officials.)

2 comics were labeled as offensive.

He was detained and questioned and is now facing jail time.

That is what we know.

The content of the comics does not matter. This is something Charles repeated several times, and I agree with him completely. Comics are Art. Art is protected speech and comics are, and ought to be, a free form of expression.

Reading or drawing a comic is not a crime.

There are no “children” in comics. These are pictures. Not people. That was the point of my essay. A picture of a thing is not the thing itself.  If I draw myself robbing a bank, I have not actually robbed a bank – or even necessarily desired to do so. Fumi is not real. Yumi is not real. They are not “children,” any more than Clark Kent is an “adult.”

A thought is not a crime. If I do actually imagine myself robbing a bank, it is still not an actual crime.

We cannot and must not treat thoughts as crimes or punish them as crimes if we wish to live in a free society.

For those of us who read Yuri, this is not someone else’s problem. Hanjuku Joshi has adorable art. So does GIRL FRIENDS.  They also have situations that, should they be real-world depictions of things, might get you in trouble with a postmaster or a TSA agent. Think about it. However, they are not real depictions, they are lines on paper. No “children” exist in either. There is only Art there, and your imagination. Thoughts, words, images. All completely innocent and crime-free.

So, this weekend, I handed out stickers that looked like this:

And then I (and Melinda Beasi, Ed Sizemore, Richard Beaubien, Lissa Pattillo and CBLDF interns Lily and Michelle and lots of other folks who helped us this weekend! ) explained this case and why it’s so important to the manga community. Readers of manga and doujinshi are not publishers, not businesspeople. We are individuals who need to stand up for freedom of expression. That’s what the CBLDF is doing right now, for a single individual.

Don’t get afraid, get active. Please support the CBLDF, and please feel free to share this image and the story with your manga-reading friends. The more of us who stand up against this particular form of tyranny, the stronger we are.

Freedom of expression is something I will passionately defend to the end. I hope you’ll join me in this effort to protect ourselves from fear and ignorance. CBLDF is hoping to develop educational materials to assist us all in opening productive discussion with institutions that need training on the topic. When these materials are available, I will be sure to share them with you.

Thanks so very, very much to the CBLDF’s Charles Brownstein and Alex Cox for allowing me the opportunity to get involved in this issue and to all of you who attended the panel, asked good questions and got us all thinking about what we can do to help. Thanks also to Deb Aoki, whose comments were leavening and thoughtful.

My last word is this – when we are all old, can we just *not* bitch about kids’ entertainment being a harmful influence? That would be kind of refreshing, I think.