![]() ![]() Sometimes fan service isn’t what’s blatant, but what’s implied. This is an advertisement for the new TV anime for the manga series, Citrus. Fan service isn’t limited to girls in revealing outfits! Even men are presented in such ways to keep the female fanbase coming back for more! Fan service is mainstream in Japan. If you can catch the eyes of readers with a girl in a swimsuit, or a guy with his shirt off and muscles glistening, you can increase your chances of being noticed by a small margin. ![]() It’s not a far-fetched notion to say that the first thing a person will notice is an attractive image of a character, whether it be a man or woman. How do you stay in the game? With a good story? That’s impossible with only 25 pages a week, with people looking at your pages for only 4 seconds each, and with your manga just one of thousands of other hopefuls. (image from Bakuman by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata) Especially when they’re trying to break into the mainstream. If your audience starts waning, the company will ask you to end your manga, and you’ll be kicked out of the lineup. The process will continue until you quit, or the audience loses interest. If that week’s publication gains traction, then you get another week from the company. You have one week to send in your next chapter. If the company sees that people like your manga, they will offer to put your manga in one of their more mainstream publications. These collections of new manga artist works all have surveys at the end asking readers to give their opinions on which artists’ manga they enjoyed. These collections are sold in cheap books that are meant to be thrown away after reading. If you are a beginner, to get your start, you would have to send your manga to companies to be published in a collection among numerous other new artists’ works. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner trying to break into the game, or if you’re a seasoned veteran. Unlike Western comics, which are published primarily monthly, all popular manga are published weekly. The reason I am using manga in this comparison is that many anime are derived from manga, and therefore a lot of the same techniques used in the marketing of the original manga get used by the anime side of the industry. To understand this, one has to understand the way manga works and how it differs from the Western concept of comics. I’m sure most of you have heard the line “Sex sells” before, and Japan’s popular manga and anime market has taken it to heart. What many people in the West think of as just blatant perversion is actually a production and marketing strategy used in the hyper-competitive and capitalistic manga/anime market. ![]() What is fan service? To readers who may not be familiar with the term, “fan service” is the practice of adding elements that attract viewers and keep them watching/reading. ![]() As I’ve been grinding my way through catching up with homework, I thought of something interesting: Why not take what I learn in my anime class (yes, there’s an actual anime class that exists), and share a little bit of it with you readers? The first topic I thought would be interesting was the topic of “fan service.” A poster of Matsuura Kanan from Love Live! Sunshine!! in Dengeki G’s magazine. It’s been a little over a week since I returned from Japan, and I’ve had to hit the ground running since I missed the first week of the Spring Semester during the trip (IT WAS TOTALLY WORTH IT THOUGH). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |