Birds go Tweet, Free Comic Book Day is Free, Mad Max goes CG Anime?

Three important bits of news from my end of the world.

So in case anybody hasn’t noticed yet, my fictional webmanga character Junko got herself a Twitter Feed… and of course my article explaining the problematic nature of a Mad Max CG anime feature film being in the works from George Miller himself, is up at The Banzai Effect! Blog right now.

Hopefully one good thing will come of it, the first anime film produced in recent memory to have an Australian dub from Aussie voice actors rather than an awful American dub which was used to sell Mad Max to American moviegoers back in the 1970s. Think about it. When was the last time you heard an Australian in an anime voice actor cast? Pretty much never. Knowing George Miller is behind this, and his insistence on creating Australian films that attempt to draw influence from world cinema and yet promote Australian talent at the same time, this is a compelling idea to me. Sure, the CG anime Mad Max sequel might turn out to suck, but at least it will have Australian voice actors in it. I hope so anyway.

Oh, and by the way…

There’s something called Free Comic Book Day, which is a worldwide event where you can get a free comic book, which comic book stores and bookstores use as an event to promote comics and manga awareness. I attended the said event at Sydney’s Books Kinokuniya. It was the same day I had morning tea with my editor to discuss my details about the publisher who is interested in my work and how to approach them, but it was a relaxed stroll through bookshelves after that where I introduced my editor who is in her fifties now to a world she’d never known. There were costumed vendors, and I was served my Free Comic Book by The Joker and Doctor Octopus (which was strangely a free Graphic Novel, which my comics blogging authority/comic book store clerk Chris Sims tells me was not on the ordering list where he works…).

Free Comic Book Day is about all comics. In case you haven’t heard, manga translates to comics in the Japanese language, so let’s get that part of comics history into the heads of Japanophiles everywhere. I would call them “weaboos”, but down under, as we all know from reading my blog, the “weaboo” does not exist. Only “anime and manga fans” exist down under. And that kind of understanding between fans of both kinds of popular fields of comics is something the Australian Free Comic Book Day uses to succeed in creating a message promoting comics and manga without the divisions of cultural discourse. I am yet to extract the comics vendors part of the story from Chris Sims, who has just gone through eighteen hours of what is basically the comic book retailer’s equivalent of Dante’s Inferno, but from my experience the effort every employee of comic retailers and bookshops put in makes the experience all the more enjoyable.

Salute to the clerks. They dressed up in outlandish costumes so you could enjoy your day shopping for comics and manga. They put in the hours every week so you can buy the comics and manga you love, and they order it in for you if they don’t have it in stock. That is why Chris Sims to me is an alternative voice to the usual anime blogs I read. He knows his trade and the medium he is supposed to encourage people to buy into. But then… there’s the clerks who I never learned the names of that probably worked just as hard as Chris Sims did. Chris Sims just puts a human face on the anguish, but joy of the hard working comic book retailers, in providing a service to the general public every single day. In Australia, these people were working on a Saturday morning. From 10am. In most likely hard to manage but realistic Star Wars Stormtrooper costumes that would make Danny Choo proud.

No people as young as the people working in Kinokuniya on Saturday for a full shift would have done the hard yards if they just wanted money to pay their rent, or their food or electricity bills. They worked, in an economy that yes, demands them to work to earn money to survive, but they worked, because they wanted to provide service to people who wanted a fun day out. Thank God nobody treated the employees badly. Some customers like myself expressed messages of sympathy of the smiling but exhausted clerks who would most likely be there all day, even after the Zine Fair and Free Comic Book Day festivities were over.

Support your local comics retailer and bookshop employees. Because they support you every day. Whether they want to or not.

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Copyright (c) Jacob Martin 2009