Public Lending Right 2013
The public-lending right results are in, totting up my royalties from British library loans this year, with no real surprises to regular followers of this column. My samurai history is at number one,...
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The Lady in Red
One of the odd obsessions that has occupied me for the last decade is Mazu, the Chinese marine goddess, patron deity of all those in peril on the sea. She began life as a real person, Lin Moniang, a...
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Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down
When advertisers and sponsors first became involved in the anime business, it was tentative and haphazard. Masaki Tsuji reports phone early calls arriving at TV Asahi from pencil manufacturers and card...
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Geass is the Word
For those that didn’t see last week, the new Manga UK podcast is up. And we’re back for another podcast, with Jeremy Graves, Jerome Mazandarani, Andrew Hewson and Jonathan Clements, ranging over...
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Bubble Fictions
It is a scene straight out of Evangelion. At the offices of a secret government project, a stern-faced leader informs a reluctant young protagonist that the world is about to end. A clock on the wall...
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Hot Dam
In 2009, the Chinese government decided it was time to protect its netizens from the dangers of the internet, by bundling a new piece of software with all new PCs. Green Dam Youth Escort was designed...
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Toren Smith 1960-2013
My obituary of Toren Smith (left), prime mover in the American manga business, is up now on the Manga UK blog.
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New Podcast
Your vertically-enhanced host, Jeremy Graves, is joined by the newly-healed, disease-free Jerome Mazandarani, Andrew Hewson and Jonathan Clements for another rip-snorting, fan-baiting, Jerome-bashing...
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Kardok és hamvak
My Spartacus: Swords and Ashes is now available in Hungarian, and has received an enthusiastic and perceptive review that singles out the character interaction between the leads, the prophecies of...
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Chinese Whispers
Science fiction is not as easy to find in China as one might think. I never saw a massive “SCI-FI” section in Chinese bookshops, although there were often entire bays dedicated to internet novels and...
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La storia segreta dei samurai
Out now in Italian, my Brief History of the Samurai, although now it’s a “Secret” History. I samurai sono l’incarnazione della tradizione marziale giapponese: eroi senza paura, che seguono il rigido...
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The Daughter of Turan
Khaidu was a ghostly apparition – a figure at the periphery of Khubilai Khan’s world that never left him alone. He would pick and poke at Khubilai’s defences for the rest of Khubilai’s life,...
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Holy Smoke!
Tomoe Komatsubara’s schoolgirl pontiff is coming to UK DVD Seven impossibly handsome pretty-boy cardinals vie for the attention of a schoolgirl Pope, in one of the odder Japanese cartoons to make the...
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Survival Redux
My Doctor Who play Survival of the Fittest is playing again on Radio Four Extra, starting tomorrow. It’s preceded by a one-shot called Klein’s Story, which they’re counting as episode “one”, but my...
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Audible Vikings
My Brief History of the Vikings is now out as an audio book, read by Mark Meadows. So now you can have eight hours of vendettas, and encounters with Halli the Sarcastic and Einar Paunch-Shaker,...
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Sinners and Winners
News just in from the United States reveals that errors on the subtitles for the bespoke Garden of Sinners release have caused Aniplex USA to issue replacement discs for one of the DVDs. There has...
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To The Light House
I’m off to Dublin this weekend for the Japanese Film Festival at the Light House Cinema, which will be showing the first two Berserk movies, Kenji Kamiyama’s 009 RE: Cyborg, Goro Miyazaki’s From Up on...
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The Impossible Dream
I realised things had gone wrong when Yoshiyuki Tomino started hitting Takami Akai with a plastic fan. It was at a European event where the organisers had prided themselves on inviting dozens of...
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No Pressure…
Meanwhile, at the London Book Fair… My agent spotted Hodder pushing my next book in posh company.
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Danger Zone
With the news out that Tom Cruise has optioned the Japanese SF novel Yukikaze for Hollywood, now’s as good a time as any for me to point interested readers at my article about its original author in...
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