moe culture, and connecting with anime through food.
Last weekend was Comic Market, aka Comiket , the huge doujinshi convention in which 35,000 artist circles offer their newest fan-made parody comics, indies games and other non-professional creations to hundreds of thousands of fans. A mind-blowing 550,000 visitors attended the event over a three-day period, easily beating the 130,000 visitors to the San Diego Comic-Con, making Comiket the second largest gathering of humans on the planet, after pilgrimages to Mecca in the Middle East. In addition to fan artists and other amateur groups, more and more companies have been using Comiket to market their products. While everyone expects companies like Nitroplus to be there, showing off their newest Super Sonico figures, other companies less closely linked to otaku culture were also at the show. Toyota had a presence, promoting the upcoming Initial D movie by showing off its classic Trueno AE86, and wireless carrier AU was tying its services to an anime about bicycle racing called Yowamushi Pedal. In recent years dairy manufacturer Snow Brand has scored big by challenging artists to create illustrations based on its cute character Yukiko-tan, and this year they were handing out free packs of coffee milk with the characters printed on the packaging. One of the challenges companies face is how to get their marketing message through to young people, which is a highly desirable but hard to access market segment, which is what makes exhibiting at the Comiket the perfect solution for many of them. Incidentally, J-List is loaded with tons of brand-new doujinshi that were just released at Comic Market 86. Browse them now!
When anime and manga creators go to design a new character, they naturally want to make their creation stand out, so they might experiment with unique hair ornaments like Sena Kashiwazaki’s butterfly hairpin, make them social outcasts in a cute way, or perhaps instill in them a love of sharks. A lot of times, characters are assigned a specific favorite food or drink, which adds a certain charm to their personalities. Some examples are Shana and her beloved “melon bread” (a kind of sweet bread that looks vaguely like a wrinkled melon), C.C. from Code Geass and her love of Pizza Hut, characters eating Pocky and Pretz in Please Teacher! and Please Twins! and the meme of Dr. Pepper being “the intellectual drink for the chosen ones” in Steins;Gate. Many characters are “mayolers” (what the Japanese call someone who love mayonnaise), like Akane from Vividred Operation, Hijikata from Gintama and Kotetsu from Tiger and Bunny, and their love of mayonnaise becomes an opportunity for comic relief. I love it when real Japanese foods find their way into anime, because being able to eat the foods the characters you love are enjoying on screen adds a fun new dimension to fandom that makes me feel all warm inside.
At J-List, we love all visual novels and eroge from Japan, and have worked hard to build a catalog of licensed English games worthy of our customers’ love, as well as offering import (Japanese-language) games direct from Japan. We’ve got some good news: we’ve renewed our exclusive distribution agreement with MangaGamer have great new games in stock for you. In addition to fresh stock of titles we’d been sold out on for months, enjoy Tick! Tack! (the sequel/spin off from the popular Shuffle! game), plus Kara no Shoujo, Eroge! (an awesome game about developing H-games) and more. Browse all the new MangaGamer titles now!
