Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me

When interest in manga was really picking up over here, I did wonder if it would sort of "force out" interest in that other import from Japan, anime. A good deal of anime, after all, is made as an adaptation of manga, and there often seems an undercurrent of opinion that stories get watered down, padded out, or cut off partway through in that process of adaptation, to say nothing of how a case might also be made that the art in manga just has more personality when it doesn't have to be farmed out to animators and in-betweeners.

However, my own interest still seems to be focused on anime, and I have to admit a part of that seems to be the scandals drummed up about how the art in this title or that has been drawn over to preserve our tender North American sensibilities. I seem to get into awful "cut off my nose to spite my face" moods, standing on principles and unwilling to buy any titles from a good number of companies. (In the meantime, other people get into similar moods towards anime companies, and I just sort of shrug their more occasional failings off...) After a long fallow period following a volume of "Fullmetal Alchemist" being edited, though, I was starting to drift back into buying manga from Viz, particularly from their new "Signature" line, which seemed to be targeted to older readers, and which they were offering online previews of. However, on hearing that the second volume of "Bokurano" got edited (as icky as the stuff that did get edited out of this particular somewhat skewed take on "giant robots" might sound), my mood deflated in a depressing and somehow familiar way, and I found myself wondering when I'd next be willing to buy another title from them. However, I was able to return the volume I'd bought to the bookstore and instead get a new title from Vertical, so maybe my connection to manga as a whole hasn't been sundered altogether just yet.