Female Wrestling in Manga: August 2008

I've been wrestling with this one for a while now ...

... no pun intended.

As you all should know by now, I'm a firm believer in the need to support the artists/publishing houses that are willing to do manga which includes what we like: I don't, and won't, post for free what we, even as small an impact as it is, can buy. That being said:

http://kusanyagi.blogspot.com/search/label/fighting

This fellow accepts commissions from people to translate and revamp pages of manga for them. Some of these commissions are then made public, as per agreement with the commissioner.

Since this falls into a "not available for purchase" way to actually read the manga as opposed to kinda getting the story based on pictures ... well ... you see my dilemma ...

Oh, only the "Wrestle Idol" and "Cynthia" need be looked at. The other has no wrestling; more weapons and martial arts kind of stuff.

I keep thinking of sending him some of my scans (Beniko?), but at $1 a page, that would be another $400 ... we'll see ...

Those guys in Japan ...

Not only can they do the ladies in 2D

drawings but also 3D model

versions!

I just happened upon this; Not an item for sale (darn) but rather an exhibition piece at a hobby shop in Tokyo ... Below find the drawing that, I dare say, was used as the inspiration, variations of which have been around a long time. Funny, that with all the great Japanese artists to work from, the modeler chose this one ...

More images can be found here: http://yume-zoukei.com/exhibition.html

Thought some might enjoy it.

What I mean by "printing flaws" ...

It can happen to the best of us, so why not the artists, too? Here, as the art department added the ropes into the scene (something a different person might have been doing?) they chose to either have her boots show completely for some reason, or the ropes just got laid in wrong.

Back in the day, before computer assisted drawing, the background/textures in a piece may have been done using a rub-off transfer sheet; you can still buy them and many budding artists use them.

In this second picture, I've put her legs behind the ropes were they belong. Doesn't happen too often, but I've found a few times this sort of thing has happened as I've been going over the pages ... thought some of you might find it interesting.

As always, as soon as I say it's not available ...

http://www.amazon.co.jp/ãƒªãƒ³Ã—ãƒžãƒž-ãƒãƒ³ãƒ–ãƒ¼ãƒ»ã‚³ãƒŸãƒƒã‚¯ã‚¹NAMAIKI-SELECT-çœŸé‹-è²æ²»/dp/481246868X

Here it is. "Ring Mama" ... As expected, it will run as a series unto itself.

I ran a trial order (though did not press "confirm") and Amazon never said it couldn't ship to me, so it would seems that this book will be able to ship out of Japan.

For those that thought I was dead ...

(re posted from what I said at my Yahoo group)

Japan's been pretty quite this year as far as new stuff in mainstream manga and/or anime goes (at least, as far as I know), though there's an adult mag that's been running a new piece drawn by artist Joji Manabe (see image; I grabbed 3 issues) ... but, like "Idol Wrestler"(different mag; on-going), I should think it will be published as a standalone at some point, so I've stopped the single issue shipping; not enough wrestling action to really make it worth while.

In the meantime, I've been gathering more CRAZY expensive rare stuff: "Lady Wrestler Beniko" ... the original Young Jump magazine issues from 25 years ago (1982/83). I've now got 20 of the 23 issues, dropping around $100 each ... Yep, $2000 ... what can I say ... once they arrive, I'm scanning the pages (around 400 in the 20 mags), removing age/printing flaws from the images, thus trying to get the images as clean as is reasonable (there's always more to do!) and saving the "restored" images. I'm sure there's a program out there that could do it for me without going blind staring at the screen for hours, but ...

Old; best I had until now