In a few hours I’ll be traveling to Otakon, so what better way to prepare than publishing OMG Kawaii Desu!: A parent’s guide to anime, manga, and cosplay on the Nook family of readers and tablets. If all goes well it will be available for purchase in a few days. So stay tuned!
Tag: cosplay
As I prepare for Anime Central this weekend, I am pleased to announce the publication of OMG Kawaii Desu!: A parent’s guide to anime, manga, and cosplay! This book has been in the works for the last year or so, somewhat later than I had first planned. So thank you to everyone for your patience!
About the book:
Your kids are watching cartoons with apple loving demons and magical schoolgirls, mixing Japanese words you don’t understand with their English, reading black and white comic books backwards, and wearing strange costumes. What’s a parent to do? First don’t panic, it’s okay. Your kids are just fans of Japanese anime, manga, and cosplay. This guide is intended to give you an educated look into the world your kids have embraced.
As popular as anime has become in the United States, it is still not mainstream entertainment. So many parents are at a loss to understand this thing that their kids have an interest in, and sometimes an obsession with. In this vein, I often get questions from other parents about what anime their kids might enjoy. While I certainly have an opinion on what I like in anime and the shows my own kids enjoy, it isn’t always easy to translate that into recommendations for another family.
So, with some gentle prodding from my wife, I’m writing a parent’s guide to anime, manga, and cosplay. I’m not looking to make specific recommendations of which anime series kids should be watching, so much as giving some background and general guidelines. There are a number of such guides on web sites across the net, but many of these focus only on anime. And I think an eBook might be a more effective way of reaching a target audience more comfortable searching for books than searching the web. Â My hope is to produce a concise guide that will allay much of the fear that American parents have when it comes to anime, manga, and cosplay.
It is true that Japanese anime is created in a culture that necessarily has a different worldview than American culture. But Japanese parents love their children just as much as American ones do. And they wrestle with the same challenges raising their children. My hope is to show that not only is there nothing to fear in anime, but maybe American parents should get into it too!
Now that Borders has filed for bankruptcy and the local Borders is closing, maybe its time to dust off those plans to open a manga cafe in the neighborhood! My wife suggested this, perhaps only half seriously, in response to yesterday’s post.
We started talking about the idea a few years ago. The idea was to open a little shop specializing in East Asian popular culture. This would include graphic novels, such as manga, along with Chinese martial arts novels. Video games, including hard to find imports, would also be part of the mix. And to keep things fresh and interesting, we’d also have a cosplay component. Staff would cosplay according to some weekly theme and we might even offer discounts or other incentives to customers who visited the store in costume.
Books are not a high margin business, so the shop would make most of its money selling beverages and pre-packaged baked goods. Sitting around reading manga would be encouraged as long as you bought something to drink or eat. A paid membership program would offer additional perks. Monthly open mike karaoke nights would round out the shop’s offerings.
In planning this, I felt that a key element to success would be keeping abreast of the latest trends and nimbly adjusting to take advantage of them. Obviously this entails a lot of work, but I do a lot of this already, so it would really just be monetizing my favorite hobbies. Now that the Borders down the street is closing, maybe this shop will finally see the light of day!