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Princess Mononoke Film ComicA Practical Use of the Internet
Introducing Amateur-Produced Manga
This is the English-only version.
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version with Japanese.
In order to introduce amateur-produced manga, a housewife in Tokyo, Katsushikaku district, has created an Internet home page where readers and authors are being brought together. The scope of the marketing is small, but books written by women students are sold to Australia, etc., so something with a surprising international quality is being born.
The introductory feature is "Internet Comic Plaza." Last fall, Nagao Sonoko (31) from the aforementioned district started it up. She is advertising 30 works that she walked around and selected from a comic market. The emphasis was on the original, excluding parodies of popular manga and so on.
Though they are technically imperfect works, the comical pictures of over 500 varieties of wild birds that introduce "The Useless Wild Bird Guidebook", the autobiographical story of travels in unexplored regions done as a four-panel manga in "Tale of a Trip to the Giana Highlands Angel Falls", and so on, are personal masterpieces.
In two months, this page has had over 10,000 accesses, and in that time over 50 books were sold. A fraction of these were sold to America and Australia, too.
Horie Yurko (23), a student from Hachiyoichi, Chibaken prefecture, who sold "Dinosaur Paradise" to some Australian men, said "We had no idea that foreigners would come to buy, so it came as a great surprise."
In the Plaza, one can see the parts of each work, introductory sentences, and so on. For people who want them, Mrs. Nagao can get the books from the authors when the price is prepaid. There is a cost of 400 yen for shipping and handling.
Mrs. Nagao says "I'm not making a profit, but I'm glad that I seem to have cut the distance between authors and readers." The address was "http://www.ifnet.or.jp/~001-comic/".
(The address above is no longer working. There is something similar at this address).
