Review. Northrop Davis, Manga & Anime go to Hollywood. The Amazing Rapidly Evolving Relationship between Hollywood and Japanese Animation, Manga, Television, and Film.

Review. Northrop Davis, Manga & Anime go to Hollywood. The Amazing Rapidly Evolving Relationship between Hollywood and Japanese Animation, Manga, Television, and Fil

cGAN-based Manga Colorization Using a Single Training Image

The Japanese comic format known as Manga is popular all over the world. It is traditionally produced in black and white, and colorization is time consuming and costly. Automatic colorization methods generally rely on greyscale values, which are not present in manga. Furthermore, due to copyright protection, colorized manga available for training is scarce. We propose a manga colorization method based on conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGAN). Unlike previous cGAN approaches that use many hundreds or thousands of training images, our method requires only a single colorized reference image for training, avoiding the need of a large dataset. Colorizing manga using cGANs can produce blurry results with artifacts, and the resolution is limited. We therefore also propose a method of segmentation and color-correction to mitigate these issues. The final results are sharp, clear, and in high resolution, and stay true to the character's original color scheme.Comment: 8 pages, 13 figure

A Manga-Driven System Requirements Development PBL Exercise

We conducted a Project-Based Learning (PBL)-type exercise incorporating Japanese cartoon (manga) techniques into Requirements Development (RD) processes. Manga has established techniques, such as those for character setting and story development, that we thought are also valid for RD processes. Using this manga-driven method, students were able to clarify high-level project goals early in the development life-cycle, and succeeded in defining high quality and unique system ideas.Comment: SEEM201

Using Posters to Recommend Anime and Mangas in a Cold-Start Scenario

Item cold-start is a classical issue in recommender systems that affects anime and manga recommendations as well. This problem can be framed as follows: how to predict whether a user will like a manga that received few ratings from the community? Content-based techniques can alleviate this issue but require extra information, that is usually expensive to gather. In this paper, we use a deep learning technique, Illustration2Vec, to easily extract tag information from the manga and anime posters (e.g., sword, or ponytail). We propose BALSE (Blended Alternate Least Squares with Explanation), a new model for collaborative filtering, that benefits from this extra information to recommend mangas. We show, using real data from an online manga recommender system called Mangaki, that our model improves substantially the quality of recommendations, especially for less-known manga, and is able to provide an interpretation of the taste of the users.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, accepted at the MANPU 2017 workshop, co-located with ICDAR 2017 in Kyoto on November 10, 201

The Rise Of Dz-Manga In Algeria: Glocalization And The Emergence Of A New Transnational Voice

This article aims to establish Algerian manga as a new object of study within the field of Francophone studies and the broader field of cartooning in the developing world. To this end, it provides a survey of existing works while answering three main questions: How has manga become part of the cultural habits of young Algerian creators and readers? What status does it hold in local cultural production? Finally, what strategies have artists employed to broaden the readership of Algerian manga and how have they taken advantage of the unique possibilities offered by this new medium

Validity of abundances derived from spaxel spectra of the MaNGA survey

We measured the emission lines in the spaxel spectra of MaNGA galaxies in order to determine the abundance distributions therein. It has been suggested that the strength of the low-ionization lines, R_2, N_2, and S_2 may be increased (relative to Balmer lines) in (some) spaxel spectra of the MaNGA survey due to a contribution of the radiation of the diffuse ionized gas. Consequently, the abundances derived from the spaxel spectra through strong-line methods may suffer from large errors. We examined this expectation by comparing the behaviour of the line intensities and the abundances estimated through different calibrations for slit spectra of HII regions in nearby galaxies, for fibre spectra from the SDSS, and for spaxel spectra of the MaNGA survey. We found that the S_2 strength is increased significantly in the fibre and spaxel spectra. The mean enhancement changes with metallicity and can be as large as a factor of 2. The mean distortion of R_2 and N_2 is less than a factor of 1.3. This suggests that Kaufmann et al.'s demarcation line between AGNs and HII regions in the BPT diagram is a useful criterion to reject spectra with significantly distorted strengths of the N_2 and R_2 lines. We find that the three-dimensional R calibration, which uses the N_2 and R_2 lines, produces reliable abundances in the MaNGA galaxies. The one-dimensional N2 calibration produces either reliable or wrong abundances depending on whether excitation and N/O abundance ratio in the target region (spaxel) are close to or differ from those parameters in the calibrating points located close to the calibration relation. We then determined abundance distributions within the optical radii in the discs of 47 MaNGA galaxies. The optical radii of the galaxies were estimated from the surface brightness profiles constructed based on the MaNGA observations.Comment: 19 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in A&

The Diffusion of Foreign Cultural Products: The Case Analysis of Japanese Comics (Manga) Market in the US

This paper outlines the historical development of the US manga (Japanese comics) industry from the 1980s through the present in order to address the question why foreign cultural products become popular in offshore markets in spite of cultural difference. This paper focuses on local publishers as “gatekeepers” in the introduction of foreign culture. Using complete data on manga titles published in the US market from 1980 to 2006 (n=1,058), this paper shows what kinds of manga have been translated, published, and distributed for over twenty years and how the competition between the two market leaders, Viz and Tokyopop, created the rapid market growth. This case analysis finds two main reasons for the growth of the manga market in the US. First is the path dependency of market growth: without Viz’s pioneering effort in the localization of manga in the 1980s, Tokyo pop’s standardization in the 2000s would not have boosted the market expansion, and vice versa. The second is stigma management by publishers. By selecting proper titles, censoring them, and establishing age rating systems, publishers sought to avoid the stigma attached to American mainstream comics and establish the legitimacy of manga as acceptable entertainment.Manga, comics, foreign influences, Japan

'"So what is this mango, anyway?" understanding manga, comics and graphic novels (Primary and Secondary'

Graphic novels, comics and manga can play an important part in encouraging reading for pleasure amongst students of any age and also have a role in teaching in many subject areas. I'm going to offer a small snapshot of the least well known of these, manga, below, but want to start with a few general points about the comic strip medium ..