For the uninitiated, Top Trumps was a card game popular in my youth. Basically, the game is played with a set of cards that contain statistics related to a particular subject (Fast cars, or Marvel Heroes and/or Villains were popular when I was young). The idea is that the deck of cards is dealt between all players, and the current “winning” player (or, initially, one of the players who isn’t the dealer) picks a statistic, and the player with the better value in that field on their current card wins those presently in play. The ultimate winner is the one who collects all the cards.

One of the interesting pieces of news in the anime sphere from over the weekend was the list of licensing values leaked from the paperwork for the Funimation/ADV lawsuit (which I’m not linking here, but isn’t exactly hard to find), which provided an insight what is usually a closely guarded industry secret. Well, I’m assuming it’s purely licensing fees, rather than money owed per-license – it’s not clear if the totals are purely the licensing cost, or if it included money owed for sold inventory.

Still, it was kind of interesting in a number of ways. I mean, the ludicrous amount of money they paid from Kurau -Phantom Memory- (a pleasant, if not exactly stellar, show I seem to remember them having problems even releasing) aside, there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of rhyme or reason to it. Shows which were popular in Japan didn’t necessarily fetch high prices aboard, like we so often assumed was the reason for us not seeing them all that often. Some really rather unexpected things cost more, comparatively at least – I guess the cost of Coyote Ragtime Show and Tokyo Majin shows the value of having a really good first episode, if naught else. I also kind of suspect this list betrays the reason why Gonzo ended up on the verge of complete and utter dissolution when they did – I mean, $660k for Red Garden? Really? Probably helped the bottom lines of those involved in Japan no end, but not so much for ADV.

(Oh, and I have actually heard of Yamato Nadesiko Shichi Henge, in so much as Nabeshin directed the anime version of it, but that’s about it)

I’m afraid that this is one of those comics that isn’t really worth explaining if you don’t get it. Sorry. Unless you get it, obviously, though that may well register a apology also.

In other news, it looks like the Black Rock Shooter TV anime is going to be streaming “worldwide” starting next week – “worldwide” in quotation marks because, if the ANN story is accurate, whatever globe or atlas is being used to determine which countries constitute worldwide is curiously missing the UK and Australia. Kind of makes me wonder if we’ve done something to upset Japan recently, and it’s just not been reported on the news over here for some reason.

Of course, I’d imagine some would say that they’re doing a favour, given the OAV episode was a little divisive (though not massively so – general opinion seemed largely positive). I was a touch lukewarm on it myself, but was still curious to see where they were going to go with the TV version. Ho-hum.

I have no proper witticism to follow this comic. Sorry ^^;

(more…)

I guess it’s the token one of these comics of the week. Nothing much to see here, really. Heck, it doesn’t even follow on from the last one. It’s not even like these are particularly quicker to throw together. But, hey, it’s tradition, so tough.

I’m sure I’ve probably got something else I could be writing about in this text section here, but honestly, I’m blanking on it right now. So I’ll just bid you a prompt farewell for today.