Download the Animation Liberation Magazine - Winter '07 edition

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Boycott: CMX! CMX is a company that conducts business dishonestly. Through dumbing down or significantly altering its manga dialogue, CMX is not only censoring its releases, but reducing its quality of manga as well. Likewise CMX represents an attempt to monopolize and Americanize the manga industry as a whole, as one of the three big oligopolies which are generally harming the manga/anime culture. Being owned by DC comics, and DC comics being owned by AOL/Time Warner, the profit CMX makes thus gets factored into AOL/Time Warner. Every time you buy a CMX manga such as "Tenjho Tenge" or "Megatokyo", you may initially believe that you are supporting a manga industry, when in reality, you are supporting both a mainstream US comic industry and a leading international corporation. AOL-Time Warner is the largest media conglomerate in the world. This may not be harmful in itself but the practice of disguising the ownership of an industry is fraudulent and hence dishonest. I love manga, but I don't like the idea of my money going to a company which I think is harming our national economy. It's similar to how Marlboro owns Kraft Macaroni and cheese (Kraft is the largest food and beverage company headquartered in North America)-I don't have anything against Mac and cheese, but at the same time I have moral qualms over supporting the tobacco industry. That is why the issue of corporate honesty and transparency is so important-- FIGHT: CMX MANGA http://digitalsin.bebopboard.net/tenten/ This is a website with formal ways to boycott CMX. There is also a pageby-page criticism of Tenjho Tenge’s censorship and edits. The following pictures are taken from their website. These are just two of a hundred. All Tenjho Tenge images © CMX, DC Comics, Aol/Time Warner, and Oh! Great. it allows the consumer to make a rational and responsible decision over their purchases with the full information available. By masking who really owns a company, we have effectively have lost our ability to make an informed purchase. This constitutes a form of consumer fraud. Aside from economic trickery, another criticism of CMX lies in the quality of the products they release. CMX has made significant edits to many of its manga titles, such as "Tenjho Tenge", so as to remove content that the corporate affiliates believed would reduce the scope of their potential demographics. This was done even though many fans vocalized expressed concerns about how the removed content was essential to major plot points of the series: this constitutes a form of censorship, as well as again consumer fraud-seeing as no mention of the edits Animation Liberation Magazine 22
are noted in CMX's products. Such changes reduce the artistic integrity of the piece, and one can argue that ultimately the owner of any artistic creation should be the artists themselves: this is a classic case of a company putting its profits before the quality and integrity of the art they are distributing. [This is similar to how Wal-Mart removes or replaces words in its CDs for the purposes of making it's products more family friendly-some can argue that it is within the rights of a company to do so, but the fact remains that t h e c o n s u m e r i s n o t w a r n e d o f s u c h c h a n g e s and thus ends up buying a different product than expected]. In any event, it can also be noted that such censorship dumbs down the manga being produced. Such changes are obviously meant to make the manga more marketable to children/adolesce nts--thus the company is in essence selling the public a different product than the one they paid for. If someone pays for an adult manga, they probably want an adult manga; not something orientated towards thirteen year olds. That would be like a store selling a copy of Mortal Kombat, and then secretly editing out the gore, fatalities and blood without letting the public AOL/Time Warner Details AOL/Time Warner's position in the world raises concerns about the companies control over the internet, media and entertainment industry in general. Indeed it should be noted that after the overturning of the 1996 Telecommunications Act (which forced companies to share their fiber-optics lines with competitors) in 2003, America went from being the world's top leader in internet development, to being the country with "the slowest, most expensive, and least reliable" internet in the developed world. It should be noted that AOL-Time Warner had incentive to prevent internet development due to the fact that increased distribution of cheap, high-speed internet would "would multiply outside video and movie offerings and endanger the cable companies' profitability". And their position as the largest internet service provider in the world allows AOL/Time Warner to directly block any would-be competitor's ISP. So not only does AOL-Time Warner have the incentive to slow internet development, they have the means to do so. This has lead to a situation in which the US has dropped from 4th place (under the Telecommunications Act) to 13th place in terms of broadband internet usage. This is even though 75% of home in the US already have sufficient cable networks which could, with some upgrading, provide basic or high speed internet. The estimated cost of our failure to keep pace with the rest of the world in developing internet technology is expected to cost the US economy an estimated 500 billion dollars in profit, and 1.2 million new jobs. Indeed according to Charles Ferguson, an economist of the Brookings Institute, "perhaps as much as $1 trillion might be lost over the next decade due to present constraints on broadband development. These losses, moreover, are only the economic costs of the United States' indirection. They do not take into account the work that could have been done through telecommuting, the medical care or interactive long-distance education that might have been provided in remote areas, and unexploited entertainment possibilities." And this occurs at a time when US economic competitiveness and the United States edge with respect to research and development are both coming into question. And that is the real crux of CMX comics being a subsidiary of an umbrella corporation like AOL-Time Warner. Animation Liberation Magazine 23
Page 2 and 3: Animation Liberation Magazine 2
Page 4 and 5: OUR MANIFESTO (About Us) ANIMATION
Page 6 and 7: Southern California Convention Map
Page 8 and 9: PACIFIC MEDIA EXPO Music, Parties,
Page 10 and 11: BAND PROFILE Name: LiN CLOVER Membe
Page 12 and 13: MIKOMICON: Year Two Guest Con Repor
Page 14 and 15: This isn’t to say that they didn
Page 16 and 17: has to do is prove that a non-Musli
Page 18 and 19: COLLECTOR’S CORNER: ICE Kunion’
Page 20 and 21: SAC-ANIME: ‘Overcoming the Once-a
Page 24 and 25: know. It is changing the product wi
Page 26 and 27: Chibi-Tokyo Presents: A Senshi-con
Page 28 and 29: cosplay parties and we’d have min
Page 30 and 31: simply had to deal with the inconve
Page 32 and 33: REFLECTION: LEGEND OF GALACTIC HERO
Page 34 and 35: dies pointlessly in a war under an
Page 36 and 37: Pages from the Past: Marionette Gen
Page 38 and 39: GLOSSARY Capitalism - Coined by Kar
Page 46: Animation Liberation Magazine 46

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