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NEWS: Sentai to Release This Boy Can Fight Aliens in English

By pleasant coincidence, I had just read an article that referred to Soubi Yamamoto and found Todd Ciolek's impressions of This Boy Can Fight Aliens from New York Comic Con, which seemingly passed with little notice when published, yesterday.

It seems very much like the early work of a maturing artist that it is, but I dig quirky, imperfect things like this, so I might buy it when they release it. I really like that ComixWave is willing to give her and things like this a chance.

Surrender Artist wrote:

By pleasant coincidence, I had just read an article that referred to Soubi Yamamoto and found Todd Ciolek's impressions of This Boy Can Fight Aliens from New York Comic Con, which seemingly passed with little notice when published, yesterday. It seems very much like the early work of a maturing artist that it is, but I dig quirky, imperfect things like this, so I might buy it when they release it. I really like that ComixWave is willing to give her and things like this a chance.

Ah, just read that after you linked to it. Pretty cool! So the way it was produced & distributed isn't so different from how Voices of a Distant Star was put out, eh? Now all we need to do is get Steven Foster on handling the dub so we can come full-circle.

I was invited to write this column roughly five years ago by an editor who asked for a twice-monthly rumination on the soft power of Japan's pop culture. One of the first columns I submitted addressed the gap between the images of empowered females in anime and the status of real women in Japan.

Many women in Japan remain mired in a patriarchal culture that limits their career opportunities. Japan continues to rank embarrassingly low on the United Nations index of gender empowerment, beneath several of its less developed Asian neighbors. Overseas fans of Japanese pop culture often see an illusion of female empowerment, delivered via enticing visuals and storylines, and created mostly by men.

But the status of real women in anime production may be evolving through advances in technology and societal shifts accelerated by post-disaster turmoil.