happy cel collectors

IMO the trend for newer mangakas is to try to get it animated AND licensed for international distribution. Getting your work serialized for publication if the first step, then getting it animated use to be the stopping point. The thing is with JP anime has exploded into a global marketplace. Shirow IMO is one of the best at adapting to the global marketplace due to this use of multilingual mangas, animated tv series and especially the GITS films.

Yes, most starting mangakas are not at his level, few are with the exception of Rumiko and possibly CLAMP. However, the trend is clear and the question whether or not the JP production houses, creators, and marketing people are smart enough to invest into producing licensed repros for the global collectors remains to be seen.

Made a few calls to some of the few people I have to look upon in the industry and here is the break down I got.

"In this business it is way more cost effective for us to make the shows all digital. Its not only more cost effective but everything takes up less space since it is all saved as files rather then bins of cels and other artwork.

Also it makes it 10 times easier to redo certain areas of a show in say a series to movie redo or other such instances to just go back into the archived digital stuff or even the production drawing/concept art and pull up what we need."

Here is the part I was most interested in when it comes to things from our standpoint as cel collectors.

"Sorry to break it to you James but you and I both know the nature of things. As such you and I both know that collectors will pay just as much for top shelf cel art as they are going to end up paying for production drawings and concept art."

Everything else was just catching up on old times and nothing really useful to the topic at hand. I must admit though I do agree to a point. Yeah I will admit that I would much rather have a cel from a show then the dougha/genga/conceptual stuff any day but that doesnt stop me from looking just as hard for say Gundam SEED production drawings and the like as I would a cel from Akira.