In March 2012 Bandai will be releasing the Bravism: Bleach Styling set of Bleach figurines. You can buy them individually or in a pack, and if you’re lucky enough to be in japan on December 17th at the Jump Festa 2012 you can see them in person — but if you can’t make it here’s a preview:

Found via natalie.mu/comic.

I’m in a total state of shock: It seems like just yesterday that I was watching every episode of Bleach — so I was blown away to just read the it’s almost the 10th anniversary of the franchise. Of course that marks the 10th anniversary of the manga which was first published in August of 2001 and is now up to 48 volumes and over 300 episodes of the anime series which went on the air in 2004. Shown here are a set of coasters which have been created for the occasion in Japan which feature illustrations by Noriaki “Tite” Kubo:

Found via natalie.mu/comic.

Wanting too much of a good thing is a very American trait — we eat too much fast food, consume way too much oil to drive automobiles that are way too big and our tastes in entertainment slouch towards mental comfort food. If we like a TV show chances are that the creators will ignore their better instincts and run the show into the ground. Such was the case with Happy Days and thus the phrase “Jumping the Shark” was born. So this is clearly a uniquely American bad habit? Wrong! Anime is suffering from the very same sin of more and more of the same.

The proof? By accident I caught myself watching Adult Swim and on comes episode 170 of Bleach. At first the thought of 170 episodes of the series numbed my mind — after all how long could you keep reinventing the show? And the answer is that you can’t. Episode 170 of Bleach could have been episode 152, 93 or 71 and you would never have known the difference. Well except for one difference: The animation was of a much lower quality than when the show began.

I then played the game in mind of wondering at what point that I got bored with Bleach. I think the exact point was when they returned from the Soul Society — at that point the series pretty much said everything that it had to say to me. And looking at episode 170 I’m surprised that the Ichigo is still in high school! So 100 episodes later nothing has changed about the show — the same characters are there, in the same high school and nothing has changed: The lack of creativity here is just depressing.

Couldn’t they have done a spin off series with a few of the characters in a new setting? Even Happy Days gave us Laverne and Shirley and yes even Joanie Loves Chachi. No that would have been too creative for the folks pumping out Bleach episodes. You’d think they’d even take a page from Marvel and do a bad crossover where a few Death Note characters get a guest part for a limited run. Or maybe they could have taken a page from Henson and done Bleach Babies where the cast is in elementary school. Or maybe they could send the Bleach crew into outer space like Josie and the Pussycats. Or maybe send them on a class trip to Hawaii where Greg wipes out while — I think you’re getting my point by now.

It now feels like in some ways the anime industry in Japan has become even less creative than Hollywood in many ways. Of course there’s a ton of finger pointing going on — everybody from illegal downloaders to a global recession takes the blame. But that downbeat picture still doesn’t explain why 287 episodes of Bleach have been produced since 2004. This means if you’re a new anime fan and want to watch every episode that at 20 minutes per episode you’d have to watch over 95 hours of video!

For me the only cure for this is if the anime industry starts to focus on quality and originality. That’s what set anime apart in the first place in a global market. In some ways success can be a worse enemy than failure because you become a creature of habit and grow complacent — and Bleach is the poster child of this for me at the moment.

Yes I know that the furthest thing from your mind is celebrating a happy new year — but for hardcore otaku in Japan it’s the season to start thinking about which anime calendar to select for 2011! Shown here are a preview of a few of the calendars which will be available for pre-orders in Japan on September 26th. Shown above is One Piece and below is Naruto:

This is a Tite Kubo Bleach calendar:

Here’s a Gintama calendar:

This is a calendar for Hitman Reborn:

This is the calendar for Sket Dance:

This is the calendar for Nurari Nurarihyon No Grandchildren:

And here’s a calendar for D.Gray-man:

Found via natalie.mu.

Above: Tite Kubo on the left and Nick Simmons on the right.

We all live with the cultural myth that if you’ve got talent and work hard that at some point you’ll be discovered. But the sad reality is that there are some very talented people out there who kill themselves their entire lives and still go absolutely nowhere. And even for these of us who do manage to make a living with our creative skills know that it’s not an easy path. So whenever you see nepotism it’s a pretty bitter pill to swallow.

So recently when I read that Nick Simmons (the son of Kiss band member Gene Simmons) got accused of plagiarizing the work of Tite Kubo I had to smile. Of course this opened up a Pandora’s box with manga fans asking a wide range of questions on issues of everything of “is it moral to scan and translate a manga without permission?” to “is it right for fan artists to charge for their work?” But for me those questions miss the entire point: The real issue is about paying your dues.

Nick Simmons

So in this case you’ve got Nick Simmons whose parents can afford to send him to any art school, yet he goes to Pitzer College in Claremont, California (which he still hasn’t graduated from). It should be noted that Pitzer College offers an art major but the school is really a liberal arts school. If Simmons was really serious about becoming an artist he could afford to go to any art school in the world — and that includes ones in Japan!

Now you may ask: Why is art school so important? The reason is that if you want to be a professional illustrator in art school you’ll take classes in life drawing. But not just any life drawing classes — you’ll be given a anatomy class and have to take interpretive figure drawing. The result of this is that you understand the structure of the human body, know how to pose it from any angle and put any style on that drawing. Do you have to go to art school to learn this? No, but if you’re 21 years old it’s the sort of “honest short cut” you can take to avoid directly copying artwork.

Had Nick Simmons gone to art school and worked hard at it he could have achieved his goal of being able to draw in the style of Tite Kubo without copying him. In fact in the field of professional animation the artists are trained to work in the consistent style of another artist — that why dozens of people can work on an animated film and it still looks like it’s the style of one artist.

Above: Believe it or not these stick figure techniques are actually based upon life drawing classes where you warm up by doing very fast drawings as the model changes poses quickly.

So now that I’ve slagged Nick Simmons for several paragraphs I’m going to actually defend him. Pretty much every artist who dreams of being somebody has role models, and in the case of Nick his hero is Tite Kubo who created the manga Bleach. Kubo is a rare genius and I’ve always been blown away by his ability to create dozens of character designs that all look different even though they’re all done in the same style. So if you’re going to pick someone to learn from to draw manga Tite Kubo is a pretty darn good choice.

What Simmons did is what every fan artist does when they’re starting out — you learn by copying what you see. Granted that’s not as nobel as drawing from life, but it is a way that artists do learn. In fact before the advent of modern art schools a la the Bauhaus one of the major ways for artists to learn was to go to a museum, pull up a chair and draw or paint what you’d see on the walls.

Above: Shepard Fairey may have copied the Associated Press photo, but at least he made it into his own style.

So lacking a proper education Nick Simmons was following a very organic path to learning how to be an illustrator. He may have been copying pretty closely, but frankly in a world of Photoshop you can’t blame a 21 year old for not knowing the difference. And to be fair while he did copy the illustration he still did change things like the position of the face (more forehead is showing) so it’s not a direct tracing. Of course I can’t say that he made it his own style, so he is still falling a bit short in my book. However I’d say that lacking an education he may not have known any better. The only difference between Nick and many of his peers with those skill sets is that Nick got a publishing deal.

And thus I assign the fault to the publishing company. Now a hardcore manga fan might argue at this point that the publisher should have know a Bleach rip off at first sight, however I’d say that just isn’t realistic. You can’t expect a publisher to know every page of every manga that’s out there. But what you can expect a publisher to know about is a track record. And if you’re hiring an artist who hasn’t gone to art school in this day and age you better do some homework on what the artist has done before. In this case the publisher didn’t do that, instead they were blinded by the fact that the artist was the son of a rock star.

You can already see that they were making the connections in their heads — because even an indirect association with Gene Simmons might open up some doors. It makes you as a publisher seem just a bit hotter than the other companies, so maybe a record label or movie studio might want to be associated with your firm. In short the publishing company was in fact using Nick Simmons to open doors, which is a pretty small price to pay for letting him cut in line in front of another artist who paid his or her dues.

Square Enix Products had on display three beautifully crafted Bleach figurine prototypes. The figures weren’t painted, but I was impressed with how true they stayed to the character designs.

The third Bleach musical will take start on January 15th, 2010 and tour three cities in Japan: Fukuoka, Osaka and Tokyo. What makes this show interesting is that it features some of the voice actors from the series. Tickets are 6600 yen and go on sale November 15th. Here’s the official flyer for the show:

And here’s a screenshot from the website to give you a further taste:

Found via natalie.mu.