What I just read

I stayed up late last night reading Tekkon Kinkreet: Black & White, a manga graphic novel about two orphans on the street, battling the Yakuza. It's downloadable here and it's available from amazon.com as a single giant volume published by vizmedia. It was also made into an anime film by an American director (an event almost impossible to imagine) and was widely praised. The LA Times discusses the film here.
There's two reasons I'd recommend reading this manga:

1). For manga fans, it's groundbreaking in terms of art -- borrowing much more from French influences than I've ever seen. Read the Boingboing review. Here's what I mean about the art not being typical manga:

2). I have a theory. American comics, especially super-heroes, are Hollywood's most profitable source material for this particular cycle. What many people don't know -- I do thanks to Dr. Drew Casper -- is that the blockbuster success of The Sound of Music actually laid the ground for the partial extinction of the American film musical for decades, because Hollywood sunk tons of money into really crappy musicals after SOM's success. The market crashed.

The same thing will inevitably happen with the super hero franchise movies and new franchises will have to replace them My guess it will be a battle between game adatations and manga/anime adaptations. They're perfect for it. Anime took a big hit in the battle this summer with the Speed Racer disaster, but there's several other big projects already in production that could redeem the resource, to wit:Therefore, while working at most production companies, a rudimentary awareness of manga, especially hot ones like Tekkonkinkreet, might make you stand out in the crowd.

Just a thought.

I know several people working in the industry entirely because they can have an intelligent conversation about comics, anime, etc. The Hollywood executives need people to translate pop culture to them.