Small bites ...

Hewlett wins top design award
Cartoonist Jamie Hewlett was named Britain's designer of the year last night for his animation work on Gorillaz, the virtual band he co-founded with Blur frontman Damon Albarn.

"Jamie Hewlett has not only created a personal mythology with the virtual band Gorillaz, he has also created designs for the direction in which technology and culture are going — the shape of things to come," Arts Council chairman Christopher Fraylin said.

The annual award brings with it a £25,000 ($47,000) prize.

Will the manga revolution be digitized?
Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun wonders what the recent launch of several manga webzines could mean to traditional print publications:

Behind the trend is the shrinking print magazine market and the expansion of digital comics on cell phones and personal computers.

Sales of print comic magazines have decreased for 10 consecutive years. The figure was 242 billion yen in 2005, down five percent from the previous year. Paperback comic book sales overtook magazines for the first time that year, hitting 260 billion yen.

Publishers continue the operation of print comic magazines, even though many of them are in the red, for the sake of publishing paperback compilations of hit titles from the magazines.

Maid cafes, and the rise of the nerd
I'm fascinated by the whole maid/butler cafe trend, so I'm happy to see London's Daily Telegraph pounce on the movement, connecting it to an even bigger story: the rise of the otaku.

A largely invisible subsection of Japanese society, otaku are the legions of agoraphobic technophiles who, from the obscurity of their bedrooms, fuel the country's multi-million-pound markets for video games, anime (animated cartoons) and manga (comic books). They have long been demonised by the media, their self-centred, anti-social approach to life blamed for everything from the declining economy to the disintegration of the family unit. But, two years ago, along came a book that changed everything.

First published in 2004, Densha Otoko (Train Man) is the "real love story" of a painfully shy computer programmer and a sophisticated woman whom he meets on a train. A peculiarly Japanese twist on the beauty and the beast myth, it was written in the style of an internet chatroom exchange - the postings of a hapless nerd negotiating his first romance, running alongside the encouraging responses of an anonymous community of online "friends".

I don't think the reporter quite grasps the meaning of "otaku," but the rest is interesting.