DC comics recently got into the manga biz with their CMX imprint. I'd been kind of excited as they were picking up two titles I was really interested in getting: GALs and Tenjou Tenge. TenTen was just released and already it sounds like a disaster.
TenTen is a fighting manga. It tends to be quite violent and has quite a bit of fanservice. In japan I believe it had a Mature rating. CMX, which uses the slogan "Pure manga -- 100% the way the original Japanese creators wanted you to see it," chose to edit the series and release it as a teen title. Needless to say the manga community isn't thrilled. Many bloggers and comics news sites have already posted about it. It will be interesting to see if DC has any response.
I'm also posting about it because it hits one of my biggest peeves with some manga releases these days. The habit of tweaking art so that they remove things that might be inappropriate for whatever age group they are targeting. One of my favorites is Hikaru no Go. Where at the end of the first volume we have someone putting a blob of gum down on the center of a Go board. In the actual manga, it's a cigarette. Of course this leads to the second volume where someone is upset about the character "putting out his dirty gum on the Go board." Please, just translate, don't start tweaking things like this. If there is content that isn't appropriate for an age group, don't market it to them.
