GETTING CLOSE TO CAPRICA:
I usually end up totally geeking out at this time of the year, as the Television Critics Association is a time when some interesting TV news and discussions starts coming out. Here’s one rumor that has me particularly excited – the Sci-Fi Channel has reportedly ordered two scripts for the Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica.

That’s encouraging news since I long had the impression that Caprica’s pilot would air as a mini-series before the network would decide to make it a series or not, as it did with Galactica. This probably means that The Sci-Fi Channel thinks Caprica is good enough to please us Galactica fans. Hopefully there’ll be some official news when the Sci-Fi Channel has its TCA session next week.

EMBRACING TRACING PAPER:
Scandal apparently broke out last week amongst the YAOI community in Japan when Embracing Love creator Youka Nitta admitted to having traced images from various fashion ads. You can check out a collection of side-by-side comparisons at this Japanese web page. As Brigid Alverson notes, I find it interesting how Nitta frequently took images of opposite-sex couples and changed them into male couples:

The page that got Nitta in trouble and the ad that inspired it.

Nitta’s faced a few consequences as her work seems to been dropped from an upcoming issue of Be-Boy Gold magazine and she’s also canceled her planned appearance at YAOI-Con. I wonder if this will further affect the availability of Nitta’s work in the United States. Embracing Love is hard to find due to financial trouble at Be Beautiful, the publisher who licensed the title, a situation that became even more complicated when the Japanese publisher Biblos went into bankruptcy and put Be Beautiful’s licenses in limbo. DMP just published one of her titles earlier this year and has another title coming out in December.

If it's up to American audiences, I doubt this will hurt Nitta’s presence here. While her tracing is a big scandal in Japan, I’ve seen a few American artists whose tendency to copy and alter images became a running gag (like Greg Land and Rob Liefeld) and it didn’t seem to hurt them. Then again, maybe manga audiences will react differently.

I know Nitta has a few fans here (and I probably would be one of them if I ever could find myself a copy of the second volume of Embracing Love); does this change your impression of her work in any way?

After the break: Gays in games and comics ... and what's Stephen Fry doing in this column?