I was tickled to find a piece of copy I wrote for my old job at the shady manga dotcom/publisher company was reprinted as someone's profile blurb at MySpace. It was originally the back-cover blurb for volume I of Tomie by Junji Ito, a horror comic about a Japanese schoolgirl literally from hell. I won't even link to it because a) I'm lazy and b) I found out that the publishing company's nearly gone defunct, so it does me no good if anyone buys the comic and I don't respect them enough to give them the publicity. Although it is a really good manga if you're into the cautionary-tale-of-beautiful-girl-who-bites-your-head-off sort of thing. It gave me a little schadenfreudic (sp?) satisfaction to find out the fate of my previous employer. Because I love comics and I love sound effects, it was in many ways the best job I ever had, certainly the best suited for me. But the place was horribly managed and run with a sweatshop mentality if not the actually sweaty trappings, and I had a feeling it was going nowhere. Of course, many people profited in the dotcom boom on ventures that should have gone nowhere, so I was always nagged by the feeling that I should have stuck it out. Fortunately, it appears that that's not the case. Now if only I had held onto my shares of that stupid search engine....
...anyway the point is, the first two volumes of "Tomie" were the only reasonably solid comics that I think came out of that place, so it's nice to see that it's still out there in the horror-fan consciousness, if only in the form of its ad copy.
6 comments:
2 things:
1) I rented the first "Tomie" movie on your recommendation. It was pretty good. Keisuke even kind of liked it.
2) What is with this word, schadenfreudic? I have never in my life heard this German word. Then one of my friends used it on his blog 2 weeks ago, I saw it in a magazine article a few days ago, and now it's on your blog. Is this a new word? Why is it suddenly everywhere I look?
Please tell me where the eff this word came from and why everyone knows it but me. I cannot stand to be ignorant like this. It totally devalues my GRE Verbal score.
"schadenfreudic" is not a word but "schadenfreude" is, I believe, a German term meaning "pleasure derived from the suffering of others." Generally not used in the sadistic sense, more like "I really am glad that guy struck out with that girl because it slightly improves my own feeling of masculinity for not even attempting it."
wow, you are, like, totally smart. but i still don't get why everyone knows this word but me.
well, it's an insanely useful word in times such as these, for blogs such as these. plus it's one of those great words that describes something very specific that we all recognize, but does not have its own word in English. there should be a word for such words. there probably is, in another language. i think i learned this word from an old roommate. it may have some Jewish or Yiddish derivation, or maybe it's from psychoanalysis.
There's also an entire song in the musical "Avenue Q" devoted to this word - this is where my understanding of it was cemented. It may account for some of its recent wider use...?
I started noticing it more and more after William Safire did an "On Language" on foreign words that are imported into English at the beginning of the year, including schadenfreude. There were some real gems in there.
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