News ‘n’ Notes

Brian Ralph sits at a table in the sun outside Donna’s in Baltimore’s Charles Village and fidgets with his paper coffee cup.

The 33-year-old has messy hair, and wears a short sleeve shirt and blue jeans. His hand with the solid silver wedding ring rests on a yellow comic book with a frightened monkey on the cover.

“The thing I was really into was comics,” he says of his years in college.

For Japanese aficionados of this sort of stuff, there is a more convenient and discreet way to stock up on the latest stories without running to the bookstore: downloading them to a cell phone. That’s helped this type of manga reach beyond the female otome–or “maidens,” as they’re known–who are the genre’s die-hard fan base. “Women and girls in their teens, 20s, and 30s like BL for their portrayals of innocent love,” says Toshiki Fujii, a manager in the cell-phone content division at Nagoya-based Media Do. “But now those who might have been coy about walking into a shop can find what they’re looking for online.”

The Pixar stock options mess was more widespread than anyone knew … though the Mouse House now is doing its best to apply some significant Band-Aids. Company has acknowledged that many mid- and lower-level employees received backdated options at the toon company, not just execs. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Disney said it would issue newly priced options to those employees and pay as much as $34 million to those with backdated options in an effort to compensate those Pixar employees both for the discrepancy in the options price and for possible tax liabilities.