Wikia Unleashes The Masters Of Animanga

SAN FRANCISCO, July 30, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Wikia, the home for social fandom and the ultimate source for powerful and relevant pop culture, entertainment and gaming expertise, today has announced The Masters of Animanga: A Wikia Collaborative Writing Project. This once-in-a-lifetime initiative will feature fully rendered illustrations and brief character descriptions exclusively curated by manga and anime legends Kazuo Koike (X-Men Unlimited, Lone Wolf and Cub), Yoshitaka Amano (Final Fantasy, Speed Racer), Takashi Okazaki (X-Men, Afro Samurai) and Shin-ichi Hiromoto (Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Hells Angels) for the Wikia community. Hiroaki Ikegami, along with famed Japanese film producer Masao Maruyama (Ninja Scroll, Trigun) will oversee the project in an executive producer capacity. The project will be hosted by the Animanga Wiki, the site's anime and manga hub, and begin Tuesday, September 3 and close Friday, September 27.

"We are thrilled to provide our community with access to the world's greatest anime/manga masters," said Eric Moro, Director of Entertainment Programming, Wikia. "It's great to have them as peer collaborators alongside such passionate and informed fans. We hope to see the results rival that of any traditional creator model."

As part of the collaboration, on Tuesday, September 3 users will be invited to Wikia to contribute to the Masters collaborative story project in a one-paragraph-at-a-time format up until its summation on Friday, September 27. Following each submission, a new user will have the opportunity to add to the story.  Over the course of three weeks, the project will develop three different stories across three different genres around a Vampire, Samurai and Girls.

To kick off the project, the Masters will offer tips and guidance from their collective careers in a series of videos on Wikia.com leading into September 3. Along with the writing portion, participants will be able to upload their own fan-created art to the story, and in turn, the Masters will provide commentary, feedback and advice to the fans creating the art. Following the completion of the project, the Masters will gather at New York Comic-Con in October as part of an interactive panel to discuss with fans the full development of the story from the early stages until the end.

Wikia currently houses over 28,000 anime communities. In total, the site's anime pages receive over 141,000,000 views a month, making Wikia one of the Web's most respected authorities on the anime genre.

About Wikia:
Wikia, the social universe for fans, by fans, is the home for social fandom and the ultimate source for powerful and relevant pop culture, entertainment and gaming expertise. It is the definitive place for people to contribute to the assembly of original bodies of multi-media content around subjects they know and love. Using Wikia, anyone can form new communities around any subject or participate in over 300,000 existing communities by reading or contributing new content. With over 20 million pages of rich content, Wikia's communities are the most authoritative information about any topic on the Internet. Wikia's video game vertical (www.wikia.com/videogames) is a leading video-game focused network on the Web. Its entertainment vertical (www.wikia.com/entertainment) is the fastest growing U.S. entertainment destination around the world.

Launched in 2006 by founders Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, Wikia attracts more than 70 million global unique visitors per month and is ranked a Quantcast Top 35 and comScore Top 100 Internet site, as well as a Nielsen Top 10 social network. www.wikia.com or @wikia

SOURCE Wikia