Posted 2/22/13 10:00 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
There's not much on the shelves for newcomers to manga this week—every new release is either halfway through a series or a riff on a classic. Still, there's plenty of good reading here, and it comes in generous servings, too, as most of this week's new releases are omnibus editions.
Posted 2/19/13 10:00 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
The new manga license announcements keep on coming, and it's looking like this will be a good year.
The big announcement came at last weekend's Katsucon, where Vertical marketing director Ed Chavez announced that Vertical has licensed "Tropic of the Sea (Kaikisen)," by the late Satoshi Kon, who is best known as the director of "Paprika," "Tokyo Godfathers," and other well-regarded anime. Kon began his career as a manga artist, and "Tropic of the Sea" ran in Kodansha's "Young Magazine" in 1990. It's a fairly classic sort of story about a seaside town where the locals have a sort of understanding with the mythic people of the sea, until developers come in and turn everything upside down. Watch for it in September; it looks like Vertical will publish it as a single volume, which is how it appeared in Japan.
Posted 2/15/13 9:49 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga, VIZ
A high school girl who finds out she is Santa Claus, an aspiring voice actress at a special seiyuu academy, and an Arabian-nights tale of adventure and trickery are among the latest batch of new manga titles announced by Viz this week. Here's the rundown.
This is a light week for new manga releases, but what there is, is choice: A collection of short stories and the first volume of a new sci-fi series, plus some new volumes in a couple of interesting ongoing series.
Posted 2/8/13 10:45 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
Up here in the Northeast we're preparing for an epic snowstorm; and on our way back from the grocery store, we're going to stop by the comics shop and check out some new manga. After all, even if the power goes out, we can still read manga by candlelight. In fact, that sounds sort of nice.
With a single exception, everything out this week is another volume in a long-running series. The one new story is "Beautiful Creatures," the graphic novel based on the Caster Chronicles novels. Check out our preview of the first chapter and watch out for the movie, which premieres next week.
Posted 2/7/13 11:06 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Graphic Novels, Manga
"In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything."
That's the tagline for "Beautiful Creatures," the graphic novel based on Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's Caster Chronicles novels; the movie based on the story is set to premiere on February 14.
Posted 2/5/13 9:00 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
Four self-described "major geeks" have banded together to form a new publisher, Chromatic Press, which will specialize in original shoujo (girls') and josei (women's) manga, light novels, audio drama—and more.
All four have strong backgrounds in Japanese pop culture fandom and publishing: Lillian Diaz-Przybyl was a senior editor at Tokyopop and helped shepherd many popular manga through the publishing process. Lianne Sentar is the author of Tokyopop's Sailor Moon novels and also works as a professional manga adapter; her credits include several volumes of "Fruits Basket" and "Alice in the Country of Hearts." Rebecca Scoble is a freelance manga editor and comics consultant, and Jill Astley is a major figure in otome game fandom who has presented scholarly papers on the topic and runs Lijakaca's Otome Gaming Blog. Read More...
Posted 1/31/13 10:28 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
It's a sparse week for new releases, but this week's list makes up in quality for what it lacks in quantity: Fresh volumes of "Sailor Moon," "Fairy Tail," and "Limit," as well as a new issue of Shonen Jump with an Akira Toriyama one-shot. Dive right in!
Posted 1/25/13 11:00 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
Last week was slow, but this week brings us the first novel by "Vampire Hunter" D illustrator Yoshitaka Amano as well as new volumes in some favorite series: "Black Butler," "A Bride's Story," "Flowers of Evil," and "Genshiken."
Posted 1/17/13 10:45 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
Shonen Jump Alpha celebrates its first birthday with next week's issue, and they are changing things up a bit, starting with the name: Alpha no more (and certainly not beta), they are changing their name to Weekly Shonen Jump, the same as their Japanese counterpart. And the even bigger change is that new chapters of SJ series will appear in both magazines on the same day.
And there are some changes in the lineup: "Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan" comes to a glorious end in this week's issue of with the final battle between our hero Rikuo Nura's Night Parade of a Hundred Demons and his rival Nue and the Gokadoin clan, all in full color. The fate of the world is in the balance—if Rikuo can't pull it out, it's going to be all yokai, all the time around here. Read More...
Posted 1/14/13 11:27 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
If you're a fan of sophisticated seinen manga, the series you like probably came from IKKI Magazine: "House of Five Leaves," "Children of the Sea," "Afterschool Charisma," "Dorohedoro," and "Bokurano: Ours" are all IKKI series, and all were published in North America by Viz.
Now IKKI is cutting out the middleman with a webcomics site that is publishing comics in Japanese and, in at least one case, in English as well: "Pandemonium -Wizard Village-" by Sho Shibamoto, which updates on the second Friday of every month, is presented in both Japanese and English.
Posted 1/9/13 9:50 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
Back at the turn of the century, Tokyopop was in the vanguard of the manga revolution, with Mixx Magazine, "Sailor Moon," and later, "Fruits
Basket." At one point, they were the second largest manga publisher in the U.S., next to Viz. And then things slowly turned sour. "Fruits Basket" came to an end, Kodansha pulled their licenses from Tokyopop altogether, their Original English Language (OEL) manga initiative didn't sell a lot of books (although it launched or boosted a lot of careers) and finally, in April 2011, they announced they wouldn't be publishing manga any more.
That wasn't quite the end, though. Tokyopop still continued to exist as a company, and last year they announced that they were getting back into the book biz, in a limited way, publishing "Hetalia" and their OEL manga "Bizenghast" and "Psy-Comm" as print-on-demand books in partnership with the anime retailer RightStuf. They also launched a Tokyopop newsletter, which focused more on food and fashion and other "otaku lifestyle" topics than manga, via Nerdist. Read More...
Posted 1/2/13 10:19 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
We're starting the New Year off with a bang, with a stack of new and classic manga for every taste: Fantagraphics' deluxe edition of Moto Hagio's "Heart of Thomas," the second volume of Osamu Tezuka's "Message to Adolf," the first volume of Naoki Urasawa's "21st Century Boys" (the followup to his award-winning "20th Century Boys"), and a stack of solid shoujo and shonen titles. Let's read!
SPONSORED POST | Posted 12/28/12 1:00 pm EST by Brigid Alverson in Best Of, Manga
There's the good, the great, and then there's the BEST. Welcome to MTV Geek's Best of 2012 -- what we thought were the cream of the crop this year in the world of GEEK!
10. ALICE IN THE COUNTRY OF HEARTS by Quinrose and Soumei Hoshino - This quirky manga goes far beyond its roots in a dating-sim game. Quinrose takes the world of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" as a starting point and fills it with engaging characters, some guileless, some menacing. This was hugely popular when Tokyopop published it a few years back, and Yen Press has picked it up in beautifully designed omnibus volumes that really do the story justice.
Posted 12/19/12 11:06 am EST by Brigid Alverson in Manga
Things are quiet in the manga world this week... too quiet. With the year almost over, and the holidays almost upon us, pickings are slim at the comics shop. But we do have a few new releases to tide us over till the January deluge.
This week's top choice is vol. 2 of "Paradise Kiss," Ai Yazawa's stylish story of a goody-goody high school student who has been faithfully following the path set out for her by her elders—until she falls in with a group of fashion students and gets a whole new outlook on life, helped along not only by her new friends' artistic endeavors but also by the romantic attentions of their leader, George. This is a fairly basic love story, but the fashion-school setting really gives it a boost, and the book is worth a look for Yazawa's art alone. (If it sounds familiar, this series was originally published in the U.S. by Tokyopop as a five-volume series; the current publisher, Vertical, has a new translation and is releasing it in three large-format volumes.)