2011 has some convention news in her yet! The convention Anime Weekend Atlanta is taking place this weekend and this evening Vertical Inc. held a panel discussing their current and upcoming titles. This included one new manga license:
Flowers of Evil – Shuzo Oshimi
The series is about a boy who finds himself being blackmailed by a fellow student who saw him steal the gym clothes of another girl in their class. The first volume of Vertical’s edition is due to be released in May 2012. The series is currently four volumes long total and was published in Japan by Kodansha. You can look at a preview of the manga on their site (click the middle white button for the preview window). Flowers of Evils‘ creator, Shuzo Oshimi, also has a series titled Drifting Net Cafe available to read online at the digital manga site, JManga.
Along with this manga announcement, Vertical Inc’s marketing director Ed Chavez said that there would be three new titles announced at the upcoming NYAF/NYCC. These titles will include one josei title (genre targeted at older woman), a new Tezuka title and one other. I’ll be attendance at NYAF so you can bet I’ll be there at Vertical’s panel for all the news!
Other notable mentions included confirmation of the Dororo omnibus (now scheduled for May 2012), Twin Spica‘s final volume count coming in at twelve and that the seventeenth volume of Tezuka’s Black Jack will have a “special die-cut cover” and extras, marking the final volume in the series. Vertical also announced they’d be publishing an edition of Fumi Nakamura’s light novel, Enma the Immortal. A preview and plot synopsis of that book can be read via a pre-existing English Kindle edition.
Credit for all the news above goes to Karen who posted the info live via her Twitter account.
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Viz Media is celebrating its 25th birthday this year (proving that awesome people and things were indeed born in 1986 – completely irrelevant it’s my birth year also). They have a mini-hub set up that’s updated with news relevant to the milestone – 
Tokyopop originally held the license for Shonan Junai-gumi and they published ten of the fifteen volumes. The complete series was originally thirty-one volumes long before being released in the deluxe omnibus editions. Tokyopop released the GTO series in 2001 and released the entire story, twenty five volumes in total. Though out of print, you can still find volumes of GTO on many online retail sites and in some bookstores. Shonan 14 Days is currently on-going in Japan with six volumes so far.
