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Viz Dominates NYCC 2009 Sunday

By Lissa Pattillo on Sunday, February 8, 2009

With Tokyopop, Bandai, Del Rey and Yen Press’s panels yesterday, it was Viz who stepped up to take centrestage today at New York Comic Con. Many thanks to @MangaCast again and the ever-vigilant (and wonderfully detailed) Gia over at AnimeVice! You can read her live-postings about the Viz panel here.

New manga licenses from Viz are:

All My Darling Daughters
Fumi Yoshinaga

Beast Master
Kyousuke Motomi

Boys Over Flowers: Jewelery Box
Yoko Kamio

Butterfly, Flowers
Yuki Yoshihara

Gogo Monster
Taiyo Matsumoto

Jormungand
Keitaro Takahashi

Natsume’s Book of Friends
Yuki Midorikawa

Not Simple
Natsume Ono

The Gentlemen’s Alliance Cross Artbook
Arina Tanemura

What a Wonderful World
Inio Asano

Yu-Gi-Oh! R
Akira Ito

ANN has thumbnails and release dates to go with these titles as well.

Also exciting from Viz is that they’ll be revealing “very soon” information about their release plans for the Monster anime series and L: Change the World live-action film. As someone who has just finished the Monster manga series (in a word, wow), I’m excited to hear that the English anime release is moving forward. An anime I may actually sit down and watch! I hope its a nice boxset release initially over individual DVDs.

Other tidbits (which you can read about in more detail over at Gia’s live blog of the panel) include Stan Lee’s Ultimo running in Shonen Jump, Naruto taking a break in Shonen Jump to make way for a lot of manga volumes spread over a few months and some date reminders of upcoming releases.

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Categories: Licensing
Tags: Conventions, Fumi Yoshinaga, Natsume's Book of Friends, NYCC, Viz Media

Saturday at NYCC 2009

By Lissa Pattillo on Saturday, February 7, 2009

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While I usually wait until a con’s end to post an overview of the manga news, some exciting announcements (okay, one inparticular) have left me too over-eager for that this time! I have Twitter to thank for that, @MangaCast and @DebAoki inparticular, who via dedicated posting, I’m able to read all the fun stuff as it happens! What’s better than that for those of us who couldn’t make it?

So thus far at New York Comic Con we’ve had a bunch of new manga announcements:

Tokyopop announced that they’re adapting the NHK mascot, Domo, into a full-colour manga due out in September. No word yet on whose writing or drawn it though. They’re also holding a contest for artists to have their fanart featured in the book though as is customary for TP, the contest it open to residents of the US only.

Bandai Entertainment informs fans that they’ve acquired the license to “all” the Gundam 00 manga, including spin-offs and light novels.

CMX has confirmed some titles that Amazon exposed in December, such as Broken Blade and King of Debris.

Del Rey has gotten their hands on Four-Eyed Prince by Wataru Mizukami, Only One Wish by Mia Ikumi and You Higuri’s manga adaptation of the anime series, Night Head Genesis. As another anime series I found interesting, but ultimately dull due to the fact that animes need to try a million times harder to maintain my attention, I really look forward to You Higuri’s version (and no complaints to more of her work in general!).

And finally, Yen Press has announced that it’s licensed the Spice and Wolf manga, Park JinJun’s supernatural mahnwa Raiders, Crescent Moon Story –a yaoi by Fujiyama Hyouta – and, the most long-awaited yet still surprising news, the license rescue of the well-loved and ridicuously charming, Yotsuba&! ! They’ll be picking up where ADV Manga left off with the sixth volume due out this coming September.

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Categories: Licensing
Tags: Bandai, Boys' Love/Yaoi, Conventions, Del Rey, Manhwa, NYCC, Tokyopop, Yen Press

Digital Manga Licenses Itazura na Kiss

By Lissa Pattillo on Tuesday, January 27, 2009

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I just recieved a press release from Digital Manga Publishing about a new licensed shoujo manga: Itazura no Kiss!

I’ve heard lots of good things about this series so I’m looking forward to reading it. Also nice to see DMP’s regular manga line-up (ie, not their boys’ love) getting a new addition.

The first volume of this 12-book series is slated for release in November 2009, with the second coming out in March the following year. You can read the full press release here.

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Categories: Licensing
Tags: DMP

Sense and Sexuality Update

By Lissa Pattillo on Monday, January 26, 2009

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As a follow-up to my Yaoi Minis for January 24th post, Kitty Media’s new title Sense and Sexuality is by Higashino You. Also, I forgot to mention that the description included in the AAAanime listing isn’t for this series, but it does have a cover image for the April yaoi release.

Baka-Updates has the following synopsis for the story:

“Hanamura Masatsugu and Takakura Kuniomi are intimate friends since childhood, and both are heirs to their respective marquises. Their favorite sport is seeing who can score the next bishounen that comes across their path in the Imperial Capital. And now Kuniomi has set his eyes on a new target…!?”

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Categories: Licensing
Tags: Boys' Love/Yaoi

Yaoi Minis for January 24th

By Lissa Pattillo on Saturday, January 24, 2009

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Some boys’ love links of interest tonight:

BLU forums are pointing the way to Tokyopop’s site where you can view some preview pages for the upcoming and long-awaited fourth volume of Black Knight. Pretty artwork awaits you!

Some exciting news over at the Yaoi Generation forums where the staff had this to say:

“We’re also wrapping up a couple new licenses! Yay! We’ll be announcing it soon… well, soonish… hehe.. It’s not one of the suggested ones though. We’ve been working on getting these upcoming licenses since middle of last year, and it’s finally nearing completion, so we’re very excited!”

So much for waiting until the end of their first series, breath, before diving into others. But who am I kidding, I’m happy. Here’s hoping they handle it well and we get some more quality work. I was impressed with their first release and hope to be with future ones.

Deb Aoki’s Best of 2008 manga polls continue, including Best New Yaoi/Shonen-Ai Manga of 2008. It’s down to a race between the global boys’ love title ANIMA by Dany&Dany, and Ayano Yamane’s A Foreign Love Affair. Personally, I voted for Future Lovers, no contest my favourite on the list. Head over there and vote for your favorite and definitely check out any titles there you haven’t read yet. There’s some good ones for sure!

A new title from Kitty Media? Sense and Sexuality, with a release date listed for April 2009 (Edit: update). And how about a potentially new title from Deux Press? Have some Spicy But Sweet, a sequel to their already licensed Naughty But Nice. And from DMP, The Lonely Mgoytist (this one seems familiar to me but I can’t find news on it before my head hits the desk from sleepiness so apologies if this is repeat news).

Y!Gallery, aka YaoiGallery, the biggest online art community revolving around men, men and men on men, has recently had a big overhaul of their Rules and Terms of Use. One of the biggest changes includes the return of ‘furries’. Characters with strong animal characteristics were originally banned due to user complaints and a blurred line of beastiality. Site users are now given the option to filter their accounts so that furry art doesn’t show up for them. Other rule changes include no copyrighted material or work taken without permission being used for literature thumbnails (saving people like me a hundred headaches for clicking on what looks like really well done fanart only to find one of a million fanfics).

And finally, Tina Anderson and MTCopyright’s full-colour webcomic Whore of Turfan continues to update weekly with lots of shiny drama to look forward to every Friday! (Whoops, how’d this plug get here? ;) ) Seriously though, a strong start for the series from two talented individuals and I can’t wait to see where its going.

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Categories: Licensing
Tags: BLU, Boys' Love/Yaoi, Deux Press, Global Manga, June, Yaoi Generation

Viz Down the 2009 Road, More Dogs

By Lissa Pattillo on Tuesday, January 20, 2009

1 Comment »

Good ‘ol Viz, always there to remind people in these questionable economic and publisher times that there remains exciting manga down the road. Of course I’m talking about Amazon where you can now see shiny covers and release dates for Viz’s titles up to October 2009. Some of these titles include the first volumes of their new series, the stylish Ooku by Fumi Yoshinaga and the colourful WaqWaq by Ryu Fujisaki.

One listing that was new to me was volume one of Dogs: Bullets and Carnage. While Viz made official annoucement of their acquistion of the original oneshot book, Dogs: Prelude, and I do recall mention of this sequel, it’s nice having this listing as a concrete ‘yes we are releasing it’. Shirow Miwa’s high contrast art and gritty storylines are something I’ve been waiting for in English a long while and I’m glad to see we’re definitely not just getting the tip of the iceberg.

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Categories: Licensing
Tags: Fumi Yoshinaga

Funimation Domination, Boys’ Love and Other Stuff

By Lissa Pattillo on Thursday, January 1, 2009

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I’m not a big anime-watcher these days so I tend to leave the anime news to other sources but since so much has come up in the last little while, I figured it’d be of interest to my visitors for some sharing. And so, quick anime recap!

Funimation’s big New Show-A-Go-Go has come to an end with lots of Geneon rescues, a few inevitables and a couple surprises. The complete list of licenses are:

Ikki Tousen
Gad Guard
Vandread
Nabari No Ou
Last Exile
Oh! Edo Rocket

Gankutsuo: Count of Monte Cristo
Slayers Revolution
Gungrave
Samurai Champloo
Soul Eater
Evangelion: 1.0

It’s great seeing Funimation rescue some of these great series and it’ll likely mean that fans will see some affordable boxsets in the future. May I highly recommend Gankutsuo, Gungrave and Last Exile. I’m also happy to see Nabari no Ou licensed because I’d really like to watch it after seeing the first episode a while back. Oh Funimation, you’re making an anime-watcher out of me again!

December was a month of boys’ love anime announcements following the news that the manga Sex Pistols would be made into a set of OVAs. Now not only are we getting an animated version of Kaori Monchi’s Hey! Class President, but also a remake of the retro-popular Ai No Kusabi (and the leads are very attractively redesigned, if I do say so myself).

Meanwhile, Crunchyroll is on, well… a roll, when it comes to picking up animes for showing on their free, ad-supported website. Since stripping the site of its illegal fansubbed work, they’ve wasted little time in refilling the site with lots of subbed, legal and still free works to view streamed from their site. Since the list is too long for me to dig for and post, I’ll just direct you here. Happy legal watching!

And finally for this anime-day posting, it was announced early in December that CLAMP’s Kobato series would be getting the anime treatment by Madhouse. All I can say is that if the studio handles it half as well as they did Cardcaptor Sakura, then all is well in the anime world as far as I’m concerned ;)

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Categories: Licensing
Tags: Anime, Boys' Love/Yaoi, CLAMP

Look what the Kitty dragged in!

By Lissa Pattillo on Sunday, December 21, 2008

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Could it be? Naono Bohra in English?! (With no thanks to DramaQueen) Kitty Media has a listing on RightStuf for Naono Bohra’s supernatural one-shot Yami no Tooboe, Mune Ni Toge (which they’ve renamed Yokai’s Hunger). Big fans like me will obviously be very happy of what will hopefully be the first of many of Naono’s work to be licensed for English release. And even better, not long to wait with Yokai’s Hunger due for release in March 2009.

Listing originally spotted by sharp-eyed voiceofreason36 at the YaoiGen forums.

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Categories: Licensing
Tags: Boys' Love/Yaoi

Hello Amazon, you have Dragonball for me?

By Lissa Pattillo on Saturday, December 20, 2008

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Time for some more reasons to make you guys think I must live on Amazon :) Discoveries are fun stuff and the stuff found often even funner:

Trill on Eden (Vol. 01) : An unannounced license from Go!Comi? By the same manga-ka who brought us The Devil Within.

And as an update on some old news, Viz announced earlier in the year their plans for graphic novel boxsets of the Dragonball and Dragonball Z manga. They were announced with November 2008 release dates, which has obviously come and gone, but they’ve been rescheduled with Feburary 3rd, 2009 releases. Certainly one heck’ve a purchase for DB fans who don’t wish to collect the series via the Viz Big line. Just wanted to show off the big and shiny boxsets for those who haven’t seen ’em before becaues I think they’re lovely and I want them :)

On a newer note, Amazon also lists volumes of an upcoming addition to their Viz Kids line-up, Dragonball chapter books. Time to get kids reading some paragraphs again! And then on top of that, VizKids has Dragonball The Movie Chapter Books, with volume one slated for a Feburary 29th, 2009 release date (you can see a tentative cover image here.) Check out the epic synopsis:

“Goku thought he was a normal high school student until he found out he’s actually a martial-arts whiz with all kinds of crazy powers. Now he and his new group of teen warriors are on a quest to find all the Dragon Balls before they fall into the wrong hands. But they may already have! Goku must battle the evil madman Piccolo with all he’s got to save the planet Earth!”

Goku is actually a martial-arts whiz?! Golly! Movie still looks fun though. Just block out the few referrences you’ll see to Dragonball and all shall be well… er, better atleast.

And finally, because it’s fun: Star Trek The Next Generation (Vol. 01) and my first look at the cover art. I’m looking forward to this because, come on, it’s Picard in manga style. It has to be seen! Accidental discoveries of disturbing doujinshi don’t count…

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Categories: Licensing
Tags: Global Manga

Saturday Splunks

By Lissa Pattillo on Saturday, December 13, 2008

3 Comments »

Eventually I’m going to run out of titles completely based on what day of the week it is. I’m only so creative on no hours of sleep! While I finish up some work on an incoming post on holiday shopping (complete with too many random colourful pictures of course), here’re some more Amazon-related finds which may or may not be new but were atleast of interest to me so I like to think satisitically must be of interest to atleast someone else out there! If you’re that person (or people?) then this post is for you :)

As usual, keep in mind that these listings may not be entirely accurate and pending official recognition and announcement from publishers, cannot and should not be considered 100% confirmed. This is especially true regarding release dates. Check it all out under the cut.