Here at are the end of the holiday season – decorations are going away, hangovers are being recovered from and everyone’s getting back work. We’ve got the big wide world of 2012 ahead of us – Happy New Year!

In celebration we’ve got a brand spankin’ new layout. I stripped Kuriousity down to the basics with some shiny rotating artwork, a new logo and the same fun content. I hope you like it and if there are any issues, don’t hesitate to let me know!

In recap of 2011, I went back and revisited our top posts and site news of the year. It was an enjoyable trip down memory lane and a good way to say bye to the old and look forward to the new. Onward!

In Kuriousity news of 2011, we welcomed Victoria Martin as a contributor to the site and my On The Shelf articles over at Otaku USA have provided a consistent release list resource that I hope has been as beneficial to readers as it’s been to me. Toronto Comics Art Fest and New York Comic Con were my big trips of the year, leading to many amazing experiences and posts for the site. Fingers crossed for more in 2012!

Pokemon ended up being the hot button topic (as seen in our top posts) when it came to news I got the most e-mails, inquiries and follow-ups about. Who knew? We saw a huge increase in digital manga news from publishers in 2011 and as a result made the decision to keep Kuriousity primarily focused on titles remaining in print.

Below are some of the year’s top posts here at Kuriousity. The Top 5′s are based on page views compared to others throughout the year.

Top 5 (Non-Review) Posts

Viz Media Adds New Pokemon, Fantasy and Omnibus for 2011
TCAF 2011: Spotlight on Natsume Ono
Yaoicon 2011: Viz Media Launches SuBLime BL Imprint
Viz Media Elaborates on Pokemon Black & White Release
Digital Manga Launches Hentai Imprint – Project H

Top 5 Reviews

Sand Chronicles (Vol.10)
Blood Blockade Battlefront (Vol. 01)
Right Here, Right Now (Vol. 02)
Codename Sailor V (Vol. 01)
No Longer Human (Vol. 01)

Most Commented Posts

Viz Media Launches New Website and Leaves Much to Be Desired
Yaoicon 2011: Viz Media Launches SuBLime BL Imprint
Viz Media Adds New Pokemon, Fantasy and Omnibus for 2011
Kodansha Comics Announces Release of Sailor Moon Manga

Total Number of Posts: 267
Total Reviews: 63

Our review count really dropped this year as we all took some much needed breathers. Even the things you love to do require a break now and again! However with the New Year upon us, we’re refreshed and ready to face 2012 with our books in hand, thoughts in mind and words on screen! You can see us catch up on some recent titles in December’s archives.

On the note of reviewing, my personal thanks goes to Ed Sizemore and his post that touches on some similar sentiments when he stepped down from manga reviewing over at Comics Worth Reading. Sometimes the one thing you really need to hear (or read) is someone else articulate your thoughts way better than you can. To the luck and fortune of manga readers, Ed is continuing his manga-related podcasting over at Manga Out Loud. Yay!

And so we leave 2011 behind us – a year of so much amazing manga and plenty of interesting news and conventions. What next?! Here’s to 2012!

We’re welcoming a new reviewer to Kuriousity this week – Victoria Martin! She’ll be posting reviews for a variety of genres with her first, Ikigami (Vol. 05), going up this past Thursday.

Victoria previously wrote reviews for the now gone Manga Life (where Shannon also wrote for previously) and was a member of Animaritime staff which Andre and I currently help organize every year.

“Victoria Martin has been a manga fan every since university, when a particularly evil, enabling friend introduced it to her (as well as re-introducing her to anime as well). Seven years later, she has quite the collection of books on her shelves, mostly shoujo/josei but with some others as well. She’s always looking for the next series to love and cherish and religiously re-read for years.”

A big welcome to Victoria! I know she’ll be a perfect fit here on Kuriousity and look forward to seeing more of her writing here at its new home.

Also, while on topic of the Kuriousity crew, a Happy Birthday to Andre and best wishes to Shannon who’s off to England for a few months!

As promised (warned?) when Kuriousity officially moved to kuriousity.ca, our new layout launched late this past weekend! Why 3.2? It’s Kuriousity’s third complete layout and it went through a couple different incarnations before launching as you see it.

It’s similar to the prior one in terms of the set-up (no sense fixing what isn’t broken, right?) but I designed it to rely much less on images to speed up loading and added some more customized sections to make navigation easier. You’ll also see mini author bios on all our posts and some easier to use social media icons as well.

Of course there’s also the Kuriousity banner which I always have fun filling with a college of my favourite series. Can you name all the characters/series/artists up there now?

If you have any issues viewing the site with the new layout or have a suggestion, please don’t hesitate to let me know. I hope you like our new layout and continue to stop back often for Kuriousity’s new content!

Edit (May 25th): … new commenting system implemented! Now introducing a comment structure that actually makes conversational sense – enjoy :)

Quick update today to announce that after having an easy-to-do forwarder set up to make our .ca work as a domain, as of today Kuriousity is officially fully hosted at kuriousity.ca!

There’s still a forwarder in place to automatically send all old kuri-ousity.com to their corresponding page here on kuriousity.ca so there shouldn’t be any problem with broken links. That said, if you come across any link issues (be they on the site or from elsewhere) let me know!

Shifting the site over to our new .ca address is step one of a little revamp Kuriousity is getting. There’re some changes to the layout coming (nothing too huge but it’s about time for a fresh coat of paint!) so I’d like to take this opportunity to put out the question for visitors – is there a particular feature you’d like to see? A change to the layout that would make things easier for you? Leave me a comment or send an e-mail my way.

I’m off to Toronto Comics Art Fest in a few hours! With many an artist to hunt down and all their snazzy art to oogle and buy (including manga artist Natsume Ono and Usamaru Furuya), I’m super excited to hit the library floor running! That and I’ll be spending a week in Toronto seeking out comic stores new and old. Expect some updates to the Oh Canada! section after this.

Going to TCAF? Let me know! I’d love to meet up with people.

On a quick site note, expect some big, big changes coming to Kuriousity in the near-ish future but in the meantime, a little change has been made to the commenting system to allow me some peace. Upon reaching an average of 2000+ spam comments a day, I finally realized it was about time I installed a plug-in to combat it. All those who comment must now enter a simple system of letters/numbers so Kuriousity knows you’re not a spambot. I apologize for any inconvenience this causes but I think it’ll be much more beneficial in the long-run with less lost comments and less time spent deleting spam.

Speaking of Viz Media’s website, they’ve begun updating their new site with content! There’s now manga info available and nice simple new URLs so finding series is relatively easy even if you have difficulty finding it via the imprint breakdowns. (Example: vizmedia.com/death-note) . There’re still a number of broken links in place but Google is already catching up with their new manga links to slowly replace the dead links it was indexing from their old site. Yay for finding stuff again!

Hey everyone – a few quick notes today about some little tweaks and changes that I’ve made around Kuriousity lately. Most exciting news though first-off is that you can now reach our website with the URL – kuriousity.ca! Only took three years to get this address but finally something true to our Canadian -side and easier to remember!

In content-news, I’ve been working to clean up some of the static pages and my first stop was the dust-gathering Oh!Canada section. Clicking the Canadian flag in the header bar now leads a page that is both a link-hub to the relevant sections but also to those posts under the Canada category. Within Oh!Canada I’ve also revamped the Canadian Comic Shops page so that all provinces are on a single, easily-navigated page. Always looking for short reviews of stores around the country so send me an e-mail if you’d like to submit one.

Across the site, all posts now include an Author tag. All posts in the past have been posted by yours truly but now you can expect some news and editorial posts to go along with the reviews already provided by the rest of the fabulous Kuriousity crew! Some recent posts have been Andre’s sleuthing about DelRey that ended up preluding their transfer over to Kodansha, while Shannon has been sharing thirteen manga series she recommends for Halloween reading this October.

Expect some more changes, additions and hopefully helpful little tweaks across the site in the next couple of weeks.

As for this week however, I’ll be down in New York for New York Anime Fest to meet a ton of awesome folks, sit in on some panels, spelunk the vendors room and be a generally eager tourist in America’s Big Apple. Heading to NYAF this weekend as well? Let me know! I’m exciting to meet people. Expect updates on the site throughout the weekend, as well as quick updates to my Twitter account with any news or fun tidbits as they happen.

Two days without a post – we’re not dead, we swear! Though it means a lot people have actually asked. It makes us happy to know readers have come to look forward to Kuriousity’s daily posts and they shall be returning shortly!

Due to an upcoming convention that 5/6 of the Kuriousity are staffing at (just realized that – neat!), the site will be on a short hiatus for a couple more days. Manga news, reviews and that odd stuff in between will return after this weekend and the conclusion of our second Animinitime event.

Until then happy manga reading!

On July 6 2007 I posted my first review here on Kuriousity. Suffice to say I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I started using Kuriousity as a blog (and not simply a server for uploading stuff) – there were inline frames involved – but thanks to lots of helpful hints, inspiring experiences and lots of trial and error, here I am able to post that Kuriousity can celebrate (?) its third birthday!

Obligatory but completely deserved thanks go to Marsha, Shevaun, Shannon, Andre and Jaime who’ve joined me here on Kuriousity to add lots of variety to the titles reviewed, publishers doing a great job releasing all the material we enjoy, manga artists for making all the material we love and readers for reading the books and sharing our affection for them! Of course a thanks to fellow bloggers who always have something to get me thinking and Kuriousity readers who never cease to inspire us to share and inform, not to mention those who have suggested so many series to read in comments that I’ve discovered tons of great books thanks to you all as well!

Three years and nearly 700 reviews later, I like to think Kuriousity is still going strong. I know I keep having fun with it so I suppose that’s what matters. Happy three-years Kuriousity! And hopefully many more :)

A little belated in my posting about it but Kuriousity will be taking a very short hiatus for the next couple of days (week including the silence since Wednesday). Reason being is my weekend being overtaken by a local anime convention, Animinitime!

I’ll be having a post-con mini report on the event (from the con-chair’s perspective?) and will be back to regular Kuriousity news and review postings on Tuesday, April 27.

Many thanks for always stopping by everyone! Have a beautiful Spring weekend :)

Today I’m proud to officially announce our newest reviewer here at Kuriousity: Jaime Samms. She’ll be covering a sorely-lacking-until-now portion of the site – boys’ love light novels! You can read her first review of Digital Manga’s Caged Slave.

“Hi! I’m Jaime Samms, also known as dontkickmycane in live journal land. I’ve been writing gay romance and fiction for quite some time now, and reviewing it for almost as long, since I tend to have lots of opinions… …My love for all things Yaoi is what brought me here, and I’m so pleased to join the team. I have no complaints about all the reading I’ll have to do, either!” – Read more…

Welcome to the team, Jaime!

But until then -

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

May everyone’s days be full of smiling faces, seasonal cheer and good times all around with friends and family :)

Today I’m officially cutting the proverbial ribbon on Boys-Luv.com – a sister-site of sorts for Kuriousity that focuses on just what the name would imply – boys’ love and yaoi! If you want to learn more or share some ideas of what you’d like to see on Boys-Luv.com, by all means please head over to the official launch post and let me know what you think.

On the Kuriousity side of things, I have a few questions for my readers. While working on Boys-Luv.com, which has a different layout and font structure than Kuriousity, I came to find that I really like the larger more spaced-out font – but before making any big changes on Kuriousity, I’d like to know what you think as far as readability goes (plus I know myself well enough that I’m often biased to whatever’s new and different).

Is the font size and style easy to read here? Would you prefer something a different size, style, colour…?

Also if there’s any other content you’re interested in seeing here on Kuriousity please let me know as well. With the new year coming up, it’s the perfect time to make some fresh changes around here and I’m open to people’s thoughts and suggestions. I’ve gotten positive feedback regarding the recent upgraded release schedules and I’m always happy to hear visitors come here because they find the content useful.

In the meantime I hope boys’ love fans will take a gander over at Boys-Luv.com and enjoy the new format (and gorgeous header image).

Here at Kuriousity we do our best to cover as many manga releases and genres as we can but it becomes more than apparent with so many great books out there to read that there’s just not enough hours in the day! So as of now we’re officially looking for a new reviewer to add to our team.

We’re currently looking for a Yaoi/Boys’Love Light Novel Reviewer. Chosen applicant(s) will not be expected to solely review light novels but that will be the focus of this position.

The role of reviewer is not paid but you will recieve copies of books to review and they’re yours to keep! All applicants must currently reside in Canada, be 18 years of age or older and of course have an interest in boys’ love, manga and writing.

Interested? Send your name, e-mail and an example review to reviews (a) kuriousity.ca

Manga Release Schedules
(Feature discontinued)

Starting with January 2010 you can view the list of releases scheduled for that month and sort the list either by name, creator, publisher or rating. Also instead of posting one month at a time, I’ll now be updating the year’s worth of release lists as the information becomes available. It’s still got a few gaps in the info but it’ll be a continuously updated feature so drop by every now and again and see what new goodies have popped up!

Having spent today compiling these lists, I can definitely say that my paychecks have never been planned so many months ahead. My thanks to those who shared their thoughts regarding the previous incarnation of my release lists and to the creators of the incredibly useful plug-in that saved me hours of time on this format. Enjoy Kuriousity visitors – I hope it proves useful in all your purchase-planning endeavours :)