Manga Xanadu

Some company needs to step up to plate and rescue the City Hunter manga from license hell. This series, written and drawn by Hojo Tsukasa, ran in Shonen Jump from 1985-1992, and has a total of 35 volumes. It’s about Ryo Saeba, a sweeper, or gun for hire, working in Tokyo. He is known as The City Hunter, the best shot in the Underground World, where he worked as an assassin for my years before becoming sweeper. Now, he works with a partner, Kaori Makimura, who is the younger sister of his former partner, Hideyuki Makimura. Hideyuki died, and asked Ryo to take care of Kaori. Together, they take on work to help people as body guards or private detectives. And even though he is wanted by the police, he sometimes helps out Saeko Nogami, a pretty detective wtih Tokyo Metro Police. There is alot of action in this manga, and lots of sharp shooting from Ryo, making nearly impossible shots to save the day. Ryo is a well muscled, good looking man, and the women are all shapely beauties. Sound like a typical shonen series? Well, it isn’t! This series is freaking hysterical!! What makes City Hunter so funny?…

Anime News Network featured a news story about Voice Bank, a software company based in Japan, that wants to put manga at your fingertips. Back in July, Voice Bank demonstrated software to convert digital manga to fit the iphone screen, and was seeking partners to deliver content in the US. Then just a few days ago in Hong Kong, showed off digital manga available through Safari (the iphone web browser), as the Digital Manga Project. Right now, it is still just an experiment, as they are continuing to research the best way to deliver the content over a WiFi connection as well as new hardware and software. Now, I’m not a big iphone/ipod fan. I don’t care for Steve Jobs and his totalitarian attitudes towards his customers, ie. limiting iphones to AT&T, not allowing phones to be unlocked or have third party apps and brick the phones of people who do with itunes updates. But I do have to admit what Voice Bank and the Digital Manga Project have done actually looks pretty good. The image is clean and is easily seen on the screen, unlike the conversions Tokyopop did of their OEL manga for the Sony E-Reader. Despite the…

Anime News Network has announced that the latest issue of Hakusensha’s LaLa shojo magazine has announced that the Vampire Knight manga, created by Matsuri Hino and published by Viz Media in the US will become an anime to be shown in Japan. Vampire Knight, published in Viz’s Shojo Beat magazine, is already very popular with girls here in the US. There are websites devoted to the characters and manga, as well as fans dressing up as characters at anime conventions. The bishonen (pretty) boys that make up most of the series is one reason for it’s popularity. Another is it’s school-horror theme. The story takes place at Cross Academy that has two class; the Day Class and the Night Class. Only a select few know that the Night Class is made up of exclusively vampires. We follow Yuki Cross, the adopted daughter of Headmaster, Zero, a latent vampire who keeps his urges at bay by drinking Yuki’s blood (against the academy’s rules), and Kaname, the vampire that saved Yuki, and considers her his. This is a shojo manga that has all the sexiness of vampires combined with hot boys and high school problems. Expect to see this licensed real fast.

At the opening of the new Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York, Viz announced the licensing of another of Takehiko Inoue’s manga, REAL, a sports manga with a twist; Wheelchair Basketball. With the mangaka present in a rare appearance, Viz announced that this lastest manga by Takehiko would join Vagabond and Slam Dunk in the Viz library.

Viz takes another step into the digital domain by offering one of it’s biggest sellers online. Naruto joins Bleach and Death Note on Direct2Drive , IGN Entertainment’s digital retail store, at the reasonable price of $1.99 an episode. It’s for windows users only right now, as it uses Mediaplayer’s DRM, but intel macs with windows emulators can run them too. Apparantly all the shows are also dub only, so if you like the watch your anime in the original japanese with subtitles, you’re going to have to stay with DVDs.

27 volumes of Naruto in a beautifully made wooden case with lots of extras. At $190, it’s cheaper than buying the volumes individually (sales/discounts not included), and you get a case to put them in to boot! Not a bad deal over all…. Truly a must for the die-hard Naruto fan! More after the break.