As well as keeping this blog, I’m the Editor in Chief of Manga Village, a news, reviews, commentary website. We’re squatting at Comics Village until our own site is ready. We’ve got some great reviews and columns for you at Manga Village! This week Charles Tan gets ready for the Super Bowl with Eyeshield 21 Vol 1 from Viz. John Thomas helps with the Half Time show with some hot girls with guns with Gunsmith Cats Revised Vol 1 from Dark Horse, and I’ve brought some monsters and maids along to wreck it all with Princess Resurrection Vol 2 from Del Rey!And check the Reviews archive for more great reviews. We’ve got a couple of columns too! Check out our Weekly Picks. Finally, for all you aspiring mangaka…do you have a story that you know you could get published, if you had the chance? Have a manga/web comic that you’d love to get on the web, but no place to upload? Then check this link out for information on our competition, Get Published at Manga Village!
As many parents with school age children know, getting your child to read can sometimes be a real hassle. This is especially true if your child is struggling in school. In this post-“No Child Left Behind”-world, this can mean pressure from teachers and schools to get your child to improve. I was having this problem with my youngest daughter. Now, I’ve always believed the way to get someone interested in reading, was to give them a book about something they were interested in or enjoyed. So with my youngest, we tried finding books that she would like, and let her choose the books she wanted to read, but she still struggled with her reading, and never wanted to do it. We were at a loss of what to do, until we found a breakthrough in the form of an anime. As well as reading manga, I enjoy watching anime based on manga. One series I got interested in was Sgt. Frog from Tokyopop. When I found some fansubs online, I downloaded them to check the anime out. So, I’m out in the living room, watching the shows, and both my daughters come out to see what I was doing. Since…
Now that I’ve admitted that I have a problem, it’s time to take the next step. Cut down the number of titles I buy. To do this, I first made a list of my manga in order of priority. What titles I would get no matter what. What titles I would get when the first list didn’t have any coming out, the titles I could take or leave and then the titles that I could drop. Do everything in moderation, even reduction, right? Once I had my list, I then had to come up with a criteria by which to apply it. I decided I would get between $50-$60 worth of books. If felt this was the best way to go, since releases tend to fluctuate from month to month. I also wasn’t going to count the manga other people in the house bought (ie, the 2 titles my oldest daughter reads, and the 3 my husband gets). So, now I have my list and my limit. I then turned to the Previews catalog, the harbinger of happiness and dread. I actually started this with last month’s order, but it wasn’t so hard. There were only 12 titles total, one…
Bandai Visual USA has announced that it will release the anime version of Haruka ~Beyond the Stream of Time. This is both good and bad. The good is that a shojo anime series has been licensed. There aren’t a lot of shojo anime out there, and with the manga version of this story being released in Viz’s Shojo Beat, a tie-in should help sales. Readers who like Haruka should check it out when it comes out. I do encourage people to check out the anime versions of manga they like. Especially a short series like this. Haruka is only 26 episodes long. Seeing the characters move and hearing them speak really adds another dimension to the story. I’ll admit that, while I usually end up preferring the manga to the anime, I have never regretted watching the anime. The bad thing about this is that Bandai Visual USA got it. If you aren’t familiar with anime, then you should know that Bandai Visual has a reputation for high priced volumes for less content. And it looks like this release isn’t going to be much different. According to Anime on DVD, this release of Haruka will be subbed only, and will…
Why do I read so much manga instead of American comics? Let’s take Marvel’s latest story line in Amazing Spiderman as a good example. It’s riled up a lot of comic fans, and been kind of hard to avoid if you follow the forum boards at all. Basically, in the story line called “One More Day”, Aunt May is dying. She’s old, it was bound to happen. Peter, who’s been married to Mary Jane for the last 10 years, just can’t seem to accept that. Peter “with great power comes great responsibility” Parker decides he can’t live without Aunt May, and goes to the Marvel Universe’s version of Satan to make a deal (like those always turn out soooo well). He gives up the last 10 years of his life, and his wife, so Aunt May can live. He’s doing this over Aunt May’s protests, by the way. Mr. Responsibility turns into a selfish 2 year old. So what’s Marvel done here? In technical terms, it’s called the “Big, Red Reset Button”. They are wiping out 10 years of continuity to turn Peter Parker back into a young bachelor, unencumbered by the hassles of a wife, to be a carefree…
According to ANN, ADV is discontinuing Newtype USA. No reason why, just that a “new, unnamed” magazine will take it’s place. To be honest, I’m not going to miss Newtype USA. Of all the anime/manga magazines out there, this one had the greatest potential that was completely wasted by ADV. But then, that’s no surprise either. I remember the excitement at the news that Newtype would be coming to the US in an english form. Newtype was the bible to anime back in the day (and I mean the 80’s when I say that). Getting a version here was awesome news to the anime fan. And then…ADV got a hold of it. It became a big, glossy ad for ADV advertisers, and not the premiere magazine on anime that it should have been. Up until this year, there was no anime/manga magazine that I thought was worth my time. Anime Insider, from Wizard, it just another Wizard magazine cosplaying. There aren’t any real reviews and nothing bad is said about the advertisers products. Protoculture Addicts…it was a nice fanzine, but really lost it when it became a published magazine. I just don’t feel I can trust what’s said in it,…
Just off the presses from ANN and Comipress, Seven Seas/Tor has just confirmed that they have licensed Inukami!. This is a manga series based on Mamizu Arisawa’s light novel series of the same name. I found out about this series through a podcast I listen to, Anime Pulse, where it was reviewed. It’s a comedy/romance in the vein of Urusei Yatsura, only much more risque. It’s about a boy named Keita who comes from a family of Inukami (dog diety) tamers and who is also a letch, in the tradition of Ataru. Yoko, the Inukami he makes a contract with, decides she doesn’t like that, and wants to be Keita’s girlfriend, and not just Inukami. She has a fire attack that she hits him with, as well as the ability to transport instantly, which she does to him, minus his clothes. The anime was hysterical, and I was following the manga through scanalation, since I didn’t think *ANYONE* would *EVER* license it. But then, here comes Seven Seas, with their new buddy Tor, going and making ANOTHER series I now have to buy. I picked the wrong year to cut down on manga…
Hi. My name is Lori, and I’m addicted to manga. It started innocently. It was 2002. My husband and I were in a comic book store, and I was looking for some new series to pick up. There, I discovered Dragon Knights, a series Tokyopop was publishing in comic form. It was fun and I love dragons anyway. It lasted 6 issues before Tokyopop abandoned the comic form and went to publishing in graphic novel form, unflipped. I of course, followed the change in format since I wanted to follow the story. And thus was my addiction born. Why do I think I’m addicted to manga? Let me explain. I was looking at the numbers for Tokyopop’s releases for a small blog I keep there, and on a whim decided to look at how much manga I purchased over the year. My husband is always complaining I had too much manga, and I just brushed it off. Until I looked at the numbers myself. For the year 2007, I ordered 156 volumes of manga through Previews. I purchased another 47 from amazon.com, Deepdiscount.com and other sources. So that’s 203 volumes I purchased throughout the year. 25 of those volumes were…
The Kindle has been getting a lot of press lately. It was feature on the cover of Newsweek, it’s back ordered because of the demand, but is it really all that the hype is making it out to be? And what’s this going to mean to manga and other j-media? The Kindle is Amazon’s entry into ebooks. Since Amazon sells books, this seems to make sense. The Kindle uses a new technology know as “electronic paper”. It uses black ink, in a way similar to an etch-a-sketch, to electronically charge the ink so that it clings to the screen. This gives the appearance and readability of paper without the flicker or glare of a computer screen. It has wireless connectivity that makes getting books and other files fast and easy. No need to search for a WiFi hotspot. Anywhere Sprint service is available, so is your Kindle. You can buy and download books from the Amazon Kindle Store with the keypad at the bottom of the reader. It comes with an account and email address for your purchases and correspondence. You can also download magazines and daily newspapers, so no more paper cluttering your house or needing recycling. It can…
Shojo Beat, the sister anthology magazine to Shonen Jump has been going through a lot of changes lately. Of the six manga that started the magazine, only two remain. The rest were graduated out for one reason or another. But, with the line up they’ve got now, I think the magazine has finally found a good balance of titles that really make it shine. To start off the December issue of Shojo Beat, we are treated to a preview of a new manga; High School Debut. Reading the short description didn’t enthuse me to the title. A girl just starting in high school wants to get a boyfriend, so she finds another guy to coach her. Blah. I really wasn’t interested in another “girl wants boyfriend like in manga” story. But, as usual, I read the preview anyway, and was pleasantly surprised. Haruna, the heroine, wasn’t too annoying in her pursuit to bag a boy. But it was Yoh, the boy who knows just what a boy will like in a girl, that really endeared me to this preview. He has a sharp tongue and really doesn’t care what people think. He reminds me a lot of Kiri from Beauty…