This just in from BookCloseouts.com! They have a promotion from now until December 31st. Place an order of $35 or more, and get your shipping free! That is an awesome deal! Now you can get Manga Claus, and $30 more of books! Here are some searches to try: Del Rey Manga Tokyopop Viz Seven Seas Entertainment Now go buy some manga! Save the economy!
I was listening to my tech podcasts this morning, like I do every Monday, and I got to Jumping Monkeys, parenting in the digital age. And, on this show, the hosts Leo Laporte and Megan Morrone do a segment called Spend, Save, Give where they take about websites that have interesting things to spend on, save on, or give to the community, etc. On today’s show, the Save was dedicated to Bookcloseouts.com, a site I have featured a few times myself on this blog. Megan was featuring it for the great deals you can get on kids books (which can be REALLY expensive). But Leo…I don’t know how he found it, but started taking about this title he found: When he first said the title, I thought I was mishearing him. He pronounced manga wrong (man-ga instead of mahn-ga), so I had to look this thing up myself, just to see if it was real. And, as you can see, it is. Check out the description of the book here. It’s as good as the picture. And buy a copy while you’re there. There are only 58 left and at 80% off, it’s a steal! Make it a new holiday…
To the San Diego Comic Con. It’s our annual summer vacation trip that we share with 40,000+ other fans. Unfortunately is always feels like ALL 40,000 are in the Exhibit room at the same time… Oh well. Hopefully this year there will be better crowd control. And we go for the panels just as much as the shopping. At least Brian and I do. The girls have DSes to keep them busy. So Doctor Who, Stargate, and an MST3K reunion! Whoo Hoo! (Yes, I’ve been an MiSTie since CC’s second season.) And of course the manga. There’s certainly plenty of it spread around the Exhibit room. Panels are sparcer this year than I remember last year. Anyway, if we can get the WiFi in our hotel room working, I’ll post some thoughts Thursday and Friday night. I know there’s going to be Wifi at the con, but I’m not lugging my laptop around in addition to all my purchases. It’s not like there won’t be plenty of others giving you the scoops. I’ll just do the commentary afterwards. I can’t wait to see what Tokyopop’s “viral marketing” is going to be. They were looking for volunteers who were going to…
From the Great Ideas Dept: John Thomas over at Mecha Mecha Media takes another look at Light Novels in the US and comes up with a GREAT new name for them: J-Pulp. I think this is a perfect name for them! It describes them exactly as they are meant to be. Short prose books meant to kill a few hours. And it’s a term book retailers and publishers can understand. They aren’t meant to be high literature, nor shoved into the foreign books section (is that really a category in bookstores?) It’s all about the genre. Get the light novels with the other novels they fit into best; Ghost in the Shell and Vampire Hunter D in the Sci Fi/Fantasy section. Then at the end of the novel, mention that the manga series is available for more stories, etc. If you’re not going to tell anyone about these book except the people who already know about them (don’t get me started on the incestuous relationship manga and anime keep cultivating), then at least get them into places where non-manga fans might stumble on them and decide to find out more.
What I’ve been dreading has finally become official: Kindaichi Case Files has been canceled. As part of Tokyopop’s slashing, the January 2009 solicitation of volume 18, Burial Francs, is on the list. I was hoping against hope that this title would some how survive, since it was one of the few good titles Tokyopop had to offer. Even though it’s a shonen title, it’s mysteries could keep an adult guessing. Engaging characters and intriguing mysteries made this a series a must for mystery aficionados. Even though I love mysteries, I didn’t pick up Kindaichi immediately. Wanna know why? Because Tokyopop can’t market a title properly to save their life! When this series first came out, they advertised it as a Japanese “Scooby Doo”, emphasizing the supernatural parts over the mystery. That was a failure on so many levels. Kids looking for short, quick mysteries with goofy characters would be disappointed, and people looking for a good murder mystery series (like me) would avoid it like the plague. I’m not quite sure what made me pick up the series. I think I just kept seeing it in our local Waldens Books, and finally gave it a real look over. I bought…
Tokyopop, being one of the few companies to embrace the potential of online manga is doing it again. Starting this week, and until Wed. 7/2/08, you can read all of Bizenghast Volume 1 on their website. And for every week after, you can read another volume leading up to Volume 5, which will be available to read on 7/15/08 only. I got hooked on this series through reading it online. Last year Tokyopop did this for the first two volumes, for the release of the third. If you want to check out a series, reading it online is a great way to sample it. And if you do like it, buy the volumes. Online manga lets you taste the series, but having the book in your hand gives you the real experience.
The apocalypse is nigh, the end of the world is near, the impossible has happened. My local Barnes and Noble actually had a decently stocked manga section! (Cue dramatic chords). This weekend I decided to go out and see if I could find a physical copy of King of Cards Volume 2. I’m not getting this one again sight unseen. My youngest was going to a birthday party, so I thought after dropping her off, we could drive down to the nearest Borders, which is about 20 minutes away. A check of their stock online said they might have it in stock. I had already written off Barnes and Noble. The one by us always has really lousy selection and the shelves are badly maintained. But, on a whim, I checked out the B&N website, and they said our local one might have it as well. Well, B&N was on the way home, and a whole lot closer than Borders, so I decided to take the chance. (And, I had a gift card for B&N, just in case.) So, we stopped and went to the back of the store, and to my utter surprise, the shelves were full! OMG! (as…
I’m gonna take a short break from my manga rantings to rant about another subject near and dear to my heart. Dragons. Yes, ever since my brother introduced me to the Dragonriders of Pern series (the Harper Hall Trilogy to be exact), I’ve been in love with the flying reptiles. I have stuffed dragons on top of my monitor, all the McFarlane’s toys so far, just about any other toy that strikes my fancy and sculptures scattered around the house. So, of course, I like movies with dragons in them too. Just recently, two movies have been released that feature dragons. One I will warn you about, and one I will thoroughly endorse. Dragon Wars aka D-War – This is a Korean movie that was filmed in Los Angeles, and completely in English. It is about the Korean legend of how dragons come to be. They start out as Imugi, serpent-like creatures, that receive the light of heaven, born in the form of a human girl, to become a Celestial Dragon. 500 years ago, the dark imugi Buraki, tried to steal the girl, and she died before the light could be passed on. In the present, in LA, the light…
Wandering around the web yesterday, I stumbled upon a Livejournal group for an unlicensed manga called 07-Ghost. It’s a shonen sci-fi that I read a few chapters of a few years ago and liked. No new chapters came out after the initial few, so I figured it was dropped as happens so often in scanalations. But, on the community, there was a message about the possible licensing of this manga based on a Take Down notice Tokyopop had sent to this manga trading website. The list of manga Tokyopop asked to be taken down can be found here. The Take Down notice was sent in January of this year. I found this list rather odd though. Yes, all of Tokyopop’s titles were there, as well as 07-Ghost. There were also a couple of other titles on the list that were not announced licenses such as Saiunkoko Monotagari, Sayuki Gaiden, and Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam. These are all series I would love to have, and Sayuki Gaiden just makes sense since Tokyopop has published Saiyuki and Saiyuki Reload. But, what made me wonder about the reliability of this list is that there were several series’ on this list that were licensed,…
You never know when or where he’s going to strike next…
The current issue of Otaku USA, as well as featuring stories about the anime Space Battleship Yamato and Star Blazers, also had an insert on the Star Blazers webcomic, Star Blazers: Rebirth. This is a web comic written by THE authority on Star Blazers, Tim Eldred. It is a continuation of the Star Blazers saga, taking place after the Final Yamato movie, and features a new generation of characters. But, did you know there were other comics based on the Star Blazers series? StarBlazers.com, the place for all things Star Blazers, has a section on the history of Space Battleship Yamato and Star Blazers in comics. Being a Leiji Matsumoto fan, I found the entries on the manga version of Yamato very interesting, since all that I’ve ever seen of them are the covers. (I had a chance waaaayyyyyy back in the eighties to buy them from the LA store Books Nippon. I really wish I had…) The article goes into some detail about the history of the comic, even showing covers of the magazines they were serialized in. It also includes a really cool bonus: a translation of a rarely seen side story, Eternal Story of Jura. Yamato/Star Blazers…
The latest issue of Otaku USA has a couple of features on the anime classic series Space Battleship Yamato. While reading these features and the writers talking about their first times seeing the series, it got me thinking about how I was introduced to it. Like most other people my age, my first exposure to Japanese animation was through the cartoons that were brought over and re-written for a US audience. Kimba the White Lion, Speed Racer, and Battle of the Planets (Gatchaman) were all shows I remember watching and liking, but they never differentiated them from the other cartoons I watched. That honor goes to another show; Star Blazers. It was 1978, I’m almost certain. KTLA, channel 5, a local television station in the Los Angeles area. It had a show on the weekends that showed movies for kids; The Family Film Festival. It ran in the afternoons, after the morning cartoons were over, and there was only sports on the local channels (there was no cable at the time). So, the Family Film Festival was the best thing on. It was hosted by Tom Hatten, a well-known local personality. He sat in a director’s chair, a clipboard in…