I’ve never understood the whole Boys Love phenomenon. I’m not a shipper, so I don’t see the appeal of putting two characters together, let allow two characters of the same-sex. But to be honest, I’ve never read any BL either. I’m not someone who goes out of their comfort zone easily, and I was going to skip this month’s Manga Movable Feast. But then I remembered I had one volume of BL I had received as a review copy back from when Aurora was still around. I had kept it to try, and then it got buried in a box of half read/half unread manga. So I pulled it and decided to read it. Two of Hearts is by Kano Miyamoto. It is one volume long and comes from Aurora’s Deux imprint. It is about Haruya Ito, a writer for an arts magazine who writes articles month to month, but doesn’t seem to have any ambition beyond that. One day, he meets a troubled teenager, Maki Hidaka on the beach near his home. Maki has issues; he’s a germaphobe, OCD about washing his hands, hates to be touched and is malnourished as his mother is an alcoholic and doesn’t provide…
Anime Boston/Wondercon Roundups Two comics/manga related cons occurred this last weekend. On the West Coast was Wondercon, the smaller, younger brother of SDCC, located in San Francisco. While more comics based, it seems Hollywood is taking every opportunity to jump on the popculture bandwagon. Manga related, Viz Media had a booth, as did CMX, Last Gasp, and EigoManga. Deb Aoki of Manga.About.com has an overview of the con as well as links to other coverage. Over on the East Coast, Anime Boston took place. While mostly an anime con, many manga bloggers attended and even held panels. Vertical, Inc. had a panel, and Ed Chavez, marketing director for Vertical as well as creator of Mangacast hosted a panel of manga bloggers. The big news from the Vertical panel was the license of a title from a mangaka once published by Viz Media. Calling it “Manga Series R” the clue is that the “R” refers to either the mangaka’s name or manga’s title. I voting (hoping) its Leiji/Reiji Matsumoto. Brigid Alverson has a full rundown of the Vertical panel at Robot 6, and you can hear the audio from the Manga Mania panel by scrolling down to the Ninja Consultant’s like…
Coded Licenses After the debut of their new website for manga, Bandai Entertainment puts up some license news. They’ve announced two new titles to add to their Code Geass line. Code Geass: Knights and Code Geass: Queens are both anthologies each with a slant toward a demographic. Knights is written to appeal to the girls, and Queens is for the boys. There are several short stories that are written by different mangaka. This is good news to me, since I love the Code Geass franchise, both anime and the manga. I really like that these are anthologies, giving us not just a lot of different stories with our favorite characters, but a lot of different looks as well. I’ve grown quite fond of anthologies, and getting more narrow ones like this would be great.
It’s that time of year again when ghosts and goblins come out to play. Do you want to get into the Halloween spirit, but just don’t know what to get? Well, here’s a list of manga that I’ve either read, or know something about enough to recommend (or warn you away from). I first posted this on my Tokyopop blog, but I’m bringing here with a few updates. Well, I thought it was going to be just a few, but every time I start to think I’m done, I come up with another book! I tried to keep the books in this list to more appropriate to a Halloween theme, than just ghosts, vampires and monsters, etc. It would take forever to list ALL manga with those in it!
Well, we got through another day, filled with even more people and more lines. Yesterday, we had to spend an hour in line and just barely got to see the Dexter panel. Today, it took 30-45 minutes on the shuttle to get to the convention center. We got there at 10:15, and was 30 minutes early to see the Stargate panels. We were able to get in only because they were the first panels of the day, and we still were in the back. We waited for only 1/2 hour for the Viz Media panel, but were still at the back, and was totally denied from going to the MST3K 20th Anniversary panel. Over an hour before the panel, and the line was already filled to capacity for the room. We REAAAAALLLLLYYY wanted to go to that one. We’ve been fans for over a decade!