Manga Xanadu

This week I look at some news from Japan, what’s new at the Vizmanga.com site, and I check out 9 volumes of Bleach that cover 3 story arc, and how it’s affected by missing volumes. http://archive.org/download/MangaDomeEpisode15/MangaDomeEpisode15.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.

Day two started out with a real breakfast.  Eggs, pancakes, french toast and toast.  This hotel is awesome!  It’s a lot better than the fast food sandwiches we usually end up with.  Didn’t make it to Stargate Universe, but we weren’t looking forward to the line, and we were tired last night.

Even though this strip is 3 years old, it still describes the experience of SDCC fairly well.  The only thing that needs to be added are the lines.  Yes, the infamous SDCC lines were back this year and worse than ever.  We got to the con at sometime after 10am and walked the Exhibit Hall for most of the morning.  My husband took lots of pictures of toys, including a few for me.

When I like a magazine enough that I want to read it every month, I subscribe to it.  That’s why I get both Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat.  But, sometimes I don’t quite get my renewal in on time, and that happened unfortunately to me this last April with Shonen Jump.  Sooo…  I missed getting an issue.  May 2008.  By the time I realized I wasn’t getting it, It was already gone from news stands, and both my local and online comic shop didn’t have it.  No big deal, I thought, it’d show up somewhere.  And it did.  Finally.  Two weeks ago!  So I have six months worth of Shonen Jump to catch up on, because I won’t read an issue without reading the preceding chapters.  Silly sounding, I know, but I want the full story, in order. This weekend I dove back into Shonen Jump with this ill-fated issue.  It would figure it was the April Fool’s issue too.  Boy did I miss it!  After two volumes of that overstuffed and over hyped Yen Plus, I was glad to get back into some real shonen stories and battles!  It started with four chapters of Naruto.  Not a lot of…

It’s another Shonen Jump edition of my Mini Musings. Expect to see a lot of these, as I read a lot of Viz. I’ll try to mix it up a little with some other pubs and some Shojo. But a look at my shelves will show more SJ than Robofish. Reviews after the cut.

These mini musings are meant to be quick reviews of manga of ongoing series, mostly titles I follow on a regular basis and don’t really need the full analysis I usually give a volume. Enjoy.  Reviews after the cut.

Well, I said I wasn’t going to read my Shonen Jumps until I got caught up with Naruto, which I did. So, I felt it was time to catch up with the issues that were piling up. Reviews after the cut.

I‘m back and mostly recovered from SDCC. I was there for three days, Fri, Sat, and Sun, with my family, so I wasn’t able to hit all the panels, but I did get to go to a couple of manga related. We got to the convention center and through registration just in time for me to go to the Shonen Jump Panel, one I was looking forward to go to. Now, I’ve talked about my feelings on the changes for Shonen Jump so far here. For over a month now, Viz has been hyping the new title to be joining Shonen Jump, with Shaman King leaving, Naruto winding down to normal, and another title ending naturally. Anyone reading the magazine knew what the ending title was, Yu Gi Oh!. That was no big surprise. And Marc Weidenbaum, editor-in-chief of the magazine didn’t leave us in suspense about what the new title was going to be. As everyone has heard by now, it’s Bleach. I was ambivalent about this announcement at first. I like Bleach. I think it’s a really fun title, and would be a good fit with the magazine. But the more I thought about it, the less of…