Have We Lost Our Soul? Monday started out with a bang as new spread quickly on twitter and then the blogs that Go! Comi’s website had expired. Gia Manry of Anime Briefs caught the expiration first, and attempted to contact someone through voice, but couldn’t get ahold of anyone. No official word has come back from any reps of the company, which doesn’t bode well for its future. The speculation that the manga company for sale in Southern California was Go! Comi gets stronger by the minute. Even though this news wasn’t all that surprising, it is still a bit of a shock, and I hope there are some publishers out there willing to “troll” the Go! Comi licenses and give us some hope of seeing them through to the end. Jus don’t look to Yen Press for that. Another Tremor in the Manga Market And the news didn’t improve any on Tuesday, as Publishers Weekly broke the news that Viz Media had laid off 60 employees, or 40% of their total. The Doomsayers didn’t come out for this, but there was a lot of worry for the Signature/Ikki line, since it’s not a cash cow in regards to sales….
Shopping Alert! Deep Discount.com is having a sale on some manga titles in their book section. As well as discounting the books, they are doing a “buy 3, get 1” free promotion on certain titles. This is a comparable deal as Amazon, and better than Borders “buy 4, get 1 free”. Their shipping is free, and the books are discounted as well. The best discounted deals are on D. Gray-man from Viz, Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi from Yen Press, and later volumes of Black Jack from Vertical. Also included in the sale are several of the VizKids titles such as Pokemon; Adventures and Diamond and Pearl, Leave It to PET, and Legend of Zelda, as well as Udon’s Big Adventures of Majoko. Vampire fans can pick up most of Vampire Knight, you can catch up on the latest volumes of Skip Beat!, or pick up most of Record of a Fallen Vampire which just finished this month. BL fans can get Junjo Romantica and Loveless. If you’ve got some spare cash, definitely check out this sale. How Bad Is It? Via Twitter. Builder, a ZDNet Japan blog, has posted the second part of an interview with Misaaki Hagino, President and…
Honey Hunt goes on Hiatus Honey Hunt, one of the last manga to be added to Shojo Beat before Viz canceled it, is going on hiatus in Japan. Mangaka Aihara has decided to take a break from Honey Hunt and is debuting a new manga in the same magazine. This is both good and bad for fans of Honey Hunt. It’s good, because it will make catching up with the manga easier. The 6th volume just came out in Japan, and the 4th volume won’t come out in the US until March. Viz apparently is keeping the long time between release days which means it may be another year before we get to the 6th volume. But it’s bad since there no indication as how long the hiatus will be. It could be a long stretch before Aihara picks it up again, and then a while after that before another volume comes out. Ask Hunter x Hunter and D.N. Angel fans about that.