John Thomas talks to the folks at Dark Horse, including uber-editor Carl Horn and director of Asian marketing Michael Gombos, as they celebrate 20 years of publishing manga and muse over how far the American manga market has come. (Dark Horse poster by Yoshitaka Amano, and swiped from John T’s site. Isn’t it lovely?)
Good news for Fanfare fans: Fanfare/Ponent Mon publishes some awesome manga, including The Ice Wandere and the soon to be published Disappearance Diary, but good luck finding them in a bookstore—until now. PWCW reports that Fanfare has signed with the book distributor Atlas, which has the backlist now and will start with new titles in November. (Via ANN.)
The MangaCast team picks the best of this week’s new manga, and member PeaRea looks at a Japanese-Indonesian anthology.
Samantha, who writes as Chay!Aliza, lists the top ten yaoi and yuri manga, some of which are not yet licensed. (Via When Fangirls Attack.)
Erin Finnegan has a nice little meditation on youth and nostalgia, in manga and in real life.
Also from WFA: Ren, a Women’s Studies student, writes about gender roles in Revolutionary Girl Utena.
Going to Fanime? Deb Aoki lists the highlights at About.com.
Review: Tom Spurgeon reviews the latest Yoshihiro Tatsumi gekiga manga, Good-Bye, at The Comics Reporter. Becky reads Sonia Leong’s take on Romeo and Juliet at Becky’s Book Reviews (via When Fangirls Attack.) Lori Henderson’s daughter Jenny has a puppy-centric review of vol. 1 of Hell Girl at Manga Xanadu. Lissa Pattillo wraps up mystery week with a look at CLAMP School Detectives. Greg Hackmann reads vol. 1 of Metro Survive at Anime on DVD. Erin Finnegan enjoys vol. 1 of Fujoshi Rumi at PopCultureShock’s Manga Recon blog. Scott Campbell reviews Julius Caesar and vol. 1 of Hellgate: London, and Holly Ellingwood checks out vol. 2 of Vampire Hunter D at Active Anime. Deb Aoki finds Haridama Magic Cram School to be a “fun read” at About.com. At Okazu, Erica Friedman presents part 2 of her review of Yuri Hime. Julie checks out vol. 2 of Love Recipe at the Manga Maniac Cafe. Leroy Douresseaux gets the quote of the week award for this passage in his review of vol. 1 of Heavenshield at The Comic Book Bin.
My main complaint is that subplots and characters gather like frenzied ants over a dead roach in a pool of syrup.
Despite that comment, he actually liked the book.
“…but good luck finding [Fanfare manga] in a bookstore—until now. PWCW reports that Fanfare has signed with the book distributor Atlas…”
Didn’t Fanfare have a book distribution deal with Biblio previously?
And isn’t AtlasBooks the sompany that bought Biblio, incorporating Biblio’s distribution arm to expand its own? (http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/11916.html
So if AtlasBooks is kinda the same company as Biblio (albeit, of course, not exactly the same) it might not be the case that they’re going to be so much better at distributing them than their previous one.
Or perhaps whatever problems Fanfare were having with book distbribution before had nothing to do with their distributor, but with other elements. Which means that if things get better, then may not get better because their new distributor is a better distributor, but because they as a publisher becomes a better publisher…
Yes, Biblio was their distributor. I brought that up when I interviewed Stephen Robson of Fanfare in March 2007. Part of the problem is that Fanfare has small printings and at that time, they didn’t have much of a backlist, so they simply didn’t have enough books to make it economically worth their while to ship them to the U.S. That part actually has gotten better—they have a bigger backlist, and several of their titles have gone into second printings so I would guess their print runs are bigger now.
They were always distributed to comics stores via Diamond, and I have seen them in comics stores, but I don’t see why they aren’t available via Amazon.
I worried you might miss this because sometimes Mangablog is off on Fridays. Thanks for the cyber-ink, Brigid!