Viz has a major announcement in the December Shonen Jump: They are planning an online manga site for subscribers to the magazine. Andre Paploo lays out all the details and speculates a bit at Kuriousity. Could this be the game-changing announcement they were Tweeting about last week?
Digital Manga announced three new titles at their Yaoi-Con panel: Men of Tattoos (Shinsei no Otoko), Rabbit Man, Tiger Man (Usagi Otoko Tora Otoko), and Butterfly of the Distant Day (Tooi Hi no Cho). Deb Aoki has the covers and more details at About.com, and she also has a report on the con itself.
Speaking of Digital, they also announced their Digital Manga Guild this weekend. That’s an idea they have talked about before—basically, fans will volunteer to do translations and edit manga with no payment up front but a cut of the profits when the book sells. Coincidentally, Daniella Orihuela-Gruber, who is a freelance editor at Tokyopop, just posted about the financial side of being a manga editor—it’s not easy, even when you do get paid up front.
Lori Henderson rounds up the rest of the week’s manga news at Manga Xanadu.
Sean Gaffney takes a look at this week’s new manga, and the Comics Village team picks the best of the most recent batch.
Caddy C. writes about female friendship in Skip Beat at A Feminist Otaku.
Melinda Beasi has a new feature, Failure Friday, in which she looks at flawed manga; she starts off with the rather strange romance manga Heaven’s Will.
Lori Henderson looks at manga that feature yokai as a protagonist and not just a punching bag.
Scary stuff: At Robot 6, Chris Mautner lists six horror manga he would like to see translated. Panel Patter, Rob McMonigal lists his favorite horror manga, and at All About Manga, Daniella Orihuela-Gruber writes about the one manga that really creeps her out. At Kuriousity, Shannon Fay continues her Halloween manga series with a look at Haunted House and Cat-Eyed Boy.
Ayano Yamane, creator of the Finder series, has her own website up in English, and she is releasing her manga to the Kindle via the publisher Animate. (Via Deb Aoki, who has all the details.)
Well, there’s a manga bible, so why not? An Indian writer and a Japanese artist have teamed up to make a manga version of the Mahabharata.
News from Japan: The long-running Garasu no Kamen (Glass Mask) reached its 35th birthday last month; Tomoko Nishida of The Daily Yomiuri provides a bit of background. And ANN reports that the artist Kabocha is working on a manga based on the anime Aim for the Top! Gunbuster.
Reviews: Omar posts some brief reviews of recent manga at About Heroes, and Ash Brown looks at some manga from the library at Experiments in Manga.
Connie on A Bloody Kiss Tonight (Comics Village)
Emily on Boy & Cool (Emily’s Random Shoujo Manga Page)
Johanna Draper Carlson on vols. 3 and 4 of Butterflies, Flowers (Comics Worth Reading)
Connie on vol. 2 of Cat-Eyed Boy (Slightly Biased Manga)
Angela Eastman on Che Guevara: A Manga Biography (Suite101.com)
Angela Eastman on vol. 1 of Cross Game (Suite101.com)
Eduardo Zacarias on vol. 6 of Detroit Metal City (Animanga Nation)
Oliver Ho on vols. 1-3 of Dororo (PopMatters)
Michelle Smith on The Dreaming Collection (Soliloquy in Blue)
Johanna Draper Carlson on vol. 21 of Hikaru no Go (Comics Worth Reading)
Leroy Douresseaux on vol. 21 of Hikaru No Go (The Comic Book Bin)
Connie on Kazuo Umezu Prints 21 (Slightly Biased Manga)
Connie on vol. 11 of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Slightly Biased Manga)
Connie on vol. 4 of Mad Love Chase (Slightly Biased Manga)
Bill Sherman on vol. 1 of March Story (Blogcritics)
Michelle Smith on vols. 1 and 2 of Millennium Snow (Soliloquy in Blue)
Kristin on Bleach Official Bootleg: Color Bleach (Comic Attack)
Connie on vol. 9 of Pet Shop of Horrors (Slightly Biased Manga)
Kate Dacey on vols. 1-3 of Presents (The Manga Critic)
Todd Douglass on vol. 1 of Saving Life (Anime Maki)
Julie Opipari on vol. 3 of Stepping on Roses (Manga Maniac Cafe)
Re: Viz’s site: If it’s all DRMed, I don’t care an iota.
OMG! This can’t be happening. You mean (gasp!) Viz has discovered the Internet!!??? THIS is the earth shattering 2012 life changing announcement that will “change everything”? Hide your wife, hide your kids, because this news might just vaporize them with its incredible incendiary impact!! And what makes the icing on the cake is that incredibly not only has Viz opened my eyes to a new format of manga delivery, they have doubled that delight with hands-on exclusives to some of the greatest manga every produced. And we’re not talking about full volumes here, even BETTER, they’re previews! OMG! The cool thing is that Viz showed such incredible foresight by starting this intiative in 2004! Couple this with the new emergence of ADV Manga and I see the manga market expanding exponenetially for the next decade.
Pirates, please, descend and feast on the boneyard that was once the manga market.
Long live Shojo Beat! Cromartie High Lives! We’ll never forget you Octopus Girl!
We’ll see how it goes. These web comic sites seem to think that everyone has a T1 connection to the internet and windows explorer running on a 6 processor pentium. Isn’t there an easier way to distribute comics without forcing us to wait for complex flash programs to load? It’s mostly black and white pictures anyway, you would think that someone would work it out.
Maybe I’m being facetious, but it would seem like we are the customers, and therefore, we are the driving force behind the market. When we stick together as consumers and fans, then the market will conform to what we want. The artists work hard and deserve to be paid for their work, and we do what we do and deserve to get our entertainment.