New Licenses include Thermae Romae, Oreimo

April 9, 2012 by

This was a busy weekend, with Sakura Con on the West Coast and Anime Boston out East, and publishers at both cons had some new licenses to announce. Sean Gaffney has a good roundup; here are the highlights:

As we noted on Friday, Vertical announced it had rescued Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss, originally published by Tokyopop.

Yen Press announced Thermae Romae, Kaoru Mori’s Anything and Something (a book of short stories), Umineko When They Cry (a sequel to Higurashi When They Cry), Blood Lad, Alice in the Country of Hearts: My Fanatic Rabbit, The Misfortune of Kyon and Koizumi (a Haruhi spinoff), and Triage X, by the creator of Highschool of the Dead.

Dark Horse’s new announcements included Oreimo/My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute, Blood-C (based on the anime), Evangelion: Comic Tribute, Emerald and Other Stories (by Blade of the Immortal manga-ka Hiroaki Samura), and a novel by Yoshitaka Amano, Deva Zan.

For those who are fascinated by process, Melinda Beasi describes her work as an editor for the Digital Manga Guild. Melinda is very articulate, so I’m sure she is a good editor, but Digital has is no managing editor supervising her work, nor is there a proofreader checking it, which is troubling.

Kristin picks the manga highlights from the April Previews at Comic Attack.

Connie puts the artist spotlight on BL manga-ka Toko Kawai.

Lori Henderson celebrates Easter with some manga that feature eggs.

Reviews

Johanna Draper Carlson on vol. 10 of Bakuman (Comics Worth Reading)
Leroy Douresseaux on vol. 10 of Bakuman (The Comic Book Bin)
Leroy Douresseaux on vol. 39 of Bleach (The Comic Book Bin)
Drew McCabe on Dororo (Comic Attack)
Johanna Draper Carlson on vol. 12 of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Comics Worth Reading)
Lesley Aeschliman on vol. 4 of Sailor Moon (Blogcritics)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 27 of Skip Beat! (A Case Suitable for Treatment)

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Comments

  1. insaneben says
    April 9, 2012 at 11:46 am

    Alas, still no license rescue for Aria.
    Sigh.
    (Sorry to repeat myself, but I felt this would be a more appropriate place to put my comment.)

  2. Estara says
    April 11, 2012 at 9:30 am

    Brigid, any chance of you mentioning this Kickstarter Campaign for the online prose serial novel Tokyo Demons to create a book 2 in one of your updates? It is fully funded but they’ve added a tier bonus at $9000 to create their own Visual Novel game and I’d love to see that.

    Tokyo Demons is an original prose serial, written by Lianne Sentar and illustrated by Priscilla Hamby/rem in the style of the Japanese light novel. The story follows Ayase, a young woman who can turn her body into a swarm of insects, and Jo, a young man with a talent for charm and pickpocketing, as they enter high school and are subsequently dragged into Tokyo’s supernatural underground gang war. The cast of characters is huge, but the perspective generally alternates between the POV of Ayase and Jo.

    Tokyo Demons is also being serialized as a dramatized audio book by Rebecca Scoble. The Tokyo Demons Audio features original music, a fully voiced cast, and sound effects for punching and/or puking when appropriate.

    The Tokyo Demons series is three books long, and the story and audio book (minus a few bonus short stories) are serialized online for free. Book 1 was funded by the staff itself and is almost complete—you can read it now at http://www.tokyodemons.com. This funding is for Book 2, which we hope to start in May or June of 2012. Funding will pay for illustrations, better equipment for the audio book, printing costs, and hopefully better food for our actors, who currently get paid in pizza. Let’s pay them in…better pizza or something!

  3. Ben Applegate says
    April 12, 2012 at 4:08 pm

    My name is Ben Applegate, an employee of Digital Manga, and I just want to request a correction here. DMG does have a managing editor and a proofreader who check each book. Melinda Beasi does not work in the Digital Manga offices and has no way of knowing what steps DMG books go through after the final versions are submitted, nor did she contact us before writing her article to find out. She made incorrect assumptions based on limited information. (By all accounts she is an excellent editor though, so that part’s true.)

    • Melinda Beasi says
      April 12, 2012 at 7:06 pm

      Hi Ben,

      I wasn’t going to respond to you over here, but there is one thing I want to make clear for readers of my Inside the DMG column. I am specifically not running things by DMG representatives or asking questions of DMG representatives as I write this series, because I want to be sure that I’m writing purely from the point of view of a participant—someone who is not privy to inside information of any kind. The original purpose of the series was to experience everything first hand, so that I could let prospective participants (many of whom were extremely skeptical at the time) know what they could expect after joining the DMG based on practical experience rather than having to rely solely on DMG press releases. My “limited information” is what I’ve gleaned from my personal experience as an editor with the DMG, no more, no less.

      • Ben Applegate says
        April 13, 2012 at 11:11 am

        That’s fine, but you can see how easy it is to read your piece and jump to wildly inaccurate conclusions as this post does. There has been a lot of rumor-mongering and misinformation about DMG going around the Web in the last two weeks and I’m tired of it.

      • Ben Applegate says
        April 13, 2012 at 11:19 am

        To be clear — I know you were being honest and I’m not accusing you of anything, I’m referring to other situations I’ve had to deal with. You wrote, “There was no managing editor for me to go to with questions,” which isn’t true, but you didn’t know that at the time because no one had told you. This post reads, “Digital has is no managing editor supervising her work, nor is there a proofreader checking it, which is troubling,” which is completely untrue, and involves leaping to new conclusions. If I don’t post here and nip this in the bud, I just know I’m going to be getting e-mails from people that say, “I heard from Mangabookshelf that you actually have someone on staff to insert new mistakes in DMG manga, while also trampling kittens.”

        • Melinda Beasi says
          April 14, 2012 at 6:19 pm

          If I don’t post here and nip this in the bud, I just know I’m going to be getting e-mails from people that say, “I heard from Mangabookshelf that you actually have someone on staff to insert new mistakes in DMG manga, while also trampling kittens.”

          Okay, you made me choke out a laugh with this. I understand your position, Ben, and I know that my article has caused you some grief. Truce? :)