More license announcements from Sakuracon: We covered the Yen Press news over the weekend, and Dark Horse announced some new licenses as well: CLAMP’s Legal Drug (previously published by Tokyopop) and the sequel, Drug & Drop; two by Satoshi Kon, OPUS and Seraphim: 266613336 Wings; and an Oreimo spinoff, Oreimo: Kuroneko. Also, Dark Horse will start publishing CLAMP manga digitally, starting with Clover in May and then Cardcaptor Sakura and Chobits in June.
Sean Gaffney has plenty of commentary on all the new Sakuracon licenses at his blog.
The manga lineup at TCAF was looking pretty solid already, with Moyoco Anno and est em slated to be guests, and now they have added Akira Himekawa, the two-woman team that draws the Legend of Zelda manga and the Japanese version of My Little Pony.
Justin Stroman gets opinions from several manga editors about scanlations and whether or not they drive demand. Ben Applegate of Kodansha Comics leads off with an interesting comment as to why manga publishers don’t use scanlations as a guide:
The biggest reason is that, unfortunately, heavy social media users are just not representative of a majority of English-language manga fans. But it can’t help that most of the target audience has already read the series online, and thus isn’t very motivated to buy.
Ichiro Marutani takes a look at the way that Japanese publishers and the Japanese government are fighting piracy.
Justin also has an interesting roundtable with manga adapters about what they do.
Moyoco Anno’s Insufficient Direction is now available on Crunchyroll.
The Manga Bookshelf team discusses this week’s new releases and their Pick of the Week.
Erica Friedman brings us up to date on the world of yuri in the latest edition of Yuri Network News at Okazu.
Lori Henderson chats about what she has been reading and presents her weekly wish list in the latest Manga Dome podcast at Manga Xanadu.
At nagareboshi reviews, Sarah explains why she wants to be just like Nanami Momozono (from Kamisama Kiss) when she grows up.
Reviews: Ash Brown rounds up a week’s worth of manga reading at Experiments in Manga. The Manga Bookshelf bloggers take a quick look at some new releases in their latest Bookshelf Briefs column.
Sean Gaffney on vol. 12 of Attack on Titan (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
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AstroNerdBoy on vol. 34 of Fairy Tail (AstroNerdBoy’s Anime and Manga Blog)
Anna N on Insufficient Direction (Manga Report)
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Sean Gaffney on vol. 1 of What Did You Eat Yesterday? (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 1 of xxxHOLIC: Rei (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
I found this remark interesting.
“But it can’t help that most of the target audience has already read the series online, and thus isn’t very motivated to buy.”
For weaker titles, that’s certainly true. But “Fairy Tail” is widely read online (legally and not so legally), and Kodansha Comics is making a lot of money on that.
But it ONLY works on crazy popular series like Fairy Tail, and it’s usually a no-brainer to license those kinds of series.
Why does it only work on crazy popular titles that are still read for free? And before they are licensed in the U.S., there’s zero guarantee that what’s crazy popular in Japan will be so in the U.S. (Hayate the Combat Butler springs to mind, where as best as I can tell, a lot of people loved the anime on Crunchyroll but had no interest in even reading the manga).