I was e-mailing Susan Hale of Tokyopop about something else and asked her if it was true, as I read in a panel report, that Tokyopop has picked up the licenses to Aria and Peacemaker Kurogane from ADV. Here is her response:
indeed all are now ours. We will be doing new translations and covers, but don’t expect to see them out until 2008!
So that’s good news, except for the wait-two-years part.
To help tide us over, Love Manga has the manga list for this week.
Once again, accusations of plagiarism have popped up with regard to Tokyopop’s Rising Stars of Manga anthologies. I was going to do a whole post on this, but I got busy and in the meantime Love Manga got the scoop, and it seems to have ended more or less amicably.
The discussion of shoujo heroines is going strong; feel free to jump in and add a comment. Kalinara rounds up the latest entries here. In his Flipped column, David Welsh lists some of his favorite shoujo heroines, demonstrating that they’re not all clumsy wimps. Love Manga picks up the thread, and it devolves into an interesting discussion of publisher boycotts and whether it’s OK to buy Chikyu Misaki even though it’s from CMX.
Heidi has some great peeks at early manga at The Beat, here and here.
I love how nowadays it’s becomnig easier and easier to simply email a “major” publisher and see them respond to you (well, maybe having a site/blog under your belt helps too), of course it’s still hard to get those juicy “confidential” infos, but it’s an improvement :)
Actually, it was always easy. That’s what reporters do all day, and when a company has a good PR department, as most do, it’s particularly easy. (I e-mailed Susan because I was working on a newspaper article.) But I do have to say, it’s much easier to call and say “I’m from MangaBlog” than to say “I was just curious.”
The best job I ever had was when I was associate editor of the Smithsonian Guides to Historic America, because when you call someone and say you’re from the Smithsonian, you really get results!
What’s different now is that the company reps are going the other way, commenting on blogs and participating in forums just like regular fans (which a lot of them seem to be).
My gosh, 2008. I hope that only is for the Aria manga, and that Aqua will be released much earlier than that.
Know what I like? Even though 2008 seems like a long time from now, the fact that we have a date seems heavenly. ADV has press-release-itus most of the time.
Thanks to Brigid for taking that extra step and getting us some info!