Winding down

SDCC is winding down, but there are still a few things to report. Toon Zone has learned that the Guardians of Luna animated series will be made into a manga by DrMaster and DGN. This is interesting:

It is expected to be in black and white, about 168 pages and will likely be produced in Japan using a traditional manga style.

At the AoD blog, Ed Chavez has news of two more DrMaster titles, Chinese Hero ~Tales of the Blood Sword and Purgatory Kabuki. He also reports that Viz announced two new Shonen Jump titles, Yu-Gi-Oh GX and Houshin Engi, as well as Gintama, which had a trial run in the magazine recently and got a “huge” response.

SignOnSanDiego has an interview with Kazuo Koike, in which they describe Ogami Itto, the hero of Lone Wolf and Cub, as a “sword-wielding Dr. Spock.” And Koike himself shows that he gets it:

“Comics are carried by characters,” he has preached over and over. “If a character is well-created, the comic becomes a hit.”

Active Anime has info on new CMX titles Canon, The Time Guardian, Go Go Heaven!! and Apothecarius Argentum Look on the CMX website, and all you’ll find are cover scans. Apparently they’re too busy to post their own press releases.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin looks at Remote and Ghost Hunt.

The Orlando Sentinel does a nice turn on the Manga 101 story. I particularly liked the ending:

Tommerdahl said Florida is cosmopolitan and diverse so it should not be unexpected that manga fever has taken hold in even the smallest communities.

“What would surprise me is if they had manga collections in isolated communities in the heart of the country, someplace like Garden City, Kansas,” Tommerdahl said.

Surprise!

Venus Rowland, teen-services coordinator for the Finney County Public Library in Garden City, said the library has had an extensive manga collection for more than a year.

“They are extremely popular here,” Rowland said of the books’ appeal in this isolated west Kansas community of about 28,000 residents”