The folks at Trouble with Comics were nice enough to ask me to contribute a guest review, and I chose vol. 1 of Bunny Drop for my topic. I was particularly honored as this site usually doesn’t cover manga.
Viz pretty much dominates this week’s NY Times manga best-seller list again, although Yen sneaks in at the bottom with vol. 1 of Black Butler. (Warning: Obnoxious interstitial ad. Really, New York Times? Has it come to this?)
Dirk Deppey posts a ton of scans from a 1992 issue of the alt-manga anthology Garo.
Lori Henderson rounds up this week’s all ages comics and manga at Good Comics for Kids.
Viz has posted an interview with Q Hayashida, the creator of Dorohedoro, at their SigIKKI website, in which she talks about her background, his inspiration, and his work process.
Can there be such a thing as too many food manga? David Welsh’s latest license request is Bambino!, which is set in an Italian restaurant in Tokyo. David also posts some Harvey Award suggestions and a poll as to what will win the Eisner.
At Manga Life, Charles Webb talks to Dr. June Madeley, the author of “Transnational Transformations: A Gender Analysis of Japanese Manga Featuring Unexpected Bodily Transformations,” for The Journal of Popular Culture and “Girly Girls and Pretty Boys: Gender and Audience Reception of English-translated Manga.” She did a survey of manga readers and has some interesting observations on scanlation use, the falloff in manga reading in one’s 20s, and other trends. (Although be warned, the sample size was small and apparently geographically limited.)
ANN finds a bootleg manga app in the iTunes store; the mystery is not so much how it got there as how they managed to miss all the others (there are at least five). UPDATE: I expanded a bit on this at Robot 6.
At Same Hat!, Ryan alerts us to a new Sueruo Maruo book, Rampo Panorama, just published in Japan, and posts the covers and a bit of info.
Reviews: The Unshelved Book Club has a quick cartoon summary of 20th Century Boys. Noah Berlatsky sees Kingyo Used Books as warm fuzzies for otaku.
Connie on vols. 1 and 2 of Alice in the Country of Hearts (Manga Recon)
Todd Douglass on vol. 4 of Animal Academy (Anime Maki)
Erica Friedman on vol. 5 of Aoi Hana (Okazu)
Eric Robinson on vol. 3 of Bamboo Blade (Manga Jouhou)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 9 of Excel Saga (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Connie on vol. 2 of InuYasha (VizBig edition) (Slightly Biased Manga)
Leroy Douresseaux on Love Knot (The Comic Book Bin)
Julie Opipari on vol. 3 of Rasetsu (Manga Maniac Cafe)
Emily on Sayonara demo Aishiteru (Emily’s Random Shoujo Manga Page)
Todd Douglass on Songs to Make You Smile (Anime Maki)
I was a little surprised by ANN’s article as well— there have been manga-reading apps that tie into scanlation aggregators for quite some time. It seems like if they wanted to draw attention to it, a more in-depth feature might have been a better choice. I wouldn’t mind doing one myself, but I don’t have an iPhone. :
I can’t believe something like that got onto the iPhone, when they’re so obsessive about other things in their app store.
Q Hayashida is a woman.