NYCC/NYAF recap

Hey all, I’m back from NYCC/NYAF—sorry about the hiatus, but the con was busier than I expected. I had so many commitments that I didn’t make it to either of the manga publishers’ panels, but fortunately a good portion of the manga blogosphere was there, and they got you covered.

The fact that there were only two manga publisher panels gave me a bit of pause. Neither Viz nor Tokyopop showed up at the Javits Center, and the smaller yaoi publisher Digital was also absent. Kodansha, which is taking its licenses back from Del Rey, did not offer a panel, although the panel was not pulled at the last minute, as some people thought.

At the ICv2 conference before the show, Milton Griepp delivered a white paper that was sort of a progress report on the industry so far. His figures show manga sales down for the third year in a row, with sales down 20% in the first half of the year and 50% over the past three years. That article I just linked to is well worth reading in full, by the way, because the white paper offers a lot of food for thought.

Vertical announced two new manga series to its lineup, Osamu Tezuka’s The Book of Human Insects (Ningen Konchuki) and Usumaru Furuya’s No Longer Human (Ningen Shikaku). Deb Aoki and Lissa Pattillo were there and provide exhaustive coverage.

The big news at the Yen Press panel is that they are rolling out their own digital manga system. No new Japanese licenses were announced, but artist Svetlana Chmakova will wind up her work on Nightschool in order to draw an adaptation of James Patterson’s Witch & Wizard, and Yen also plans to adapt Gail Carriger’s young adult novels into manga form. Lissa Pattillo has coverage at Kuriousity.

Dark Horse also announced two manga, Bloodline Battlefront (Kekkai Sensen), by Trigun creator Yasuhiro Nightow, and Drifters by Hellsing creator Kohta Hirano, as well as the novel Shinjuku, Book 2—Azul, with illustrations by Vampire Hunter D artist Yoshitaka Amano. Deb Aoki was there, and so was I.

Other reporting:

Kai-Ming Cha’s roundup for PWCW
Deb Aoki’s photo gallery
Kate Dacey’s con report: Day 1, Days 2 and 3
Sean Gaffney’s con report: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
Erica Friedman posts the recommended reading list from the panel “Gay for You? Yaoi and Yuri Manga for GBLTQ Readers,” which was one of the highlights of the show
Melinda Beasi on manhwa at NYCC
Lissa Pattillo shows off her swag
Deb Aoki on the special superhero doujinshi created for the show.