Another good week for manga, with Yen Press shipping Bunny Drop Volume 5 ($12.99). Even more exciting is the long-awaited release of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Volume 12 (Dark Horse, $11.99).

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery
Service Volume 12

I actually have a digital preview copy right now, but I’m not reading it. Others have talked about how distracting the Dark Horse watermark can be in their online review copies, and that’s a big part of it. KCDS also has excellent endnotes, by editor and adaptor Carl Horn, and when I’m reading the book in print, I can stick my finger in the back pages and flip back and forth to keep up with the annotations and sound effect translations. That’s too complicated in a PDF. So I’ll wait another two weeks to get my print copy — since Dark Horse is one of those companies (another is NBM) where Diamond gets the books two weeks or so before Amazon does.

I am intrigued by this promotional line at the publisher’s website: “The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a focus title of Dark Horse’s new Blood and Guts promotional campaign.” I always forget how violent and gory this title can be, since I enjoy it so much, and I normally hate that stuff.

Straddling the line between manga and graphic novels, Del Rey puts out House of Odd ($10.99), the third in their series of illustrated Odd Thomas stories, based on the Dean Koontz character. This one has a new adaptor, Landry Q. Walker, but it’s still drawn by Queenie Chan (The Dreaming).

KC’s already reviewed The Sincerest Form of Parody (Fantagraphics, $24.99), an historical collection of MAD-inspired parody comics.

I’m looking forward to two of my favorite superhero comics, both from Marvel. Daredevil #10 ($2.99) and The Twelve #11 ($2.99) should be good reads. The former promises a flashback to the hero’s “first days in the costume”. Marvel also has four Avengers titles, just in case you weren’t sure that there was a movie coming out. That seems a bit like flooding the market, putting out all those titles in one week, but I guess they want to give readers as many choices as possible if they’re interested in the team.