The Udon Entertainment release of The Rose of Versailles exists! I have touched a copy! See photo proof below. The release of this historically important manga was originally announced in 2015, but production and localization (and the desire to make the release the best it could be) delayed that date. It’s been made available for order through comic shops, with a planned release this month, but current information indicates it will ship in mid-January. I just wanted to let those […]

Although it’s a horror manga, which I normally can’t tolerate, I really enjoy The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. The art is wonderfully detailed, the characters are wacky and interesting, and the ghost stories often have a revenge / “twist in the tail” aspect that keeps them interesting. Unfortunately, the most recent volume available in English was volume 14, which came out in the summer of 2015. I’m glad to see we don’t need to give up hope yet. Dark Horse […]

In 2015, Udon Entertainment announced that they would be publishing Riyoko Ikeda’s classic shojo manga Rose of Versailles. It’s about a woman dressing as a man and protecting Marie Antoinette as commander of her palace guard. It’s very frilly and starry-eyed, as suits its original 70s period of creation, but it’s also historically significant as an influential story. In early 2018, the publisher provided an update on their publishing plans. Now, the book is available for preorder, and I know […]

Square Enix, best known in the US as the video game company behind Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, Kingdom Hearts, and Space Invaders, has announced that they will be launching “a new line of English-language manga, novels, and art books” this coming fall. Previously, they have licensed their manga titles to existing English-language publishers, including Fullmetal Alchemist (Viz), Soul Eater (Yen Press), and Black Butler (Yen Press). Their first releases will be a Final Fantasy XV novel, The Dawn of the […]

Kodansha has a robust digital-first manga program. (They emphasize calling them “digital-first”, instead of “digital-only”, since a few of the more popular titles have later been released in print.) Their newest announcement, of a title coming to their various digital outlets on April 23, stunned me, since it’s a manga series that many said would be too challenging to release in the US. Hikaru Nakamura, author of Arakawa Under the Bridge, has also created a more infamous story, about two […]

This is a major change without much detail behind it yet. Viz Media, the long-standing publisher of translated manga, has been operating in the US since 1986. It’s owned by three major Japanese publishers. Many observers of the comic market, coming out of the superhero world, don’t pay attention to just how substantial they are. They have almost a quarter of book market graphic novel sales, far above any other publisher. Now they have announced that they are launching Viz […]

I’ve been enjoying Cells at Work!, the manga series by Akane Shimizu that anthropomorphizes red and white blood cells and dramatizes various body processes. Kodansha Comics has released five volumes in English so far, with volume 5 out last November. (I’m not sure what’s going on with volume 6. The February Previews catalog had a listing for it, due out mid-April, but that code now shows “item not found”. Amazon has a release date of 2080, which means its unavailable […]