The newest series from Tsunami Ohba and Takeshi Obata, the creative team behind Death Note and Bakuman, is Platinum End. It’s available in English digitally, with a new 99-cent chapter monthly. You can get it on the Viz Manga app, at VIZManga.com, through the digital Weekly Shonen Jump, or at ComiXology. It’s an odd story, with echoes of the “student affected by supernatural being with questionable motives” story of Death Note. Viz provided this description: Mirai is a boy who […]

I enjoyed the chapters of School Judgment Gakkyu Hotei I read in Weekly Shonen Jump last year, so I’m glad to see it will be collected. I should have known that was inevitable, since the story is drawn by Takeshi Obata, who’s well-known on these shores for Death Note and Bakuman. The premise, as written by Nobuaki Enoki, involves disputes among elementary school students being settled with lawyers and court-like class arbitration sessions. As the introduction page says, “the government […]

I’m not sure I fully understand the business arrangement behind this, but a number of manga titles published here by Vertical have just become available on ComiXology. You have to look under Kodansha as the publisher, though, because they’re licensed by Vertical from Kodansha Ltd. and are being distributed by Kodansha’s US digital operation, Kodansha Advanced Media. (And good on them for working through what could have been complicated business aspects to make more manga available digitally and legally!) Those […]

Yen Press has announced that they will be bringing Fruits Basket back to the US. The 23 volumes of Fruits Basket by Netsuke Takuya were originally published here by Tokyopop from 2004-2009. It was immensely popular, a huge bestseller in both Japan and the US, and demonstrated the potential value of the manga market in North America, particularly in bookstores. It also showed how much of a buying force female readers could be. It’s the story of an orphan who […]

This summer, news went around that former manga publisher Tokyopop, which stopped printing books in the US in 2011, was returning. Again. For the third time. Tokyopop had a panel at this year’s Anime Expo where they announced that they are “planning to begin publishing manga again in 2016” by “seeking to license ‘hidden gems that are not yet noticed’ from small or independent publishers.” That may be because big publishers no longer want to get involved with a company […]

Princess Jellyfish has long been enjoyed by US fans as an anime series. They’re drawn to the story, about a girl geek living in a house full of women devoted to their hobbies, including a manga artist and a history buff. The shy young lady loves watching jellyfish, and one night she meets a beautiful woman at the pet shop who’s a lot more than she seems. The growing friendship between the geek girls and the woman who chooses to […]

The second Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus is due out tomorrow in comic shops. The first volume reprinted three of the books for $19.99, and this one does the same, containing individual volumes 4-6. Stories feature Crop circles and alien visitors Plasticized museum bodies A dead baby and a guest appearance from the protagonist of Mail Insect hunting with a ridiculous American exchange student who dresses like a stripper A ghost village A mummification service Working as professional mourners A […]

Kodansha Comics, the manga publisher, has added their entire digital catalog to ComiXology as of today. This consists of 350 volumes of 53 series, including their very popular Attack on Titan, Sailor Moon, and Fairy Tail. The press release states that new releases will be available the same day as print, “as well as some digital-only debuts.” Kodansha joins Viz as the major manga publishers available through that digital distributor. Speaking of Viz, they’ve just announced that Weekly Shonen Jump, […]