I wrote my first post for ICv2.com, the comic business news site, last week, covering manga announcements made at the recent Anime Expo. Find out more about what Dark Horse, Kodansha, Yen Press, and Seven Seas will be putting out over the next year. I’m most looking forward to Ichi-F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, coming from Kodansha in March 2017.

Want to borrow Viz manga titles for your e-reader? OverDrive is the leading digital distribution platform for libraries, “supplying the industry’s largest catalog of eBooks, audiobooks, streaming video, and periodicals to 34,000 libraries, schools, and retailers worldwide, including 90 percent of all public libraries in the U.S.” Viz Media has just announced that they will use OverDrive to provide their “most popular digital manga titles” to libraries in the U.S. and Canada. These are mainstream properties, for now, with 146 […]

Viz Media has announced that it’s celebrating its 30th anniversary by launching a website redesign at viz.com. The actual anniversary is in July, since the company was founded in San Francisco in July 1986, so watch for more “exciting activities” promised for later this year. In the meantime, the refreshed “interactive web destination offers increased functionality, seamless interoperability and a host of easy-to-use new content features that are accessible across all platforms, including mobile devices and tablets.” Like many responsive […]

YaoiCon, to be held in the San Francisco area September 16-18 (the same weekend at SPX, but I imagine there isn’t a lot of audience crossover), will be celebrating its 15th anniversary of gathering fans of yaoi in anime and manga. Now they’re adding an East Coast gathering, BishounenCon, which will launch March 3-5, 2017, in Warwick, Rhode Island. The name change indicates a wider focus with the new show. Viannah Duncan, convention director, said, “we’ve taken our love of […]

When Vinland Saga returned from hiatus last year, the plan was only for the 6th and 7th volumes. Future volumes were dependent on sales. Apparently, those were decent, since publisher Kodansha announced at Emerald City Comic Con this weekend that Book Eight, collecting the Japanese volumes 15 and 16, will be out in Fall of this year. This edition catches the English-language edition up to the Japanese releases. And it comes with some advice for fans: be sure to watch […]

As hinted in summer 2015, Tokyopop is back, via two book listings in the Diamond Previews preorder catalog for the comic book store market. (No word yet on the bigger plans discussed for apps and a wide-ranging media presence.) Tokyopop stopped publishing in the US in May 2011 , after an attempt at a reality TV show. They came back in 2013 with print-on-demand versions of the few licenses they still held. Most were lost when the company went down, […]

In this interview with Director of International Publishing and Licensing Michael Gombos and Manga Editor Carl Horn about Dark Horse’s manga business, they reveal some positive news about how the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service omnibus is doing. According to Horn, This is a title that has struggled as a regular series, volume to volume. We sold more of the first printing than we sold of any individual volume…. This is a title that we’ve began 10 years ago and it’s […]

Back in 2012, a manga adaptation of the Sherlock TV show starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman began running in Japan. Now, that comic comes to English for the US and UK via Titan Comics. Sherlock: A Study in Pink will debut in June. They’re describing it as “a manga comic series”, so I’m guessing it will appear in issues before being collected, similar to the way the original was serialized in chapters. A Study in Pink was the first […]