Seven Seas had a surprising success with this year’s My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness by Nagata Kabi. The manga broke through to new and crossover audiences with its autobiographical tale of a young woman coming to terms with her sexuality after a series of struggles, including hiring a prostitute. Now they’ve announced that they will be publishing a sequel. My Solo Exchange Diary explores “personal issues surrounding mental health, identity, and intimacy. Her relationship with her parents is growing more […]

I’m glad that digital distribution makes it easier for companies to bring certain manga titles to the English language market, but as a fogey, I have to admit I much prefer reading a book to flicking pages on my tablet. So I was glad to hear Kodansha announce that one of their digital series I was particularly interested in would be coming to print in summer of next year. Tokyo Tarareba Girls, by Akiko Higashimura, creator of Princess Jellyfish, has […]

Viz Media announced at New York Comic Con, among many other bits of news, that they will be re-releasing another series by Naoki Urasawa, as they did for his Monster. (Update: This story has been revised. The reprints will be in paperback, not hardcover.) Similar to that reprint, the 20th Century Boys re-release will be in double-length softcovers, titled 20th Century Boys: The Perfect Edition. The series ran in English as 22 volumes published from 2009-2012, and this new reprint […]

While finally trying to organize the review stacks, I realized that I have an extra copy of After Hours, the quietly atmospheric yuri manga about young women djs. So I’m giving it away! To enter to win this contest, leave a comment below telling me your favorite manga starring a young woman. A winner will be picked randomly from all entries on Friday, September 29. U.S. addresses only, please. Winners will be emailed to confirm address. If email is not […]

Out now is the super-sized Death Note All-in-One Edition. That’s 12 volumes’ worth of manga, 2400 pages, in one binding and a matching silver slipcase. Death Note was first released in English from 2005-2007. It’s the story of a high school student who meets a shinigami, a god of death, and so anyone whose name he writes in a special notebook (the “death note”) dies. It’s written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, a team who also worked […]

Isn’t this just the perfect giveaway item to promote Delicious in Dungeon, the manga about eating what you kill in a dungeon crawl? It’s a set of chopsticks in a promotional wrapper! As they say, for the manga, “it’s eat or be eaten… literally!” (And yes, this first volume came out in May, but it’s been a long summer and I’m still catching up.)

Fanfare/Ponent Mon puts out some great, unusual manga, from an exploration of the Japanese prison system (Doing Time) to the contemplative works of Jiro Taniguchi (The Walking Man, A Distant Neighborhood). It was their publishing the works of Taniguchi that made me realize how skilled something so simple could be. Not that that describes his art style — it’s insanely detailed, as you can see from the preview pages at the publisher’s website. No, that’s a statement about how quiet […]