During the pandemic quarantine, book publishing is mostly continuing and comic book publishing has mostly ceased. Which lead to me wondering what the manga publishers are doing. They have very little dependence on the comic market stores, so that shutdown doesn’t matter to them. But many bookstores are also closed, reducing the ability to reach customers, and manga series are serialized, making it important to keep readers hooked. The publishers, in general, are slowing down their release schedule and converting […]

Two sales you might want to take advantage of, if you’re looking for reading material and don’t mind digital for your manga. The first is a whole flock of first volumes for 99 cents each. 270, to be exact, from Kodansha and Vertical. (Need some ideas? Here are all my Kodansha manga reviews.) This is a great way to sample the start of a series! Sale runs through April 13. Secondly, there’s a comiXology originals sale that includes the entire […]

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 […]

In an interview with Stu Levy at ICv2, the Tokyopop CEO gave some more information about the company’s plans to reprint Aria. Kozue Amano’s Aria (and its two-volume predecessor series Aqua) was a beautifully illustrated light science fiction series about girl gondoliers on a future Mars that looked a lot like historical Europe. The appeal to me was the mood it created, about appreciating nature, seasonal change, and the small moments of daily life. The first three volumes were first […]