We have three manga earning spots on this week’s USA Today Top 150 best-sellers: vol. 17 of Fruits Basket debuts at number 99, vol. 20 of Bleach slips from 85 to 140, and vol. 14 of Fullmetal Alchemist checks in at 148.
Viz has five new shoujo titles lined up; ICv2 has the scoop. And the Naruto tsunami is on the horizon: Comicsnob says the next three volumes are already in the warehouses.
Tokyopop’s German arm has announced some new titles.
Bringing back a popular feature, The Otaku lists new releases for this week and last week.
Del Rey has relaunched their website
It’s the end of an era, albeit a short one: ChunHyang72 is ending her Tokyopop blog and will be focusing all her energies on Manga Recon (where she blogs under her real name, Katherine Dacey-Tsuei). The lack of RSS feeds has made it frustratingly difficult to keep up with the blogs on the Tokyopop site, so I’m a little late with this, but it’s worth noting as CH72 really helped provide an organizing principle in the early days of TokyoSpace. She offered pointers to the best of the content and guidelines for the inexperienced, and I think her influence made it a better place. Anyway, Tokyopop’s loss is PopCultureShock’s gain, and Katherine and co-blogger Erin F have made Manga Recon a lively and worthwhile read.
Site maintenance note: I updated the blogroll this morning to weed out the dead links. I also added two webcomics: My Poorly Drawn Life, Tania Del Rio’s very funny slice-of-life webcomic, which should have been in there ages ago (sorry Tania!), and Gal Samurai, a kogal-kicks-ass manga imported from Japan by Popteen.com (I reviewed it this week for Digital Strips). Enjoy!
Reviews: Julie checks out vol. 7 of Skip Beat! at the Manga Maniac Cafe. Leah enjoys vol. 1 of Black Sun, Silver Moon at Hobotaku. Eric P reviews vol. 2 of Kedamono Damono at Okazu. Kurishojo checks out vol. 7 of La Esperanca at Manganews. At Active Anime, Sandra Scholes reviews vol. 1 of Not So Bad. Leroy Douresseaux reviews vol. 1 of Heaven!! at The Comic Book Bin.
What I find hysterical is that Viz’s “Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time” (Harukanaru toki no naka de – in Germany as In A Distant Time) regularly gets previewed by people as if the main character’s name was Haruka.
Her name is Akane. There is no Haruka in the whole manga, which is based on a very popular visual romance novel for girl series (PS), which also had an OVA and an anime series.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harukanaru_Toki_no_Naka_de
http://www.animenfo.com/animetitle,1580,qwoqgc,harukanaru_toki.html
So many sites doing the new release list thing nowadays, who to link to? XD Remember back in the days when Love Manga was the only site that did this? Was sad to see both LM and Irresponsible Pictures leaving the scene.
Agreed… a real shame!
If a site doesn’t have feed, I recommend using FeedYes to generate a custom feed of the site, works like a charm (I use it for ICv2).
Thanks! Actually, shortly after I posted this, Tokyopop restored all their RSS feeds. (Coincidence? I think not!) This caused my news aggregator to show 737 new posts, as it refreshed every post for the past year. But at least it’s back.
Thanks for the kind words, Brigid! Nature abhors a vaccuum, though, so I suspect some other enterprising blogger will pick up the slack. PhoenixfireV is definitely a blogger to watch at TP.