I had a busy weekend, culminating with a trip today to the Essex Shipbuilding Museum to watch the launch of a hand-built wooden schooner. It was an awesome experience, and I’m really glad I got to see it. Here’s a bit of what I missed while I was out:
At Love Manga, David Taylor looks at the top 50 manga for July (actually, as a special bonus he gives us 52).
New blog alert! Manga Junkie writes about offbeat manga that are unlikely to be licensed in the U.S., at least by the manga publisher she works for. In fact, the first two she writes about are so unusual I can’t imagine who would publish them—but I wish someone would. The blogger is anonymous, but her distinctive writing style seems very familiar.
At the MangaCast, Ed is reporting on Comiket, the Japanese doujin event, which should be familiar to readers of Genshiken.
Comics-and-more introduces a new feature, Double Take, in which both Dave and Patrick review a book in a sort of Siskel-and-Ebert dialogue. The first book they take on is Drifting Classroom, a book that I enjoyed immensely—so I was glad to see them give it a big thumbs up.
Good news: Fanfare/Ponent Mon has licensed Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary, which won the 2005 Japan Media Festival Grand Prize. It’s an autobiographical account of the manga-ka’s battle with alcoholism and his experiences when he quit drawing manga and deliberately became homeless. More info is here. (Via Completely Futile.)
JP Mayer blogs about some recent translations (can you say n00b in a manga?) and the question of shrink-wrapping. On the latter topic, a commenter has a chilling anecdote:
At my local Borders Express, they locked their manga up in little plastic boxes.
They stopped (I think sales must’ve gone down), but the newest volume of series is still locked up.