There are a few other things happening besides retrospectives.
There are two manga on the USA Today Booklist this week, and neither comes as a surprise: vol. 15 of Fruits Basket checks in at number 108 while Naruto drops from 67 last week to 133 this week.
At the Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon interviews Vertical’s Anne Ishii, one of the sharpest people in the business, who delivers some clear insights into the realities of marketing. Two other interviews, with webcomicker and Viz freelance editor Shaenon Garrity and Joe “Jog” McCulloch, also touch on manga and make interesting reading in any case.
At Deutsche Mangaka, Elae translates an interview with Georg F.W. Tempel, director of the publisher EMA. There are some interesting commments regarding sales figures, series length, and genre:
He also stated that BL and romance are the best-selling genres, regardless of whether they’re Japanese or German manga, with comedy doing very poorly.
Did you know that there are five comics artists in Austin, Texas? Nope, me neither. The Austin Chronicle interviews all five, including Steady Beat creator Rivkah.
ICv2 has a brief announcement that Media Blasters will publish the two-volume manga The Gorgeous Life of Strawberry Chan, by Ai Morinaga. The first volume is due in June 2007, the second in September.
From the Broccoli blog: Disgaea 2 will be previewed in the February Anime Insider. Also, a few tantalizing details about vol. 7 of Kamui. Meanwhile, the E’S character designs certainly rocked Ed’s world at the MangaCast.
Patrick Macias interviews American film director Michael Arias about his animated film Tekkonkinkreet, which is based on the manga of the same name (Black and White in English) by Taiyo Matsumoto. According to this accompanying article, Arias is the first foreigner to direct a full-length animated film in Japan.
Amazon has opened an otaku store.
Two advance reviews at Active Anime: Holly Ellingwood on vol. 8 of Ouran Host Club and Christopher Seaman on vol. 6 of Kikaider Code 02.
I wonder why The Austin Chronicle failed to interview the six ‘comic/manga’ writers that live in Austin?…or perhaps outside of Austin, doesn’t quite count as ‘Austin’. ^^ Great article though, thanks for the link.