The Go!Comi people have just opened their online store. Which is great, but makes me wonder: In the past, many of their titles have been Borders exclusives for the first three months or so. Are they dropping the exclusives, or will they forbear selling their own books during the exclusive period? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. UPDATE: No we won’t: Go!Comi CEO David Wise explains how it will work in the comments.
Erica has some observations from Comiket.
Yet another article about Japanese nationalism cites hate manga as part of the problem.
Here’s a cute article about a teenager who got hoooked on Go after reading Shonen Jump.
Reviews: David Welsh has review, with spoilers, of vol. 5 of Dragon Head. Connie at Slightly Biased Manga reviews vol. 7 of Sorcerer Hunters, vol. 1 of Revolutionary Girl Utena, vol. 13 of Fruits Basket, vol. 3 of School Zone, vol. 3 of The World of Narue, and vol. 14 of Dragon Ball. And someone at The Star of Malaysia—why are the reviewers there suddenly anonymous?—just loves vol. 1 of Emma.
If you try to order volumes exclusive to Borders, you get a notice that this book won’t be available online until [general release date]. So it looks like the exclusivity clause is still in effect. (Though if I were working for GoComi, I’d change the notice to one explaining the books are available early through Borders; they won’t make as much as they would if they got a pre-order, but they are more likely to keep the impulse buyers.)
We only have one exclusive series with Borders, “Her Majesty’s Dog.” We indicate this in the descriptions of volumes which have yet to be released or are still in their exclusivity phase. We won’t sell these volumes in the online store until they go wide (six months after they are released to Borders/Waldenbooks). This is also indicated by the availability date.