Another week, another slew of new releases! I was too late to get a hold of a copy of 20th Century Boys (Vol. 10) but there was still plenty of other good titles to pick up (now with some pictures):
BLU, the boys’ love imprint of Tokyopop, had a couple of new titles out this week. The most exciting of which was the third volume of Voice or Noise. The second volume was released in February 2008 so it’s been quite a wait for this follow-up. None the less I’m as excited to finally purchase a copy now as I was looking forward to it after finishing the last. Great boys’ love series!
The other title I picked up from them is Scarlet, a one-shot by the same creator who did Cute Devil. Honestly, I don’t have much interest in this artist or this premise but I bought the painfully overpriced book all the same because it marks a new (potentially continued?) book style and I wanted to check it out/support it. It sports a larger-than-the-norm trim size and colour inserts at the front. I flipped through it and it was actually a bit disorienting reading a BLU title suddenly notably larger, though snazzy all the same. It’s great to see, especially since it takes a step closer to almost justifying the $18.99 price tag.
Continuing on the semi-boys’ love trend, I was amazed to see a whole slew of DokiDoki titles on the shelf of Chapters (the B&N/Borders equivalent to you Americans out there). They’ve only ever carried sparse copies of Vampire Hunter D from Digital Manga so seeing them branch out to this varied imprint was exciting, plus very promising to the local boys’ love fanbase who are too timid to special order. Though not boys’ love, I purchased a physical copy of Alice the 101st which I reviewed earlier in the month for ANN.
Moving onto other genres, I picked up a copy of Bakuman (Vol. 01) – the team of Death Note makes a manga about making manga – and the fourth volume of Ooku in which it feels like the faux-Shakespearean speech that I really dislike seems more toned down (or is that just me?). In the mail I got a copy of the newest volume of Butterflies, Flowers which is hilarious – I am completely enamoured with the mature silliness of this series and I hope many others are too.
And lastly, thanks to my local library, I’ve been reading the Manga Guide to Databases. After reading the Manga Guide to Statistics last week and being impressed with how much I actually retained from it, I sought out this one as I’ve been wanting a basic introduction to databases. Yay for learning?