San Diego Comic Con 2011 is in its final hours today so its round-up time! As the biggest pop-culture convention of its kind, there were many bloggers on site to record all the details, so, while here on Kuriousity I’ll just be giving the brief run down of manga-related news, I’ll also be giving select links of where you can go to learn more.
Digital was the biggest news of the year. For everyone’s benefit, I’ll forgo my usual sad sighs and short rambles at the trend of more digital and less paper and skip right to summing up the news!
Edit (July 25th): More info re: Viz Media’s licenses added
Viz Media launched their new manga-portal website, VizManga.com, over the weekend. It shares accounts with their iPad/iPhone manga buying systems so that anything you buy through your Apple product, you can now read online -and vice versa. It’s like the Viz Media Kindle, minus currently any portable accessbility for those without an iPhone or iPad.
Currently the website has forty different series you can purchase volumes from spanning all across their imprints. The website is offering 40% off all the digital volumes until July 31st and has lots of free previews. At full price the volumes are $4.99-$5.99/US each.
Over at the Manga Bookshelf, Melinda takes both Viz Media’s manga site and Square Enix’s (which I didn’t have much good to say about when it launched) sites for a test drive with detailed reasons why you should, or shouldn’t, check them out.
JManga.com – the “first official Japanese comic site” – is set to launch on August 17. The website will have translated manga posted for readers to purchase from a number of Japanese publishers. How much the manga will cost will vary publisher to publisher and the quality of said manga (adaptation, lettering, etc.) will remain a mystery until the manga goes live as well. Unfortunately for the curious, this launch looks like it’ll be for those in the US only, at least for the first while. (More info available at AnimeNewsNetwork)
Also on the digital front, Dark Horse said they’re looking to launch a method of reading their manga digitally in the near future and Square Enix is currently offering the first volume of their series free (though again only for those in the US).
Now onto my most anticipated news of any convention – the licenses! Alas publishers didn’t have many to offer at SDCC (the tsunami in Japan being cited as the number one reason), but there were still a few to look forward to thanks to Yen Press and Viz Media:
YEN PRESS:
Durarara – Akiyo Satorigi/Ryohgo Narita
Kore wa Zombie desu ka? – Shinichi Kimura/ Sacchi
Olimpos – Aki
VIZ MEDIA:
A Devil and Her Love Song – Miyoshi Tomori
The Earl and the Fairy – Mizue Tani/Ayuko
Admittedly of the three Yen Press titles I’m only excited about Aki’s Olimpos after enjoying her one-shot work, Utahime, as published by Digital Manga, but something is better than nothing! Both of Viz Media’s books look lovely though – I’ll definitely be picking those up! Overall not much for one of the biggest cons of the year but with NYAF coming up in October, fingers crossed we get some more titles announced then.
And as a brief but great-to-hear finish to the manga news, Naoki Usawara’s 20th Century Boys won an Eisner award for best Foreign Language (Asian) release this year. Congrats to him and Viz Media for their excellent work!
… anod some bonus awesome SDCC news:
– More information, character sheets and a trailer for the upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender spin-off series – The Legend of Korra! I was one of many hanging onto every image, clip and word on Twitter as attendees at the panel posted them live. You can check out the trailer here to view the awesome animation we’ve come to expect and crave after ATLA.
– Speaking of nice animation, a bunch of new clips for the upcoming Thundercats animated series have been posted. They look awesome! I’ve been watching a lot of the original Thundercats series for the first time lately thanks to Teletoon Retro so I’m really interested in seeing the new super shiny version.
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