Here we are in the first week of 2013. We survived 2012! A lot of the past year is a blur in my mind, a flurry of up and down personal trials and an ever changing manga industry that makes a lot of the events of the past twelve months mesh together. Where does it begin and end!?
Thank goodness for Kuriousity to give me some grounded events and dates with which to look back on. That said, it’s time for a brief look back at Kuriousity in 2012!
It was an interesting year for the manga industry witha lot of really big changes and plenty of surprises. A lot of that has been manga going digital and the growth of publishers’ digital platforms including JManga, eManga and Viz Media’s offerings. Kickstarter? That was definitely a thing, and don’t forgot those manga licenses that many were hoping for and perhaps never expecting such as a collection of Gengoroh Tagame bara, more yuri from Seven Seas, and titles such as Vinland Saga, Twin Knight and GeGeGe no Kitaro. These things were only the tip of the twelve-month iceberg.
As for me, I couldn’t afford to attend any big conventions this year, but I did still ensure I was at the Toronto Comics Art Fest where I was able to meet Konami Kanata. She was very nice! I’ve also continued my On The Shelf articles for Otaku USA and continue to contribute the occasional manga review to my local indie paper, The Coast along with Shannon. It’s fun deciding which books I think best suit the audience of readers and, like with Kuriousity, any reader inspired to pick up a book based on my writing absolutely makes my day.
And what a year for manga published! This post would go on forever if I shared all my favourites this year, but some of the ones that I really enjoyed include Girlfriends, Thermae Romae, Alice in the Country of Hearts, Olympos, and the final volume of Ouran High School Host Club. Then of course there’s the on-going volumes of my favourite series such as Sailor Moon, Toriko, Wandering Son, Yotsuba&! and so many more…
Below are some of the year’s top posts here at Kuriousity. (The Top 5’s are based on page views compared to others throughout the year):
Top 5 (Non-Review) Posts
Digital Manga Launches Second Kickstarter for Tezuka’s Barbara
Project-H Licenses New Hentai Title Velvet Kiss
Digital Manga Licenses Shoko Takaku’s I’ve Seen It All BL
Victoria’s Favourites: Top 20 Manga Part 01
Vertical Inc. Heads to Space with Knights of Sidonia in 2013
Top 5 Reviews
My Cute Crossdresser
Shocking Pink!
Three Wolves Mountain
About Love
The Review That Wasn’t: Spice & Wolf (Vol.05)
The most commented post this year was Digital Manga Launches Second Kickstarter for Tezuka’s Barbara where I shared my thoughts on Digital Manga’s use of Kickstarter for licensing and publishing manga. It’s a topic I still feel fairly strongly about today and I loved that so many others felt passionate enough about it to discuss the pros and cons of the process.
Total Number of Posts: 231
Total Reviews: 66
Our post and review counts stayed very near to last year’s, which is some consistency I’m glad for. It was a rough year for personal stuff but Kuriousity is something I hold very near and dear so I’m always glad to still have the time for it. And I’ve no plans to stop anytime soon! (Even if my content consistency isn’t so great – eep, sorry!)
To mark the new year, I made a few little tweaks to the Kuriousity layout. Notably the menu bar has been moved below the header banner and made (hopefully) more clear by reader request. There’s also the soon-to-be-launched Manga Resources page which will provide a quick one-stop spot for basic info on manga publishers, critics and helpful terminology. Coming soon, I swear…
And so we leave 2012 behind us – another year of amazing manga and a lot of big changes that are still working to shape the industry today. What next?! Here’s to 2013 being a good one!
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[…] Patillo looks back at the year 2012 and she looks over the past week’s new releases in her On the Shelf column at Otaku USA. […]