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Posts Tagged Dark Horse

Otaku USA: On The Shelf – September 7, 2011

By Lissa Pattillo on Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Students, students, students – they’re everywhere! Here in Halifax we have a large amount of universities and colleges considering the size of our humble city so when September hits, the population seems to spike! I hope they’re lucky enough to find the awesome places we have here to buy comics and manga, just in time for this week’s new stuff.

My On The Shelf article is up over at Otaku USA which includes a whole bunch of Viz Media titles and four new series starting from Kodansha Comics. There’s just so darn much! A gift for the shelves and a curse for the wallet. Perfect moment to be thankful that so many independent Canadian retailers charge based on the strength of the dollar and not those prices on the back of books though… yikes.

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Categories: On The Shelf, Release Lists
Tags: Dark Horse, Kodansha Comics, Manga, Otaku USA, Vertical Inc, Viz Media

Dark Horse Tweets An Omnibus Future for FLCL

By Lissa Pattillo on Monday, September 5, 2011

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We’ve still got some convention season left for 2011 and Kumoricon was location for some manga news this past weekend. Yesterday Dark Horse made note on its Twitter account while at the convention that the company would be releasing an omnibus edition of FLCL.

“Naota”s life isn”t simple. He lives with his eccentric father and grandfather in a city marked by a gigantic hand-iron shaped factory perched on a hill. So the last thing he needs is for his brother”s ex-girlfriend to make passes at him or for an impish, playful alien to smack him in the head with a bass guitar and then insinuate herself into his family.” – FLCL Tokyopop Edition

The Twitter post only states 2012 for the release date and Dark Horse’s website doesn’t have a listing for it yet. Based on past editions of the series, we can expect the omnibus will be around 400 pages. Dark Horse’s high quality omnibus – such as their growing collection of CLAMP titles – suggests the book will probably have some nice full colour pages as well, if not a few other extras and at least a new translation. We shall see!

Tokyopop originally released the two volume manga mid-2000, as well as several FLCL light novels. They’ve since been out of print for a long while so hopefully that means there’s a buying audience out there eager for another go at owning it. Funimation also released a special edition set of the anime series on Blu-Ray and DVD earlier this year so there may be a new audience to target as well.

Credit to AnimeNewsNetwork for posting the news.

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Categories: Licensing, News
Tags: CLAMP, Dark Horse, Manga

Otaku USA: On The Shelf – August 31, 2011

By Lissa Pattillo on Wednesday, August 31, 2011

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Is it really the last day of August already? Yikes… summer just flew by. I can’t believe people will be returning to school in just a few days. I may’ve graduated years ago, but I still love hitting the books – just a different kind of course (not that I didn’t read a heck of a lot of manga in my school years as well!). Otaku USA has my newest edition of On The Shelf posted for this week’s manga releases.

My top pick is definitely Kohta Hirano’s Drifters. Elves, magic, distorted and exaggerated historical figures and the creator’s snazzy art style = a must read! Fingers crossed we don’t have to wait as long for volume two of Drifters as we did for volume thirteen of Eden… Better than never though, Dark Horse, so my thanks for both this week!

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Categories: On The Shelf, Release Lists
Tags: Dark Horse, DMP, June, Kodansha Comics, Manga, Otaku USA, Viz Media

Otaku USA: On The Shelf – August 10, 2011

By Lissa Pattillo on Wednesday, August 10, 2011

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It’s that time again – and shall be that time every week – new comics time! My On The Shelf article is up at Otaku USA for your reading pleasure.

My top pick for this week’s releases is Viz Media’s Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit:

“This book doesn’t get a lot of discussion and it’s a shame—it’s a great story that really gives you a lot to think about in regards to society, mortality and a government’s hold on its people.”

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Categories: On The Shelf, Release Lists
Tags: Bandai, Dark Horse, Kodansha Comics, Manga, Otaku USA, UDON, Viz Media

CLAMP To Resume Legal Drug Manga Series

By Lissa Pattillo on Saturday, August 6, 2011

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Exciting news for CLAMP fans today – it was revealed today that they’ll be resuming work on their series, Legal Drug! CLAMP had previously done three volumes of Legal Drug before it went on hiatus in 2003. Tokyopop released the ‘complete’ series in English.

“Meet Kazahaya and Rikuou. By day, they are two ordinary pharmacists; by night, their boss has them filling special prescriptions for clients with ailments that can’t be cured using ordinary elixirs.” – Tokyopop description for Legal Drug

Not too long ago it was announced that Legal Drug would be re-released in Japan, which of course times quite well with this news. Though translation of the relaunch say this will be a new series, I think it’ll still be more a continuation but with an opening that allows it to be taken as a new series. Clear introduction of characters, plot, etc. The re-release of the original three volumes will allow for readers to pick them up if previously missed, while the new series offers shiny new content for existing fans and still a clean-slate for new ones. Plus it’s been such a long time since Legal Drug was last serialized – it’d seem kind of odd just calling it a straight continuation.

I’m really excited as a big lover of the original. The big question for us English-readers now, however, is when will Dark Horse announce the license? Fingers crossed, but consider this a big ‘pretty-please, Dark Horse!’. The original Legal Drug seems like an easy one-volume omnibus perfect for a new English edition but is it on Dark Horse’s radar? The company’s release of Gate 7 has been constantly fraught with delays and failed launch dates but I remain confident in their CLAMP-releasing abilities based on the sheer quality of their Cardcaptor Sakura, Clover and Chobits‘ books.

For now though, a simple YAY! It may be a while yet until it’s available for us to read in English but it’s CLAMP, so at least I’ve little doubt it’ll come to us eventually.

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Categories: News
Tags: CLAMP, Dark Horse, Manga, Tokyopop

Otaku USA: On The Shelf – August 03, 2011

By Lissa Pattillo on Thursday, August 4, 2011

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Sorry for the silence here on Kuriousity, readers. We’ve had some technical difficulties with updating the past couple of weeks. Things finally seem to be smoothing out with our web provider however (as evident by you reading this post – yay!), so our backlog of content will be posted over the next few days.

Recently I was invited to contribute to Otaku USA’s web publication (helping expand from USA to more NA!). This week marks the first of my new manga column for them – On The Shelf. The weekly article will be a showcase of the manga available that week through comic-distribution (thus meaning predomiantly Diamond Comics). I’ll be listing the available titles from a variety of manga publishers along with taking some time to ~~gush~~ elaborate on a couple different books each week as well. I hope it proves a useful resource for manga fans!

I’ll be linking to my Otaku USA articles from Kuriousity from now on as they’re posted. My Swag Bag posts – where I share what I myself ending up buying that week – will continue to be posted here. I hope readers continue to share what they’ve purchased manga-wise that week (I’m always curious to know!) as well as contribute their own weekly recommendations over at Otaku USA.

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Categories: News, On The Shelf, Release Lists
Tags: Dark Horse, Manga, Otaku USA, Vertical Inc, Viz Media, Yen Press

SDCC 2011: It’s All About the Digital

By Lissa Pattillo on Sunday, July 24, 2011

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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

Swag Bag – Avatar and Attorneys

By Lissa Pattillo on Thursday, June 23, 2011

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It’s swag bag time! Purchases have been light these past couple weeks after an enjoyably hefty purchase stack last time but there’s still some highly recommendable goodies!

First up are two of my top favourite running series – 20th Century Boys (Vol. 15) and Black Jack (Vol. 14). I can always count on both to be consistantly entertaining and these new volumes were no exceptions. 20th Century Boys in particular always make me want a manga book-group or something of the sort here in Halifax – this is a series that demands discussion! And darn that Urasawa, the man can make a cliffhanger.

From Viz Media I picked up the newest volume of Bakuman (Vol. 05) which continues to be excessively wordy and flounders on decent main character interaction BUT manages to be fun and educational all the same. I find myself actually excited for the new volumes, especially since they’ve been getting better with each book (granted volume one definitely wasn’t hard to top).

Looking to start something new, I bought the first volume of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney by Kodansha Comics. I’ve never played the games and my knowledge of the story ends at people yelling ‘Objection!’, so it’ll be interesting to see how I find the manga edition.

Next, though not manga it definitely has it’s share of crossover interest: Dark Horse has released a huge collection of short Avatar: The Last Airbender comics in a full-colour book called Avatar: The Lost Adventures. I’ve been waiting a long time for something like this to come out so I literally ran to Strange Adventures to buy my copy – worth every penny and then some! Both the art and the writing is fantastic, very true to the original story with lots of humour – highly recommended!

And last but certainly not least, something else not manga related but still awesome – a Tardis Cookie Jar! Oh yes. I’ve recently gotten hooked to the new seasons of Doctor Who and after marathoning all six new seasons in two weeks, I couldn’t resist buying this when I saw it. It’s big, it’s blue and it lights up and makes that Tardis sound, you know the one. It’s so cute, I love it :)

So what was in your swag bag this week?

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Categories: Features, Swag Bag
Tags: 20th Century Boys, Bakuman, Black Jack, Dark Horse, Kodansha Comics, Manga, Naoki Urasawa, Osamu Tezuka, Vertical Inc, Viz Media, Viz Signature

Publisher Websites Come, Go and Update

By Lissa Pattillo on Sunday, April 24, 2011

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Some website news today and I don’t mean regarding Kuriousity (though a reminder you can get to the site from the more easily remembered kuriousity.ca!).

First up is Kodansha Comics which after months of using their website KodanshaComics.com to list their press releases, has uploaded their actual website It’s simple and neatly laid out, which is great to see on a publisher site. Very easily navigated so yay for that! You can see covers for several of their upcoming books on the Release Dates page. The search and title info is unfortunately just linked to Random House’s page instead of housing its own internal sources but at least it’s something. A note that if you’re not using a screen resolution higher than 1200pixels wide, I’d recommend zooming out to 83% viewing. It’s a fixed width site that doesn’t seem designed to support smaller screens.

Elsewhere Dark Horse has made some huge changes to their website and I must say it looks and works great! It has a sharp new look, a retooled search function and an easy to use Browse function that allows you to call up any or all of their books in a specified period of time and ordered in a variety of ways. Each individual page even has a link to Comic Book finder so you can find a location nearest to you to purchase the goods. This site update comes just in time for their upcoming Digital Store launch which will include manga-epic Lone Wolf and Cub. My kudos to the design and programming team – the new site is fantastic!

On a less positive note, Tokyopop (which recently announced its shutdown of the company’s publishing division) is gearing up for a complete tear down of its website. With a community heavy in participation including blog posts, forums and media uploads, they’ve sent out a few e-mails to remind folks to save what they want now because as of “early next week” it’s all going to be gone.

“As we’ve previously stated in our newsletter, TOKYOPOP.com will go offline early next week. We know that you probably have kept copies of everything you’ve uploaded (photos, videos, drawings etc.), but we just want to be extra-sure and give you this last reminder so that you can pull anything down from TOKYOPOP.com that you still need. The last chance to pull your uploads is THIS WEEKEND! After this weekend, you will not have access to material on TOKYOPOP.com. If you’re concerned about losing any data, please act right away! Don’t forget to tell your friends about this too, if you think that they’re unaware of this.”

And as a bit of weird final note – the old URL for now defunct manga publisher GoComi! has been resurrected and now has the bare basics of a WordPress installation. There’s a teeny tiny bit of info regarding GoComi and a couple of their titles but I wouldn’t see this as any sign of a return. Most likely it’s a more creative than usual domain park seeing as how it uses old cached information and images from Amazon (plus a bunch of ads to take advantage of visitors who might be curious enough to click on the Google Ads). Still a little weird though, hmm? [Thanks go to Ryu Sheng for noticing this one]

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Categories: News
Tags: Dark Horse, GoComi, Kodansha Comics, Manga

CLAMP’s Gate 7 Manga Coming From Dark Horse in 2011

By Lissa Pattillo on Saturday, April 23, 2011

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The CLAMP fan-community, clamp_now, has translated new information from the manga team’s website about the international release schedule for their new series, Gate 7.

Gate 7 has already been serialized for a few issues in Japan and France, with tankouban (graphic novel length) editions set to come out in a number of countries around the world, including in North America from Dark Horse. The release date for this edition is summer 2011 – not too far away!

Originally Dark Horse comics had said that they’d be simultaneously releasing Gate 7 in small single-issue format. That was a few years ago and there’s been little news from Dark Horse since about it – granted they haven’t let up on the CLAMP releases with a bunch of omnibus editions of the group’s titles. While it seems safe to say we’re not going to get the serialized edition as originally thought, it’s still nice to see the series itself remains on the agenda one way or another.

I’m really excited to have this book in hand. I’m a huge CLAMP fan and must own everything they’ve done, for one, and the art looks gorgeous. Though Dark Horse has yet to comment on this news, hearing it come directly from CLAMP seems like a pretty good sign. Fingers crossed!

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Categories: Licensing, News
Tags: CLAMP, Dark Horse, Gate 7, Manga