Manga

The past year has seen an unusually large number of Sherlock Holmes adaptations, both in comics and on the screen, but not all Holmeses are created equal. Last night, British viewers got to see the last episode of Season 2 of the BBC's wildly popular starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, and Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows starring Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law is still doing well in theaters a month after it opened. So if you're in a Holmesian mood and wondering what to read next, here's run down on the Holmes adaptations which have come out or had new installments in the past year. Varying from inspiredly odd to unreadably awful, don't go to the comic store without reading this first!

Although we think San Diego is the biggest and the craziest comics event on earth, all dedicated conologists know that Japan's Comiket is actually the biggest. Held twice a year, the Winter edition just wrapped up and over 500,000 people attended the three-day festival. The incredible thing about Comiket is that it is an amateur press show: the fans are there to buy doujinshi -- fanzines based on popular manga by "amateur" creators. We know Japan is full of amazing wonders and enigmas, but the huge popularity of fanfic is definitely among them.

Looks like we might not get that "New Manhattan" live-action version of AKIRA after all. I know you're all crying. Maybe Warner Bros. knows that too, as they shut down the Vancouver production office:

Chocolate Apple 1991-2011, a manga released at the just passed amateur manga show Comiket -- which drew some 500,000 people -- presents the author's heartfelt appreciation of the late Steve Jobs and his creations, while portraying Jobs as a cute Japanese girl.

Well, that didn't take long. 2012 has claimed its first publishing casualty as Bandai Entertainment has announced they will be canceling their manga and home entertainment publishing to focus on licensing their brands as they undergo a restructuring. Their Facebook and Twitter accounts will also be shut down.

Gantz, Hiroya Oku's popular, super-violent manga about a team of operatives and their mysterious missions, is ending its run in Young Jump next year, it's being reported. More than 30 volumes of the manga have appeared in Japan -- in the US, Dark Horse is up to volume 20. It's also been adapted into a TV series and two movies.

Some online sales data for 12/25 and 12/26 from IBM, a Top Ten list from Amazon's Kindle graphic novel page, and a surprising discovery! Read on!

I hope this has been worth the wait! Here are the independent publishers Random House distributes, and there are some lesser known (but quite good) titles here!

The long on-again, off-again life action Akira movie is decidedly on again at Warners, with Jaume Collet-Serra to direct the Steve Kloves script. Given that AKIRA is a worldwide classic of anime and Japanese film in general that hugely influenced both animation and the cyberpunk movement, it seems ripe for reinvention in that Hollywood way. And of course, also in that Hollywood way, despite the story being set in and infused with Japanese culture, because American moviegoers are all white and cannot be persuaded to pay money to watch Asian people on the screen, the film is being moved from New Tokyo to "New Manhattan " (essentially New New York) and replacing all the Asian characters with white people if casting rumors are true.

After many starts and stop -- an Albert Hughes directed version had the plug pulled after pre-production had already started earlier this year -- Warner Bros has greenlit a live action AKIRA remake again. This time Jaume Collet-Serra (ORPHAN) is set to direct. The movie apparently got new life after the budget was cut to a practically spartan $90 million.

Yen Press has announced two manga style adaptations of bestselling YA novels: Sherrilyn Kenyon's Chronicles of Nick and Cassandra Clare's The Infernal Devices trilogy.  HyeKyung Baek is attached to The Infernal Devices as artist.  Both series...

This is interesting.  Viz is migrating Shonen Jump to a digital edition that's only 2 weeks removed from the Japanese original.  (And you can probably chalk that up to translation time.)  They're on the...